DUSK
The sky turned a pale blue as evening approached. The sun had just about disappeared by now leaving behind a reflection of soft peach in the clouds.I Looked out into the narrow bite which served as the western entrance to the harbour. Haitian sloops, private yaughts, Cruise liners and local fisherman all filtered through at this point.The light house stood across from the way watching over it all.A flock of seaguls took of from the edge of the dock while a small group a tourists remained on the wharf stripping themselves to their swim suits to jump into the merky harbour with a big splash.I continued to look on as local shop keepers, vendors and plat ladies slowly packed up their goods to go home for the day. Mrs Mcdonald strolled pass as usual with an umbrella tucked neatly under her arm, 'how you doin' sweetie", she inquired politely as I replied with a curtious smile to return the expected " fine and thank you mamm"I leaned against the dock's concrete wall pensively thinking how this whole place was where my grandfather had once walked in older times, English news papers clenched tightly under his arm like Mrs Mcdonald's umbrella. How removed it all seemed to me now, those stories feeling more important at the time than they actually ever were. I never connected with any of it really, it always felt like old folk talking old times while I sapped it all in with childish imaginative facination.I relived each tale with such vivid recall for some vain reason perhaps to understand a sense of place in a changing land that I truly never felt a sense of belonging to. Everyone else always seemed more entitled to all this than my confusion about it all, my mother being an english woman coming to the Bahamas in the late 50's and my father's traditonal Bahamian roots which I continued to cling onto to justify my sense of home but an accepted understanding that I was not quite them.Everything here was a memory of the past, an old relic reminding me of yesterday.Yet this feeling of displacement remained and a longing to belong that plagued me as a child. I think it is an eventualy evolution when one is forced well meaningly to conform to a single cultural note of a National identityYears ago i made the conscious decision to let go of it all, not wanting to accept the history that went along with me..I looked around Bay street, time stood still here for me and some how I was held in its grip from the past without a conscious placement of self.