This week's Photo Friday challenge is “vehicle.” And this is my response to it:
(click to enlarge to read ad copy on tram)
When I was last in Budapest, just this last September, I ended up taking lots of photos of trams, cars, underpasses, platforms, bridge sidewalks, all things of transit and transitions, I suppose. Budapest was never my home, since I lived there less than two years of a fairly long life now, so it is apt that the elements that most appealed to my photographer's eyes in that city had to do with motion.
A vehicle is a means of transport. It is supposed to get you from here to there, whether in body, mind, or spirit. You take at as it comes, then leave it. You board a plane, you do your Spanish verb drills, you sit to meditate. It is supposed to be practical, right? But the vehicle becomes something else than mere means of transport if you happened to have spent too much time “in transit.”You get stuck. You may even get agoraphobia, or you may well become peripatetic.
Part of me, I suppose, is still on that tram in Budapest, waiting to be flown, for my smile, to New York. Which means that I am going nowhere on the tracks laid over cobblestones in Budapest, even as I keep moving, in my mind, to a New York that can never be arrived at, let alone be mapped.
