Dennis the Menace

           

            During song practice on Monday morning I had the feeling that as colds go, this one wasn’t as overwhelming as ones I’ve had in the past. Afterward though I suddenly felt like I was wearing a helmet of wet cement in between my skull and my brain.

            Sleeping is not as pleasant when I have a cold. I lie there in a sloshy sort of grogginess and drift in and out of strange but uninteresting mechanical dreams about things like continuously searching for the right PDF file and never finding it.

            I walked over to Wind Mobile to pay for my phone service and ran into Sue, from the food bank. She had already stopped briefly ahead of me to chat with someone she was acquainted with. What I’ve observed every time I’ve seen her over the last year is that she can’t walk down the street in Parkdale without seeing and talking to five people she knows along the way. I commented, “You know everybody!” She explained that she knows a lot of people because she’s lived here for thirty years. I’ve lived here for almost twenty years and I hardly know anybody.

            I worked that night for Kieren Brent’s class at OCADU. I was glad to find out I would be posing for a portrait. Not that I mind being naked, but when I’m sick it’s too much trouble to undress and dress. During a my first break, one of the students looked at me and smiled, then gestured a lifting motion with both of her hands around her face. Then she told me that I looked tired. I said, “I have a cold” but she thought I’d said, “I’m cold.” And responded, “I’m burning up over here!” I corrected her that I’d said, “I have a cold”. She told me that she’d had a cold a couple of weeks ago, followed by the flu. I couldn’t top that.

            I watched the first episode of the Dennis the Menace TV series, starring Jay North, from the 1950s. Dennis’s parents need to get out for one night out to the movies without Dennis around, but no baby sitters who’ve experienced sitting for Dennis are willing to do it again. They finally find someone that is new in town who agrees to sit. Dennis decides to take advantage of his anonymity. He gets his friend Joey, who never speaks, to come over to his place for a sleepover. He sneaks him upstairs but asks him to pretend to be Dennis while Dennis goes out to the movies, sitting two rows behind his parents and driving the whole theatre nuts. It’s funny that I guessed which actress would be playing the babysitter before she even arrived. I don’t know why. It was Madge Blake, who played Aunt Harriet on the Batman TV series.