Gluey and the Pastemakers

            On Sunday morning I translated a few more lines of "Complaint du progress" by Boris Vain.

            I memorized the chorus of “C’est la vie qui veut ca” by Serge Gainsbourg. I reworked the rhyme scheme in my translation to match the original.

            I got caught up on my journal.

            I finished chapter one of The Inconvenient Indian by Thomas King. He says Pocahontas and John Smith probably never even met and even if they did they wouldn’t have been lovers since she would have been about ten years old. Smith wrote her into his own autobiography when she later arrived in Europe as a celebrity. He told the same story about exotic women from Turkey and France rescuing him as he did about Pocahontas. He also says Louis Riel was a bit of a nutcase with a messiah complex who wasn’t a particularly good leader and is remembered mostly for having been executed. His point is that history remembers what it wants to. There were plenty of Métis heroes involved in the Northwest Rebellion but since they didn't die dramatically they have been forgotten.

            I washed the threshold between my living room and my kitchen. 

            Although it’s a lot brighter than it was there are still patches of brown glue on some of the boards and so it's a gluey kind of clean. "A Gluey Kind of Clean". Wasn't that a hit song by that British Mersey Beat group “Gluey and the Pastemakers”? 

            I think I could get more of the glue off with another hour of scrubbing, so maybe I’ll do that because it doesn’t look very satisfying when I turn and look at it from my desk.

            I had a toasted cheese and tomato sandwich for lunch.

            IN the afternoon while doing exercises I listened to Amos and Andy. In this story Kingfish gets a Valentine with a poem calling him a lazy bum. Sapphire says she is embarrassed to leave the house if that’s what the world thinks of her husband. It turns out though that she sent the Valentine to try to motivate Kingfish to get a job. It doesn’t work.

            I took a bike ride to Bloor and University, south to Queen and home. It was a warm afternoon and I could have worn shorts but I’ve gotten used to pants now that it's fall. Another cyclist about my age stopped beside me at two lights making conversation. He said it’s dangerous riding down here. I asked, “Is it?” The second time he said it was a nice day for riding. I agreed that it wasn't bad.

            When I came home I got caught up on my journal.

            I finished reading chapter two of Thomas King's The Inconvenient Indian. He says there are more dogs with stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame than there are Indians. There are only two Indians: Will Rogers, a Cherokee who never played Indians and Jay Silverheels, a Canadian Mohawk who only played Indians and is best known for his 221 episodes of The Lone Ranger as Tonto. I don't remember hearing that Will Rogers was Cherokee, but he did have Cherokee heritage and his father was a Cherokee judge.

            I read several sonnets by Dante Gabriel Rossetti both silently and out loud. He has some interesting internal rhymes.

            I roasted a sirloin tip because its best before date was Monday but I didn't have it for dinner. I was about to make an egg with a piece of toast when David knocked on my door. He said that he and I had an appointment but I didn’t understand. He'd offered to buy me something for dinner on Saturday and I’d said I was making something. He’d then said we’d do it on Sunday, I’d thought that he was just going to bring me something. It turns out that he had actually invited me to dinner. I’d totally misunderstood and I told him that but he seemed a bit hurt. I was embarrassed that I’d disappointed him. I told him we could go out to dinner next weekend and he reminded me that we’d had an appointment. I guess maybe it would have been totally clear that he’d invited me out in his Ethiopian culture but the words he’d used certainly weren’t obvious in mine. I sensed that he needed me to ask for another appointment and so we agreed on next Sunday. I said we could go to the Japanese place next door. He said he doesn’t eat seafood. I also heard him say recently that he doesn’t eat pork. I wonder if he’s an Ethiopian Jew. Then for some strange reason he wanted to give me $20. I tried to refuse several times but finally I accepted it. He said he wants me to write a letter for him relating to his sister’s death and he’ll talk to me about it on Monday evening. David told me that someone had stolen his twelve-string guitar.

            After David left my neighbour Benji knocked on my door. It looked like nobody wanted me to have my egg that night. Benji wanted to tell me that Cesar had told David that he’d bought our building and that he was kicking everybody out. It’s not true but Benji thought it was funny that David believed him.

            I watched the final episode of the first season of Wagon Train. One thing unique about that show for the 50s is that it followed a chronological and geographical sequence of a wagon train traveling from Missouri to California. I assume that every season began and ended in the same way along the same trail. In this story they have arrived outside of Sacramento, California. Julie Revere has traveled with her very ill father Maxwell who bought land in California with money he’d made from prospecting. While Maxwell is lying in bed, Flint takes Julie to look at the land. It turns out that what had been beautiful farmland when Maxwell bought it has been turned to swamp after being flooded by hydraulic mining in the mountains. When they get back to the wagon train Maxwell insists on seeing his land and so Flint takes him to a different location that is still pristine. Maxwell dies happy but Flint is determined to get Mort Galvin, the man that sold the land to Maxwell, to make things right, especially since he’s also responsible for the hydraulic mining. Flint confronts Galvin in his saloon but he is knocked out and taken to the docks where they plan on shanghaiing him on a boat to China. But it just so happens that the man mopping the deck is Flint’s friend Cliff Grundy, who appeared in an earlier episode. Seeing his friend locked up Cliff knocks out one of the thugs and escapes to the wagon train and shortly a whole group Flint’s friends come to rescue him. Once free Flint immediately goes back to confront Galvin. He demands that he refund Julie the $5000 her father paid for the land Galvin ruined. Galvin still refuses but suddenly Dora Gray, another character from a previous episode, intervenes. She's now a wealthy and influential woman and apparently a former lover of Galvin. She tells Galvin to give Flint the money and he gives in.