LOCAL OBSERVATION

Of Parrots and Ducks

BY CHRISTINA OXENBERG
Konk Life Staff Writer

Autumn in the northern hemisphere is a perfect time to travel, and traveling I am. First to New York and now Serbia. I just could not help from coming back.

That my beloved Green Parrot is closed and under renovation is an excellent reason to leave Key West. Most importantly the dance floor is being rebuilt and I feel a little responsible for its extensive wear and tear. What a great time to be away, because to be there and not to be allowed to go dance at the Green parrot would be worse than hell.

Equally hellish in my sainted little island life is the weather currently where the atmosphere perspires and oxygen vanishes and you feel like you’re gagging on mouthfuls of clouds. A great time to leave, temporarily, of course.

I’m in the very ancient city of Belgrade, Serbia, where I have rented an apartment short-term and I’m feeling like a native but behaving like a tourist, using methods like the tram tracks to find my way home. Employing hand gestures to communicate numbers, flashing fingers and quizzical embarrassed looks, until the person says, ‘English?’ And I nod pathetically and present my money, colored papery notes, fanned out like a deck of cards, and let them pluck what they like. The city of Belgrade is hustle and bustle like New York except of course with a European cast with ornate curly cues on the buildings while others are blocks of marble, still others bombed wreckage with trees growing where once there were walls.

Busy open air coffee shops everywhere are filled with slouched lupine locals with deeply relaxed natures. The men are manly and march and the women supremely feminine slither on their oiled hinges. Little restaurants out on the cobblestones are filled with people who seem to have little concern for time and care only for their miniature coffees and brandies.

By contrast there are the tranquil houseboats along the banks of the river Sava where I was lucky enough to be invited for lunch last Sunday. A barbecue of fish fished directly from the waters surrounding us, while somebody’s mother chopped this and that and made magic from unrecognizable produce. Mouthwatering magic. Here it is calm and beautiful and the people are hospitable and mellow and I’m told the scent of food brings strangers to one’s houseboat. I lounged in a hammock, a platform with a mattress hung by chains and right before I closed my eyes, giving into the paradise, I observed a fat log floating swiftly down the center current of the river, two indolent ducks squatting on it, hitching a leisurely ride.

I traveled here on a one-way ticket but, despite my romance with this foreign land, I cannot stay forever. For one thing, I left my car at the Key West airport. I’ll be back soon.

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