Eventually I got to talk to the person I was supposed to see but it took several minutes to be scanned and searched, let alone to convince the folks at the door to let me in. For a minute I was torn between the terror of being taken seriously and the tedium of trying not to be a threat, which made the reason I was there all the funnier to me.
My superstition about a thing today was mostly about not watching, which made going over to a big box store to see if anyone else was all the more delightful when I found nothing but nature footage and commercials for streaming television services and many ads for TV screen features. The only better thing was the joyful comfort of seeing familiar faces and hearing them sing karaoke at a historic music venue I’d never visited before.
This was a weird weekend where work just sort of bled over into days I wasn’t officially on the clock, first with the high-end haircut yesterday and then with the late breaking word out of Chinatown. But you lace up your shoes or you slip on your boots and go out to the story so you can tell it. If you’re out there long enough, the cat sniffs at you when you come home.
I’d timed my trip down to the station and my entry into public transit just right, and strolled up to the building to stop outside and take in a surprisingly quiet and peaceful stretch for a chilly midwinter end-of-workweek. It wasn’t work, but it was obligation, the good kind.
The city is starting to become differently legible to me, and it feels spooky but also reassuring. Memories attach like muscles to a map, and then six different stories sit up during a jaunt to a bistro. There’s the stairs with the car, the park where it still happens, the street where the drill took place. Normal, but wild.
On the verge of several new things, it felt good to go do old things, like getting back in the saddle of the bike at home, or getting going early enough to hit the donut shop, or lift a lot of boxes in the search for one particular thing.
Even a little break in the rain since midweek was welcome, and it felt like you could feel the spring in some people’s steps around public streets in the city today.
When you conjoin the messenger and the mine owner up in the sky, it’s only fitting to find them in front of you as well, Not only in the environment, power outages notwithstanding, but in people as well. What a week, and still only Monday.
The story always changes when you’re in it, when shivering the side of your vehicle as you’re crossing a bridge upper deck, watching 30-ft traffic signs side to side or just nervously navigating a neighborhood with night falling and time running out on a shift. When life is a movie, it’s not the plot that’s the problem. It’s the scenery.
There’s rain again, tomorrow and tomorrow, and there’s no census to capture every drop that flies past my window at work or that lands on the patio bannister or the roof at home. But I’ll see some of them again, maybe over by the greenway in the creek, or in the mist in highway lanes. Maybe they’ll see me too.
