Daily Blague

The building that I live in has a footprint shaped like the letter "H," but with a sizeable extra wing that juts out to the right of the top right-hand end of the letter. This means that there are twenty-percent more residents on the east side of the building than there are on the west. And yet both sides are served by the same complement of elevators: two for passengers and one for service. This works just fine on the west side. On the east side, the elevators are forever breaking down, or out of service for repair.

Every once in a while, my response to getting caught in a crowd of irritated neighbors blocking the corridor before the passenger elevators is to walk over to the west side of the building, take the elevator to the "penthouse" floor, and climb the flight of stairs to the roof, which I then traverse to get to the staircase on my side of the building. It's five flights down and my knees don't like it, but it's always better to be moving than to be waiting.

The other day, I paused for a moment, setting the mail on one of the mushroom-cap ventilators, to take this souvenir. This is the view that getting home occasionally involves.

It's rather like being on the crew that polishes the jewels in Topkapi or the Tower: the things that you get to see in an everyday way. I don't claim that there's anything terribly interesting about the particular scene on view in the snap. But I do know that there are residents of the building itself who would be brought up short by finding themselves so high up in the air in the middle of finding their way home.