Purple Pick

           

            On Friday I went to PARC to teach my yoga class. One good thing was that the Healing Centre didn’t need a lot of setting up this time. Most of the chairs were already stacked, so all I had to do was sweep the floor.

In order to improve my French, I’ve started reading a French language novel for teenagers. It’s “Klonk” by François Gravel, and so far I’m surprised how much I understand, though I always keep a French-English dictionary nearby to help me out. He talks about the problems of being an adolescent; how one’s legs and arms are so long that one resembles an orangutan; and about the pimples. The narrator is the youngest of six children. So far he’s introduced his oldest sister, who cuts out the pictures of singers and film stars from magazines, but since she doesn’t have an album to put them in she puts them instead on her dresser mirror. There are so many of them though that she can’t see herself to do her hair, so she uses her younger sister’s bedroom mirror, which causes problems. Her sister does not cut pictures of teen heartthrobs because she is in love and spends hours on the telephone with her boyfriend, sometimes not even speaking, but just listening to one another breathe. Since the oldest does not hear any conversation, she figures she is not interrupting anything and comes in. The younger girl accuses her of eavesdropping. The older says, “You weren’t even talking!” to which the younger replies, “That proves you were eavesdropping because you couldn’t have known I wasn’t talking otherwise. Then the older sees her lipstick on the younger one’s dresser and the argument grows as the logic diminishes.

            I waited till 15:00 and since no students came, I left. Instead of going home for a siesta, I just went straight out for my bike ride. One reason I wanted to go early was because I’d left my purple guitar pick at Fat Albert’s on Wednesday night and I wanted to catch a guitar store before it closed so I could buy a few more. I still had a black guitar pick, but for some affected reason I want to have purple ones.

            I went to Broadview and Danforth. As I was waiting to cross to the northeast corner, school had just gotten out and a buxom young student with full, red-painted lips, a tube-top and tight jeans crossed in front of me. That’s what stoplights are for. When the green came, I crossed and started exploring the streets just north and east of the corner. Other than Broadview itself, none of the streets adjacent to Danforth are two-way, plus, in the first few blocks, there are a lot of crescents, so they get confusing. It’ll take me another trip to finish that jumble and get into the straighter streets further out.

            On the way back, I stopped at the Remenyi House of Music to buy three purple guitar picks. I asked for their student discount, which meant that the young Scot who runs the guitar department had to pull a calculator three times the size of my cellphone out from under the counter in order to work out my discount. I paid $1.40 for the three picks.

            When the westbound light was red at St George, I headed south. When the southbound light at College was red, I turned west. Since the lights led me to Dundas and Lansdowne, I went into No Frills, because they had a big sale starting that day. I bought a few items that were only a dollar, but then forgot to buy coffee, which had been my main intention for going there.