A Window View

Wesleyan threw up a new email system, and told me I was far over quota. Apologies, but my account has been disabled for five days. This morning I woke up with an inspiration of genius and learned how to expunge my Trash folder, and voila, everything works again. So I'm still at jagraham@wesleyan.edu

Today is a gray morning. I'm looking out my window at my favorite menu of Soviet concrete. There is a big ridge half a mile away covered in Soviet City, beyond that is gray sky, and a darker gray mountain ridge about five or ten miles away. There is yellow concrete, gray concrete, mixed brick/plaster/cinderblock concrete, peeling concrete, and on the new building half way up the ridge, freshly painted concrete.

Tbilisi is not always gray, in fact, three days ago I had the miraculous sight of seeing a massive snow covered mountain between the hills that surround the city. I had never seen this mountain before, and it appeared as if one of the mythic Narts had decided to move his homeland closer by. He just picked up his mountain and moved it. It was a huge pointy peak, the kind of mountain photographers love, I thought, is this K-2 or Matterhorn...? No, it must be the famed Mount Kazbeg, inspiration of poets and highlanders, of church builders and Promethian mythologists. I had no idea one could see Mt. Kazbeg from Tbilisi. We were in a car, and turning a corner, my glimpse of the snowcaps disappeared as if an illusion. I have never seen the mountain before nor since, but they say Narts are unpredictable.

Back to my window view. The architectural style here is to build a concrete frame with minimal re-bar for a ten or eleven story building. The gaps in the frame are filled in with a hodgepodge of bricks or cinder blocks. On nicer buildings, these would be plastered over and painted gray or off-white. On many of the buildings out of my window the bricks, yellowing, redrust, or brown, are still exposed. When the Soviet Union fell, people were desperate for space, and many walled in the small balconies attached to their apartments with whatever building materials were available. These appendages look like gnarly fungi desperately protruding from their mother trunks. If you're wondering, precarious is the word I'm thinking of too.

Laundry hangs on lines on most balconies, roofs are made of tin, and doorways of metal or thin new wood with windows. Many windows have bars over them, mine included, though I'm on the ninth floor of this building. Crime was rampant a few years ago, and I suppose people repelled off the roofs to rob apartments? I have no idea. The bars are nicely decorative and I hardly see them anymore. One can get used to any prison in the world I suppose, sometimes we don't even see the ones we live in.

I have firewood! Any squatters in my chimney are now in peril...