Time Travelling

by Brooke, September,  2016  

We are in the apartment; four air conditioners are running and it is 32° Celsius in the bedroom, and it is nighttime. Adrian has taken his pillow out to the back room.  I extend my hand above my head and feel the heat pressing down through the ceiling, as if beyond the plaster the thin tarring of the flat roof has caught fire.  It will be impossible to sleep.

Adrian was here in Toronto already, for a recording session, and I had driven down from Britt early this  afternoon in a borrowed car, to be able to visit two friends from England, Tim & Shane Spall, here for the Film Festival. I had to get the exhaust pipe replaced after I made it to the city, as the old rusty one crumbled coming down the 427, and the car sounded like a B-52. Still it was great to have wheels.

The TIFF events start Saturday. I’m having lunch with Shane, and then meeting with her and Tim after watching "The Journey". They’ve gotten us four tickets to both of Tim’s films. The second, "Denial", is on Sunday and Adrian will be able to join us, and go to the swank party after. Culture shock. I’m to head back to the boat on Monday. Wonderful Pauline is feeding the cats in our absence. 

I should have had a swim before I left the marina this morning.  I think of the coolness of the night there and of the clarity of the stars. Of how, if the sky is clear in the evening, Sagittarius is directly across the river. That teapot shape is so bright within the constellation and tilts just above the trees in the darkness of the early night; its handle is to the left and its spout to the right. The tip of the teapot’s spout is a perfect invitation to the centre of the Milky Way. The hub, the home, the genesis of our spiral galaxy, is twenty-seven thousand light-years away in exactly that direction. I can rest in the swooning starlight on the top step of the fly-bridge, gaze across the Magnetawan River, and look towards the beginning of time.

Sagittarius by Hubble

One evening recently, the transient couple on dock three, on a Carver from Green Bay, came over to us and sat at the garden table and told us why they were supporting Donald Trump. It had a lot to do with terrorists and illegal immigrants and the necessity of a wall, and how Barack Obama had “destroyed” America. I found myself unable to listen to what they were saying, Karen and Mark, as they spoke in slogans with no ability to support or expand on their position, except that if you offered statistics to contradict the slogans, they would counter that those numbers were manipulated by Obama and that, by the way, he was rigging the election after having destroyed health care. “We’re Karen and Mark. You can remember our names because it’s like K-Mart. K- Mark!” 

I left the table, where Adrian was encouraging them to expand on their arguments, trying to understand how their points of view began. I slipped away from the garden, walked up the gravel drive and spent a quiet time slowly folding, unfolding and re-folding shirts and towels and knickers up in the wash house. This summer I’ve generally been able to avoid the news and the fear-mongering right-wing, and the police shootings (both ways). It strikes me that Fear-Mongrel might be a good play on words. I hear rabid murmurings but have no space in my life to be drawn in. That will change, undoubtedly, if in some bizarre twist, that Hollow-Man is elected.

Up on the bridge again, alone in the starlight, gazing across at Sagittarius. My heart aches at the twenty-seven thousand light-year expanse down just this one arm of our galaxy; and at the smallness of the world immediately around me. And my heart aches at my own potency and my impotence.

Above a lock on the Trent, some time back

When I was outside sitting on the grass, I killed an ant that had crawled on my leg. I wasn’t thinking, could have lightly flicked it away instead. Life can change in an instant; life can end or falter or begin. We can slide into depression, be cornered by fear or be slammed into disease. I am not bothered by spider-webs or biting insects. The wind can be a monster. The rocks hold, though, sometimes, our lines ashore do not. Lately, I seem to falter. I laugh and cry easily, sob deeply, but no longer know if it is because I am sad or because I am happy.
I do know I am very much alive.

sunrise