Golden Hours (Daily Planet email #1120)
In my mind we are together in Cleveland, strolling on an endless Saturday. Sidewalks dappled and windows winking, we move lightly through easy air, in flowing conversation and comfortable silence, paper cups down a lazy stream. Our shared history gives us this freedom and foundation, a blank and beautiful slate we can fill with…? Well, anything we suppose in the moment, and the moment thereafter. Any moment will do.
We stumble across an antique store – is it even open? Oh dear, it is. We stumble into it as well, since the door won’t open all the way from the warped tile and a tower of vintage microwaves. The air close and the accumulation closer, it could be a ransacked storage unit, but there’s a cash register behind one of the cats. Shimmying our way through the dusty narrows, we think maybe these piles used to be more pile shaped. A museum of the useless? An omnibus of terminus? Tattered music mutters from in back but we see no people, so we are mercifully able to escape without interaction, without obligation
On our merry meander, there is bread and cheese, public art and just enough edifice. There is coffee and care, a place to sit and a stage to stand. There is wander and wonder, lapsang souchong, and weeping, sepia striations of oxide jacking. We calibrate and palpitate, exploring the avenues peppered with pleasant, dutiful garbage, where even the graffiti is somehow ennobled. Did you know that not even fifty years ago, there were three billion more birds than there are today? Can you imagine? What a lot of noise! What a lot of poop! It’s true, we live in the best of all possible worlds.
Look here, it’s a downtown toy store, three stories of languid entropy that has outlived almost everybody. It’s a classic city space, the kind you see in an old movie where a desperate parent convinces the proprietor to open back up for just a moment, even though it is dark and Christmas Eve and people are scurrying home, laden with packages. Inside, a lonesome music box loop and the spirit of cobwebs, lurching collections of new-ish gewgaws and there, on shelves near the high ceiling, a parade of ossified dolls, forever young. A Professional Toy Salesman sneaks his lunch, crouching in a tiny storage alcove, furtively removing the wax paper from his cold tongue and catsup on rye.
We rest in the square by the fountain and let the wind cast loosened water over our contented arms. The community is in full force today, you can see the light, a childish and hopeful disposition in the passersby. An historic marker grabs our attention and is soon forgotten, one moment and always the next. Is that a chill on our tender arms? The sky begins to paint with a different brush, suggesting the day is not endless after all. But we know better. It ends only when we do.
Daily Planet Productions Ltd.,
measured out in coffee spoons.
