It's Curtains for Me!

           

            On the morning of Thursday, May 26^th, I received a birthday present shortly after getting up. I opened my apartment door and my cat, Amarillo, came in after three and a half days of being away. He ate a bowl of kibble and then immediately left again, but it was a gift to know that he was probably going to be all right now that, despite his health problems, he’s out wandering around again.

            There were some greetings from Facebook friends that were in my messages already, and more trickled in throughout the day, as people were informed by the social network that this was indeed my day of naissance. Something I hadn’t seen before though was that Google Chrome, in place of the usual anniversaries of historically significant people had posted a happy birthday greeting to me. Then when I went to the bank, the teller looked at her computer and said, “Today is your birthday! Any plans?” I told her I was going to try to find some curtains. “Awesome!” she exclaimed.

            It had started raining, but I decided I’d go to the local Salvation Army thrift store at Queen and Lansdowne anyway. I got wet and felt uncomfortable on the way over there, and my search turned up nothing.

            I had set a goal for myself on my birthday to find some curtains for my living window, and the plan had been to head up to Bloor if the Sally Ann on Queen didn’t pay off. But when I left there it was still raining and I didn’t fancy spending my birthday getting soaked. I had a feeling that the rain wouldn’t last, so I went home for a while.

            On the way though, I stopped to get a beer at the liquor store. Coming in out of the rain to the refrigerated beer room at the back was like suddenly slipping back into winter.

            A couple of weeks before that I had bought a package of Wrap n’ Go spicy beef and bean burritos, but had kept them in the freezer. I heated up a couple in the oven and had them with a beer. They were delicious!

            The sun came out after a couple of hours and so I renewed my birthday mission. There was still a bit of rain falling as I rode up Lansdowne, even though it was sunny.

            I locked my bike near the thrift store at Lansdowne and Bloor where I’d bought my motorcycle jacket. They only had clothing on display but when I asked about curtains, the sales guy showed me a pile of material between the counter and the door. I looked through it, but found nothing.

            I left my bike where it was and walked east to the Salvation Army thrift store. Despite the fact that the Bloor Street store has a different layout than the one on Queen, the shelves pretty much look exactly the same with nearly identical items. They had curtains too, but nothing that I wanted.

            I walked a little further, past the House of Lancaster strip club to Ransack The Universe, which is a very trendy looking thrift store with trendy looking people behind the counter. The big blonde woman told me to look downstairs in the big wardrobe, which I did. There were curtains, but again, not what I was looking for.

            That was the end of the thrift stores east of Lansdowne, but there was still Value Village to visit. I walked back to my bike and rode to the other side of Lansdowne, but rather than riding a block and dealing with a left turn, I walked along the south side of Bloor, behind a young woman with a big, sexy behind and a walk to go with it. I thought for sure she was on her way to work at the Club Paradise at the corner of St Clarens, but she was on her way to Value Village as well.

            Once I was inside, I asked a young employee if they had curtains. She turned to face a distant part of the big store and looked like she was about to give me directions, but then asked me to follow her. At the farthest corner of that vast musty smelling market of second hand stuff was a stretch of curtains that ran down one aisle and up another. I went through everything and though I found some that might work for my window, the sizes were too narrow. I decided to check again. On the other side of the aisle there was a set that I’d passed by previously because of the crimson fabric being done in a vertically wrinkled design. It started to grow on me and it looked like the two pieces were wide enough for my window, so I took them.

            I found the same employee that had brought me to the curtains, working nearby, and asked her if they had curtain rods, but she said they didn’t. I walked back to the other corner of the store to look at the stuff on the shelves. I didn’t know if it was something that I’d touched among the other fabric, or the stuff I was carrying, but my arms were feeling itchy as I walked. There was nothing among the rows of plates, glasses, cups, utensils and knick-knacks that I needed, so I went to the checkout. The curtains cost me thirteen dollars and change.

            I then rode along Bloor to Brock, south to the back door of the Dufferin Mall and then walked to Walmart. I looked at curtain rods but they were twenty-five dollars, so I decided that I would just buy some thumbtacks for now and then worry about properly hanging the curtains later. I found a two dollar pack of a hundred tacks. I remembered the very friendly middle-aged Middle Eastern born woman in the headscarf. She looked my little package of tacks and exclaimed, “Oh! Good one!” Then she tried several times to get me to sign up for a Walmart credit card. I insisted several times during our brief transaction that I didn’t want any more cards.

            I decided that since I was at the mall, rather than riding to the supermarket, I’d walk to the No Frills. I exited the mall and went to the grocery store along the outside. It was so far I might as well have just gone to get my bike and ride somewhere.

I picked up a small bag of black grapes, a bag of oranges and some raisin bread. The birthday boy decided that he wanted steak for dinner and I found a pack of three rib-eye steaks on special for eleven dollars. I rarely buy potato chips these days, but for the occasion, since the PC “Loads Of” chips were on sale for $1.25; I picked up a bag of sour cream and onion.

Once I got home, set to work on putting up the curtains. They are perfect in terms of width, but they were about a third of a meter too long for my window, so I bunched up each of the loops through which a rod would go and tacked tacked them to the top of the window frame. Once everything was relatively even, I tied the curtains with the green ties that came with the green Martha Stewart curtains that I got from Zellers two decades ago and which hang over the inner part of my bedroom door. I never really used the ties for the bedroom, but they looked nice against the crimson curtains. The ideal would be to eventually get some rods and to have the curtains shortened, but for now they didn’t look too bad. Now though, the people in the building across the street won’t be able to see me naked as often. There’s always give and take in life.

Even though I felt sleepy in the late afternoon, I decided to milk the day and not take a siesta.

I grilled the steaks in the oven and had one of them with the chips, some sour cream and onion dip and a glass of Creemore. I watched the first two episodes of The Honeymooners. Show number one was centred around the Kramdens not having a television while the Norton’s had one on credit. Alice bugged Ralph about getting one because while he had his bowling and his lodge meetings, all she had was the walls to look at. Finally Ralph decided to buy a TV jointly with Ed and flipped a coin to see whose apartment the machine would be kept in. Ralph told Ed, “Heads I win, tails you lose” and of course he fell for it. It comes about that Ralph can’t tear himself away from the television and also that he and Ed fight over when they get to watch it. They make up and fall asleep together while watching the late late show, even though they both have to work in the morning. It seems that all of the early television shows that feature watching television as part of the story tend to portray it in a negative light.

The second episode involved some gangsters having left a suitcase full of counterfeit money on Ralph’s bus. Since they would have had to identify the contents, they didn’t go to pick up the money, so that meant that after a month, Ralph got to keep what he found, even though he had no idea there was money inside. Ralph needed fifteen dollars to pay his lodge fees but Alice wouldn’t give it to him. Ed suggested that he open up the suitcase to see if there was anything in it worth selling for fifteen dollars. When he did so, of course, Ralph thought he was rich and started living like a king, even quitting his job and calling his boss a “bum”. The gangsters come for the money and are just threatening Ralph and Ed when the police arrive to investigate the phoney cash.

Gleason and Carney were great comedic actors.

            I think though that these weren’t the very first episodes, since there were earlier short segments that appeared previously on the Jackie Gleason show.