I have a worm gnawing at my intestines. It happens to me a lot here. It reminds me that when I came, I had to start using a belt for the first time in my life. I have a Uruguayan belt that I bought at Lazarus in Westerville, OH. It doesn’t have holes punched in it because it is sort of woven out of the leather strips. So you put the catch through at any point you wish. When I started wearing a belt here, I made a mark from frequent usage, but now I don’t use the mark as I have to draw the thing tighter. Part of it is living at this altitude and not having a car, but part of it is from time to time some alien organism lost in the labyrinth of my bowels and finding no compassion.

* * *
Got a talkative taxi driver. He’d been to Manhattan, Albany, Las Vegas, Tucson and El Paso. Why didn’t he stay? He likes it better here. At one point, he went out and built a wooden house on top of a mountain and farmed onions and potatoes in Villa de Leiva. Interesting, isn’t it? What is he doing driving a taxi? Knows this place like the back of his hand too.

* * *
Here’s an oddity. There’s this foreigner selling minutes (phone calls that they charge you 200 COPs a minute) downtown. When people act like human phone booths they call out “Llama’as, llama’as, llama’as,” without ever pronouncing the D and with a certain rhythm. But the foreigner can’t figure it out and says “LlamaDas, llamaDas, llamaDas,” without understanding that the value of that D changes in pronunciation, especially here. He’s got a different rhythm to it all, which is the weirdest part. Besides, he looks like a sulky gringo, too lean and tall to be a son of this soil. So at night I was passing this phenomenon and suddenly I saw some crazy, female tramp squatting, hiding behind a light post, and calling out “Hours, hours, hours!” in Spanish (horas). Cognitive dissonance.

She was making fun of the gringo—I wonder if he wasn’t on some kind of sociological research; she was definitely a few fries short—but the mind, taking all of this in, wanted to find the congruent contrast. Hours and Calls (llamadas), don’t correspond, and it was the brain lurch caused by the mind groping for the missing word behind the mocking lunatic’s word choice—minutes—that sent the whole thing into the twilight zone.

When I lived in Minnesota I would be filled with great longings to depart in the spring. And in the spring we would travel. Eventually, the anchor line gave and we came to Colombia.

Now, when the best part of the year there comes around here, I begin to remember. I begin to remember the gradual and incremental cold that deepened and deepened. I took great joy in it. Great joy in Christmas trees and indoor lights, candles and the indoor of winter . . . baths—I haven’t had a bath since sometime in January.

I love the changing of the trees, their melancholy loss, the increasing bleakness and the notorious wind. I miss the chilly, withered reeds, and the supplicating branches against wan skies of forlorn clouds. I miss the seedy parts of the Minneapolis skyways, the wind-blown doors and trailing plumes of steam. The striations of the snow I miss, and the full moon seen when emerging from the Institute of Arts.

Never mind the chili dogs, the mounds of fries, the plentiful breakfasts and restaurants with space in them. We don’t get saurkraut a lot down here, nor cream soda, Dr. Pepper or root beer. No real Chinese food like in the USA. The pizza, if you want really good pizza, costs the same or more as there, which means it is priced astronomically for here.

I miss the wide roads, driving and especially acceleration. I miss winding in a dark car quickly, the temperature controls, speed and Bach combined, a passacaglia while outmaneuvering some slow dolt with a liberal bumper sticker, or a Jesus fish. I miss the great buildings of Minneapolis, so massive, so warm in winter, so full of cheer and books and restaurants. I miss the bitter walk along the streets from restaurant to book store. I miss the paperbacks abundant.

But you know what? If I left Bogota I’d miss it too, and awfully. The more I move, the more I realize that in this world I have no abiding city, and I hope it all adds up to a keener longer for my long home, a satisfactory, eternal dwelling place with all the light of God.

I can honestly say I miss California, and I was only there a week. I miss Mexico City when I get down to thinking about it, and I do it pretty often. I miss Ohio, especially its winters and its springs. I miss Texas with its wide ways of life, its wire fences and ugly bungalows; I miss the squirrels and the palms, the sand and seashells of Florida. All this stuff I love and long for. I bet if I wanted to, I could even miss Washington D.C. and I aint even been there for more than 10 hours altogether.

I yearn still for the North Atlantic, for cold waters, cold spray, cold wind and cliffs and grass. I miss the sight of its sea-fowl, of narrow houses set on hills. I don’t know exactly how that longing got in there, but it exists still today and reading Beowulf doesn’t mitigate it. It still bothers me that when the world is all made new there will be no sea, but then I remember that I am made for that place and secretly long for it. I know and know not what I long for. But the longing is deep in me, and constant.

It is a strange nostalgia, because I find that the more I move in this world, the more I wait upon the surface of this terrestrial ball and find things to love, the more I am for another.

I have two book cases nowadays, but on them stuff of so much distilled worth that I don’t think I can ever be done with these few books. I think Epstein was right about 300 being the number. I’m using the public/private, in other words general library, of course, in order to dedicate myself to the mastery of an exclusive few in my own library.

I also purchase from time to time. What was my surprise yesterday in an ambulatory flea market where there never lack used book booths when I found Davidson’s Analytical Hebrew and Chaldee Lexicon in nice shape. When I get my BDAG this Sunday I’ll be almost complete, and the Davidson didn’t cost me the close to $200 I’m afraid the real Spanish-Hebrew thing is going to cost when that day comes. An Analytical is necessary for me still in Hebrew, but it isn’t enough.

We get nice prints that are from time to time sold at the library. Printed in Italy—home of the really fine printers, I suppose. Well-done and not so expensive anyway. I got a Van Gogh. We got it framed and I’m really pleased. It is one of the great things about Bogota that they still don’t shop for everything on the internet. You have the moment of finding the object by chance, weighing the circumstance and the cost, deciding, and then the satisfaction afterward.