Wednesday, September 26, 2007
Shipshape, PLUS EXCITING UPDATE
Oh man, this has not been an easy day so far. Leaving the gym this morning I noticed that, for the first time in months, it was still dark at 6:30. I got back home to find that we’d had an ant invasion and spent the rest of the prep-time portion of my morning working with Kel to rectify things, poison my kitchen, and get Z fed, diapered and dressed as he very thoroughly tested our patience and boundaries in every way he could possibly imagine (and he’s an imaginative little cuss). I got to work unshowered, unbreakfasted, and uncalm.
So what can I do about it?
How about this: I’ll try to share a moment I experienced a month or so ago, when I noticed what had apparently been before my blinkered eyes for years on end already but which I had never, apparently, seen. That’s the sort of thing that might help me overcome my present state of irritation, and maybe even encourage me to find a way to enjoy myself today. It’s worth a shot, anyway. So:
Written as my bus pulled up:
I’ve stood at this stop hundreds of times over dozens of years and more, and, looking across the street, I’ve only noticed the blocky entrance grate and the big garish triangular metal marquee and the place where the Red Gorilla sign used to be stuck the to façade of the building but it’s now just a gluey smear on the wall. That’s all I ever noticed – and now, today, I look up across the street and the sun is casting just right; and the storefronts to the left and right are both somehow darkened in shadow, but this building directly across the street from me is brightly lit, and on the wide section of wall between the two simple, unornamented top-floor windows, I discover a medallion frieze – a circular vignette of a sailing ship with sixteen sails, three masts, billowing waves rolling and breaking under her prow, a wide sky of magnificent cumuli. I can almost see it in color, though it’s all just concrete and flat beige paint. It seems to bell right out from the blank plaster face of the blank empty building; it seems to be sailing right out at me.
All those years, and I never noticed it. And today, goddamn it, I finally did. I wonder what else I’ve overlooked.
UPDATE: I wrote that little bit of text a month or so ago, and just transcribed it to the blog yesterday morning. Late that afternoon I headed home by way of a brief visit with a friend at our favorite hanging-out park, and then headed toward the nearest bus stop - the one across from the little maritime frieze I’d just described for the world. The building was shrouded in scaffold hung with cloth, but I was able to discern through the construction chaos that the top floor of the structure, where the little ship made its motionless journey for decades, had been completely removed. I could see on the two adjacent buildings, signs of demolition going up several feet on their in-facing walls, and what had been a modest four-story office structure was now a three-story tear-out site. Above the third floor, the roofline was jagged and rough, with rebar occasionally poking out to prod the sky like skeletal fingers reaching up from some Wes Craven grave. The ship had sailed. I’m just glad I caught it while I had the chance.
