If I was a more thorough journalist, this would be a more complete account.
I’m not sure, though, that it would be a better story.
I’m almost sure it wouldn’t be.
About a week ago, I was walking home along a busy city thoroughfare, before cutting diagonally through a library parking lot. It was a brisk, cool start-of-fall afternoon, with a feel of impending rain. The lot has been empty for months; even the construction workers who used to leave their Tim Hortons cups on the grassy verge after parking have left now, and it’s a jarring COVID-19 wasteland every time I cut through.
I kept my head down: the sheer haphazardness of the parking pattern set off alarm bells, so I just kept to my lane.
But on this particular day, I saw a small cluster of cars, four in all, parked so they made an irregular square. They were all outside the parking lines, anchored on one side by a huge white extended-cab pickup with all its doors open on one side.
It was the sort of thing that looks wrong, that piques your attention.
I kept my head down: the sheer haphazardness of the parking pattern set off alarm bells, so I just kept to my lane.
Until I heard the music.
There was obvious but indistinct music from the white pickup — the wind was coming from behind me, so I couldn’t really make it out.
When I got far enough around the blocky front of the truck, looking out of the corner of my eye, I almost stopped; I’m sure I did a little check-step.
Laid out on the ground inside the windbreak of cars was a square of flooring, like a dance floor but with a square of pavement at its centre, and making their way around the floor were three couples. Each couple wore ordinary street clothes and surgical masks; they each had one hand clasped together, the other on a respective hip.
They turned in time with the music, moving first forwards and then backwards around the squared racetrack of dance floor, obeying a precise order that was completely invisible to me.
They showed no sign that they even realized I existed. It was almost ethereal, with the traffic roaring by, no one even slowing down, the dance bound tight to its own pattern of imperatives.
There was one other witness.
An extra dancer, waiting for a turn? Solely an observer? I don’t know.
A woman sat alone in a folding lawn chair at the edge of the dance floor, her own surgical mask bright blue across her face, watching the dancers circle. I lifted a hand, waved. She waved back, and then let her hand fall back into her lap, so I know for certain that they were real. The dancers twirled on.
There’s plenty I don’t know: who were they? Will they ever come back? Do they keep a portable dance floor available solely for pandemic reasons?
I could have found out what it was all about: I could have interrupted, asked questions, found out precise details. Taken a picture.
But I would have fractured the image of that vast empty parking lot, the three pairs of dancers moving perfectly in sync to the music, surrounded by their audience of open and empty asphalt.
I wish I’d stopped and asked questions; perversely, I’m glad I didn’t.
But I think of them now every time I walk through the library parking lot. And I think I will, for a very long time.
You can have too many answers.
Russell Wangersky’s column appears in SaltWire newspapers and websites across Atlantic Canada. He can be reached at [email protected] — Twitter: @wangersky.
