Who gives a fuck? It's Parkdale!

           

            On Thursday I left for class at 10:00 just in case I might find that there’s no lecture before mine on that day.  There was, so I sat on the floor out in the entryway, plugged in my laptop and plugged the flash drive in on which I’d loaded “The Story of the Treasure Seekers”. I had hoped to finish chapter two before class, but there was no time. It didn’t seem to matter for this lecture anyway, plus, I had already correctly deduced which of the siblings was the narrator of the story.

            Deirdre said that “The Story of the Treasure Seekers” is a book about books and makes reference to some previous piece of literature in every chapter.

            Since the narrator is a child there is no all-knowing storyteller and Nesbit deliberately has him make mistakes as he passes judgment on events.

            The children often play at being shipwrecked mariners but this is also a metaphor for the financial state of the family and the children’s sense of abandonment from having a dead mother and an emotionally distant father.

            The only adult the children feel affinity with is their next-door neighbour’s uncle, who is a writer. The implication is that only adult artists are able to align themselves with the minds of children.

            The children are voracious readers but they can’t see through form and formula. There is no difference for them between a newspaper advertisement and a fairy tale. They take everything at face value. When they see and ad placed in the paper by a moneylender, promising, “worry free loans”, they perceive the shark as a benefactor. I haven’t gotten to this point in the story yet, but apparently the normally ruthless businessman is so moved by the children’s belief in him that he becomes a benefactor after all.

            The book criticizes the false expectations set up by previously written children’s literature. Boys adventure stories of the 19^th Century were exciting but improbable. Alice’s world was sealed off as a dream. But the Treasure Seekers is realistic.

            The story doesn’t really build towards a conclusion, but rather they go from one adventure to another and so it’s more like beads on a string.

            Thursday’s lecture only lasts an hour. and so we  were done at noon. As I turned to head out, a student who had been a row or two behind me called out, “Christian!” I was just starting to recognize the guy with the reddish brown beard when he explained that we knew each other from the Tranzac open stage on Monday nights. It was Brian, the guy who sings Irish songs, sometimes in Irish and who lately has been playing reels he learned on the penny whistle during his recent trip to Ireland. We were both surprised to see each other, as I thought he was majoring in Irish studies and he thought I was majoring in French. It turns out that Irish is just a minor for him and English is a major for him as well.  We walked out together while he told me about a relative of his whom the RAF killed in an illegal air raid during the war between Ireland and Britain. This is the first time I’ve ever had anyone I’m remotely acquainted with in the same class as me, though I don’t know if we’ll hang out at all.

            I rode up to Eglinton and Yonge and then east through the ironic construction chaos between Yonge and Mount Pleasant.

            I was about to walk my bike across the street when a young woman accosted me. She said, “I see you’re on your bike! What are you going to do in the winter?” I answered that I’d be riding my bike. “What a trooper!” she said and then started telling me that I could go inside and get a free pass. Since I’d thought we’d been discussing transportation, I assumed at first that she was talking about a Metropass, but she was hawking for Good Life Fitness. I said, “I don’t live around here.” Because I thought that would end her sales pitch, but she asked, “Where do you live?” I said “Parkdale” and she said, “Oh, we have centres near there!” Finally I told her, “I get plenty of exercise.” And she got the message. She wasn’t even in such great shape herself to be trying to attract customers to a fitness centre.

            That night I heard an argument outside my window, though I don’t know exactly how it began. Someone had disapproved of something a woman had done and she shouted out, “Who gives a fuck? It’s Parkdale!” The woman who complained said she cares, because she lives here. I looked out my window and below me saw a tough looking woman, who I’d seen around for years, holding a two litre plastic pop bottle half full of something that didn’t look like pop. The woman who’d complained about whatever it was the drunk woman was doing was a casually dressed middle class white woman in her thirties accompanied by a man and woman of similar background and age. The drunk woman threatened them and the man scoffed, saying, “Oh, like you’re gonna beat us up!” I think I’ve seen that woman fight and I’m pretty sure she could take two guys like that. From what I’ve observed, there are no tougher women on the street than Africadian women. She came towards him saying, “You wanna try me?” Just then, her friend, who seemed sober, came running up, got between the drunken woman and the trio and calmed her down. As the trio walked west though, she followed after them, calling them out and mocking the woman’s declaration, “I live in Parkdale!”