You're not in Kansas anymore, or Park Slope for that matter

This morning I was walking to the bank, up this slight incline in the main street running perpendicular to my own. Its funny how there are things about our experiences we forget until some unrelated event brings them back to us in full color. So Im walking, and the sun is really starting to beat down, nothing like the last few weeks but its getting there, and then this convertible pulls up into my line of peripheral vision, and I hardly notice at first, my mind being elsewhere, until all of a sudden this muffled sound that seems like a high pitched chant, starts coming from somewhere, and its sounding as if the speakers its beating out of are really poor quality because its mixed with a whole bunch of static and the words are hard to make out. I look around and its coming from the convertible I mentioned before. And maybe because of the poor quality of sound, maybe because of the heat mixed with this, but prayer time popped into my head. Briefly, I'm again sitting in a tiny overpacked and windowless bus, listening as the call to prayer gets pumped over public speakers along the red dirt roads of Dakar in order that those not near a Mosque can put out their blankets and pray along with all the rest, facing towards Mecca. Now the thing of this thats probably also assisting this momentary loss of time and place is that my oversized sunglasses are this brownish red, lending the quality of that red African dirt I mentioned to the pavement, the buildings,and the cars. Funny, I know. I feel like I should be back in my makeshift head cover and sea blue wrappa that I was always being told I knotted wrong. I haven't thought of Senegal like this in a couple years, despite my continued contact with a favorite acquiantance of mine from over there, and I think the oddest part of this little memory is that it made me nostalgic for the place. Africa was something that got under my skin and burned for a very long time, something that changed me in both subtle and obvious ways, that I hated and loved and cried over for countless reasons. And strange though it seemed to me at the time that the scene rushed back into my head; I missed the place, and smiled at the thought of it. Now perhaps you've seen one of the pictures I have up here, or perhaps I have it elsewhere, but its a black and white of a broken down bus in a back yard with trees and trash and walls surrounding it; well that was my backyard when I was living in Senegal. The doors to the room I shared let out onto a tiny little balcony that overlooked that, and every day when I came back from my research or some other venture, I sat overlooking that mess, listening to my music on my walkman, and I thought of all the things wrong with this world that could let that happen, of all the things wrong with my being there in the way that I was, my doing what I was doing. I hated myself for wanting to run, and beat myself up over doing, but not being able to do enough. Anyway, I guess it takes some years for experiences like the one I had to fully work their way into the mind and find a way to be interpreted that doesn't inspire more than a quick smile to sum it all up, but there is was, and it colored my day in a strange and familiar way, and so it made me smile.