What If Love Is A Substance?

            

           

            Back in the 70s a musician I knew on the streets of Vancouver told me “love is glue”. He meant it as a metaphor, but what if love actually is a subtle gluelike substance emitted by the human mind in order to connect with others. If that’s the case, then, like all substances, it can be used positively or negatively, depending on the web spinner’s intentions.

            It seems to be that what smells so bad about my cat Amarillo is his saliva. He cleans himself but doing so just puts the smell all over him. On top of that he drools almost constantly.

            I didn’t go riding on Saturday because of the rain, so I had time to finish reading Philippa Pearce’s “Tom’s Midnight Garden”. It’s a British summer holiday story about a boy named Tom, who is forced to leave home for a couple of weeks to avoid catching his brother’s measles. He goes to stay with a boring uncle and aunt in their boring home, which is a flat in an old house. In the entryway of the house is an old grandfather clock that keeps perfect time but counts out the wrong chimes. At midnight it strikes thirteen times. Tom is having trouble sleeping in the new environment and sneaks downstairs and in looking out the back door discovers a beautiful garden, even though the next day he sees that there is no garden in the back. Every night he wanders out at midnight and can spend hours or even days in the garden, which turns out to have been the garden for that house, but about a hundred years before. He meets a girl his age there and they become friends, but he’s like a ghost in that world and only Hattie can see him. At the end of the story, it turns out that Hattie is still alive in his own time and that she is the old woman who owns the house where he’s staying. It’s not an earthshaking piece of literature, but it’s a charming and well told story.

            I listened to two episodes of “Amos and Andy” from 1944. There was a stuttering barber character similar to a character later created by Mel Blanc who would usually start saying something while he was stuttering and change the story several times before finally spitting out the simple truth. For example, when asked if he’s had any good looking manicurists working for him he said, “I had a lot of good looking ones! There must’a been fifty, ahh nine, ahh six, ahh, well there was one that was fair!” I can’t find a cast list for the episode, but I think it was probably Mel Blanc himself playing the character.

            I watched the Buster Keaton silent film, “Our Hospitality”. Keaton played the only surviving McKay, who had been sent away from the south to be raised in New York City to avoid a long-standing feud with the Calfield family. McKay lives at the corner of Broadway and 42^nd street, which in 1830 is made to look like it’s out in the middle of the prairie. He gets word that he’s inherited his father’s estate, so he takes a ridiculous train ride on what was apparently a state of the art train back in 1830. On the train he meets a girl with the same destination. They fall for each other but it turns out that she is a member of the Calfield family. Most of the movie is spent with her father and two brothers trying to kill McKay. There’s a great scene though when she is about to go over a waterfall but McKay swings out on a rope and rescues her just as she goes over. Keaton did his own stunts.

            My upstairs neighbour, David knocked on my door twice. He came once in the afternoon to give me twenty-four small cans of cat food, and then again that night to give me four bottles of Bud Light and a litre of milk from the States. David must have an African name. I’ll have to remember to ask him what it is. I find it very annoying when immigrants change their names when talking to English speaking people.