Call Reception for a Shove

Call Reception for a Shove

The world has changed. It is an old Relief Society home for the abandoned and street lost, now converted to a cheaper hotel of small rooms. The lift is out of order. The last tranche of heat mid-Autumn wrings the air out, squeezing three high 30’s days from the relentless calendar. I wonder what Judy Collins thinks of this, unpacked from her time, where the season is in reverse. The concierge says the café at the front is open for coffee and food.

“The coffee is off.” It is not even 5.00pm, and there are several hours to go until the show. Maybe a beer is the better option anyway. He takes the top off the stubby and places it on the bar. I ask for a glass. “I thought I’d already done that.” He takes another stubby from the fridge, takes the top off and hands it to me smiling. I watch him squeeze the bottle top back on, and put my previous drink back in. I am puzzled and glassless, but cannot be bothered.

Out on Spencer Street people sweat their way by. Thirty- five years in the country takes the city out of you, no matter what they say. The burger is OK and the chips are decent, and there is a jumble of need and destination out on the path, a conglomerate of wend. I’m wandering. Coming in on the bus past the black peat drained soil where the asparagus fields in fern have turned saffron, wind caught the fronds in a wave beyond colour, beyond words.

We walk the 2 k’s, the lid on the frypan. The Recital Centre fills early, air conditioning. Judy’s a little late. Her guitar won’t stay in tune, but her voice hardly needs it, at almost 85 its cycling pure, the pianist plays around it. She shuffles songs, notes, and paper, how an unknown Joni Mitchell nervously sang the big one to her over the telephone, how she woke in a mountain home and went down to the couch where Bob Dylan was writing Tambourine Man. She asks the audience to remind her who’s she’s speaking of.  “Oh yes, we told the record company the guy just can’t sing.”  The famous lovers who wrote the famous songs about her, the songs embedded in so many lives. The set ends too soon.

We walk back along the river, sculpted pavement, restaurants brimming, shirtless crowds meander, the queues at the gelato stores licking fingers in the melt. E bikes on the run, madly skidding by kids too young to be out. I’m a hover fly in a now unfamiliar landscape, thinking of how Leonard Cohen had to be coaxed into Judy’s TV show because he was terrified he couldn’t sing or play. We share the silence of her memories back to the once boarding house.

Across the road the trains are on an elevated bridge, coming and going, in a slow arc, level with the window, breaking cover from behind the Grand Hotel. The back- a track – track of their keyboard curve refrain chants its way to dawn, when the city noise recuperates. The shower is squeezed into a 3’ by 2’ cavity, and the tiny door opens out, with a hard pull. Turning side on I scape by and in, not needing to call Reception for a shove, today.