On Thursday morning it was nice to be able to listen to Radio Canada during yoga again. The station was clearer than it had ever been, which is good for my French listening and learning.
At around midday I rode over to Freshco to buy fruit and
shaving gel. I picked up some cherries and green grapes that were on sale, plus
some bananas and a bag of oranges. I also got a bag of snap pea crisps, a bag
of cooked chestnuts, a can of roasted peanuts, a carton of soymilk and the gel.
I went to get a couple of cans of peaches but since the last time I’d been
there they’d moved the coffee and tea to where the canned fruit had been for
the last several years. I found out that they’d moved the canned fruit one
aisle over.
At the checkout counter my cashier was Cheryl, the middle
aged woman of East Indian descent from the West Indies who has been working
there since it was Price Chopper. I commented to her, “Just when I was starting
to know where everything is, they move everything!” She shook her head to show
she shared my disappointment and then asked, “You know why they do that don’t
you?” “No.” She seemed surprised. “You don’t?” Jeeze, if she’d been so sure
that I should have known, she wouldn’t have had to ask. She explained that they
do it to prevent customers from knowing where everything is, because when they
do they have a tendency to just come in, grab what they need and then leave.
This way, if they have to look around in new places they are more likely to buy
other things.
On leaving Freshco I was walking
behind an extremely old woman who had her hands behind her osteoporotic back as
she slowly ambled along. Her fingers were all tensed and twisted so that each
of her hands formed an odd shape of claw.
When I got home, my next-door neighbour
Benji was burning Indian incense as he often does, but I’d never smelled it so
strong in the hallway. I was choking on it even though his door was shut. It
must have been incredibly thick with perfumed smoke inside his place.
I spent three hours that night
getting caught up on my journal.
I watched an Alfred Hitchcock Hour
story called “Ride the Nightmare” about a man named Chris Phillips who’d been
involved with three other men in a robbery many years before but had run out on
them before the job was finished. They got caught and thrown in prison while he
went to California and changed his name to Chris Martin, went on the straight
and narrow, married a beautiful woman and settled down. But his partners in
crime blamed him for their capture. They’d recognized his picture in the paper
that was published when he’d won a bowling tournament and saw his new name and
location. They escaped and came after him. His wife had not been aware of his
past but when she found out she didn’t want him to call the police because he
would be put in prison for his crimes and she would lose him. The first of his
old colleagues broke into their house and so Phil had to kill him. They buried
his body in the mountains. But then the other two kidnapped his wife and demanded
a payoff. He met one of them in the California desert to make the drop but when
the guy tried to drive off without telling him where his wife was he managed to
catch him, disarm him, beat him up and force him to take him to the shack where
his wife was being held. There were two bullets in the gun that Chris had taken
from the guy. He kills the guy in the shack but when he tries to shoot the last
of them the bullet misses. The other guy takes his partner’s gun and goes after
Chris and his wife. Chris starts a brush fire that surrounds the last man and
he is burned to death.
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