Yesterday marked my first week as a mosaicist with Mosaïka, and I made a few photos before leaving the studio. Halfway home, I stopped by my favourite used bookstore to get out of the cold. I found Levertov's book on the poetry shelf, its cover rather poignant as I had just taken very similar pictures. Bought it on the spot. I love her Author's Note, a good epigraph for this blog:

These tesserae have no pretensions
To forming an entire mosaic.
They are merely fragments,
composed from time to time
between poems.

Simiarly, at used book sale at the Atwater library a little while back, I heard a lady say, Isn't this a lovely find, and I asked what book she was talking about. It was a book of Aesop's Fables illustrated by Alexander Calder, and she smiled and said, You can have it if you want it. Just the morning before I had been at the Old Port taking pictures, and remembered photographing Calder's monumental sculpture Man, across the river on Île Sainte-Hélène. So I bought the book; it was twenty cents and it is excellent. Calder draws his animals with unbroken lines, as if they were twisted out of a piece of wire.

...and to think that there are people who do not believe in
coincidences, when one is constantly discovering coincidences in the
world and is beginning to wonder if coincidences are not the very
logic of this world.
· José Saramago, from The Stone Raft

Sorry for your wait, says the hairdresser, sweeping hair into a dustpan. I am prepared to say sorry, he continues, because when I am behind ten minutes for you, it means I have been behind ten minutes for everyone. So I have been saying sorry all afternoon.

He clips my hair and tells me about scissors. Those, he says, pointing to a pair, are one thousand dollar scissors. They are expensive but you have them for five or six years and you make money with them. The best scissors, he says, come from the United States and Germany. Italy, they have famous scissors too but not all brands. China is starting to make good scissors.

These scissors my father sent me from Iran. They were made in Japan. They don't have these here but Europe is full of these scissors. They are not the most expensive scissors but I like to use them for men's hair. Men like the sound they make. He snips the scissors rapidly to demonstrate and they make a quick, sharp, staccato sound, like a typewriter at full speed. Not like these, he says, picking up a purple-handled pair. These are Canadian, they are cheaper scissors, seventy dollars. He works the scissors and the sound is dull and shapeless.

These scissors my father sent, he says, have broken three times and I always fix them. He shows me the handle, its translucent plastic fractured and melted in several places. I will always have these scissors.

The usual, he says. Student, or not a student. I am not a student right now, I say. Sixteen-fifty. The change jangles into my hand. Salut, have a nice weekend.

Montreal is full of puddles, yellow and swelling with sunlight. There is a strong wind, and I feel it through my hair. A car passes, barrelling up Guy, windows rolled down. A dog sticks its head out the back window, black eyes wide, face full of fast air, and I think, I know how that feels.