Myrna Fahey

            On Thursday morning it was a relief to be able to play guitar and sing instead of spending hours and hours on an essay. But my guitar kept going out of tune and my playing sucked.

            I’ve almost finished memorizing "Titicaca" by Serge Gainsbourg and “Le complainte du progres" by Boris Vian.

            In the late morning I was about to leave for the supermarket when I discovered that I had a flat tire. Fortunately Bike Pirates would be opening in fifteen minutes and so I went to wait outside. While standing there I read a few paragraphs of Thomas King’s The Inconvenient Indian. He was talking about the various Indigenous activist organizations in the history of Canada and the United States.

            Den opened up and I started changing my tire. I discovered that the puncture was on the rim side of the tube but we couldn’t find anything in the rim that would have caused the flat. I asked Den if my tire was still okay. One of the older volunteers who was chatting with Den at the time chastised me for asking because I should be able to tell. He reminds me of Igor Kenk who had the ironic attitude that if you don’t know how to fix your own bike you shouldn’t take it to other people to help you fix it. I told him that I didn’t trust my eye. He said that his and Den’s eyes are old and shouldn’t be trusted. Said I wasn’t talking about my physical eyes but rather my ability to discern. I bought a new tube and installed it but when I was putting tire back on I noticed that the derailleur hanger kept moving and didn’t line up. I asked Den if it was supposed to be tight. He said that the kind I have doesn’t need to be because the nut of the wheel will hold it in place.

            While I was there I took the opportunity to oil up my chain,

            I was finished in an hour. It’s amazing how little I know after coming to Bike Pirates for five years but then again five years ago I couldn’t change a back tire by myself, so there has been progress.

            The tube was $6 and I kind of cheaped out with my donation, as I only gave $4. Then again I have given them generous donations in the past.

I asked Den if Bike Pirates is still moving. He said it's not certain yet and they got an extension on their lease until February. He said the landlord likes them as they pay the rent on time and take care of the building but he still wants to raise the rent by $300 a year and they can’t afford it. H said landlords are screwing themselves because eventually they won’t be able to get anyone to rent their places if they keep raising the rents. He compared it to climate change and said people just do what they are used to doing and don’t think about the future. He said that in Miami they are losing their beach so quickly that they have to bring in new sand from other places at night but they are running out of places to get it. I asked if it could be manufactured but he said it would require too much heat. They do manufacture sand for the making of concrete but I guess beach sand is more complicated because it’s partly made of organic material. I suspect though that eventually they’ll work out a way to create man-made sand.

            He said, "I'll be dead but I worry for my grandchildren!" I hadn't known that he had grandchildren. He has three granddaughters in Philadelphia from his previous marriage. Both he and dawn are from the States. He said they are both from across the border from Sarnia and so I guess that would be Port Huron, Michigan. He and Dawn were high school sweethearts and he proposed to her back then but she turned him down. Twenty-five years later she said, “Yes”. I commented that he and Dawn make a cute couple. He admitted that they fight but they’ve been married for 28 years now and they would be delivering a harpsichord to Georgetown together that night with dawn lifting the other end.

            He said he and Dawn are taking care of an invalid at their house right now and it takes a lot of time. They tried to bring in professionals but the woman just screams at them because she’ll only permit Dawn to help her.

            Den said that two of his harpsichords are part of the Rubens exhibit at the AGO but he doesn’t get why the musicians are playing modern music on them at an exhibit for a 17^th Century artist.

            I rode to Freshco where they’ve started selling Christmas trees and other bits of evergreen for decoration and so the outside has a nice coniferous fragrance. I bought one bag of grapes, a half pint of raspberries, Bavarian sandwich bread, Old Dutch potato chips, a pack of chicken drumsticks, a pack of lean ground beef, frozen pork ribs, half a brown sugar ham, a pack of sliced hot salami, and a block of old cheddar cheese.

            The guy ahead of me had bought a scented wreath that had shed needles over the conveyer belt. I pointed it out to the nice cashier who seems to be in charge of all the other cashiers and who is friendly with everybody in both English and Portuguese. She got a hand broom and swept it up and then she leaned into the dustpan and declared, “It smells so good!”

            I had a chicken wing for lunch that I’d torn off the whole chicken I’d roasted on Tuesday.

            In the afternoon I did my exercises and finished watching the Naked City episode “A Turn of Events” for which the audio had not downloaded. I couldn't figure out without the sound who the murderer turned out to be.

            I worked on my journal.

            That night for dinner I had a potato, a chicken leg and some gravy while watching Zorro.

            This is the beginning of a new, more intriguing story arc. The new commandant arrives and while he is giving his speech, Don Diego is impressed enough to conclude that Zorro will no longer be needed in Los Angeles. But suddenly the new commandant is assassinated. The killer, Esteban Rojas, puts the rifle into the hand of a mentally challenged beggar named Josafat and Josafat is arrested. But when Rojas notices that Maria the barmaid saw him come down the stairs he hypnotizes her and convinces her that he is Zorro and that he killed the commandant because he was a bad man. Later we learn that Rojas is part of a larger organization as he is chastised Magistrate Galindo for not killing Maria. Rojas has Gomez his coachman kidnap Maria and drive away with hr tied up in the coach. Zorro pursues them. Gomez jumps from the coach as the horses still charge onward through treacherous territory. Zorro reaches the back of the coach but he can’t reach the reins and so he frees Maria and jumps with her just before the coach breaks free of the horses and goes over a cliff. When Zorro returns to Los Angeles he finds Rojas has been killed and an eagle feather has been left behind by his assassin.

            Josafat was played by Charles Stevens who was publicized as being the grandson of Geronimo but he was not even Native. He perhaps got the idea from the fact that his father’s first wife was Apache. He had the same birth date as me, but 63 years earlier.

            Maria was played by Myrna Fahey. For a while she dated Joe DiMaggio and received death threats from a mentally ill person who only wanted Joltin Joe to be with Marilyn Monroe. She starred in the 60s TV series Father of the Bride. She played Blaze, a member of False Face’s gang, in two episodes of Batman.