Early Sunday morning is  a great time to walk on Los Angeles' midcity streets. The sun is breathing but not yet with any sort of ferocity, and the sidewalks are relatively empty. No speeding cars. No rumbling trucks. The stores are shuttered; even the sidewalk cafes have yet to open their doors, and other than me and my little Earnest, only a few energetic joggers are out and about. Earnest runs happily about, sniffing amongst the roots of an overgrown ficus tree, and I look carefully at the window displays of the storefronts we pass. A gallery off 3rd Street displays products suitable for scrubbing out all of last night's angst and tomorrow's anxiety.

Recipe for Restoration

Pour a bit of Voila
at the edge of the remembered
rub into crevices of the forgotten
wait until sun dissolves
to gold all dark shadow
sprayed down first by Despair
dug deeper with a wash of Dread
left to rust by ruin.
What is gone returns.

If the nouveau cleaning products prompted me to write silly verses in response to such a 'clean' display of grey, the whimsy of the  Let's Go Fishing window, with its neon color and collaged imagery of nostalgia made me want to dance. Despair-Dread-Voila seemed a tad too intentional and a wee bit too serious to be viewed as anything but fashionable art by the likes of me, but the casual happiness of the flat-painted pines and swimming butterflies of Let's go Fishing (for compliments!), a commercial window display not meant as art, made me laugh and made me think in more interesting directions than did the fine art designed to trigger thoughtful response.   I ended thinking more kindly of the cardboard cut-out with her inner tube than of the carefully positioned revisions of commonplace cleaning products. That rubber ducky scrubbed the cobwebs from my mind.

And then I found this glass-walled column, a window made square and tall, next to a closed door with only a small sign entrance to the back. On the other side of the door, a more traditional store window papered from the inside and blank to the street. Inside the glass-walled column a pile of worn ballet shoes with one checkered slip-on shoe nestled happily on top.

No explanation.

Keep dancing. Dance until the toes of your shoes are soiled and the soles worn through.

Dance.