Money

Hey man, can you spare some change?

I want to listen to rock & roll my whole life

Hey man, I’m so high I can barely walk,

Pappo is playing tonight, I can’t miss his show.

Charly García

“With these I can buy a Coke” he said as he piled up some coins in his hands. “With these, I can buy a sandwich too…” and he put aside two more coins, “…or Central’s flag!” “In a while, I would have enough money to buy a motorcycle, no, better yet, that truck, that 4x4, the one over there… wooow,… that one, it’s awesome!!!” “My mom is missing some teeth; with these coins I’m sure she will be able to get some new ones.” As he ran out of coins, he took some from the first pile and made a new one. “Yesterday, I saw those orange snickers with a green stripe. They were so cool! Tomorrow I’m gonna buy them.”The traffic light turned red. The cars stopped by his side. While his older brother stood in the middle of the zebra crossing and juggled three old dirty tennis balls, he – who couldn’t be more than 8 years old – was completely unaware of the rest of the world and kept switching the coins from one pile to the other without even knowing how to count them, without understanding what those lines on the coins represented, without thinking of their value, completely ignoring what “quantitative” means… rating everything according to his needs, according his own measure… and we all know how the world looked like when we were only 8.

The day

It’s funny how one sunny day can erase an eternity of storms and showering rain. The streets and sidewalks are shinning and there’s a new green on every plant calling for the warmth of a new spring. Behind the woolen scarves and heavy coats, that barely allow the sight of eyes and maybe a red shiny nose from time to time, there is a glimmer of hope in those who understand and know they just have to wait for the bad times to fade.

Sometimes, when I’m out, walking on the streets in this weather, I can’t help feeling this way. But there are ups and downs on the way, and it seems that any imperceptible detail can turn everything into clouds and shadows again. And then is that I realize that, although everything is shinning on the outside, the winter is still within me, drying up the few leaves that were still alive, freezing my ideas and drying off my joy, enlarging the doors so as to close them indefinitely, while the wind is blowing cold and strongly and roaring like a storm so as to remind me who’s the boss in here.

Sometimes, I think the restlessness of the night prevents me from enjoying those random moments during the morning and I lose myself in tangles of worries, trying to find solutions, definitions and conclusions. And the only thing that I conclude is the day itself, full of omissions, deferments and dead times in which nothing happened but implacable seconds. And the light dimmes. And the glimmer, all mighty glimmer, is now just an old memory.

Some chimney will still be smoking in September. Someone will write a name or a music note with his frozen breath like a surreal cloud in the morning. The grass will have its umpteenth time to resume its growth, beating the frost, ignoring defeat and the effort to do it, repeating its cycle under the influence of its instincts or by the power of BEING THERE rather than BEING ITSELF. Or is it that, instead of ignoring defeat, it avoids it? Or is it that, rather than avoid the effort, consciously ignores it? Or is it that we call instinct to all that our reason eagerly wants to leave outside its domains? Or should we just simply BE THERE rather than fruitlessly BEING?I don’t want to settle with just BEING THERE… I want to BE.

But that only happens every other sunny morning, just like a few minutes ago… right now, it’s getting cloudy again.