Confusing Film

            On the Saturday morning of September 10^th, a black squirrel chased a brown squirrel across the power lines from the south side to the north side of Queen. I’ve seen this kind of territorial rivalry between two colours of squirrels before, but it’s usually at street level.

            Since I knew Staples closes at 18:00 on Saturday, I made sure I left my place by 17:00. I got there with half an hour to spare. I bought one red 360-page notebook for my poetry course, one blue 250-page book for Aesthetics and a pack of five needlepoint pens.

            I thought about continuing on out to Cosburn and Coxwell, but it looked like it might rain, so I headed back to Parkdale. I stopped at Freshco and squeezed my bicycle into one of the only free spaces. I suspect that at least 85% of the bikes locked there are abandoned. I could tell by the dust on the seats, which was thickest on one with a child seat on the back.

            I bought soap, toothpaste, yogourt and 3.25% milk.

            That night I watched Alfred Hitchcock’s 1932 film, “Number 17”. It was action packed and to some degree funny, but the story was a bit confusing. A man who is secretly a police detective shows up at a spooky house on a windy autumn night. Inside he finds a homeless man skulking about and a nearby body. A young woman falls through the ceiling while looking for her father, whose body they had found but now the body was gone. The girl has a telegram about diamonds. A bunch of crooks show up looking for the jewels. Among the crooks is a beautiful deaf and dumb woman who turns out not to be deaf and dumb and who is not a crook after all. The house is built over a rail line that leads to the English Channel and a ferry to the Continent. The thieves escape on the train while the others pursue them. The detective though doesn’t make it to the train, so he hijacks a bus full of passengers and forces the driver to chase the train at top speed, much to the terror of those in the seats. The crooks don’t know how to stop the train, so when it reaches the channel it slams into the ferry and sinks. The jewels seem to be lost but the homeless man reveals that he is wearing the diamond necklace.