’It really nice’.
’ It cost plenty money so it had to be nice’.
’ Yes, if you had given me all that money to play with I would have built something really nice too.
’ Yea, but still the country should be proud of it’.
Yesterday, I saw the Summit Village coming to come. It was the first sight I had of it which was somewhat surprising, the Laventille Rhythm Section of which I remain the titular manager having already put down a lot of donkey hours at the Hyatt Hotel from which a view of the seafront was possible, but they understood that this old seahorse was not as durable as he used to be, the men dutifully reporting back on their doings under Mr MacFarlane, comrade-in-Carnival arms that they have been ever since Mr Minshall bowed out (can one still hope temporarily?) from the mas.
So I looked and I listened, the above conversation taking place even as the three of us gazed across the turquoise waters of the Gulf, taking in the T&T Express sailing gamely past the Caribbean Princess, the one towering above the other, but the other for all that doing what these relatively small boats have by now become accustomed to doing, Trinbagonians crowded on deck certain they were being brought safely back to port.
Up and down the concourse people were taking in the sea-side sights and I thought how mistaken had been my architect friend who had raged about Mr Manning taking away the islanders’ right to see the sea, the man, himself (almost as if he had heard him), talking, the day before, about how ’we are returning the waterfront to the people of Port of Spain and Trinidad and Tobago’ and elaborating:
’In fact, they haven’t had access to this waterfront since the port was built in 1939 or something. It’s a long time since then and, therefore, many people who are on the waterfront were not born yet when this waterfront was closed off to the people of Trinidad and Tobago. They have never experienced it’.
Islander that I am, I remember listening with, well, regretful nostalgia, to Courtney Bartholomew telling me about his growing up in and around what was then Marine Square, my imagination stretching the point to the point where I could almost see him dangling his toes in the water that lapped around his verandah, which of course was not the case, only that, waking up, he had the sea as a daily companion before the colonial authorities reclaimed land for more utilitarian, if prosaic use-if you get my drift.
Now, though, hearing the twitter all around me-from all the races and classes, mind you-I couldn’t help but think that the Botanic Gardens and thereabouts were about to lose pride of place as THE spot for wedding pictures, brides and grooms, the more the word gets around, sure to show up on the Waterfront, with their retinue of bridesmaids and groom-whatever, cell cameras clicking even as the itinerant professional cameramen tried to get a shot and a hustle in, the advance in amateur picture-taking technology destined to doom them in .
And pretty as a picture the Waterfront was and this was in the heat of the noon-day sun, the heart and the mind doing a turn to the time when, even before all this was fully laid on, I was banqueting in the Hyatt when, looking aft, I saw, through the expansive glass doors, twin lights probing through the night, the islands’ ferry, for that was what it was, bearing brightly down so that, just for a moment there, it looked as if the lights were coming straight as us, the ’suits’ for all their patented pragmatism, looking so much like romantic schoolboys, only their innate circumspection, I thought, preventing them from bursting into applause.
Walking back from whence I came I passed though the Breakfast Shed (’ Ruby, like all ah all yuh sell out today’/ ’People just in here to sit down from the sun’/ ’Not from all the filled, half-filled and empty plates I see’/ ’Hmmmphh...’ A last backward look at the water from the fountains wind-whipped enough to sprinkle some of the grinning guests. Freeze the frame in this moment of prideful pleasure. Tomorrow will come the accounting soon enough.
