Everything pours forth

Everything pours forth. Photographs their history. Books their words. Walls their sounds.
--Patti Smith, in M Train.

I didn’t leave my apartment today, except to walk down the hall to the laundry room and to ride the elevator to the ground floor so I could walk up the ten flights of stairs for exercise. The streets are frozen. My car is under a couple of inches of snow. Portland schools are closed. City Hall. All the libraries. Shops. Closed because all the side streets are an inch and a half of packed ice. It melted just enough, around 3 p.m., to freeze again at 4. Some of the main streets are clear, according to reports on the radio, but the side streets are all packed ice. The whole city is a skating rink, and no one has ice skates. We weren’t expecting it. We act as if each year will be like the last. It isn’t.

It was my day to spend with Sue, but I couldn’t safely cross town and the river to her place. I listened to the sounds. Upstairs the familiar whirring of the stationary bicycle an elderly Chinese man rides for hours every day while his wife methodically chops. Vegetables, I suppose. Down the hall, coughing. The muted babble of a television. In my own space, Bach, and the familiar whirring of my mind. 

Patti Smith crosses my mind again and again. You’d think we were old friends, as often as I think of her. Here’s what she had to say about flubbing her song at the Nobel Prize Ceremony. 

I hate the photograph posted with that article. The definitive Patti-Smith-of-Kendall’s-imagination is the one made by Mari Aoyama. You may have to have a Facebook account to see it. But wow.