Cha Cha Cha

            On Friday that feeling that I’d had for two days of a cold coming on was gone.

            I had to crawl out of my poetry writing cocoon for a while because I was running out of coconut milk and fruit, so I rode down to Freshco. I didn’t put a lot of layers on but it didn’t feel too cold until I got close to Dufferin and a gust of wind shook me with an arctic blast. I bought Clementines, grapes, canned peaches, mixed nuts, coconut milk for drinking and a can of the creamy kind for coffee.

            I continued to work on my autobiographical poem.

            I looked out my window in the late afternoon and saw Cesar, my elderly upstairs neighbour, sweeping the sidewalk in front of our home. He had swept all the garbage into the street and then was brushing all of that eastward into a pile behind the garbage can. With his mission accomplished he walked away as more plastic wrappers, bits of paper and a streetcar transfer blew in from the west behind him.

            I watched an episode of Leave It To Beaver in which a girl invited Wally to the cotillion at the country club but took the liberty of entering she and he in a cha-cha contest because she could tell he was a smooth dancer by the way he walked. The thing was though that he did not know how to cha-cha and so he desperately tried to learn the steps on his own from a record. Finally his father took him for cha-cha lessons just in time.

            I remember around the turn of the century when my ex-girlfriend and I went for ballroom dance lessons. We were learning the cha-cha, as well as the samba and the tango. She stopped because she thought that I wasn’t enjoying it. It was never enough for her if I assured her that I was enjoying myself. She had to perceive a look of exuberance on my face because she was sure she knew better about how I felt than I did. That woman was a juggernaut of disappointment.

            That night at the usual time the singer walked by beautifully belting out a classic ballad, though I don’t remember what it was. I was busy trying to track down the source of a suspicious photo that someone had posted on Facebook with the claim that it was of a refugee attacking a citizen. I discovered that Google Search can also find the sources of images and found that the violent photo had nothing to do with immigrants but was taken during one of the many economic protests that take place in France.