Archive for August 9th, 2009
Sit in the dark. Then go out in the dark.
Sweaty around the house today as well as outside of it. Spent most of it indoors until I heeded the siren call of the cinema and went off to see You, the Living with Thor, Ed, and Jeff. Delicious deadpan Swedes, shot in a 1970′s christmas candy color scheme. Some of the best thunder you’ll ever encounter in a movie. Just the sort of thing I’m happy to see these days. There were tasty cookies and later, flank steak.
For a reason that is not clear to me, one of the street lamps closest my door has been removed, leaving a pocket of mysterious darkness, a gap in our block’s grin. The lights of the apartments don’t reach the street, and so there’s a slight bit of menace beneath the big trees that line the sidewalk. There’s nothing to be afraid of on my block, but I have been conditioned to a certain interval of illumination, so the fact that there’s some missing now unsettles me, although tonight I was the threatening figure: well not me exactly but as I was heading back in from Lehigh’s evening walk, I heard “Mommy I’m sacred!” and saw a young girl clamber up into her mothers arms and duck her head down in fear. They were headed to the ice cream truck stopped down the block. “It’s a tiny dog! How can she be scared? It’s stupid!” fumed her brother, all of eight and already hard bitten, stomping along beside them. “She’s just five, she’s frighted” said mom, as the girl squealed a bit, increasingly nervous at the notion that our paths were going to cross very soon and that even her mother’s arms might not provide adequate protection from the dog in the dark. I hustled Lehigh up the steps, and inside in time to hear one more exasperated “It’s just Stupid!…” before closing the door. Five or no, I felt for her.
Tags: daily photo, friends, lehigh, movies, my block
