Long Cool @ 70 MILL

 

 

 

 

 Determined Little Beauty In The Long Cool Love Cave @ 70 MILL St.

 

 

He looked at her silhouette against the bright window at the far end of the place.

The lovely smiling curves of her small body surrounded by the glowing brightness

of the windows to Toronto at the other long end of their most recent home.

 

Earlier, there might have been a very selfish thing taking place as he drove home.

Before, when he was driving the long way home from his new work in the old car

he had heard that one line from the Talking Book CD by DeLillo

called COSMOPOLIS that said :

“When he died he would not end, the world would.”

 

He could not help but smile.

This was a time of enjoyment at being alive.

This was a time of not being dead and gone.

It was all of the wonderful things that found him each new morning.

It was the look of it all when you opened the door to their new home.

 

When you opened their door on the 9th floor, after you had entered the turn-of-the-last-century 1999 first floor that had been mixed with and butted up to the heavy solid rack-house brickwork from the 1800’s century before that, with all of that sitting on the small street across from the main Distillery complex of Victorian Industrial buildings of stone and brick with painted British wooden trim and windows, it was the look of the place.

 

 

 

 

The small street had a combination name that also made him smile at its obsolescence.

 70 MILL Street . . . it reminded him every day of the now rapidly disappearing movie format of 70 millimeter film that movies had been made with for so long. Now, in this digital age, they lived with one foot in this future-present and the other in their 1800’s of worn brick and metal and stone.  It felt just right.

 

 

 

After passing the small trees and gardens at the street level entrance, tended to by the earliest residents of the building, and after riding the small elevator up to their 9th floor in the not-too-big building, and walking down the short and modest hall to their door, it was the look of it when you opened the door to their new home that pleased them both so much.  The look of it that drew them in, toward the light at the far end of the place.

 

 

 

 

She in this place was the same determined little beauty that he had met back in ‘04. 

Her progressive motion, cloaked in style, had pleasantly packaged up her inner driving creativity. 

All of this flowered forward throughout their new living space.

Her dark eyes flashed bright and her smile gleamed wide as her strokes and motions took form in the shapes and placement of everything.  The stretch of organic and curves on the right side ( that somehow became his area ) meshed and locked with the left side of her compartments and open spaces.  Both the left and the right sides married in the middle-flow of what now struck him as the Long Cool Love Cave.  It was long and cool in the hot summer when they had moved in. When you opened the door from the hall your eyes were pulled through and past the long dramatically lit central space and right out the bright windows to the northern view of Toronto with tree tops poked through with old and new buildings sticking up and through and beyond the leaves, right up into the big bright northern sky.

 

 

 

 

 

 

She could be herself here, and all the constantly occurring ideas with their transitory experimental juxtapositions could all play out in this new long space. 

 

 

 

 

 

When visitors came to call and asked whose ideas these where in this new place he pointed his right arm and hand directly at her as they both smiled. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

He had never really just given in when living in a space, particularily one that was most obviously now HOME.  But she was better than him at seeing and playing and doing this. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

She created a new space for the both of them to truly settle down into. 

 

 

 

 

And as things moved about, as certain new or old objects left the space they were in yesterday and ended up resting somewhere else today, it never bothered him because they always looked better and somehow supported the feeling she was giving birth to in this place as the jazz music played through the digital air.

 

 

 

 

This new sense of HOME in this place had fanned out to the city of Toronto itself. 

 

 

 

He no longer asked her which way to turn, or where certain streets or addresses were. 

Something in his mind clicked, then slapped down into a new clean functionality.

He knew where he was in this city.  Everywhere in the *whole* city.  This was new.  He really had not learned the lay of the land anywhere since he had lived in Vancouver 40 years ago.  Now it seemed as though he had just been drifting, at varying rates of speed, for about four decades.  He now knew the North, South, and East and West of it all.  And he liked going HOME here from any of these four directions.  He knew things had changed and he wondered ( but not too much ) about what would happen next.  He would just take it the way it came.  And he somehow knew that   “When he died he would not end, the world would.”

He was enjoying being alive.

He was glad that he was not yet dead and gone.

It was all of the wonderful things that found him each new morning.

It was the look of it all when you opened the door to their new home.

 

 

 

(end)