An Outlandish Journey

My most outlandish journey begins in the spring of 2019.  I hadn't thought about Mick or the Rolling Stones in years. The last time I saw them perform was in Leipzig in June 2003, a few weeks before I ended up in Greece where I met Themis, with whom I've shared a life ever since. In the fall of 2003  I learned that Mick had fallen in love with L'Wren Scott, a tall American model and fashion designer. I decided it was time to abandon my fantasy of one day meeting and getting to the bottom of that peculiar chain of events that had brought me to his island in April of 1992, the 80th anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic. And a bunch of other mysteries in my wandering life. After Leipzig for the next 16 years I paid only passing attention to the Stones and Mick's slolo album Goddess in the Doorway which I listened to once or twice. I was beyond hearing messages in the lyrics whereas back in the mid 90s I had imagined some could even be about me: an indefensible notion t

  I had never been so alive as I was over that winter. I had friends who understood me, who grasped my hidden European soul which was ready to leap from its cage and run around the basketball court. We were a core group of four girls but not exclusively-- we loved everybody in Miss Brown's home room. We were all a big family of mostly darkhaired dark eyed immigrants who had landed together in this experiment- that's what they called us. We were the "Latin-Science" class who were meant to emerge as hybrids with a dead language and new formulae fighting for dominance in our future. We also sang -- our class choir which was 85% girls won the school competition that year and went on to be best in the city. Nothing could stop us.   Plus we had the Stones, backed up by the Beatles, playing in our heads, fuelling excited conversation by our lockers between classes where teen magazines were shar ed and pored over for the latest scandals over in Britain involving our heroes B

  A Losing Streak   Home   ▼ Saturday, July 27, 2019 The Vanishing School Girl I never got a chance to explain - he was just gone. I must have felt judged, abandoned, lost before I even knew what happened. Like the twirling piano stool or the record player turntable - my head was spinning. In some future world I was waking up, but in this one I was spiralling into hell. And nobody saw - it was just me in the basement which was now the whole dark universe and what did I do then? In one world, 50 years away, I woke from a dream that had turned bad and was threatening to get even worse... Then came the aftermath. There had to be an aftermath. Once Mick drove away in the rental car, the one with the broken mirror (seven years bad luck), maybe en route to the next concert in the next city, which was Ottawa on a sunny day in late April, late afternoon by the way the sun slanted in the photo and made the three Stones squint...  or maybe this happened on another day, like the Friday, April 23,

  A Losing Streak   Home   ▼ Saturday, July 27, 2019 The Last Time This is not what I remember because I remember almost nothing. But this is what I can piece together from the available facts, a video, and a dream I had about 10 years ago. I was 14 years old and living at my parents' house in the suburbs of Montreal. It could have been a Saturday afternoon. My father and brother were not around and my mother was in the kitchen at the sink looking out the window. She said, "There's someone here to see you. Go let him in." I stopped whatever I was doing and went to open the front door, and there was Mick Jagger. My first impression was that he'd recently had a haircut looked neater than when I'd last seen him, probably months earlier, probably on the T.A.M.I. show which my friends all watched on TV. I opened the outer screen door and he stepped into the entrance and stood for a moment in the hall next to the living room, looking around. He was 21, very polite a