A Study in Gray

I went to pick up my son at daycare and the hallway was filled with boys from 4-12 all suiting up in snowpants and mittens and toques and there was a chaos and an energy that could only be described as jubilant and they were all going out to play.
"C'mon son, time to go!" I said to him and his shoulders dropped and his arms dropped and he threw his head back hopelessly and gave me a "But Daaaaaad! and I said "We have to go buddy." and he said "Can't I just play outside for a little while?"
I had been outside, first at 4:30 a.m. scraping my windshield, and now at 4pm after spending half an hour in a vehicle that just wasn't getting warm enough. It was cold outside, crisp and clear see your breath and hear things clearer cold. Outside was not on my radar, but then it occurred to me that I could get a hot coffee in a warm coffee shop and let the day seep out of me and the heat seep in to me so I said "Okay, I'll be back in half an hour." and he said "Yay!" and I zipped my jacket up all the way and crossed my arms across my chest, tucked hands in under my arms and turtled my head into my trapezoids. I hunched quick steps in a quick-stepped hunch to a new place that had just opened, just up the block.
Il Secondo is new and it's a hip urban coffee shop pizzeria and bakery all in one. I walked in and ordered 'a coffee to go but I'm going to have most of it in' and I got my coffee and loaded with a head turning amount of sugar and headed to a corner seat. I sat quiet, which is something I don't do or can't do depending on who you ask. They had slow jazz playing, old Billie Holliday or young Ella Fitzgerald and it put me in a peaceful space, a romantic space even and I sat with my wrists around the coffee cup to warm my blood and as had been my intent, let the warm seep into me.
Above me the ceiling was open-concept and black, lined with fat round heating ducts all painted black to match in that style popularized by the 'premium casual' dining industry. In the far corner, a wood fired pizza oven glowed orange and flickering and the walls were painted milky coffee colored and the chairs and tables were painted dark coffee color. It felt urban and felt metropolitan until I noticed the blue and yellow and flowery country crockery placed at intervals on high corner shelves. Imagine Grandma Lee circa 1974 stumbling drunk into a Starbucks in the West End of Vancouver circa 1994 and puking in the corners. That would about describe it.
Granny china or not I was in a drifting and dreaming state of mind and I was happier than I usually am at the onset of winter when I can't get warm and happily I soaked in my surroundings. At a counter along the window one of those 21st century hippie girls (siwash sweater, spandex pants and a tie-dyed shirt) sat studying, and her book was flat on the table and she had her head resting on her hand parallel to the pages. She had clean, free, product free hair and it fell fine and flowing and flipped over her shoulder and she wrote at the page from a position off to the side. Her neck was bent at a nearly 90 degree angle and it looked like an uncomfortable position, but it looked like it was her favorite and her most comfortable position and she was young and pretty and had a look in her eye like she was writing poetry or songs or something romantic and firelit, a look that was soft and filtered like old silent movies or 70s sunshine pics. The heating ducts put out a quiet hushing gray noise and the music kept padding and purring away like something you'd been thinking about and forgot and the pretty girl's aurora (no I didn't mean aura) had me feeling romantic and poetic too and I fell in love with the moment and I was looking around at everything with my groove on, which you either get or you don't.
Looking out the window I saw the street and cars and the brick building across the road and parking meters and power poles and power lines and leafless skeletal trees and an overcast sky that must have been open cast somewhere out of eyeshot because there was sunlight there too and in cast long shadows on the ground. I was grooving on the crazy angles all the straight lines of the man made things made against the unstraight lines of the unmade things and it was then that I noticed everything was gray. I mean EVERYTHING man! Now gray usually makes me want to fucking hang myself, honest to God. It's always been the thing I hate most about Saskatchewan winters, the whole monochrome 2 dimensionality of everything. Yet here I was managing to get lost in just how many shades of gray there were in front of me, and finding one of those rare transcendent moments where you realize that there is nothing on this planet that is not beautiful! The old mottled gray pot-holed street, a decade or so from it's last resurfacing, oil-stained almost black here, darker gray with the wet silhouette of an old puddle there, and shadows falling at crazy crisscrossing intervals contained an entire pallet of gray in the space of an empty parking space. Stretch it up, onto the clean, bright concrete of the cool crisp crumbling sidewalk and spill up into the fluid form of an old parking meter and there were a dozen more grays. The skeletal tree-a gray as white as sun bleached bone, it's furrows and fissures shaded charcoal and deep, it's immaculate imperfection humbling the perfect gray power pole beside it. Give me a pencil and a millenia and I'd struggle to sketch it for you, a little less pressure where the shadows fade, a smudge where the ice just melted. A thousand shades of gray, contrasts as deep as moon and sky and so freaking gorgeous and complex and simple at the same time and it just screams illusion at you. I knew in an instant that like the song says it's all too beautiful, and whatever it is; love, hate, birth, death, water and ice, blood and feces, war and peace- it's all exactly the way it's supposed to be and all any of it takes is just a moment of peace and the right vantage point and there's beauty in all of it.
Look. I've been up too long already. This is one of those posts that I'll regret making public because it's a little too visceral, and by that I mean that I've given you my viscera in this one, for you to do with as you please. Generally that's an open license to kill or maim, at the very least cripple, so I'm hesitant to put it out there. But at the same time, it's one of those things that only a few of us with more senses than just eyes and ears and orifices will get, and I think that if you know I'm resonating on that same wavelength, that I've got it too, well the world is a little bit bigger and better for us, isn't it?