Mickey Rooney

            On Sunday I still had the tightness in my thigh a day after I’d pulled the muscle but it didn’t seem to be any worse. The bike ride I’d taken the evening before didn’t feel like it had agitated the problem and it was still more uncomfortable to walk than most anything else. During yoga it bothered me a bit while doing the pose that I was doing when I’d felt it rip in the first place.

            For breakfast I had one piece of toast with margarine instead of two as part of my new diet. At lunchtime I ate one of the egg and bacon bagel sandwiches that my upstairs neighbour David had given me. At dinnertime I only had one egg and two pieces of toast. Prior to finding out my weight on Friday I would have had two eggs and maybe a third piece of toast or some crackers with cheese. The changes I’ve made haven’t caused me to feel hungry.

            I was disappointed that morning when I looked at the updated weather forecast and saw that rain was no longer predicted for the afternoon.

            I spent a lot of time writing about my food bank adventure.

            The jets in the air show were dropping dumpster-fulls of noise into the sky over Parkdale. My next-door neighbour Benji was mopping the hallway floor and I told him to keep it down so I could hear the air show. He commented that we only have to hear the planes for one weekend but imagine what it’s like in a place like Syria where people are hearing the planes all the time. I thought that was interesting and wondered if refugees from Syria in Toronto would experience any trauma from seeing and hearing the planes in the air show. I found out later that this is the case. One refugee family, before leaving Lebanon had to sedate their daughter before their flight because the sight of the plane put her into a panic. In refugee camps that are located next to army bases, children begin crying hysterically when planes arrive. It’s not just planes though, as any loud noises can set off people, especially children with PTSD.

Benji doesn’t have a lot of sympathy for refugees. He gave the example of the 1500 people that lost their homes in a high-rise fire in St Jamestown while refugees are being put up in a hotel. But the tenants’ situation is only temporary and most or all will be able to eventually return to their apartments. They are being taken care of and those without family and friends to put them up will be put up in hotels as well. The difference is that these people all have a social and economic infrastructure to fall back on while many refugees arrive with nothing and with no friends or family here and have to start from scratch. Benji is one of those many immigrants that thinks that the wave of immigrants that he was part of was better than the current one. He also complained about how much better his native Guyana was under British rule. They asked for independence and the British shrugged and said okay but Benji says the country is now a hellhole without British help.

            At 16:30 I reluctantly got ready to take my bike ride but at the last minute I decided not to go. The reasons were a combination of wanting to get my journal entry finished and thinking that I should maybe give my strained leg a rest. Even though pedalling didn’t seem to bother it I thought it might be a good idea to at least give it one day without activity. I’d taken two and a half hour rides every day for the last five days in a row so it wasn’t like I’d been neglecting exercise.

            I had a beer with dinner and watched an episode of Mike Hammer, Private Eye. In the story, Hammer wins $50,000 in a poker game and goes home with Dutch, the beautiful dealer. After a hot night in her apartment he wakes up to find both her and all of his money gone. The cops bust in with the new District Attorney, Barry Lawrence, who won the election on a promise to crack down on gambling in New York. Lawrence tells Hammer that his friend Eddy NoShoes, who’d been at the game the night before and who owes Hammer money was found beaten to death. Lawrence revokes Hammer’s PI license and also kicks the police captain and Hammer’s best friend, Skip Gleason off the force for illegal sports betting. When Hammer goes to look in Eddy’s room he finds a blue contact lens and a collection letter telling Eddy that he was past due on boarding payments. It turned out that Eddy owned a racehorse named Laurel Canyon. He goes to the stable and finds that the horse had been taken away the night before. When hammer goes home he finds his door busted open. He charges in with his gun out and finds the horse and its trainer in his apartment (The delightful surprise for me at this moment was to see that the trainer, Lucius, was being portrayed by the great Mickey Rooney). Lucius does not yet know that Eddy is dead and he explains that the horse is Eddy’s marker for his gambling debt to Hammer. Lucius wants to run Laurel Canyon in the Golden Cup and so Hammer helps to get the horse entered. At the racing grounds Hammer’s assistant Velda meets and falls for Lord Gaffney, who has also entered his horse in the race. It turns out though that Lord Gaffney wears blue contact lenses. He was the one that killed Eddy because he wanted his horse.

            Mickey Rooney was 77 at this time and made everyone else in the cast look like amateurs. He worked constantly as an actor from the time he was a child star in silent pictures to when he died in 2014. He has four stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame: one for film, one for radio, one for television and one for theatre.