Square Bubbles

by Paul Turner

Downtown: Added on November 19, 2006

We often make the urban pilgrimage to Portland where my wife loves to shop at Nordstrom. I, however, am more comfortable waiting across the street in Pioneer Courthouse Square, watching the cross-section of humanity in flux at this crossroads of city buses. Many of these people are aloofly itinerant, transferring from one bus to the next. Others seem to take up residence on the brick square. The chess games provide a quietly sedentary island in the sea of moving bodies, occasionally punctuated by the sudden movement of pieces. A black man with a pot belly and an affable seriousness cleans the clock of a suit-and-tie type who has stopped for a chess match, perhaps on his way to the next meeting.

On this autumn afternoon, I watched the slice of sunlight pressing between two skyscrapers sweep across the square's criss-crossed brickwork like a lazy second hand. I scooted myself up against one of the walls and inched down to stay in the path of the moving light. As the homeless and the homeward bound sauntered by, I saw a young woman sitting in the swath of light right in the middle of the square. With Maxfield Parrish whimsy, she started blowing bubbles. They were glass-like orbs capturing the angled light and sending it upward with the rising bubbles. She delighted in the floating, glistening array and kept adding more. A man walking by with a large snake wrapped about his shoulders like an animated shawl stopped to watch the girl and her bubbles. Even the kid panhandling for bus money seemed to take a second to check out the light passing through the glossy wafting circles, released by the young woman in the middle of the metropolitan plain.

The migrating light shaft ticked over the square and the temperature dropped with a suddenness that betrayed the end of summer. The young woman stood and did a strangely expected twirl with her arms extended, as if dispensing a blessing/adios to the square. I rose to my feet as the next gusher of humanity squirted from one bus to another. The chess games had wrapped up and streetlights glowed unnaturally against the darkening sky. The spirit of the city was changing shifts and the night crew was coming in with different players, but it was getting late and I wasn't up for a double feature.