Rasta with a Bike

            On Friday I did some writing.

            I washed a pair of shorts in the sink and put them out on the deck to dry.

            In the late afternoon I took a bike ride. It was warmer than it’s been lately but not so hot that I’d had to open all of my apartment windows earlier. While cycling though I was sweating a lot but there was also a breeze blowing that caused my sweaty skin to tingle whenever I was stopped at a light.

            I took Victoria Park to Medonte, then took that to Delwood and then Stellarton to Pharmacy.

            On the way back a guy in dreadlocks got ahead of me after a light, riding a bike that was too small for him. He was blasting French dub reggae music. I guess he might have been from Haiti. I passed him while he was adjusting his music.

            My body was tired and aching a bit when I got home. My legs were pretty sore. Working to be fit makes me feel like shit.

I cut up and roasted the chicken I’d bought the day before and had a leg with a potato and gravy while watching two episodes of “Dobie”. 

In the first, Dobie got an A for an essay he wrote called “My Dog”. He mentioned having a dog all through the first season but we never saw it and there is no dog in this episode either. Dobie needs money to date a southern belle named Mason Dixon that goes to his school because even though her family is no longer rich she has to keep up a front and requires all her boyfriends to have money. He needs $25 to go out with her. Maynard reads about a newspaper contest that offers $25 for the best essay on “My Dad” and so to help his friend out he decides to enter Dobie in the contest and to use his "My Dog" essay as the template and to simply change the word "dog" to "dad". Dobie’s essay wins and his father is touched. He begins to take Dobie fishing and on other father and son outings, even though Dobie wants to go out with Mason Dixon. Eventually he starts to like hanging out with his dad and decides to spend the money on a new fishing reel for his father rather than on Mason. She says she never wants to see him again.

In the second, a couple leave a baby on a park bench because they have lost their jobs and must go back to the old country, but they want a better life for their baby. Maynard finds the baby and adopts it. Dobie and Zelda keep telling him to take her to the police but since he is so attached to the child they don’t have the heart to force the issue. He feeds the baby chocolate ice cream and ginger ale. Eventually he decides that the baby needs to be adopted by rich people, so they bribe Chatsworth Osborn III, who is failing chemistry. If he fails chemistry his mother will put him in a military academy so Zelda, the smartest student in school offers to tutor him if he will talk to his mother about adopting the baby. He agrees but when his mother sees Maynard and the baby she calls for the guards to throw him out. But then when she sees that Maynard is holding the kid wrong her maternal instinct kicks in and she takes it in her arms and bonds with it. Just then the parents of the baby arrive. It turns out that they are the servants she has recently fired, not because they were bad servants but because she habitually fires her servants on a regular basis. They have come to pick up their cheques before leaving for the old country but they see their baby and want her back. Mrs Osborn tells them that the baby is staying there and so are they.
            The mother of the baby was played by German actor Violet Rensing.