Insisting on Angels

            Maybe I was feeling strong on Thursday morning because my doctor had told me I was in excellent health after my check-up the previous day. For whatever reason it seemed to me that I was really belting it out during song practice. When Du Juan came up Dunne he smiled widely on the opposite side of Queen from my window. When he crossed over he called up to tell me that he could hear me from across the street.

            One of the first Serge Gainsbourg songs that I learned how to sing in French and to play on guitar was “Les Sucettes” back in 2009. At the time though I never came up with a singable English translation and then I decided to go through all of his songs chronologically, starting with 1958. Now that I’ve translated all of his songs into 1966 I’ve returned to “Les Sucettes” and come up with an English version. It didn’t take long to re-memorize on Thursday, since most of it was still in my head.

            For breakfast I opened a can of diced tomatoes, added a few drops of Scotch bonnet sauce and ate some of it as salsa with Scottish potato chips.

            At midday I started cooking some navy beans.

            I usually have lunch between 13:30 and 14:00 and decided to use up the rest of the vegetables that were in my fridge. I had two onions and an eggplant so I sautéed the onions in gargarine, then added the eggplant, the rest of the diced tomatoes, a bay leaf, some marjoram, salt, balsamic vinegar and Worcestershire sauce. It made a pretty good ratatouille. At the same time that I was making lunch I made my dinner by adding tomato paste and chilli powder to the beans.

            I edited and uploaded a video of me singing my song, “Insisting on Angels”. The weird thing though was that the upload to YouTube took about five minutes whereas any other song of the same size that I’ve uploaded took a few hours. While I watched the percentage of completion racing along I was almost sure that something was wrong and that the video would be incomplete in some way, but it was fine.

            Before Yonge Street I almost wiped out. I was trying to get ahead of another cyclist without cutting her off and so I came a little too close to the corner of a car’s back bumper. Swerving to avoid it I temporarily lost control and it could have been pretty ugly at that speed if I hadn’t quickly gained my balance.

            That afternoon I took my bike ride. There was a woman singing opera at Yonge and Bloor. I raced with a couple of guys and we went back and forth taking the lead until there was only one guy. He finally got ahead a few blocks before he turned north. I guess he figured that it was his last chance to beat me.

            I finished exploring all the streets west of Dawes Road. I’d covered most of them already but missed a few the day before.

            Passing the conga drummer in front of the liquor store near Pape I used his rhythm as my soundtrack as I pedaled west.

            On the way back I could definitely feel that the weather was shifting as the steadily hot part of the summer was over. I could feel a cooler breeze on my bare arms as I rode west across the Bloor Viaduct. 

            The opera singer was still warbling in multiple octaves when I got back to Yonge and Bloor.