Watching the Light

My grandmother used to call it “watching the lights come up.” The idea was to drive to some viewpoint just after sundown and look towards downtown, watch the streetlights come on, and the houselights, and the office lights in the skyscrapers, as the light in the sky faded. Strange way to occupy the time, but it was born of radio days, cribbage-playing days, when the TV offered a couple of snowy channels under rabbit-ear antennae, if you were lucky. As entertainment, it was reflective, meditative. I’ve been hyper aware of light ever since, and the transition from day to night has become my favourite time of day for watching.

Today my vantage point is the bridge over the Second Narrows, with a great grey mat of cloud overhead, ending in the west, a band of gleaming sky behind the city. The skyline looks like a black paper cutout, a caricature of a city skyline, something you’d see on a neon sign, with a couple sashaying across the front, outside a 50’s ballroom. The light, approaching the city center, puts the buildings in flat relief, the foreground wet brick and cinderblock; midground, mustard and red painted concrete; and behind, the tall tall glass and steel yes skyscrapers, ghostlike with the interior light a perfect match with the light in the sky, so that it seems like you can see right through them.

Next to the sturdy, boxish lowrises of the old part of town, these tall columns look so fragile, and my mind goes to the promised, inevitable day when the Big One strikes, the earth shudders, and all that glass, miles of glass, shatters. There will be a glass rain, millions of tiny splinters falling in the sun, and from a distance it will look like fairy dust, sparkling in the fading light, and the streets will glitter, magic and deadly.