She Shows You Where to Look...

One of the few wonderful things about living in a city is that there are certain places you can stand and see things you never expected. When I lived in Vancouver, the city woke up one morning to find the outline of shoe prints stencilled in various places on the sidewalks of the downtown core. People puzzled over them and walked around them, assuming them to be the first phase in one of those catch-your-interest advertising campaigns. It wasn't until you stood in the footprints that you realized their actual function. If you stood in the outlines and looked up, you could see, between the monolithic tombstones of progress, spectacular sliver views of the North Shore mountains. You could only see them if you stood in certain places - the ones marked by the stencils. I thought of that at lunch today as I walked through my downtown. I stepped down a sidestreet and found a patch of dead long-grass, waving in the wind before the noonday sun.