Performance

His light and spacious store-front
office presents as a peculiar place
of professional business. Behind the
reception desk, a soft-spoken young man
adept at putting clients at ease, at the
preliminary ministrations of technical
gear, conducting retinal scans,
meticulously completing paperwork.

The ceiling in the large reception area
festooned with model planes, dirigibles,
colourful miniature hot-air balloons.
Clocks in every conceivable shape: octagonal,
wags-on-the-wall, regulators, bracket,
gingerbread, talk and tick the minutes of
waiting time, chiming Westminster hours.
Interspersed, an array of gilt and silver
mirrors of every conceivable size, shape.

People are seated, awaiting appointments,
on petit-point and leather, wood-carved
and rattan-embellished, antique dentist
armchairs and more, selecting from
among colour-plated tomes on Egyptology,
space travel, cosmology, flora and fauna of
the world, gardening whimsies and aquaria
as reading-and-ogling material. The office
clearly appointed by someone with a flaming
sense of humour, refusing to take life too
lightly, nor too seriously, but just so.

Reflecting, in fact, the physical flamboyance
and tangential mind-tics of their host, the
irrepressible Doctor Brown, Eyedoctor.ca
who eventually reveals himself as a study in
casual delusional self-awareness; tall and
gangly, slicked-back hair, high, gaunt cheekbones
and gravelly, sombre voice revealing the
high-tension-wire act of a circus performer.
To whose ministrations patients entrust
their health, humour and vision.