November 18, 2010

Another banner day – poo wise! And that’s enough said about that.

The pain is ridiculous today. Enough said about that too!

I had lunch today in my tiny studio that I set up by my south facing window. I call it “Beach”. I made a room by lining up two stand alone closets and putting storage bins on top to give a wall that permits light and air into the rest of the main space. Beach is where my personal assistants sleep and surf the internet. It is also where I occasionally paint and where guests sometimes stay.

I call this space Beach because the view faces Lake Ontario. One can see easily to the Niagara escarpment and occasionally one of those strange refractions occur that gives the illusion that Rochester, New York, is only a few kilometres away. Rochester is on the southern coast of the lake and certainly is two hundred kilometres or more due south of Toronto.

There are about four by six city blocks of neighbourhood between my eighth floor window and the lake. This neighbourhood includes six other high rise coops and condos, three parks with various amenities such as a basket ball court, swimming pool, toddlers’ play ground, walking and bike lanes and dog exercising facilities. There are two rows of small business establishments on either side of the main route, a street car track and two bus routes, two or three evangelistic style churches, two schools and multitudes of townhouses, duplexes and single houses. Even though we are a twenty minute drive from downtown Toronto or Canada’s biggest international airport (depending on which direction you take) I essentially live in a low key small town – a trick of geography.

My neighbourhood also includes flocks of Canada geese, swans, ducks, gulls, starlings, black and grey squirrels, beavers and at least one muskrat. There are oak, maple, chestnut, walnut, elm, willow and several varieties of evergreen trees in every yard and public area. Homeowners grow roses, coop residents plant marigolds and corn flowers, and an enormous variety of beautiful plants – names unknown to me – flourish in the parks.

At this time of year the deciduous trees have dropped their leaves, which turned from green to a riot of yellow through orange to red, then from pale to golden brown before being blown off their branches in the early winter wind storms of ten days ago.

As a watcher this is my favourite time of year to be looking out my Beach window. The dropping of leaves gives me a clear view of the lake, the neighbourhood between and the rocky shoreline, including the spit at the end of the park that is part of Humber College’s campus. When the weather is friendly I can stroll to the end of this spit (and along three or four other pathways) to be close to the water, birds, weeds, rocks and clouds.

I have travelled on cruise ships and to parts of eleven other countries as well as across Canada. There are many breathtakingly beautiful places in the world. South Etobicoke is one of them.

Today I was struck again by the strangely vertical and linear pattern that is visually embedded in my Beach view. There are mast heads on the sail boats in the marina south of Humber, myriads of lamp posts and hydro poles, hundreds of tall and naked trees, and blocks of tall, skinny townhouses with their steeply peaked roofs, built one against the other like European tenements. This afternoon even the clouds cooperated in the illusion of linearity. A lower bank of dark rain clouds scudded in a diagonal direction to a higher array of white fluffies creating patches of rain and sun light falling on the grey water in those straight piercing lines one sees sometimes on religious greeting cards.

Last winter I attempted to paint this strangely linear pattern of my neighbourhood. I worked on the canvas for months. The trackers who supported me teased me by telling stories to anyone who listened of how I tortured them with rulers and masking tape, trying to reproduce the pattern. I felt my result was inadequate. The painting hangs on my wall but it rarely draws comments from visitors.

This afternoon I felt the urge to try again. It is intimidating to think of both the trackers’ dismay and my inadequacies at replicating what my imagination so simply perceives. This aspect of my physical limitations – that my trackers must struggle on my behalf – leaves me with a wish that I could privately struggle on my own. Then I could have the space to learn what I don’t know now.

Perhaps it’s time to look at a MAC based drawing program again. Previously I couldn’t find anything that I could make work with my Morse Code interface. But who knows!