Leonard Cohen

            As soon as I finished yoga on the Tuesday morning of October 25th, which was around 6:30, I started working on my Canadian Poetry essay. I couldn’t give it my full attention though because the exterminator was going to be coming either in the morning or the early afternoon to treat the place for fleas. All I did to prepare was to fill up two bags with laundry, including my bedding and then flip the bed on its side. I didn’t bother pulling the couch out because I doubted the fleas were living behind it.

            I worked on my essay till 14:00 and then I called the landlord because he’d told me Orkin would be there between 10:00 and 14:00. Raja said he’d try to reach the guy and then get back to me. About five minutes later he called to inform me that the Orkin man had knocked on the door, but Sundar hadn’t been around to let him in. He said he’d be there in half an hour and would call him when he got to the door and then Raja would call me to go down and let him in. A few minutes later I heard a knock downstairs and so I went down and let him in.

            He told me that the smell of the flea poison is a lot milder than what they use for bed bugs and cockroaches, but that it was recommended to leave the apartment for four hours anyway. I told him that I might have to come back sooner because I had to write an essay. He said that two hours would probably be enough.

            I normally just leave the door unlocked and leave when Orkin comes, but by the time I was about to leave, he was almost finished spraying. On his way out, I asked him whether it would be easier to get rid of fleas without pets. He ventured that he didn’t think he would have any need to come back after this treatment.

            I took my laptop to the Laundromat and worked on my essay while the machines were washing, agitating, turning, spinning and drying my laundry. A Laundromat is really just a carnival for clothing. My pants feel dizzy if I put them right after they’ve been in the dryer.

            When I got home there were only about two hours left till class time. I kept on working but when the time came for me to get ready to leave I decided to be late. I would have preferred to have more time, but I “finished” the paper based on the time I had.

            I struggled with going through all the texts that I’d mentioned in the essay so that I could provide the proper citations with the editions, names of publishers and page numbers. The class was about half over by the time I printed up the paper. I got ready to leave and was on my way out of the building when I realized that I hadn’t printed my name on the essay, so I had to go back in, fix that oversight and print the essay out all over again, staple it and leave.

I arrived just a little past the second hour of the class and discovered that George was playing a movie. It was the 1965 documentary, “Ladies and Gentlemen, Mr. Leonard Cohen”. I had been worried that I was going to miss the lecture but had forgotten that it was right in the syllabus that he would be showing films that night. Actually, I don’t think I’d ever seen the Cohen documentary. It was informative and entertaining and it was good to see again a lot of the Montreal landmarks that I remember from my three years of living there, like Ben’s Delicatessen, where the owner or manager gave my daughter a piggy bank. The film he’d shown before I got there was “The Handmaid’s Tale”.

            At the end of the movie and the end of class, I noticed that very few students had stuck around. I handed in my essay. A young woman approached George to tell him that Patrick was on his way to hand in his paper, but George said he couldn’t wait. Then she asked him a question about our final paper, with the option of submitting our own poetry instead of an essay. The requirement is that the poetry we submit has to have “a conversation” with three of the poets we will have covered. She wanted to know what that means, but I wondered if it also wasn’t a way of delaying George so he’d still be there when Patrick arrived. I asked George if he would discourage us from submitting poems that we might have already written as a conversation with one of the poets. He answered that “discourage” is a strong word, but that he’d like to think we were writing new poetry. He added that he’s always happy to look at any poetry we’ve written though. I said good night, and as I was leaving through the lower door, Patrick was just going in through the upper door.