Three Feet

...make all the difference between running and rolling. The extra foot is as revolutionary as the opposable thumb, or so my ruminations inspired by the triskelion in the Sicilian Flag hanging at Enzo's would have it.

My son is highly impressed with the tomato sauce they use there, and from the look of the crowds there Sunday night, I'd say he's not the only one. What I didn't expect was to be so thrown back into Matthew Barney's Cremaster Cycle by such a harmless event as eating out in Windsor Terrace. That owes to the triskele, also an emblem of the Isle of Man, and to the football game playing on the large flat screen behind the bar, but mostly to the strange rounded plastic shade that covers the garden, an odd clear shell-like covering which looks like it expands convertable style to enclose the space when it rains. Under the influence of the triskele and the full moon, I read it as a weird contraption that could turn the room into a dirigible. The horn-like tresses rising above this pretty Medusa's head add to this unexpected and welcome smattering of neopaganism.

But why three feet and not four on the triskelion? Maybe the triskele gives us a leg each for past, present and future. Perhaps it would appear a little more grounded and stable if it had a fourth leg, then we'd have a leg for each direction, but then we'd also have a swastika. Which, long ago and far away, would have suggested good luck but it's another one of the many things the Third Reich ruined woefully.