I don’t know if you can tell but Adobe Caslon Pro has changed me. I don’t know if you understand, but discovering a new font is transformative for a writer. Adobe Caslon Pro–my new muse, friend, goddess–unfurled this certain streak of dainty aesthetic throughout my Word documents. My journal entries have been blossoming and so has, I hope, the story I’m writing.
That story–I’d originally meant for it to arise and play out in Chicago, 1988, but after doing research and hitting the wall of Valspeak and whatnot, I’ve shifted it to Toronto. I know the city. The UofT campus sprawls through it; housing prices haven risen sky-high as the CN tower; and in fact I was there last weekend, gazing up at the colorful billboard in Yonge-Dundas Square.
The entire afternoon we were there, my best friend Isla and I walked around the glamorous CF Toronto Eaton Center. Afterward, we saw a sculpture of drowning houses in the sunlit lake. It was supposed to be about global warming: I found it beautiful, how the houses, pretty as paper doll homes, were tilted and half-submerged in shimmering water, but Isla said it was sad that people had thrown plastic garbage into the pool regardless. We’re different that way. Later we entered MUJI Atrium on Dundas Street, and it had the most gorgeous array of lights I’d ever seen: brilliant diamond-white flame, encased in clear glass cubes; hundreds of these radiant lanterns hanging from the ceiling, emitting light. It was kind of magical.
On the evening train that we took back to West Harbor, dark trees flashed past the long window. In the middle of a word game, I happened to look up.
“The lake!” I yelped. There was a glow, just past the dark rustle of leaves, not unlike the one of the glass lanterns; it was like satin with a sunset-sheen.
Isla understood immediately–she ducked away from the window as I fumbled for my phone camera. But then a tree flashed into view, then another, then a whole forest, and we realized that we were too late. The view plunged into darkness again. So we returned to our word game, that magic lost. But I still remember that brief breathless moment because it refuses to fade. Clarity and strength of a memory are two separate properties. A memory can have the fleeting power of a distress flare, lighting up the sky until it fades into the darkness that makes you forget the momentary wildfire that once haunted the night. The other kind of memory could be like a glass lantern that shines faintly, but twinkles on for days, dwindling just a little … even when you’ve left it behind in Toronto.
*Names mentioned are pseudonyms.
