Stinky Cat

           

            On Monday morning I started reading Frances Hodgson Burnett’s “A Little Princess”. At first I thought it was going to be another fairy tale but after a few paragraphs I began to recognize the story from a Shirley Temple movie I’d seen a few times as a kid. It’s about a little rich girl who is pretty, sweet, kind, intelligent, talented and unaffected in her ego by any of those things. Her mother is dead but she has a perfect relationship with her father who is as perfectly wonderful a human being as she is. But her father has to go to away and must leave her at a boarding school with a headmistress who doesn’t like the girl but behaves as if she does because of her money. In the movie, her father goes missing in action and the money runs out. The headmistress takes all her stuff away from her, gives it to the girls she likes and forces Sarah to earn her keep by becoming a scullery maid. I seem to recall that she remains a perfect little human being no matter how badly she is treated.

            Since I would have to work in the afternoon at OCADU I tried to take a nap for an hour and a half from 12:30. The phone rang though at 13:00 and it was Statistics Canada doing a survey on time usage. The woman said it would only take four minutes, so I agreed to answer her questions. She said “shore!” in response to everything I said, so I assumed she was from down east. After about four minutes she asked if I would like to continue. Apparently this was just the initial part to determine if I was eligible to be part of the survey. She said it would take at least another twenty minutes, so I told her I didn’t have time. She said someone would call back some evening.

            I went back to bed and almost slept for another hour.

            I worked two shifts at OCADU. The first was the second half of my pose for Kieran Brent’s class. I was trying to find the classroom for my second class but had never heard of room 420. I ran into Brian Haddon who had seen my name on the sign-in sheet and so had waited for me downstairs. He said that they’d changed the room numbers across the street in Village by the Grange campus. The rooms on the third floor, where Brian was on his way to work, used to have numbers like 1312, to distinguish them from the rooms in the main building. So I had been looking for what used to be room 1420.

            We walked up together and chatted a bit on the way, but split on the landing of the third floor.

            I worked for Echo Railton. She’s a perky young woman approaching fourty who sort of tries to act like she’s the same age as her students. She hooked up her phone to the sound system and played music that she had stored there. I was surprised that she had an album by Belgian-African pop star, Stromae. I did all short poses for the first time since last April. That and the fact that I’d forgotten to bring a lunch with me had me pretty tuckered out by the time I was finished work.

            When I got home it was much later than I would normally make dinner, so I put together the quickest thing possible: eggs and toast.

            I watched the Buster Keaton film “Steamboat Bill Jr.” It was sort of a Romeo and Juliette story about two young people in love but who were the children of the captains of rival steamboats. This has Buster Keaton’s most famous stunt. The two-ton front of a building falls over on top of Keaton but he is in exactly the right spot so that only the frame of the open attic window comes down around him.

            When I was getting ready for bed I discovered that I had forgotten to put my mattress on its edge, and so my cat Jonquil had been sleeping on it. Her body is giving off the same rank odour that’s been emanating from my male cat, Amarillo, except that she’s not drooling. I’ve noticed though that her front claws are brown and have become deformed. She can’t seem to retract them and so she makes a little tapping noise whenever she walks. Luckily she had decided to only lie down on my bunched up top sheet and so that’s the only thing on the bed that came up smelling like her. I put that in the laundry basket and slept without covers that night.