Dissolving
Montreal, Canada.
The man in the guitar shop was very tense, somewhat agitated, as he showed me two very different folk guitars. Someone spoke to him from the back of the shop, and he yelled back, "Not now! I'm serving three people at the same time!" I had seen only one other customer.
Then a black van swerved wildly onto the sidewalk, missing the front window by mere inches, the men shouted and in a panic-stricken moment, I saw the glass implode, flying with it, guitars of all colours and makes. But none of that happened outside my head, and the guitar man took some deep breaths and stuffed a generous number of picks into the gig bag. As an afterthought, he picked a red and white strap off the rack and stuffed that in too.
So that was how I ended up walking around town for half the day with a precious instrument strapped to my back.
At the canal, the water was a profound blue. Some men were tossing a football about on the embankment opposite. The guard at the dam with a shock of carrot hair gave me a curt nod and a hint of a smile. Trying to find my way back to a familiar main street, I wandered through forgotten, deserted places, where the people wore boredom on their faces as they puffed on their stuffy cigarettes. The unpretty parts of this city, dormant as a discarded cigarette butt. A couple of workmen were negotiating a big machine for some purpose or other, and they smiled at me as I wandered past, but I do not know if they were smiling merely because of me, or because I was wearing a guitar.
Posted by sniffles at September 05, 2002 03:20 PM