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Sport 39: 2011
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Friday night foot-traffic jammed the streets as my guide led me into the jubilant neon.
We entered a vast department store and followed the stately ascent of the escalators.
Here it was Mothers & Daughters night. Fathers and sons were watching baseball or emptying buckets on the driving range, while in endless succession the well-heeled mothers and their teenage offspring glided heavenwards, talking in their courteous, amused voices or here and there nuzzling tiredly at one another’s flanks.
‘Turn around,’ said Kurosawa. ‘Tell me, what are you seeing now?’
I saw the ranks of label stores. I saw the escalator descend. I saw that it carried, like some bright cortege, the ordered procession of my former selves, and of all my former wives and lovers, younger with every floor we fell.
And that each new floor was like a bend in the river at which we removed one more article of dress, while the rusty feathers of summer fescue shivered at the touch of our splendid limbs.