The Origin of Waves Read Online Free

polished wood to make it looklike brass, it was the Vicar who used the word which almost slipped by us, as it was spoken in his
accent
which we could hardly understand, but which we killed ourselves afterwards imitating.
“Flott-sum!”
And after that sermon, we too called those other little boys by this name. But we thought of ourselves as
that
other little boy in the poem about boys wearing shoes, standing and wondering.
    It is about, it is, I think, a little after eleven o’clock on this cold day in December; and I am walking north along Yonge Street, just up from a place which used to be a commercial bank and which now looks like an abandoned church; and bag men and homeless women have made it their drinking place where they sleep on sheets of thin cardboard, making it look like an institution for justice and a prison in Latin America; and up from this camping ground are the stores open today by Indian immigrants from Sri Lanka and Pakistan and Trinidad, and closed tomorrow by the Housing Authorities sent by the police, for reasons the Sri Lankans cannot interpret; up from the southernmost end of the Eaton Centre, across the street; up from Massey Hall off that short street, walking in a kind of white valley, for the thickness of the snow has hidden all these buildings from easy sight, and I can only know they are there from memory. And the snow has hidden all colour and life from the street, and the Christmas colours of green and red, silver and gold, from store windows; and I am alone, and I can see nobody, andnobody can see me. There are only shapes; the shapes of people I hear ahead of me. I raise my head against the flakes that enter my eyes, almost blinding me, and those that fall into my ears, tickling me; and I try to laugh at this short tickle, to see the fun in it; but there is no sky, and no sun, and no warm sand, only a channel of white. I am walking through a valley with no landmarks on my left side, or my right, to give me bearing and remind me of the notice of movement, although I know I am travelling forward, north, since I have set out from the bottom of the street, by the Lake.
    It is only in the past five years, after my forty-fifty years of complaining about winter, and my threats to myself about going back home, that I find myself walking beside the Lake, wondering what would happen. The Lake is a lake. It is not the sea. There are seagulls but no scratching crabs; and the boats are larger and from larger countries; and no sand on the shore, there is no beach; and no waves; but it is the closest thing I can come to, in the absence of sand of any colour, like the conch-shell on that beach. The Lake is a place I can sit beside and dream of waves and the origin of waves and where waves can take you. I stand leaning on the metal rail guarding the Lake, preventing my jump, in this tormenting time of indecision: home or here; sun or snow; and I have thought, many times, that at this age, and with the leisure that age brings and that hangs languorously on my hands, of attempting precisely that. Jumping into the Lake. “Jump in the goddamn Lake,you bugger!” a man told me, forty years ago. I was working in the summer in a Flo-Glaze factory as a part-time worker, a working man, when I was a student at Trinity College; and I had put the wrong measurement of percentages and paints and concentrated tints in the order I was given to fill. “Go jump in the fucking Lake!” This was the advice a woman gave when I could not fill the order of her love, when she said she knew that she loved me, after I had asked her to marry me. I was a student out of work, then. Jumping into the Lake. I have tried it often in my mind, but the metal rail prevents me.
    On that afternoon back in the island, with sun and light and sky blue as the desire for Chermadene, a young schoolgirl who John and I, as in many things, liked with the same passion, we did not talk about lakes. But we talked about Chermadene. John and I fell in love