Street Symphony Read Online Free PDF

most likely wouldn’t have, and she did worry. She worried about how long she was going to live and what would happen if the annuities ran out. Most of all, she wanted to leave something towards Evan’s and Lisa’s university fees. She would try to be frugal for the sake of her only grandkids, Holly’s sweet twins. So the cost: Return bus fare, using senior tickets, three dollars. Admission to the museum, zero because she had a membership card. Soup and coffee in the café for lunch, ten dollars. Make it a day out. No, half a day. How long could you stare at bones, even bones cleverly reconstructed to form an outsize extinct animal? If a dinosaur ever suffered from arthritis, it would have been torture for the poor beast with all that cartilage to wear away.
    The great creatures ran, they ate and slept. They laid eggs, and therefore must, incredibly, have had sex. It conjured up a grotesque image: Two fifty-ton beasts lurching towards each other with romance in mind, but no worse, perhaps, than the mating of humans if seen by another species. And did the dinosaurs’ hatchlings move away from their parents to other parts of the earth and rarely visit? But it wasn’t research into the lives of sauropods that was driving her to set out on this rainy day to the museum – it was Paul and his suggestion that they share a room on their trip to Seattle.
    Yes, it was economically sound to share a room. Yes, she liked him. But hotel rooms contained beds, and the pleasure of their weekly meetings for coffee or drinks could be spoiled by the memory of two contemporary ancient bodies grinding together between the sheets. Are we there yet? Nothing would be the same after that. Even “I know you like my muffins” would acquire a subtext that hadn’t existed before. She looked at the clock on the stove. Quickly, she wrote down the lines that had come to her that morning in bed, Phonemes freed from the lexicon, Fell around the kitchen floor, And assembled themselves, Into new expressions. Words to be worked on later.
    Set the alarm. Lock the door. Forget umbrella. Go back inside. Get umbrella. Repeat security procedures. Exit.
    The bus drew up at the stop by the Rainbow Care Home and the driver lowered the ramp for a man in a motorized wheelchair. The man’s head was tilted to one side and it took him a long time to move the brake lever with his crooked fingers. Once he was in place, the driver called out, “You okay?” and the man replied, “Okay!” in a deep, painful voice. His eyes were bright and Ella smiled at him, her heart aching as she admired his courage in venturing to the city alone. He was clearly hanging on to his independence, perhaps by a fingernail.
    And that was it. Independence! Four syllables that created a space, a place of one’s own in the world, a castle with keep and moat. For the past five years, she’d used her widowhood as a shield and thrown the words “my late husband” into conversations as a talisman. Not that there’d been much need for boiling oil so far. Only two knights had made serious attempts to cross the drawbridge. Glen had needed a nurse, and nursing, as she well knew, could best be done when there was love. Herb had offered much in the way of pleasing vacations, but to places where there was a golf course. He was noisy, his voice as loud as the pants he wore when he played. She could foresee a jolly final stretch to the last green with him, but his handicap was blinding self-admiration. And besides, as she assured Graeme and Holly and Donna, their parents had enjoyed a happy and wonderful marriage – a fiction – and there could be no replacement for their father.
    At The Grove, she’d slightly considered Roland-the-builder, healthy looking, no apparent creaking joints, but he was too lost, too unanchored and not ready to move on. He shied away when they met each other in the hallways. He talked about his late wife, Kate, as if she’d just stepped out and would come into the