Eaton Centre

[vaneramos]

The Toronto Eaton Centre, yesterday afternoon.

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For correctly identifying the special effects in a photo I posted last week, I asked stephe to give me a photo assignment to undertake in Toronto over the weekend. He asked for images from a couple of sites. One of them was the Eaton Centre. It's a huge, splendid, glassed-in mall that reminds me of a Victorian crystal palace.

I had heard that photography was forbidden there. I wasn't in the mood to have my camera confiscated yesterday, but I decided to pass through anyway, en route to the second location. At a balcony rail overlooking the lower pedestrian floors stood a cluster of Asian tourists flashing their cameras at one another. Not ten paces away, a security guard stood nonchalantly chatting with a shopper. Since the rules weren't being stringently enforced, I decided to proceed with my photo shoot. Shots from the second location will be posted later this week.

These were my two last stops before catching the 4:30 Greyhound bus to Guelph. I had dawdled downtown all afternoon, and paid for it by sitting more than two hours on a commuter run while the sun set ahead and to the left. We were jerking forward, bumper to bumper, on Highway 410 through Brampton with dusk beginning to settle when I dug through my bag for a book to read. It was The Man Who Fell in Love With the Moon, by Tom Spanbauer. lowfatmuffin sent it to me late last year, and I finally cracked the cover in the middle of a concrete wasteland. It transported me immediately to the mountains of Idaho more than a century ago, and for that I was grateful.

I'm ready to be transported anywhere just now. This morning I had trouble extracting enthusiasm to do anything. Writing at my desk, I asked myself where I would rather be, immediately envisioning a warm beach of white sand with shells to pick and a blue sky to scrutinize. We have sun here today, but accompanied by the kind of cold that might freeze bare skin in a matter of minutes.

I had to go deeper to understand what is really bothering me. I've been feeling buried in metaphorical rubble ever since my daughters went back to school. I started digging out of it last week, but in my office I'm surrounded by the material manifestation: books, papers, fabric and other art supplies, magazines—the stacks and layers of my disorganized ambition. It is not conducive to creativity. When I started on my newest collage last week, I had to shuffle awkwardly through heaps and piles.

The first priority at this moment is to turn this room from the ruins of a bombed city into the clear horizons of a tropical island. I have morning sun at the windows; that will do for starters. Next I need some geographical manipulation. I'm not sure how to go about it.