A Kind of Magic – Tenerife, Canary Islands – [04/13/2016]

It took me a while to realize that I’d been to Tenerife before – it feels like a much longer time ago than it actually was. IT was only a year or so back, but so much seems to have happened since kit and I sat and sipped drinks and ate overpriced ice cream at the edge of the port’s central lake.

Howe could so much have happened in so little time? How many people have come and gone out of my life since then? How many names that I don’t even remember? Of names that I remember but not the face that goes with it?

Not depressing exactly, in reality I find it quite fascinating. Although it does make me realize that I should play more attention to such things.

After the slightly off-kilter time I had in Lisbon I decided to go out on my own today rather than with a friend, Tenerife is not a huge city (by contrast to others that is) and my bus ticket gets me most all of the important places. It’s a sunny day and I don’t have an object to wandering quietly with my camera, hoping to stumble on a museum or a place for ice cream.

I’m always on the lookout for ice cream

The dessert bar at the edge of the lake where Kit and I ate is still here of course. And it is just a dessert bar, not a restaurant proper, it sells cocktails, sweets and coffee. Since mid-afternoon is a wee bit early for me to order  cocktail if I’m not having much in the way of actual lunch (the one slice of apple pie I did have was delicious but doesn’t really count as lunch), and since I’m not a big fan of drinking alone in the first place – cappuccino it was.

The second hand smoke that laced through the air reminded me more strongly than the language of the menu that we were far from North America with its health laws. Perhaps it should have bothered me, but it doesn’t, it’s just part of the atmosphere.

Part way through nursing my luke warm cappuccino, two local musicians take up residence on the concrete of the man-made lake shore. Buskers, they soon add lively guitar and Spanish lyrics to the ambient noise, playing while walking backwards along the water‘s edge; it’s clear that they’ve done this many times before. They’re talented, and I usually try and support buskers, but I have no local change (or at least I thought I didn’t) in the hat they eventually pass around. They move on and their music gradually fades into the distance, leaving the rather blasé pop music of the café’s radio instead

I definitely preferred the guitars

Sitting here, still sipping my now cold coffee and becoming slowly invisible to the overworked waitress find myself awestruck once again by the path my life has taken. IT is, granted, not the life I had planned for. Circumstances came along and put me through a change, I trained my whole life to be on stage and I truly believe I may end up there yet – only to find myself a computer teacher; which is honestly just another performance on a different kind of stage. I found love, lost it, and then miraculously found it again – and ended up in a place where sitting at a cosmopolitan café in the Canary Islands is just another day.

I may not have ended up exactly where I thought I would, perhaps I simply wasn’t willing to starve for a dream, who knows – but with a list of “things I Have done” that currently stretches 11 page long and grows ever day, and a job that – while not a show in the traditional sense – still works to a script every day and still make people leave my classroom with a smile if I do it properly – I challenge anyone to say I haven’t succeeded.

Not of course, that there isn’t more to come, to live is an awfully big adventure.

A professor of mine at Theatre College once told us that we needed to remember that just because we didn’t find success in the way we hoped did not mean we were a failure. I see now what she meant.

If you launch yourself towards the moon, you might find you trip before you get there. But if you open your eyes, you’ll probably find you still managed to land in the arms of the stars.

Bright blessings.