A fall flâneur’s counfounding curbside finds

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 16/11/2024 (330 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

It was dark, really dark, when I struggled out of bed and levered myself into Wednesday morning.

The time shift hasn’t made 5:45 a.m any brighter than it was two weeks ago, and waking up in the dark makes even getting dressed more difficult.

My walk to the bus is supposed to be practical. I was supposed to be thinking about the editorial I should have finished Tuesday. It was, if you’re keeping track, about how the provincial government should be funding RSV shots for infants and the elderly. I often think I’ll be able to get my work thoughts in order while I’m walking, and sometimes I do, stopping occasionally to email myself sentences I’m afraid I might forget.

But most days, good intentions get driven out by the twin forces of curiosity and imagination. I walk the same route to the bus in the mornings, and pretty much the same, but much longer, route home in the evening. Right now, both are set in darkness, which creates its own particular tone.

Wednesday morning was still and just the right kind of damp: the kind that speaks of light rain that’s just passed by, that’s likely only a few blocks ahead now. The smells of wet and decaying fallen leaves, a kind of sharp cleanse in the air. Black elm branches stretch fingers up to the sky, matte against the urban glow reflecting off the clouds.

Bicycle tires whisper wetly on the pavement as two or three individual bicyclists cruise by. One, a man with a grey beard that blows back over his shoulders with the breeze his speed is creating is a darkened regular: no lights on his bike or person, but where I am on my route when he passes me indicates whether I’m on time, early or late.

Scattered runners of various intensities: lopers being paced by their accompanying dogs; striders focused on best times and perfect forms. Sometimes, a new convert, breathing hard and slapping their feet down with every punishing step.

Because I take the same route, my attention is often caught by what changes: in summer (and light), it might be the ripening of sour cherries on trees I pass. Sometimes, the reddening of tomatoes or raspberries in boulevard gardens. Lately, the finishing-up of city paving projects.

But even more so lately, it’s the regular arrival of particularly out-of-place things.

Wednesday, mid-block, a pair of bright-blue gym shorts, turned inside out and discarded in neat grass by the curb, as if their owner had simply stepped out of them to run on, au naturel. Oddly abandoned clothes are hardly unusual on a Winnipeg street, but imagining the how, when and why of their discarding never fails to make me want the real answers. Who peels off their socks, feet exactly one stride apart, and leaves them lying like shed snake skins? Why inside-out track pants, lying there as if posed deliberately, knees-bent? Why just one black formal dress shoe, so brightly polished that beads of rain have formed on the toe cap?

The second thing Wednesday? A bright-white plastic highchair, right on the edge of Westminster Avenue and probably set out for giveaway, oddly looking like it was hitchhiking for a new town, a change of scene. “I’m outta here, baby,” more literal than jargon. How did it get here, my imagination nagged. How did we get here? There was a story to be found, a story of loss or separation, of growing up or moving on. Things like that worm their way into my head — I imagined yelling and tears, the weight of silence, but tried hard not to firm up what would likely be a complete and crushing narrative. It’s just a no-longer-needed highchair, I told myself.

There’s a superstition called the law of threes. Emergency workers sometimes claim really bad events come in threes, and that you should never let your guard down until the third has come and gone.

The third thing Wednesday? On Ruby Street at Preston Avenue, at the edge of the street and full under the radiance of the streetlight, a blue plastic Coleman cooler, its lid dirty, its stocky rectangular body turned just out of line with the curb.

I look at it, imagining. Nudge it with my foot — it’s heavy. My delay there meant I missed my bus.

A car came up to the stop sign behind me, washed me with its headlights.

It was a dare, that cooler. Dare you to open me. Curiosity says to take the dare, or you’ll regret it later, always wondering. Common sense and raw imagination, equally forceful, told me not to.

I opened it anyway. Inside, eight or more Tupperware containers, some stacked, some on their sides, each one full of its own individual dark materials.

Oh look, I thought, the challenge has been reset. Pick one up: have a look. Hold it up against the bright streetlight, see if it’s beet salad or mashed potatoes. Or maybe something far worse.

Go on, the cooler seemed to say, you want to know.

But, unusually, common sense won.

I let the lid drop, and it closed with its particular hollow plastic thunk, the familiar thunk of all Coleman coolers everywhere.

Certain stories are better left to the imagination. Others are better simply left alone.

Russell Wangersky is the Comment Editor at the Free Press. He can be reached at russell.wangersky@freepress.mb.ca