On Friday, I finished reading Sherman Alexie’s “The Absolutely True Diary of a Part Time
Indian”. It’s a well-written, even sometimes poetically written, but very
simply written story. It’s sometimes funny but mostly sad, though it does end
hopefully. The most powerful part is the basketball game in which Arnold Spirit
comes forward as the most valuable player for the team of the white high school
he is attending but against the team of his reservation. He felt like both a
traitor and a hero at the same time.
As I was getting ready to go teach my
yoga class, I was looking for the fifteen dollars that I had left after buying
coffee the night before, but I couldn’t find it anywhere. I could only conclude
that I’d been in such a rush that I’d been careless. I told myself that I must
not have shoved my change very deeply into my pocket, and admittedly, the pants
I’ve been wearing don’t have very deep pockets. I figured my phone, moving next
to the money as I pedaled my bike might have caused the money to shimmy up the
fabric and drop to the street.
At PARC, I saw
Shelly downstairs in the drop-in, and she said she’d be coming. In the healing
centre at PARC, I was getting the room ready for yoga when Shelly’s friend
Mario hobbled in. He sat down for a while in a chair, as I dragged furniture
around to make more space. Finally though, he got up and left. Shelly came in a
little after start time. She just wanted instruction on one particular
exercise. The Sun Salutation has both standing and floor parts and she has
trouble making a smooth transition between the two. So I divided the exercise
in half and gave her a series to do while standing and another to do on the
floor. That took about half an hour and she was satisfied with that, so I ended
up leaving at the same time I would have left if no one had come.
I went home briefly
to take another stab at looking for my money. I usually take my money out of my
pocket and put it on my dresser before I change into my home clothes, but I
thought that maybe I hadn’t. Perhaps I’d put my pants in the kitchen as usual
and the money had fallen among all the clutter of the bedroom and living room
things that I keep out there while I’m waiting for the bedbugs to be gone. I
couldn’t see it there. I thought that maybe it had fallen behind the dresser,
but it hadn’t. I shrugged and resigned myself to having accidentally given
fifteen dollars to a stranger, and just hoped whoever it had been had needed
it.
I rode along Bloor
to Sherbourne and then started exploring the streets just north of there. As I
crossed the bridge over the Rosedale Valley, the autumn colours were
spectacular in the sunlight. I explored the streets between Sherbourne and
Castle Frank, south of Elm Avenue. Holy cow, south Rosedale is a rich area! There are some
very nicely designed modern homes, but there are mostly a lot of beautiful
houses of many designs but they looked like they might be some of the oldest in
Toronto. It seemed to me that this would have been the perfect neighbourhood to
have taken my daughter trick or treating when she’d been young. Though ritzy, I
could tell that these nice old buildings would be quite spooky after dark. The
only thing that took their scariness away was the cheap Halloween decorations
some of them had on display.
When I got home, I
was getting ready to change out of my away from home clothing, when I suddenly
remembered that when I’d rushed out to buy coffee the night before, I hadn’t
changed my clothes. I had put my money in the track pants that I wear around
the apartment. Sure enough, the money was there in the right pocket.
I watched Buster
Keaton’s first feature film, “The Saphead”. Keaton hadn’t started directing at
this point, but he was the main star. It was a comedy but not slapstick like a
lot of his later work. He played, Bertie, the bumbling son of a Wall Street
tycoon who was in love with his father’s adopted daughter and she with him. His
natural sister’s husband was his father’s number one man in the company but it
turned out that he was cheating on his wife with a dancer named Henrietta. The
dancer became ill, but her dying wish was to expose her ex-lover by giving his
wife her husband’s love letters. But in order to save his sister from a broken
heart, Bertie claimed the letters were his own and threw them in the fire so no
one would know. Bertie’s father disowned Bertie. Meanwhile the brother in law
bilked Bertie’s father of all his securities by causing the shares to drop on a
mine called Henrietta. Bertie had bought a seat on the stock exchange but knew
nothing about it. All he knew was that everybody was shouting “Henrietta!” and
he wanted them to stop. He was told that all he had to do was say, “I’ll take
it!” to anyone who shouted the name and they would stop, so he bought all the
stock and it went up in value till he’d saved his father from bankruptcy.
No comments:
Post a Comment