isoglossia — pending reconstruction

Now, at first glance this inoccuous-looking postcard would probably make you think that I plan to write a post about a nice little jaunt up to the Isle of Wight.

I have never visited the Isle of Wight. No one has ever thought to send me a postcard from the Isle of Wight. Nevertheless, this image comes directly from my archives and I am wondering what I was ever thinking to begin the Random picture stream series with that picture of L’Esprit Nouveau when I had this in the vault. The story behind this postcard is larded with randomness. I suppose that must have been what I was thinking: don’t begin with the MOST random picture — that wouldn’t be random. So I’m smarter than I thought, only I don’t let myself know what I’m thinking til later. That’s smart.

Since I posted the story of buckwheat my sister has written to inform me that a lexical item like the buckwheat I described is known linguistically as a flapping owl. This is something I love about my family: even if you are supposed to be the family expert on some topic, they can always teach you something. So, this flapping owl idea is interesting — private language generated by and shared among families or friends.

My friend Emily in San Francisco is enduring evidence of how the internet works at its best. We met like penpals used to only now they use computers and five years later I still count her among my ‘closest’ friends even though she lives 10 time zones away and we’ve only occupied the same continent at the same moment a handful of times. She did a fair amount of trans-hemispherical hand-holding when I was agonizing about whether to stay in Argentina or not, and was a strong and knowledgeable supporter of the Slovenia plan from its inception. When I got the job offer she told me that she would definitely visit me if I ended up in Slovenia, and sure enough she did.

But for complicated logistical, linguistic, and hedonistic reasons we decided to see Slovenia last during her visit to Europe in the summer of 2002. I picked her up at the airport in Milan (which was surreal, having never met her before and having only one pixelly photograph of her wearing Audrey Hepburn’s sunglasses at a birthday party in a SF biergarten to go on). We drove across northern Italy and the southern coast of France to Barcelona. Our plan was to go to the Paellapallooza or whatever they call it at Benicassim that year, with Radiohead and Belle & Sebastian and who knows who, but we had too much fun and blew off the festival for some reason. I think we were too cool. Or too geeky. Hard to tell.

But that’s getting ahead of the story of the Isle of Wight and so I need to back up to I guess day three of our trip, when we were really settling into the idea of knowing each other as that person across the parking brake rather than some disembodied email wit. We spent a night in Nice and strolled along the Place de l’Anglais or whatever, the waterfront, in hot sun looking for postcards. It turned out, I think it’s fair to say, that Emily shares my mania for sending postcards to essentially everyone you’ve ever known any time you go somewhere that would potentially engender envy in another human if depicted on a postcard.

The postcards of Nice and many other places fall into three categories. If depicted on a pie-chart (sorry, too lazy to whip up a quick pie-chart, use your imagination), they would occupy two massive swaths approximately equal in size, with one tiny, teeny, eye-poking splinter representing the third category.

Category one is the standard, garden-variety picture-postcard, with various gorgeous views depicting the French Riviera: Nice itself, Juan-les-Pins, Cannes, Monte Carlo/Monaco, and so on. Palms swaying, sumptuous hotels, sunsets melting into the Med. I probably sent one of these to you. (It might’ve gotten lost in the mail).

Category two also saw me purchasing some, but for a more restricted class of recipients. These are the “Spring Break” type of postcard which are basically generic and usually have nothing to do with the place where they are purchased other than to suggest “dude, I am getting LAID! (or would like to)” These are the topless bathers, the thongs, the rows and rows of sand-dusted bottoms, etc, and usually have some sort of bon mot that might or might not have some loose tie with the area the postcard is supposed to represent (”things are NICE in NICE” might be the legend in bubble-gum pink Comic Sans beneath a bunch of hooters, e.g.)

The splinter category, that tiny slice of the pie-chart, is for me the most elusive yet most desirable type of postcard. These are the postcards that were delivered by mistake or through some less-obvious means came to be where they should not. A close relative is the postcard that is so random and inscrutable that no one has bought it, so it sits there in the sun-drenched rack year after year, curling and fading and accruing more camp flavor with each passing decade.

This is how we got the Isle of Wight postcards. For a second as we stood there on the sidewalk of the sea-side promenade in Nice the world seemed to wobble slightly on its axis while we asked ourselves, “did we somehow arrive upon the Isle of Wight without meaning to? What the…?” But quickly we regained our wits, accepted where we were, and bought up all of the Isle of Wight postcards (maybe eight of them). We saved them to send to the people who would be most entertained to get a postcard from somewhere we weren’t. Or to cherish forever as a monument to chaos.

Maybe it is worth noting at this point that the previous year I had sent Emily a postcard from Tasmania — that is, the postcard came from Tasmania and I came across it while I was in Argentina. I think it’s safe to say that I have never been within 5,000 miles of Tasmania.

It seemed so random that those postcards had been there in that rack that we decided that Isle of Wight would for the rest of the trip be our phrase for dealing with the bizarre and the unexpected. It seemed to work pretty well. Plenty of Isle of Wight things can happen between Barcelona and Ljubljana. I am not sure whether Emily has kept this in her lexicon. I get precious few occasions to use it, but I treasure the memory, and am releasing it into the wild.