Saturday in the park

It is one of the last days of summer. Sharp, cool mornings turn into hot days. Hurricane Irene is making her way up the coast. Soon, it'll be wet and even colder. Goodbye summer. Hello fall.

With a lazy day stretching out in front of me, I decided to go to the library and get some comics. I prefer the term comics to graphic novels. But the term I really like is BD because it is in France and with French friends that my love for comics really got its start. I used to read them a lot. Not the sci-fi-fantasy-sex-pot-violence ones, nor the mangas, but the sullen, ironic and silly ones. There is a scene in Lapinot that made me cry for the hilarity of it. It has a dog saying "whiff" and a cat, named Richard (Riri to his friends) saying, "tout doux". There is an amazing Swiss comic called "Priapus" based on the Greek myth about the boy with a huge penis. It has no words. It is amazing. I remember reading it in the park and being stunned by the artist's ability to convey his story through images (and no, it is not all dicks). Don't even get me started on David B or the Isaac le Pirate series.

It was with these thoughts in my head that I wandered over to the Bande dessinee section of the library (it had been so long since I had taken out comics that I stood blankly in front of the Large Text section before figuring out that BD was now where Foreign Languages used to be). I got three comics, one about life in Israel, one about a man with Alzheimer's and one about a depressed French guy (the last being a very popular theme in comics).

With my books in hand I went to the park and sat down next to a tree across from the baseball diamond. There was a baseball game on and participants and spectators had set up a barbecue. After a few minutes, I realized it was a deaf tournament and I had a frisson of voyeuristic glee before forcing myself to return my attention to Exit Wounds (the Israeli one). A baby cried and I thought, "Who will hear her?"

I opened the first page and noticed someone standing to my right. A tall man, in coke-bottle glasses and a black, sleeveless shirt. "Trouvez-vous quarante et seule?" he asked me. "Quoi?" I responded not quite sure I had heard correctly. He repeated his question. I puffed with indignation (readers of this blog will know that I do like a good indignant puff). "Je ne suis pas quarante ans," I said offendedly. He persisted in wanting to know if I was alone and I told him to piss off.

Really.

Exit Wounds was interesting, I couldn't get through the depressed French one, and I am saving the Alzheimer's one for another day.

Long live summer.

Hammer in the morning

My odd attempts at freelance journalism have often been fueled by interests I have or irritants that make me want to share my griping with a wider audience. I thought I had found the perfect story when one sunny, summer morning, I was awakened by the sound of jackhammers outside my window. Indignant, I peered out to see city workers digging up my sidewalk. Upon closer inspection, it seemed my corner of Parc-Ex was getting a make-over, complete with large orange signs, bulldozers, and sunglassed construction workers smoking cigarettes and texting as they leaned on a wall. I felt there was surely a story here. Why else would I be awoken so early in the morning? I called the city and tried to ask intelligent questions but ended up blurting out, "But why replace perfectly good sidewalks with new ones? And why before 7 am in the summer?" The answers were perfectly reasonable (replacement of sewer tops, verification of water mains, etc) and my ire fizzled to a coal glow of jackhammer headache. Then the work was done, the only reminder was the checkerboard appearance of the new sidewalk squares interspersed with the old. Until. Until this morning when the jackhammers started up again, the lounging city workers reappeared and the street in front of my house was ripped up.

It is just the section of street in front of my house that is getting the overhaul. One wonders if my call to City Hall got the ball rolling, as it were. I do recall saying, "It's not the sidewalks that need replacing, it's the streets." Perhaps they took my advice and are now replacing the streets, one bone-jittering section at a time.

In the meantime, I need to get away from my house.

Righteous indignation

Today in the post, a letter I had sent to a friend was returned to me for insufficient funds. Said letter had spent so many weeks mouldering on a table before actually making it into an envelope and then to the post office, that its return was cause for great dismay. Bloody hell! I immediately fell into a rage at the stupidity of the employee at the post office who had sold me the wrong stamp and puffed myself with righteous anger. I was ready to be the hand of vindication, the sword of all that is just, I was ready to roar my indignation.

Of course, there is a back story. I do not fly into rages at the slightest provocation, although I will admit, I do tend to feel the casual slights, the vague injustices and the mild set-backs of life a little more severely than my more sanguine friends (What do you mean there is no strawberry sorbet! Oh my god, what am I going to do?!!).

But the back story is this: the guy at the post office is a jerk. He never smiles. He is grumpy all the time. He is never helpful. He never offers seasonal greetings or comments about the weather. His stoney-faced reserve drives me bananas. And here was my chance to finally vent all of my pent up irritation at the poor man because I now had a reason, rather than the rather vague, you're being rude, which works with my son but probably not with blase government employees.

Off I marched to the post office, letter in hand, ready to incinerate the man with my righteous rage. He was lounging against a wall talking on the phone when I came in. What chatting during work hours?! My shoulders hunched and I was read to pounce.

Some people have an amazing ability to diffuse anger and our friend at the post office had this trait. While taking absolutely no blame, he got me to remove my useless stamp from the envelope and add it to another one. He embarked on a speech about re-using stamps and the importance of doing it sneakily or else I would be fined. He was on my side after all! But wait, it was his fault I had to re-use the stamp in the first place. These thoughts faded to the back of my mind. He added an extra stamp, waved away my offer to pay and sent me on my way.

I left feeling like I'd gotten a deal. Righteous anger melted like ice-cream in the sun.

Writing about nothing (for GC)

When I started this blog, it was in the hopes that having an audience would push me to write; write more, write better. But sometimes I have nothing to say. Or what I have to say is personal or silly or inflammatory. This is not the venue for such thoughts. So what do I write when I have nothing interesting, funny or intriguing to share?

Here it is:

I got a flat tire today. I couldn't find my patch kit. I did find a spare inner tube. The inner tube is not the right size for my wheel. It took a lot of sweating in the back yard before I figured that out. My hands are dirty and sore. My clothes are dirty. I have an appointment with the bike repair shop tomorrow morning.

I was recently told that buckwheat pancake mix has to rest for at least an hour before it can be made into pancakes. I had never heard this before. I have always mixed the batter and then thrown the mix onto the frying pan, making lovely flat grey crepes. I made pancakes this morning. I should say, I tried to make pancakes this morning. After three attempts ended in the garbage, and I tried two different oils, my son had to resign himself to a bowl of cereal which he did in a rather unsportsmanlike manner ("BUT I WANT PANCAKES! On a PLATE!"). I blame the new bottle of frying oil but part of me wonders if too much information is a bad thing.

The postal strike has meant that I have received a new phone bill every few days for the past week, each time with a larger and larger amount due.

While a polyester-cotton sheet mix may seem like a good idea at the store, the scratchy nights that ensue are not.

I don't do well in crowded insectariums.

There. That is my bit of nothing for today

Nosebleeds and things that go crunch in the night

As the title suggests, we are just back from a few days of camping. I was wary before we set off, D- having made clear that he did not like camping last summer by endless tantrums and general naughtiness. I had found this quite worrying as I had envisioned my life with a child as being generally, if not literally, one big camping adventure. I decided to try again this year, decreasing our stay outdoors from a heady eight days (last year) to two nights in a private campground.

The website showed a play-ground and a man-made lake, and mini-golf, and horse shoe games. The reality was slightly different: the lake was almost empty and the water stagnant, the mini golf consisted of a field with some numbered flags, and there was not a horseshoe to be found. D- loved the water slide, zipping from the top into my arms but on the seventh or eight go around, I slapped a horse-fly on my arm at the wrong time and he bashed into my head. A nose bleed for D-, a fat lip for me and the bug got away.

It got better from there. We met our friends. We found the perfect place on the river to swim, a little slip of sand stretched like a hand into the clear brown water. We relaxed and let the city leave our bones.

The first night, snug in our tent, I heard a crunching sound that I could not identify. I looked out into the night with my flashlight expecting to see the reflective eyes of a small animal but saw only the remains of our fire. Was it the last popping and fizzes of the embers? I went to sleep.

The next night, same thing: crunch, munch, scritch, scratch. I envisioned birds in the trees above, feasting on berries, or squirrels searching for nuts. I stepped out of the tent and the sound stopped. The moon was bright on the grass. D- turned in his sleep and sighed. There was nothing to see.

On the third day, we started to pack up our camping gear, slow to leave nature for the city. I pulled the fly from the tent and discovered what all the scratching had been about. Hundreds and hundreds of earwigs had climbed up the tent poles to nestle in the nylon tunnels made for holding up the tent. I hate earwigs. D- and I had great fun beating the tent with a stick, making the earwigs twirl and fly into the grass.

I love summer.

Visa shmisa

pink and blue bicycle bought off of kijiji: 5$
training wheels : 16.90$
bicycle bell : 4$
children's soccer shoes bought off kijiji : 7$


The joy of getting things done, biking halfway across the city and discovering new neighborhoods, the precarious balance of a children's bike wedged onto the back of a bicycle, the sun and wind, the pleasure of being given grape freezies by a stranger because we look so hot an bothered, the fear at dropping a bicycle with a child in it, the relief when the child isn't hurt, the bargain hunter's satisfaction at getting a deal: priceless

The path and the well

There is within each of us a well, deep and dark, walls of moss, and dark murky waters below. We walk past this well most days, sometimes not even noticing it is there. Maybe we have placed a large wooden cover on it, padlocked it behind a fence, perhaps it is overgrown with weeds. The path through the woods takes us onto sunny vistas and wind swept fields, it doesn't go past the well anymore.

Today my path has brought me to the well, and I have slipped in. Down down, like Alice falling down the rabbit hole. Into the dark place of sadness that inhabits us all. Suddenly everything is dark and the light seems so far away, so unattainable from the bottom, from the sharp rocks and the still, dead water. I want to cry and cry. Perhaps by filling my well with tears the water will slowly rise to the surface and bring me into the sunshine again. For now, I sit quietly at the bottom, frogs and lizards grazing my arms and legs. I don't have the energy to contemplate the long climb up the well to the surface.

Perhaps if I rest here a few hours, a few days, I will learn the value of being sad.

In the meantime I listen to Mercedes Sosa.