Switching From Cream to Milk

           

 
            On Sunday, since events of the day before crowded it out, I did some laundry. I threw all my underwear, some socks, the stuff that got caught in the rain on Thursday and a few other things into a garbage bag. I also took the big empty plastic bucket that I use to carry kitty litter and slung the handle over my right handlebar. I was trying ride with the bag in my left hand but it swung in and got caught between the frame of my bike and the back wheel, causing me to jerk to a stop as the back wheel lifted about ten centimetres off the street. It tore it in a few places but I was able to make it the rest of the way without mishap.

            I think that the Laundromat near Lansdowne and Queen is entirely managed by Tibetans these days. The guy in charge this time looked like he was in his fourties. An older woman came up and spoke to him in Chinese. He looked away from her, towards me and shook his head, telling her sternly, “I don’t understand what you’re saying!”

            I went up to No Frills to buy kitty-litter, deodorant soap, margarine and coffee milk. Over the last year I have gradually switched from using half and half in my coffee to five percent cream. In the last couple of months though I’ve started using 3.25% milk and I don’t notice much difference. Since I’ve been drinking skim milk for several months, the 3.25% milk tastes like cream to me now.

            I watched Buster Keaton’s most famous film, “The General”. He plays a train engineer in the south when the civil war starts. He tries to join the Confederate army but because he is a train engineer he’s considered more valuable than a soldier. They refuse to enlist him but don’t tell him why and so his girl rejects him, thinking he’s a coward for not enlisting. Later there is a plot by the union to steal his train and sneak behind enemy lines, but through a combination of skill and bumbling idiocy he takes on the Union army and wins that particular skirmish, almost single-handedly. There is a spectacular chase of him getting back his train and then another of the Union army in another train pursuing him. The film was both a critical and a box office flop and the studio lost so much money on it that it was the last time Keaton ever had full creative control over a motion picture. Many years later it was recognized as one of the greatest films ever made. Orson Welles said it was the greatest Civil War film ever made, the greatest comedy ever made and perhaps the greatest film of all time.

            I finished reading George MacDonald’s “The Princess and the Goblin”. There seem to be two morals of the story: to be a prince or a princess is to be an exceptionally honest and honourable person, whether one is of royal lineage or not; and if one expects to have others believe in them one must also believe in others.