Busted Blood Vessel

       There’s a woman that I’ve seen through my window for many years every morning as I play guitar. For most of that time she has looked like she is pushing herself through thick drifts of abrasive air. She’s been hunched over with a permanent frown and looked like there was some horrible burden she’s been carrying.

       In the last year though she has been walking erect and with a little more bounce in her step. The air in her path is no longer a wall that she has to push against. I wonder if it’s the happy little black and white dog that she walks every morning that has changed her life.

       On Monday at around 12:30 I rode up to Long and McWide to buy a G string and I asked for a 0.66 mm string, but even though I specifically said millimetres, the guy behind the counter said, “We don’t have anything that big!” It amazes me that we’ve had the metric system for fifty years and it still hasn’t caught on, except in terms of volume and distance. Weight is sort of fifty-fifty, but when it comes to the size of things, most Canadians seem to be lost and couldn’t possibly tell you how many centimetres tall they are. I really think they should have just broken everybody into it cold turkey fifty years ago.

       I went to the bank to take out my rent money, my phone service money and a little extra for some fruit. A guy in front of me had lost his card and was asking for a new one. He said he loses his card fairly often because he has memory problems. The manager gave him a new card anyway even though he couldn’t provide any proof of his address because he said the people in his house steal his mail. I’m fairly certain that if I’d lost my card and I didn’t have proof of my address on me they would have made me go home to get it.

       It seemed that talking to the guy in front of me put the manager into a certain maternalistic mental state, because when she was serving me she was speaking as if I were a child. I wanted an amount that cut into my fifty dollars of overdraft protection. She talked to me like I didn’t know there would be service charges, and explained it more than once as if I’d been hit on the head and needed special explanations.

       At the supermarket there were finally large bins of delicious local apples on sale. For the last couple of years, I guess because of the weather, the crops have not been good enough to make these available.

       After paying for my phone service I called my landlord, because I hadn’t heard from him since I called him last Wednesday to ask for a bedbug treatment. A young man answered the phone. I don’t think I’ve heard his son’s voice since he was a little boy. It’s deep now and he no longer has a Sri Lankan accent. He was answering the phone because his father was in the hospital from a busted blood vessel in the stomach. I’d always though from the way Raja yelled at me on the phone that it would have been a vessel in his forehead that would explode first. I left a message about needing treatments every two weeks.