Badgers and Coyotes

           

            Wednesday was the first day in nine months that I’ve had to work at OCADU for an 8:30 class. I got up 5:00 though and had time to play guitar for half an hour and even make coffee.

I worked for Terry Shofner’s class. He’s one of the few instructors who actually engages me in conversation whenever I work for him and is interested in hearing about my university classes.

I was scheduled to work that afternoon from 15:10 to 18:10, and I would have normally had time to ride home and sleep for a while, but my professor has her office hours from 14:00 to 16:00 and I wanted to get some feedback on my essay, so I wanted to be there half an hour early to guarantee I’d be the first one to see her so I could get to work on time afterward. I decided to go to the models lounge to try to sleep there. I rested for a while with my feet on a chair and the chair’s cushion against the wall behind my head, but I couldn’t really sleep. I plugged in my laptop and read some more of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s “A Little Princess”. She really was a pretty good writer, especially in some of her descriptive writing. I’m about two-thirds of the way through. In the movie, Sara’s father returns after being incapacitated for all the years his daughter lived in poverty. In the real story, it looks like her father is really dead and it’s her father’s partner, who had been thought to have run off with his money, was the one who had been incapacitated. He’s made it his life’s goal to track down his partner’s daughter and to give her her father’s share of the fortune he made. He still doesn’t realize though that he is living next door to the school where Sara is trapped in the life of a drudge.

As I’d planned, I was by far the first student there for Professor Baker’s office hours. She spent fourty minutes looking at and talking about my essay. She likes a lot of my ideas about the use of talking animals in literature; even the one about “otherness”, which I wasn’t sure wasn’t a little bit tacky. I was telling her that otherness inspires sympathy more than sameness and that it can be seen not only with animals, but also in aliens and androids as presented in science fictions stories. She didn’t agree with me at first but in the middle of reading my essay she told me that I was right about robots. She reminded me that I have to steer clear of absolute statements and just stick with the material at hand. There was also the obvious fact that the essay needs to be organized, but I didn’t even really consider what I showed her to be a first draft yet.

While researching coyotes, to try to see how many natural characteristics fit with Thomas King’s character of Coyote, I came across some interesting information that I shared with Professor Baker. Apparently, Coyotes form amicable relationships with badgers in the wild because they help each other dig for rodents. Coyotes have been seen snuggling up to badgers and even licking their faces. I would imagine that if they can get the badgers to like them the coyotes wouldn’t have to do as much of the digging. Sort of like, “You’re a wonderful little badger and I like you very much! Thanks for the rat!”

I asked her to reassess my first essay and she told me my TA had already let her know that I would probably make that request. She said she would read my electronic submission.

I also asked her if she would sometime offer me a critique of the only children’s story I think I’ve ever written. She said she would if I was sure I could handle it, so it was arranged that I would email it to her in January.

It was lucky that I was her first visitor because when I walked out of her office I had just half an hour to get to work. There were at least five or six people waiting in the hall to see her when I left. None of them looked all that happy to have been waiting for so long. I don’t know if she spent so much time with me because my essay was particularly interesting or if it’s just that she kind of lives in a dream world where time doesn’t exist like a lot of people from the west coast. Even though her office hours are only for two hours, I’m sure she stayed until everyone had had a chance to consult with her.

I worked for Sara Sniderhan from mid-afternoon to evening. Her hello at the beginning and her thank you at the end were stiff and businesslike but she seemed a bit warmer in the midst of the class. She’s probably just shy, and covers it up with a cold veneer.

When I left work it was dark and raining. I passed the sax player who I see busking a lot at the corner of Spadina, but he was about a block east of the corner where the sidewalk is very wide. He has longish hair, swept back from a well-receded hairline and he looked and sounded good playing the sax intro from Gerry Rafferty’s “Baker Street” in the rain. He was playing it way too quickly though.

That night I watched the fourth episode of “Cheyenne”. It was a lame, formulaic story about going to a town across the Mexican border to bring back a bandit. The bad guy and his men run the town and have robbed it of its spirit. Cheyenne and Smitty take on the badguys by themselves, inspiring the men of the town to rise up to help them. Again, it was stiffly written and poorly acted. This show blew its chance with me and so I deleted the whole file.