Read Online Dancing in the Dark by David Donnell - Free Book Online
Authors: David Donnell
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the back of the head with my newspaper.
“Jesus is all about love,” I tell him.
Dead skunk by the shoulder as we exit from the 401
and drop down a couple of streets to get onto Morningside
Drive. It was hot, what was a skunk doing on the 401 anyway? There
were small insects, hot delicate dark
gnats squashed across the dusty blue windshield.
AVANTI, AVANTI
“Avanti, avanti,” she says, pushing the little
boy in the blue cap,
he looks about 9 ½ or 10,
up the scuffed dusty marble steps of Union Station
onto the cement platform
where the Toronto Express
to Buffalo is about to leave. There are
giant orange&blue weather balloons moving at a slow
northeasterly pace over Pickering,
a small community
airport some 34 miles away. Avanti. She has a suitcase in one
hand & a big 1940s purse & a laundry bag bulging with
I don’t know what in her left hand. There are different trains in America.
The designs change from time to time. This is one of the great CP trains.
Some are classics & some aren’t. “Avanti,
avanti,” she says,
& cuffs him on the ear. He
is straining up on his toes with the huge suitcase
as the train comes in. When she cuffs him he laughs
& leans back in her direction as if she were a large tree
in dark blue sweaters and a rumpled black skirt suit
with black stockings.
OCTOBER
October explodes in this (wooded) hilly & potato rich enclave at the northern end of the Niagara escarpment. Alliston, on the Nottawasaga, & other towns west to Orangeville are warm & soft & gusty this Friday, 7:35 a.m. Orange and blue umbrellas on front porches, rain slickers out on the farms. Everywhere you look the trees have gone as berserk as a loon’s hypothalamus with riots of orange yellow red pale vermilion savagely oversweet turned on itself crimson dark. There is a fine October rain coming down, so fine that you can hardly see it, almost a mist, it barely wets your face. 16°. A few 40 mph ducks skim the tops of distant lush wet trees. Geese crossing in loose Vs down by the bridge. This is western Ontario but continentally almost as far south as Massachusetts, Point Pelee, or Frank Lloyd Wrights Chicago. The air is full of oxygen. The dense rich colours swim in this air like Matisse nudes, blue knees & elbows, magenta buttocks. Warm thick air gives a tremendous lift to your motion. I seem to fly above the pale dark grey early morning towns of soft hills & steeples almost like Chagall’s crazy mystical Rabbi fiddling over the scant roofs of pre ww 1 Minsk. (1000s of miles north of where Babel wrote about Itzak the gangster. Where Gurdjieff sold the barrel of bad herring and put the money into fresh animal skins.) Water trickles gently along the curbs into the cosy black gratings of innumerable sewers. It’s warm & wet & gorgeous. My Rockports squelch on the gravel. I lift my face up to the sky. I open my black umbrella. I wave to you happily my friends across the shimmering slopes of the western escarpment.
WINTER BOOKS TO READ IN NEW YORK, CORN CHOWDER, AN EMPTY ROOM, CHORIZO SAUSAGES
I said
[it was about 7:30
& there was a pool of darkness at 34th & Avenue B]
[there was a yellow taxi, I had said the corn chowder needed more
chicken stock]
to my friend Adam Gopnik
who is, for sure, no average GOP kind of guy, “You stay in New
York & write for the
New Yorker
. And I will go back to Toronto,
that big sprawling city on the north shore of Lake Ontario,
& I will have a huge empty white room & corn chowder with chorizo
sausages
& I will move Tom (Bass) from chapter 7 to chapter 9,
& I will write a Matisse blue spotlight song
& you will be in
“Jesus is all about love,” I tell him.
Dead skunk by the shoulder as we exit from the 401
and drop down a couple of streets to get onto Morningside
Drive. It was hot, what was a skunk doing on the 401 anyway? There
were small insects, hot delicate dark
gnats squashed across the dusty blue windshield.
AVANTI, AVANTI
“Avanti, avanti,” she says, pushing the little
boy in the blue cap,
he looks about 9 ½ or 10,
up the scuffed dusty marble steps of Union Station
onto the cement platform
where the Toronto Express
to Buffalo is about to leave. There are
giant orange&blue weather balloons moving at a slow
northeasterly pace over Pickering,
a small community
airport some 34 miles away. Avanti. She has a suitcase in one
hand & a big 1940s purse & a laundry bag bulging with
I don’t know what in her left hand. There are different trains in America.
The designs change from time to time. This is one of the great CP trains.
Some are classics & some aren’t. “Avanti,
avanti,” she says,
& cuffs him on the ear. He
is straining up on his toes with the huge suitcase
as the train comes in. When she cuffs him he laughs
& leans back in her direction as if she were a large tree
in dark blue sweaters and a rumpled black skirt suit
with black stockings.
OCTOBER
October explodes in this (wooded) hilly & potato rich enclave at the northern end of the Niagara escarpment. Alliston, on the Nottawasaga, & other towns west to Orangeville are warm & soft & gusty this Friday, 7:35 a.m. Orange and blue umbrellas on front porches, rain slickers out on the farms. Everywhere you look the trees have gone as berserk as a loon’s hypothalamus with riots of orange yellow red pale vermilion savagely oversweet turned on itself crimson dark. There is a fine October rain coming down, so fine that you can hardly see it, almost a mist, it barely wets your face. 16°. A few 40 mph ducks skim the tops of distant lush wet trees. Geese crossing in loose Vs down by the bridge. This is western Ontario but continentally almost as far south as Massachusetts, Point Pelee, or Frank Lloyd Wrights Chicago. The air is full of oxygen. The dense rich colours swim in this air like Matisse nudes, blue knees & elbows, magenta buttocks. Warm thick air gives a tremendous lift to your motion. I seem to fly above the pale dark grey early morning towns of soft hills & steeples almost like Chagall’s crazy mystical Rabbi fiddling over the scant roofs of pre ww 1 Minsk. (1000s of miles north of where Babel wrote about Itzak the gangster. Where Gurdjieff sold the barrel of bad herring and put the money into fresh animal skins.) Water trickles gently along the curbs into the cosy black gratings of innumerable sewers. It’s warm & wet & gorgeous. My Rockports squelch on the gravel. I lift my face up to the sky. I open my black umbrella. I wave to you happily my friends across the shimmering slopes of the western escarpment.
WINTER BOOKS TO READ IN NEW YORK, CORN CHOWDER, AN EMPTY ROOM, CHORIZO SAUSAGES
I said
[it was about 7:30
& there was a pool of darkness at 34th & Avenue B]
[there was a yellow taxi, I had said the corn chowder needed more
chicken stock]
to my friend Adam Gopnik
who is, for sure, no average GOP kind of guy, “You stay in New
York & write for the
New Yorker
. And I will go back to Toronto,
that big sprawling city on the north shore of Lake Ontario,
& I will have a huge empty white room & corn chowder with chorizo
sausages
& I will move Tom (Bass) from chapter 7 to chapter 9,
& I will write a Matisse blue spotlight song
& you will be in
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