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02/20/2005: "Around the Block"
Late in the afternoon on a cold February Thursday, the sun shines through my office window. I'm not busy with work and it looks nice outside and I don't want to wait for tonight's walk. I call over to Manny's and he agrees to the get-together.
Long shadows cross lines on the back of afternoon houses. The brick on those houses, their texture and colour. There's one in a weathered red with a fenced backyard and green shrubbery. Oh. Look at the shadows. They're making lines and patterns and then the side that is in the sun is so absolutely bright and warm and somehow represents all that is comfortable in this world. Discover that the side that is so absolutely not in the sun, dulled and quiet somehow, is now the side that I stand in. It is cold and now moving onwards.
Turn and face the fence to Manny's backyard. The shadowed side to a series of beige wooden slats, the chrome of a truck shining bright in between the fencing gaps. Manny leads left through his backgate, though there's a second opening right and the shining chrome calls right and it's right. And through the right passage it is and on the other side, there is Manny waiting.
Manny turns left again, this time I follow as he leads the way to Queen Street. "What a great street is Queen West" I think for the how-many-eth time in my life. And we're walking and talking and laughing and listening but always the sun, the vanising sun. Then I remember something Gluckman said, about this being the land of the Northern Sun. So we turn north, to the right, up Spadina.
Past the wall of the CIBC, "For What Matters", where this time there's two different ladies wearing outfits that make me look. Past the grocery stands, where people patiently sort through boxes of vegetables, in search of tonight's dinner. The food looks so healthy and nice and I'd like some for myself, wouldn't I? But right now we don't need anything except to keep on going.
All the way to Henry Moore at the southwest corner of Dundas and McCaul. I look and it pulls me in; the rings and the spaces around those rings. And I'm talking about this sculpture called Two Large Forms with Manny, how it is round and bronze and inconsistent with the shapes and materials of the neigbourhood. And how this sculpture couldn't be any better of a fit. Then I stop, forgetting what I think I know. Following the undulations and how the circle between the two rings leaves a space where the heads of pedestrians walking on McCaul pass through. How the rooftops of the adjacent houses make pointed triangles on the sky, while the roundness of the rings take in this neighbourhood and reflect it back out, like bouncing the sounds waves off a screeching streetcar. And bouncing the life, the rest of the life of Toronto with a man passing who looks at me, and I at him.
We consider that we're punks, me and Manny, tripping around like we are. But is there something else we're supposed to be doing? Doesn't seem so, and we continue our trip, for the time being at least.
Eventually I'm back at the computer, where I check in on the walking group's plan for the night. But my inbox is empty, even Jason calls to cancel. Funny how it seems to work out. I can feel now that I've had enough walking for the day, and now enough writing, too. I hope I can never get past this feeling of things working themselves out.
