sketchbook: Wednesday 19 October 2011

WED 19 OCT 2011 ca. 10:30 am GRANVILLE & BROADWAY

The black steel bench is cold; the thrum of traffic is insistent, loud, and close. I'm facing east across Granville Street while Kimmie has her teeth cleaned back on Burrard Street.

It's turned cooler, more nearly overcast: the gaps in the cloud cover are small and shrinking. The sun glows distantly beyond a ragged patch to the southeast: light seeking its way through grottos of cloud.

A pigeon has alighted in front of me, looking almost expectant. Clean and blue-gray, it flaps away again. A squad of travelers streams from the bus that has pulled in, people unconnected with each other except for their choice and time of transport. A minute Chinese woman walks the other way, tapping a pink umbrella, wearing a plaid crushable hat. She boards the #10 bus, which, with a short fart of pneumatics, readies for departure and is gone.

Dumptruck rounds the corner, yellow-green, almost military-brindled; trucks snarl up Granville generally.

The buildings here are low-rise, oldish. Across Granville are the boutiques Bombay and ella. The old brick building on the corner, which I remember as a business school decades ago, is now vacant in its 2 upper floors; the tall vertical rotating sign suspended from the corner of the building to project over the sidewalk is stationary. It reads Kaplan, and below it a For Lease sign is hung on the wall. The ground floor is still occupied: Blenz Coffee and a Chinese jeweler whose name is partly hidden by a blighted little tree out front.

Now the Granville bus has pulled in front of me, interposing its big square windows.

Over the intersection is a crisscrossing tangle of wires, mainly for the electric buses. Little yellow leaves fall occasionally from the maple-trees standing at intervals on the hardpan of the broad sidewalk—silent corpses that sometimes lift like little hands in a stirring of air.