The Long, Warm Thread Between Us

            On Sunday the things I wear around the house were getting a little cheesy so I washed them in the sink and put them outside to drip before drying them in my hot apartment.

            I was running out of fruit on the tenth day of my fast and so I couldn’t wait for my cheque. I headed down to the bank and when I noticed it was raining I resigned myself to not having dry home clothes in the next few hours. I took the minimum amount out of my account because I still wasn’t sure if I’d have enough for my rent when the direct deposit arrived later in the week. I went to Freshco and picked out a few things, adding up the prices as I shopped. I took a bunch of globe grapes; two mesh bags of avocados, a trio and a duo of hothouse tomatoes on the vine and a jug of orange juice. You can’t get that much for $20.00 when you’re living on fruit. The express checkout was closed because one of the senior cashiers was doing some paperwork there, so I stepped in a long line behind a couple of late middle aged women of East Indian descent but maybe from Guyana. For some reason they let me go ahead of them. When my items were tallied it turned out that I had slightly miscalculated and so I had to take back the duo of tomatoes. But the cashier had to weigh them all in order to deduct the amount and she seemed annoyed about that.

            When I got home I started another ghazal called “The Long, Warm Thread Between Us” and finished it later on:

I feel the tug

of the long, warm thread between us.

Interesting things materialize.

Firemen lift up a man on his knees.

I don’t ask for much.

Just one slow-healing touch.

That streetcar. I want to be on it,

though I don’t know where it’s going.

There are lots of discarded parts

to Frankenstein for the cause of art.

Abundance is lush.

It’s just too much.

Now is an adventure.

A random circus of moments.

The ego is a person too,

though there’s so much pimpin that it do.

            I watched an episode of Leave it to Beaver in which Eddie Haskell tried to cheat on a history test by putting the answers on paper towels in the boys room dispenser. His plan was that he would ask to use the washroom during the test and then go there to look at the answers. But early in the test Wally Cleaver got ink on his hands and he had to go to the boys room to clean them. While he was drying his mits he found a cryptic message on one of the towels, but shrugged and then tossed before going back to his test. Later when Eddie went there he couldn’t find his cheat sheet and suspected that Wally had used it. When he later saw that Wally got a 92 on his test while he only got a 62, he concluded that Wally had definitely cheated, so he sent an anonymous note to the teacher to rat on him. To instructor called Wally in early the next day to talk to him about it but he knew that Wally hadn’t cheated because he had actually gone into the washroom before the test, removed the answers and left the note.