I went all the way across town today looking for a blue faux lantern – the metal kind that you open up and put a candle in and set on your porch on warm summer evenings. I saw them yesterday, in fact, when Mike and I went to IKEA. (Mary told me, too late, that she would like one for the backyard. Well, what she really said was for wherever outdoors, but anyone looking at our porch would know that blue is definitely out.)
I went all the way across town, knowing that the Gardiner is under construction and that the cost of gas was going to supersede the lantern’s purchase price and that, sometimes, when there is congestion on the highway, my anxiety factor can creep up and suffocate me. But Mary wanted that blue lantern, and she hardly ever asks for anything, and what with her birthday coming up I thought that she would love an extra surprise.
So off I went in the elevated tarmac heat, crawling along the Gardiner Expressway behind an over-sized van – cars and trucks and motorcycles bumping along at greatly reduced speeds. (Greatly reduced reads oxymoronically. Mind you, morons run in my family – which was another thought I had on the highway. Well, not morons exactly, but crazy people. I wonder which is worse.)
Anyway, I was listening to Cheryl Wheeler’s new cd – we picked one up for $20.00 at her Syracuse concert – and la la la-ing along, the wind and perfectly blue sky carrying me away into a reverie (there’s nothing like weather to pin a person down), eventually pulling into the IKEA parking lot, my head full of strangely nostalgic thoughts for a group of sorority-like women, most of them unkind, that I knew long ago in Ottawa. Funny what a sudden configuration of cumulus clouds can do.
I went into IKEA and marched toward the lanterns, and to my dismay discovered that the blue ones of yesterday were the lime green ones of today. I wondered if there had been a recall, although I couldn’t imagine why. Anyway, while I was there peering and pecking, ambling about for no more than ten or fifteen minutes, I lit on another present I had initially spied coming into the store, which I bought. (The item, not the store.) So, one purchase later plus Pepsi, I was on my way back home, caught up again in the lingering thoughts afforded me by the ever-slowing traffic.
This time, still listening to Cheryl Wheeler, my eyes were taken up by the distant turbine windmill (if that’s even what it is called), its (I almost wrote ‘petals’) arms spinning around and around, reminding me of those lovely colourful windmills that are tacked to candy sticks that children play with. As I was gazing at this monolith (if it truly is a monolith) (and even if it isn’t, I suppose), I spied an airplane heading for Toronto Island – it looked like a white licorice allsort, flying downward toward the lake – Cheryl Wheeler singing a song about walking and taking a day at a time.
Something Brent once said to me popped into my head, about those patients who you just know are going to have complications, and I thought of my son, walking through his life one day at a time. I glanced over to my left, the cars on the Gardiner at this point stalled, and I saw the corner near the store where I used to work until the alcoholics and the dust became too oppressive…and I thought of the number of friends, or people I thought were my friends, who used me or who let jealousy get in their way of a friendship it seemed they once earnestly, even passionately, wanted.
I know it sounds funny, but the whole time this was happening I was, in relative terms, happy: resigned to the state and nature of things and the world, and only minorly wishing – apart from my son, that is, where my wishes are major – that some relationships had turned out better than they have. That said, I can’t complain (although, clearly, I do). I have many wonderful people around me, who love me and who are – thus far – my friends.
I spun around the corner from the Gardiner onto Leslie Street, feeling like a teenager again, reminded of the time I stood in the back of the speeding work van singing Sweet City Woman, newly in love (or whatever that meant to me then) with Homer.
Cheryl Wheeler, in the meantime, was singing about her dead cat, although the song was terribly funny and tragically light-hearted.
I raced through every (green) light, flying up Greenwood toward home. I turned up the cd, louder and louder, hanging on to the last gasp of her song, fully grateful for the slowed-down drive to IKEA in search of a blue lantern that wasn’t even there.
I don’t think I believe in fate the way some people do, although I know, Horatio, that there are more things in heaven and earth that are dreamt of in my philosophy. But sometimes when I am alone in the car, pressing my way along the highway, I see my past rise up behind me and crash into a glowing future, the white licorice airplanes bearing down toward a runway whose margins are currently ink-etched in place, the pilots engineering their landing along a route that will someday be overgrown with delicate island flowers and tortuous weeds.
