Molasses Hat

           

            I spent a lot of Sunday reading Arthur Ransome’s “Swallows and Amazons”. It’s not a complicated story but it’s a bit tedious because it goes into a lot of detail about sailing, and no real adventure occurs for the first hundred pages. It’s very realistic, except for the idea that four siblings would get along so well together.

            In the evening I rode north under a speckled sky. The speckles headed west, so once I was also riding in that direction the clouds didn’t look speckled. I finished exploring the area south and west of Bayview and Moore. Returning westward along Moore, the sky was scattered with pink and gold fire. By the time I was back on St Clair though the fire had extinguished and all that were left after sunset were ashes coloured clouds. It was almost dark as I rode west on Queen, with just some patches of dark cloud against the deep blue of the horizon.

            I watched the Roscoe Arbuckle film, “The Butcher Boy”, which co-starred Buster Keaton in what was apparently his film debut. It was certainly not his performance debut though, since he’d been in Vaudeville with his parents since he was a child. The film again consisted of a collection of situations, some of which were centred around Arbuckle’s job in a store. One involved Buster Keaton coming in with a bucket to buy molasses. He dropped a coin in the bucket and handed it to Arbuckle. Arbuckle filled the bucket and then asked for the money, but of course the money was in the bucket. Keaton, while waiting for his molasses, was in another part of the store watching some old men play checkers, but he had left his hat on the counter. Arbuckle, needing a place to pour the molasses in order to get the coin, dumps it into Keaton’s hat, retrieves the coin and then pours the molasses back into the bucket. Of course the slapstick begins when Buster puts the now sticky hat on his head.