another piece of the puzzle

Cleaning my basement (see Tuesday February 28, 2005, “Dust”) means fundamentally that I'm reading my basement as most of the pack-ratting I do involves papers, writing, books, files, postcards and weird little scraps of paper often with the name of a book-never-read written on them. One thing I found the other night was a “diary” I kept of sunrises. These were recorded during the same period of time I discussed yesterday – sometime during the seven years that I commuted between Hamilton and Toronto. The entries are dated but there’s no day-of-the-week or year so I can’t say exactly when they were written. The sunrises were recorded on the GO bus. While I drove the evening shift, I took the bus when I was on day shift. I’d get the 5:20 am bus. I had a portable cassette player/AM-FM radio and I listened to music and watched the beginning of the day. (I remember I became strangely attached to some morning show on a rock station. I forget who the celebrity hosts were but they revelled in bathroom humour and, for some reason, I enjoyed it or maybe it was the music they played…) I never slept on the bus in the morning but I almost always slept on the way back – waking just at the curve in the road around Cootes Paradise.

Here are some excerpts of what I saw:

Nov 7
Red & navy clouds
Navy clouds rise up into the blue
Red spreads into peach

Nov 13
Best seat in the house!
This Mortal Coil
Mild sunrise pale pink
Lighter shade of navy
All with a wash of grey

Nov 19
I saw both sunrise & set today
The back wheel of a quickly peddled bicycle silhouetted against the orange setting sun
Soles occidere
Sunrise singles bar

Nov 22
“all my senses rebel”
a hole in the sky with the sun leaking through

Nov 27
Yesterday the driver let us off at Adelaide and University rather than at King and University. Everyone was really confused by this.

Nov 28
Spectacular sunup – Flamboyant.

Nov 30
Muted purples, oranges, greys. Dull spectacle. The days are getting so much shorter right now that I’m arriving too early to even see the sunrise!

Dec 7
Mauve (clouds) and peach (sky). Nearly translucent.

I want the sunrises to return.