There’s a point I pass every morning on my route in to work. It’s probably one of my favorite parts of my morning route. It’s the corner of 9th St. and Prospect, where I get my first good, long, straight view of Downtown. It’s a bit uphill from Downtown, and you get a nice, graceful view of the little patch of skyscrapers that make Kansas City’s business district skyline.
I think that Prospect is just about the halfway point of my ride. It’s the point where I’m warmed up, either direction, and the rest of my ride after that point seems much more easy.
Some days, early in the summer, the angle of sunrise lights up the downtown buildings, pink, orange, and yellow, windows glinting like sequins, concrete and brick glowing as if lit from within. On days like today, when it is raining and foggy, the tops of the buildings are lost in the low-lying clouds, and the buildings could be any height whatsoever…they could go on forever up into outer space, into another dimension. I have a daydream that one should go up an elevator when the top of the building is buried in clouds, and press the button for the highest floor, and the elevator should forget how tall the building is and just keep going, and you could get out, somewhere, sometime, and be–where? Another world, perhaps, with pink clouds and squat, green people who talk like a tape player played on fast forward, with houses that look like melted marbles and fantastically plumed pet birds. Or a city of brilliantly-striped onion domes and hovering scootercars flying from rooftop to rooftop. Perhaps the elevator doors open out directly into a cloud; all wet, cold, and obfuscating.
I started writing a children’s adventure story about a little girl who goes up an elevator in a building cloaked in fog and ends up having to rescue a wizard who had inadvertently jinxed the elevator and had to be brought back to fix the elevator before she could go back home. She spends a great deal of time skipping from one weird world to another, looking for clues that indicate the eccentric, absent-minded wizard had passed through. I should finish the story–I have fun when I am writing it, but I get distracted. It’s growing far too long and bizarrely complicated.