Another World, it Seemed...
Saturday, April 22, 2006
And it dawned Molly’s 15th that day.
So it was to the City Museum that fair April night – Jimmy, OLeif, Collette, Jesse James, Wally, Susie, Rose, Bob B., Molly, and Samantha.
Collette was impressed, she had to admit. There it was, off 16th and Washington – an old factory building it seemed, near all the new lofts built into the other old factory buildings amidst cathedrals, galleries, and other upper-crust society cliques.
How to describe the City Museum exactly…..? An ordinary factory building from the early 1900’s, no doubt – perhaps fifteen stories. Collette had to guess on its history. Outside of the building, however, the front was soldered into a virtual adult jungle gym of bridge pieces, stone towers, trolley cars, forests of metal carnage, slides, and staircases. A jet plane stacked atop the coils, steps, and catwalks. It teemed with activity – from little ones with parents and packs of teenagers to adults with beers from the underground bar near the outdoor cafe, where baskets of sandwiches and drinks, etc could be brought from the second floor cafe near fountains, koi, and nooks and crannies near the pizza ovens. Inside, were two other grand mazes of tricky and rather awkward tunnels, chains, walks, sculptures and colors. Mosaics, pools of turtles, lanterns… It was practically as though a junk yard from the sixteenth, eighteenth, and twentieth centuries had been shaken into a cove of the museum and soldered into some sort of sense of tunnels and caves. And most everything was splashed in color. Inside the first little world, Collette descended into the cave of rather foul-smelling cool. And with the crafted stalactites and cave paintings, eerie light, paths, etc. she felt rather as though she had passed into Christian’s valley of the shadow.
Below the no-skateboard skate park with ropes from the ceiling, the old pianos upon which were currently being banged, there was a gallery of old opera posters… Quo Vadis and Puccini… and just past that small hall, hidden past a set of double glass doors and a tank of puffer fish from around the world, was a shaft of darkness. Straining upwards, she saw coal shoots and tunnels, staircases, and cave walls bending up into the darkness towards the skylights of the ceiling four or so stories upwards. She crawled around the dank and wet with the others, hearing whispers and screams and shouts above and around and below her as she scattered through the sloppy caverns.
The old bank vault was a shout across the hall within a great room with several windows open to the cooler air of the street just outside. White twinkly lights hung from the ceiling and one dividing wall was constructed entirely of empty glass soda bottles; the room was mostly deserted. Upstairs was an even dimmer-lit room by the circus hall and great paper Chinese lanterns hung from the ceiling. The windows looked down onto the mess of mazes below.
The even was followed with shakes and sodas at Steak ‘n Shake and OLeif and Collette finally hit the feathers at 1:30am.
“Oh, the year was 1778,
How I wish I was in Sherbrooke now!
A letter of marque came from the king,
To the scummiest vessel I’d ever seen,
“G~d ~~~~ them all!
I was told we’d cruise the seas for American gold
We’d fire no guns-shed no tears
Now I’m a broken man on a Halifax pier
The last of Barrett’s Privateers.