sketchbook: Saturday 8 October 2011
SAT 8 OCT 2011 ca. 1:45 pm LONSDALE & 1st ST.
The fall sunshine is faint but hot: some shadows are vague and smoky; others are crisp, like the shadow of my pen-tip on this cream-colored paper. It has just waxed stronger, and now fainter again.
I sit on the concrete lip of a planter overflowing with rhododendron, in a kind of stall made by two sidewalk signs standing on the brick paving-stones radiating from a center in front of Waves Coffee: to my left a blackboardlike sign advertising The kat walk: Hair, Nails, Skin; to my right, Colette's Frocks, with the black-and-white image of a 1940s pinup girl reclining on a background of pink houndstooth fabric.
The intersection is busy with both cars and pedestrians. There is the surging of car engines shooting up the hill of Lonsdale, and the tootling of electric-guitar notes from a sidewalk musician up the street. Trees, maybe maples, stand at the edge of the road and rise from the divider at the center of Lonsdale; they have the faint blush of early fall, and a few leaves lie on the bricks amid cigarette butts, a paper plate, and some words written boldly in yellow chalk: THANKSGIVING FLOWERS @ Bella Doni, with an arrow pointing up 1st St.
Two cyclists whiz down Lonsdale in identical white jackets and silver helmets. An old man all in black treads downhill, pushing a four-wheeled walker. A woman walks toward me across Lonsdale, pink shirt, gray plaid jacket, dyed red hair; she has to proceed slowly because cars do not stop for the zebra crossing; she steps in front of a yellow cab that reluctantly stops a meter away. A loud diesel pickup truck roars by sounding like a much bigger vehicle under heavy load. Young woman in black walking a tiny jingling dog. A thin man has his animated young son by the hand, the boy talking nonstop, his plaid shirt flapping. White-haired man walks by, slowed by the two heavy bags he carries. Young couple stops so the woman can fiddle with her phone. Brisk-paced man in a moss-green sweater. A persistent wasp keeps returning to hover around my eyeglasses and jean jacket.
Now the sky grows more full of clouds; shadows are faint, barely perceptible. A bus thunders through the intersection and pulls into its stop below 1st, signals flashing brightly. The sun has become a bleary zone of nuclear white beyond the tattered leaves of a tree and the motionless stoop of a streetlamp. And the amplified guitar riffs burble on below the rough breath of traffic.
