Biting an Apple Sticker

beside the café
the homeless wind

goes through the garbage

            On Saturday morning, while I was practicing playing and singing my songs, an elderly woman with a permanent scowl walked, zombielike up Dunn Avenue and across Queen Street to the Coffeetime, as she does every morning. I usually see her several minutes later, crossing and walking back down Dunn. This time though she went directly across the street, opposite my place, with her cigarette and her coffee, and stood there for a while. The heat was on very high in my building and so I had both of my living room windows open. I was singing my song “One Hundred Hookers” and though the guitar has proven to be audible at that distance I don’t know if the lyrics can be heard across the street. Suddenly though, the woman looked up at my window, extended her arm over her head and began waving at me dramatically from side to side from side to side, while shouting, “Heeeeeeey! Heeeeeeey! Heeeeeeey!” several times. Then she stepped off the sidewalk, just a little toward me, and squatted with her knees far apart while comically miming the strumming of a guitar. Then she straightened up, put her scowl back on, but stood there finishing her cigarette while nodding her head in time to the song I was playing. After that she walked like a zombie back towards the donut shop, without looking up at me at all.

While eating a delicious apple, my enjoyment disappeared when I noticed that I had already bitten off and swallowed half of the sticker.

I spent most of Saturday working on my Children’s Literature term essay. It’s always a slow process to find a thesis out of the writing that I just throw down spontaneously at first, but I think I finally found it. Now I need to pull all of the ideas into harmony with the thesis.

I watched the last of the Sid Caesar collections that I’d downloaded. Woody Allen, Mel Brooks, and Danny and Neil Simon were all writers on Caesar’s Hour. Allen said that he learned everything he knows about comedy from Danny Simon. Apparently, Carol Burnett went to every single rehearsal of the show when she was honing her skills as a comedienne.