Our home office window looks out onto the alley
behind the place we rent. I saw Matthew pull up
in his old Toyota van, ladders, drop cloths, cans
of paint, and the rest of it piled in back. (You could see
it through the glass.) Today we went to touch up an
apartment on Queen Anne right across from Bhy
Kracke Park. Matt said it was aptly named--one night
a crackhead went and kicked in an entryway window
and ran upstairs to pound on door of the resident who'd
had the nerve to tell him to stop shouting obscenities in
the street. Well, she got her wish--the guy was off the
street. That was then. The apartment we were painting
overlooked downtown, big picture windows making
the most of the vista. The occupant said she was
renting the view. I opened the bedroom window for
some ventilation and while I was painting it started
to snow, sleet, and hail. By the time I was done the
sun had come out again. Weather like television,
flipping channels at random. Matt and I worked the
living room together where the renter was watching
Rear Window, one of my favorite Hitchcock films.
The TV was like a window, too, looking into Jimmy
Stewart's apartment looking out and into a flat
across his courtyard. My friend Chet had binoculars
by his Manhattan law dorm highrise window and once
said, "Macaulay Culkin lives there." I'm not that big a
peeper but at night sometimes I marvel at all the
flickering lights of TV's mass hypnosis as it plays
behind people's windows. Matt took a long way home
which was OK because we weren't in a hurry and
while crossing Ballard Bridge I pointed my camera
up through the windshield and got really lucky.