The area tilts me on an axis. It's as if I am looking through a magnified diving mask. Only it is not me swimming but the world swimming around me. And it is the only corner I have ever been on that does this. Thirty years ago I thought it my state of mind; now I know it is the corner itself. All the shops have changed except Honest Ed's. And maybe it's that vaudevillan double football field store of everything that is a mere four years older than me and long before Wal-Mart. Selling is a circus. Thousands of feet of coloured seasonal lights never stop blinking. Lights that mean shopping, gifts for oneself or others, new things, cheap things.
Poverty drives this corner. The dispossessed come from everywhere, converging. Last year I tripped on the street car tracks and fell headlong on the traffic-heavy road. I'm not imagining that gravity shifts its axis here.
Sheath of feeling. Words groping to touch air.
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"Everybody has their own pet peeve," I once heard a comedian say, "Mine is gravity." And there it is. Things that hold you, that pull you, the constrain you. Do they represent safety? Do they represent repression and the crushing of possibility? Do they shape the universe or refuse to allow it to find its true shape?
ReplyDeleteI don't know if that corner is constraining, but it is a strange street corner and I'm not sure why. When I'm standing there, waiting for lights to change, it's like everything tilts somehow. It's been like that at that corner since 1979 for me. A dispossessed corner. If there can be tellurian lines in the earth, and certain 'sacred' spots, perhaps there are also variations on the Twilight Zone theme? I'm laughing of course - it's probably just the circus of Honest Ed's, a store that's become such a cultural icon I like to go in to get a flavour of Toronto that's sure to disappear when he dies (he's in his 90s now). Hey, where else can you get cotton sweaters the colour of blueberries that button and fit snugly for $2.99? Or a stainless steel teapot for $4.00? The store has never been renovated and I'm sure there's still stock there for the inception in 1948. But I'm changing the subject of this little piece, which I wrote during a heat wave in the Summer...
ReplyDelete(I hope I managed to get you smiling too!)
Wow. This describes the energy of a place as well as anything I have ever read. And for what it's worth I believe there are twilight zone areas .....
ReplyDeleteThere is a £ store (maximum price for everything £1) close to where I have been working recently, and I was planning to go and buy some basics at lunchtime. I couldn't go in. Though if I was down to my last penny I probably could, but maybe a stronger energy would drive me through in that event.