The Bikers rally that took place in Philadelphia that day

was but one highlight from a journey out from Media with

my dear friend Carole.

The city of brotherly love became the place where friendship

blossomed and now after more than twenty three years

I know she is still looking out for me and taking the lost

lonely lad she found isolated on a bench in a bar, surrounded by hundreds

of all-American types, drinking, laughing, shouting for the unseen

team to score in a game I didn’t understand properly, out for a walk round

the city every day, even though the vast basin of the Atlantic

separates us.

 

This bohemian looking women,

billowing, willowing skirt, hair capturing the wind

and holding it prisoner with not a thought of ransom,

smiled across the heaving floor

and asking boldly outright,

no thought remonstrating in her head

that she might, could, should be wrong,

“Was I English, you guys are so reserved, painfully so?”

Was I English? At that point I could not have given an answer

which would have been suitable. Of Cornish stock and with Birmingham

tattooed in my heart, but with the thought for many years of

changing to that of the country closest to my heart,

a signature on a piece of paper and learning a new set of rules,

both of which to this day are actions I abhor,

and instead of Cadbury’s blood running through my veins

or the Tamar and the Rae dictating my mood,

Niagara Falls and the Wendy Burger

would be my sustenance.

 

Just over a week in her company and she taught me

more about myself than I had learned in years.

The photograph, the only decent one of me in existence

of my image wanting to kiss the Liberty Bell

as I thought at that moment I may have actually

achieved a sense of freedom, still sits, framed like my thought

on the bookshelf next to Kerouac’s lost soul.

Standing on the marker where my hero J.F.K. stood for the last

time in the city before America lost its innocent charm

and sitting in the Dickens Bar and falling in love with a place

rather than a person. My perception changed as Bruce Springsteen

walked in the part of town I never saw.

 

Many years later, perhaps the only person on the planet

who would drive for four hours to hear me delivery a British ode

in a Washington hotel, my thoughts go back to watching that Biker’s rally

and I understood that the Atlantic is misinformed,

that I may not be able to swim the distance

between us, to share the memory of a week and a day,

a day in which the guards of the Pentagon could have shot us

without a second thought, their trigger fingers itching to have a go,

a week in which my love for her was untainted by the thought of

anything but learning, listening and fun.

In a friendship so unique, I think of you fondly,

the Atlantic Ocean, mysterious and so vast,

is but a bridge a yard in length, the biker taught me that.

 

For Carole Labrum.

Ian D. Hall 2015.