Love Lockdown
A bridge, a lock, a solo wanderer in Rome
A bridge, a lock, a solo wanderer in Rome
When I stop my bike on the paved pathway beneath Ottawa’s Heron Road Bridge, the traffic speeding overhead sounds soothing, almost serene. Cars shush by, unseen, like wind through the trees. Trucks clickety-clack over expansion joints, like trains. I can also hear the river’s spring freshet, rapids cascading over a limestone step a few metres […]
A s a child, I ventured almost every year to British Columbia’s Southern Gulf Islands and I became fascinated with the history of the places I visited there. It wasn’t so much the tangible traces that intrigued me—the skeleton of a building or a scrap washed up upon the tide line—as the absences and spaces […]
For a time, when I was very young, my father drove my sister and I to school. We lived in East Vancouver, and at a certain left turn, my father would wave his hand toward the windshield, shake his index finger at a small, rising hill and say, “Never cross that bridge. That bridge leads […]
A dented bus lumbers across the sun-baked plains. Every surface inside is grimed with fine diesel grit and road dust. My hair is powdered with it. I’m travelling with my new friend Sophie. She’s from Holland. Bollywood soundtracks blare from the speakers up front. Everybody knows the lyrics but us. Sometimes grown men board the […]
“Ride’s closed down!” the carnie shouted. He was wearing a purple windbreaker that, along with all the carnival signs and rides—the Tilt-a-Whirl, the Gravitron, the salt-and-pepper shakers—looked like it was transported directly from 2020. Eye of the Tiger blasted from speakers.
A bronze statue on a plinth comes to life. It bops a passerby on the head with its sword. The man executes a double-take, fists clenched. He’s wearing a kilt and black knee socks with red tassels. Even his silver buzz cut looks fierce, gilded by a shaft of setting sun. But the statue is […]