263 - Say Goodbye

I write this on a rainy, cold day, one day after I’ve shot this image in the bright light of an amazingly beautiful and hot day under southern skies. Yesterday I took a final round of swimming in the deep blue of the sea, and then we left Mali Losinj and the spiders of Cres at about noon. This image is from breakfast. I normally don’t have ice cream for breakfast, but in that climate it was perfectly OK.

I sat there in one of the cafés along the promenade, stunned at how empty the marina was (on the other hand, if you had a boat on such a day, what would you do but use it?), and then I saw the street lamps. They were a gift of the city of Varaždin to the city of Mali Losinj, and somehow they have an oriental quality that fascinates me. I took some images of this group of lamps, some of one lamp alone, and that was it for the day. Everything else were documentary shots.

For the Song of the Day I wanted something with the words “say goodbye”, and “Time to Say Goodbye” by blind Italian opera singer Andrea Bocelli and Sarah Brightman wouldn’t have been too wrong, but I still settled with Cole Porter’s “Everytime We Say Goodbye”. What version? Ella? Too sweet. Ray Charles and Betty Carter sometime in the 1960s? Too sweet as well. Annie Lennox on the “Red, Hot + Blue” AIDS benefit album? Not really. Betty Carter? Somehow cool and not bad for so much blue color.

No, it’s even cooler still, yet there is all the longing in it that I feel for the south and the sun. It’s instrumental, it’s John Coltrane on his 1960 album “My Favorite Things”.