The Great Highway

            On Monday I called up the Toronto Public Health Department to complain about the absence of a “No Smoking Within Nine Metres of the Door” sign above the entrance to PARC and above the other door of the same building, which is the entrance to the food bank. The person I spoke with said that an inspector would be sent out to 1499 Queen West to investigate. It would be nice for a lot of lungs if my call results in a sign going up.

            That evening I took a bike ride. It was quite warm so all that I needed was a tank top and shorts. There were lots of cyclists out and so on the Bloor bike lane I had to go out into the car lane twice just to get ahead of other riders on the narrow path.

            My plan had been to just go as far as Church, but after I’d passed Yonge, Church Street came up so quickly that I decided to extend my far point to Jarvis before turning back. On the way home I went south on Bay Street and then west on College all the way to Brock and then south to home.

            I received another email from Mick Harvey on Saturday, but only got around to responding on Monday.

            Here’s what he wrote:

Thanks for your email.

I agreed with you about the trifle/rifle lines the first time around. It
was a poor outcome at the end of a long and complicated project and I
never fixed it up. Guilty as charged. It does not, however, invalidate the
rest of the translation or the rest of my work. The handgun? Just an
opinion - the song is written in the third person.

I do not agree about using the Strindberg literary reference, not that it
is not what Gainsbourg has referenced but that it has no use to anyone
hearing the song in English - it’s a waste of space.

Invalides was explained in my previous email. I am perfectly aware it is a
Metro station and the line in my version is “For Invalides you change at Opera” I really don’t understand why you raised it again.

All the other complaints you made are based on transcription or aural errors on your part or just…..more opinions. I shall paste my version at the bottom of this email so you can see for yourself. Not that it will bring you much joy.

Your comments about rhyming sounding or feeling "accidental" are indeed something to aspire to but I must say I feel you are coming much more from the poet’s, as opposed to the lyricist’s, point of view. This “ease of rhyming” is not nearly as critical an area in song lyrics - in fact on occasion obvious, strong rhymes can be helpful musically or for emphasis.

Your opinions about cover versions concur very much with mine but with my Gainsbourg project I did not feel the need of interpreting the original music into something personalized nearly as much as when I normally approach someone else’s song. I expect the reason is fairly obvious. It was a project-wide position I took. I was happy to reference and stay close to the original arrangements when they were fantastic in the first place and were what had initially drawn me to his work. I have recorded many so called “cover versions” over the years and they are, precisely, not cover versions (literally a direct copy of a song with the name of the local artist on the cover who was performing it) they are very much interpretations.

All else is just more opinions - interesting or otherwise.

Regards, Mick

THE TICKET PUNCHER OF LILAS

I'm the ticket puncher at Lilas
To whom the passengers pay no regard
There's no sunshine in this Metro station
A strange vacation
To kill the boredom in my vest
I've extracts from Readers Digest
And this book says to me
That life is just a ball in Miami
And all the while I'm working like a slave
Down in this cave
They say work's better than the dole
But all day long I just make holes

I punch holes, little holes, then more little holes
Little holes, little holes, always little holes
I make second-class holes
And punch first-class holes
I punch holes, little holes, then more little holes
Little holes, little holes, always little holes
Little holes, little holes
Little holes, little holes

I'm the ticket puncher at Lilas
For Invalides you change at Opera
I live down in the bowels of this here planet
I have in my head
A carnival of confetti
It even gets between my sheets
Under this white tile sky
The only things that shine are exit signs
At times I dream I go into a daze
And in the haze
The railway platform is a quay
A boat is coming to get me

From this hole, little hole, where I make little holes x2
But the boat is sailing
My day-dream's always failing
And I stay in this hole punching little holes
Little holes, little holes, always little holes
Little holes, little holes
Little holes, little holes

I'm the ticket puncher at Lilas
Arts-et-Metiers direct by Levallois
I've had enough I've had it with this bullshit
Down in this cesspit
I'd like to be on the trapeze
Leave my cap and cloak room keys
The day will come I'm sure
When I will get away to something more
I'll take a car a plane a train a yacht
No matter what
But if the time I have is cursed
I'll have to leave this place feet first

I punch holes, little holes, then more little holes
Little holes, little holes, always little holes
I think I will trifle
With a great big rifle
And make a hole, a little hole, one last little hole
And make a hole, a little hole, one last little hole
And then they'll put me in a hole
Where I will hear no more of holes
Never again of little holes
Of little holes, of little holes, of little holes

Here’s my response:

Mick,

Thanks for your response and for the full text of your translation of "Le Poinconneur des Lilas". I can see now that I made a mistake in how I heard your reference to "Invalides". I didn't catch while listening that you said "for Invalides".

I don't understand though why, if you are unsatisfied with the "trifle" "rifle" rhyme, why you wouldn't change it? I change what I've written all the time when it doesn't feel right.

I also don't get why you think that "The Great Highway" doesn't serve just as well as a death metaphor for an English speaking audience. Everyone gets it when I sing it. The Strindberg play has been performed in English as "The Great Highway" and in French as "La Grand'Route" so obviously the words represent the same symbolism and to remove it in translation thins out the depth of the poem.

I don't agree that there is any difference between song lyrics and poetry in terms of translation and I think that translations of lyrics should aspire to the same intention of the original, unless of course one comes up with an adaptation that improves on the artistic quality of the original. Gainsbourg is hard enough to match, let alone improve upon, but I think that on some occasions I've done so. But I think there has to be sensitivity in translation to the type of speech being used. For instance, a french lyric or poem in colloquial language shouldn't be translated into formal English with a lot of "thee"s and "thou"s as is often done. Also when the work has double meanings or metaphors the translated version should aspire to find equivalents. In the case of this song both of us, I assume, avoided directly adapting the reference to "La fille de l'air" since English audiences really wouldn't recognize the story from the Gogniard and Raymond play that, as far as I know, was never produced in English. But “the daughter of the air” is a strong image and so I think that an English equivalent is needed somewhere in the verse to replace it. That’s why I came up with, “I want to break this cage and fly, just leave my monkey suit behind”.

One image that you came up with that I especially like though is to have the subway platform turn into a quay.

Thanks for the communication.

Here’s to art,

Christian         

            I watched an episode from the last season of Leave It To Beaver that started with Barbara Billingsley having a new hairstyle but in the next scene she was wearing her previous do.

Bad Space Helmet

            I was doing an experiment with Sarah Silverman to see how long I could keep a space helmet on once the oxygen supply had been cut off. I lasted about a minute and then I unzipped it. It wasn’t a very scientifically correct dream. What kind of space helmet would use a zipper? They probably use a series of clamps or screw it on or else it’s just part of the whole suit. Anyway I unzipped it just in time and was gasping for air but my right lung had expanded like a balloon. Sarah looked worried but told me there was nothing to worry about.
            I think this dream had something to do with how my throat felt after standing in the smokey line-up in front of the food bank.

On Sunday morning while I was doing song practice, several squirrels came along the power lines across the street and then crossed Dunn Avenue along the one that angles south near the tree just south of the southwest corner and then jumped onto the branches. I only saw one of them getting attacked by a sparrow but this time it didn’t retreat. One squirrel came over to my side but then changed its mind and went back.

I started watching the sixth and final season of Leave It To Beaver. The opening segment has Barbara Billingsley wearing a very stylish short pompadour hairstyle but in the episodes she still has the old one. I guess they filmed the intro after the season had wrapped.

I was curious what state Beaver’s hometown of Mayfield was supposed to be in. Most fans speculate that it was Ohio, but according to Jerry Mathers, who played Beaver, they deliberately left the location vague, even to the point of blurring Ward Cleaver’s licence plate so it wouldn’t distinguish a state. But it basically did seem like a world where the Midwest had California weather, since there was never any snow. 

Second Hand Anger

            The Parkdale food bank line-up on Saturday seemed a bit longer than usual for 9:45. That was probably because it was close to the end of the month but before the arrival of the cheques from social services.

            It was the warmest Saturday so far this year and so it made waiting in line much less uncomfortable than it has been. The lack of breeze though caused the second smoke to linger in the area where it was produced and I could definitely feel it choking me even more than the chronic norm.

            Most of the regulars were there already but two faces that stood out further ahead in line were those of a 30ish mother with her 5ish blonde daughter. A little behind them was the guy who is always smoking his e-cigarette, except that he wasn’t wearing his hoody for the first time and I could see that he was bald.

            A nervous looking woman pulling a cart came walking down the street and kicked a twig that was lying on the sidewalk and it hit me on the shin. She said sorry and as an explanation said that she’d kicked it so people wouldn’t think it was her broomstick, then she crossed to the other side of Queen.

            The line filled up behind me fairly quickly and then Bart, the young man with the condition that seems like it might be coprolalia, which is the tendency to uncontrollably blurt out arguments and statements, usually to no one in particular, arrived a couple of people later, marked his spot with a bag and then stood away.

            Almost immediately Bart started swearing at cars or people across the street but while the others in line usually ignore it, this time a big woman closer to the front snapped, “Hey! There’s a kid here!” Bart walked quickly about half a block east for a while and then came back to continue his speech habits unchecked.

            Though I know that the woman’s reaction came from an instinct of protectiveness, I really see no logical reason for people to try to suppress the use of strong language around children. Kids pick up language habits from parents and other close acquaintances but not from strangers in line-ups. As a poet, I like all language, including the strong variety but consider certain words like “fuck” to be more effective when used sparingly rather than as punctuation. I raised my daughter in Parkdale and she heard swearing and saw unconventional behaviour all the time. I told her that there was nothing wrong with any words but certain ones should be avoided in school to avoid getting suspended. She grew up to be an eloquent and socially responsible young woman.

            Added to Bart’s usual spontaneous utterances this time were those fluid, nasal inhalations from the back of the throat that we tend to use to gather mucous before spitting. He did spit often, but sometimes he would do it just before another outburst. One time he stepped out to the edge of the sidewalk, horked a loogie, then smiled with satisfaction and exclaimed, “Say hello to little Bart!”

            I had forgotten to bring the book with me that I usually read in the line-up and so I spent a lot of time instead deleting all the calls from my phone going back to March.

            Bart said something to someone unseen about them having been eaten while they were being born.

            At one point a couple of elderly men were passing, about 40 years older than Bart and it seemed that Bart knew the shorter of the two. He let spew a trainload of vitriol on the old man as he continued, perhaps to have breakfast at PARC. A couple of times the man turned to say something back but Bart became even louder and repeated a few times the call for the guy to, “Go and suck your mother’s fuckin cock!” At that point the e-cigarette smoker came back and started trying to tell Bart that he was upsetting the little girl, but it just caused Bart to be more agitated and amplified. I put my hand on the e-cigarette guy’s shoulder and tried to explain to him that Bart was not well and that he was wasting his time trying to reason with him or to try to suppress him with an argument. Finally the guy turned to go back toward the front and said to me, “Obviously he’s a sociopath!” I responded with, “What do you expect? We are on Queen Street in front of PARC!” Then the e-cigarette guy took out a real cigarette and smoked it about three meters away from where the little girl was that he was so concerned about. I guess he thought that the at least 250 known harmful toxins contained in second-hand smoke are less harmful to children than second-hand anger.

            I think that trying to control the behaviour of strangers is like arguing with a rainstorm. In cases like this it is the responsibility of the parent or guardian to teach the child to understand that in the world there are people that for whatever reason have no self-control and that it’s just something one has to learn to deal with. Angry language or behaviour that isn’t directed at a child does the kid very little, if any harm and unlike second hand smoke, one can’t get emphysema from it.

            I had to move away from the smoke sometimes even once the line started moving. I walked east closer to the PARC entrance and saw Helen Posno standing there with her walker. I went over to chat, asking if she was waiting for breakfast. She said that she was there for reflexology therapy. I told her that I used to teach a yoga class at PARC but stopped after three years because not enough students were showing up. I offered the view that the PARC members just weren’t really a yoga group. I’d recounted how one woman asked if she could go for a smoke halfway through a lesson and one time a guy came into my classroom after hearing there was yoga and he’d thought that they’d meant yogourt. When Helen’s reflexology therapist arrived it turned out to be the same nervous person that had kicked the twig into my leg before.

            When the advancing of the line had moved me close to the front, I heard the door person exclaim that last Wednesday the food bank had gotten 117 clients.

            Sometimes people don’t smoke when the line is moving because they don’t want to start a cigarette that they can’t finish. But this time there were people hanging around and smoking that weren’t even in the line-up. The Ethiopian guy who sometimes ends up ahead of me in line even though he started behind was at the front this time and had just lit up a long cigarette. Bart asked him if he could finish it when he went in. He said he could but he kept it anyway.

            My lungs and I were glad to be finally let inside. It’s always one’s name and birth date that are checked on the computer before a client is given a number. Since my birthday had been the day before the receptionist said, “Happy belated” without looking up at me. I got number 30.

            As usual, the first thing that Angie handed me was a bag of six eggs, which is always awkward because one has to keep them separate so they won’t be crushed. It suddenly dawned on me that I could put them in the mid-sized pocket of my backpack where I keep things like my wallet and my camera.

            For the first time in a long time there was no milk and so the only dairy being offered were two small cups of fruit bottom yogourt and what cheese there happened to be on the pizza slices in the two bags she gave me. As usual I got a tube shaped container of frozen ground chicken.

            From Sylvia’s vegetable section I got three potatoes, an onion, one and two half carrots plus a third of a rotten one, a container of cherry tomatoes, a bag of frozen cut yellow beans, a large container of cut and washed arugula and kale mix. I noticed that there were green peppers and I’d just assumed that Sylvia had given me one but when I checked later I saw that she’d forgotten. She might have been distracted by the mother with her little girl, who were just behind me. Though they’d been about seven places ahead they were delayed because this was their first time and the woman had needed to register.

            The shelves had a lot of odd ethnic items this time around. All by itself at the top of one shelf was a package of gourmet biscotti. It reminded me of the first time I’d had that kind of cookie. In the summer of 87 I stayed in a pension in Milano and the proprietor insisted that her tenants not give treats to her elderly mother. But I had a bag of biscotti on the dresser and the old lady used to walk into my room while I was writing, go over to the bag, smile at me, take a cookie and then leave.

            Other international foods included a large can of saag, which my helper pulled out from among several items. Even though she was of Indian descent she wasn’t entirely sure what saag was and had to read the ingredients. It’s 74% mustard leaves, 19% spinach and 3% green chillies. I took it. Another Indian inspired item was a can of mulligatawny soup. From Brazil I received a carton of Vita Coco coconut water with peach and mango puree. Then from Morrocco I got a jar of couscous sauce.

            A little less ethnic, although from the Netherlands was a bag of “Say Yes to No” Dutch Gouda bread chips. I also got a small can of Second Cup hazelnut cream instant coffee.

            For the last few months there has been lots of canned beans but no tuna. This time though there were no canned beans offered but there was a can of tuna.

            The only cereal they had was chocolate kids cereal, so I didn’t take any.

            For the first time in a few weeks I took a couple of loaves of bread and they seemed to have lots of it. I grabbed a couple of non-sliced loaves that looked like they were multi-grain.

            There was certainly an exotic selection of shelf items this time at the food bank, though it was very sparse in terms of dairy and there was zero fruit.

I had $5 in my pocket and so immediately after the food bank I went to No Frills to see if they had any deals on fruit. Their best bargain was three grapefruit for $2, so I took six.

There were two guys begging outside of the supermarket. One of them was sitting on the concrete outside the entrance and the other was sitting in his bare feet on the Queen Street side of the store. I got the impression that both guys were from the same group home in the neighbourhood. While I was unlocking my bike the barefoot man asked me for “a five”. He had a lot more than I had on the sidewalk in front of him.

I Got To Be Clever On My Birthday

            I didn’t get to bed until just before 1:30 on Friday and stayed awake for quite a while. Despite all that I didn’t feel all that tired when the alarm rang at 5:07. Maybe I was excited because it was my birthday.

            After yoga gave myself the present of doing a shortened song rehearsal. I sang three of my own songs and then seven of my translations. My new denture held very well and so for the first time in a long time I was able to belt out the songs with full confidence that nothing was going to start wobbling in my mouth. After practice I finished uploading a translation to my blog and then transcribed the lyrics to “Mamadou”, which was the next Serge Gainsbourg song that I planned to translate and learn to play.

            After doing three rehearsals of the ten minute piece that I plan on performing at the Words and Music Salon on June 3^rd, I had breakfast. Nothing fancy, just two pieces of raisin toast, a bowl of cereal and half a container of yogourt with some chocolate. While making coffee, after I’d poured the boiling water into my French press and put the kettle back on the turned off element, I reached over it to turn on the oven. At that moment, the kettle suddenly started spitting steam and in reflex my hand flew backwards and slammed into the bottom corner of the over the counter shelf. It really hurt and even started bleeding slightly without the blood running. It looked almost like a little dog bite afterwards and smarted for the rest of the day.

            I spent the rest of the morning freeing up space on my computer because I’d started downloading a few porno films and they needed a little more space.

            After taking a shower in the early afternoon, I got dressed and headed out to shop for a birthday present for myself. I was wearing shorts and at first I regretted it because it was chillier than I’d expected. I considered going back home to change but either it warmed up or I got used to it.

            The first place I went was the Salvation Army thrift store in my neighbourhood. There have been times when I’ve found some good stuff there but in the last couple of years I don’t think they’ve had much of anything that I wanted. This is despite the fact that they had a sale of dress pants for $2.

            I rode up to Value Village at Bloor and Lansdowne. I keep looking for a clamshell shaped light fixture or soap dish at these places but nothing ever turns up. I noticed they had a rainstick for $25 and I was curious if it sounded as good as the one I made for almost nothing. It didn’t. They had some reasonable shorts that might have fit me but I realized while I was there that what I really wanted to do was to get a curtain rod. A year before that I had bought my curtains there and put them on my window by folding over and pinning the tops, but I’d always had in mind actually making them fully functional as curtains by mounting a rod. I looked around the store but they had nothing in terms of rods at all, so I left.

            I stopped in at the Salvation Army thrift store just east of Lansdowne on Bloor. They also had a $2 sale but once again there was nothing in the way of pants that would fit me. They had no curtain rods either.

            I went down Brock Avenue to the back of the Dufferin Mall. I went in since I was passing because I wanted to look for an adaptor that would connect my microphone to Nick Cushing’s drift cam. While locking my bike on my last few stops I’d been having trouble with the lock. I’d had to fiddle with it for a while each time to get it to close. Finally I peeled off all the rubber armour and it closed a little better.

            Before going to The Source I went to the washroom at the north end of the mall. Just after washing my hands I was about to leave when a big man in a very large metallic red electric scooter started coming in. He was having a comically hard time getting his wheelchair around the corner, though for a normally sized vehicle of that type it would have been a breeze. He had to back up about three times to change his angle of approach until he finally got in and it immediately reminded me of that humorous trucker song from the 1960s, “Give Me 40 Acres and I’ll Turn This Rig Around”. When he finally made it in I couldn’t help but comment, “Maybe you need a smaller machine!” He smiled with embarrassment and said, “Yeah!” but he probably meant, “Go fuck yourself!”

            At The Source I found that they had the adaptor I need but that it costs $12.99 there. I didn’t want to spend that much because I still wanted to get a curtain rod and buy some food. I made a mental note to check at Staples for the same thing the next time I have money. I suspected it would be cheaper there.

            I rolled down Brock Avenue to my neighbourhood and stopped at the Home Hardware on Queen Street. At the back they had some very long wooden dowels that looked like they might fit my double window. I tried to figure out the price and there was a measurement on the end of the dowel but I couldn’t find a matching price for it on the rack. I asked the moustachioed senior staff guy who’s been there at least for the two decades that I’ve lived in Parkdale and though he’s often quite nice, he seemed annoyed this time by my question. He said that the prices were on the rack but found out for me that it was 2.4 meters long and that it $7.29. That price seemed okay to me so I went home to re-measure my window frame. It looked to me that the dowel would fit, so I went back and bought it. Then I inquired about brackets for attaching the dowel but their selection wasn’t very good. He suggested that I go a couple of doors down to the fabric place because they have a fairly large selection of curtain accessories. I did that and found they had some nice curtain brackets for $5 each. I said I might be back and went to the Dollarama to see if by chance they had curtain rod brackets. They didn’t, but they did have something that looked like it might serve as pretty good rod holders: coat hooks. I decided though to check through my junk drawer at home before buying two coat hooks because I was pretty sure I had some. Before leaving though I checked their minimal electronics section to see if they had the adaptor I needed, but they didn’t.

            My two adjacent junk drawers in the kitchen have things that I’ve accumulated since the 80s and carried around from apartment to apartment. I don’t even remember now where most of the stuff came from but I’m pretty sure that at least 90% of it consists of found items. Going through the bottom one I found several double coat hooks. The two smallest ones matched and their bottom hooks fit the diameter of the dowel perfectly.

            I found four small screws and secured the two hooks to the upper left and right corners of my window frame. When I placed the dowel on the hangers they made very cute curtain rod holders and I wondered why I’d never heard of anyone doing that before. I can see online that it’s been done but it seems rare.

            Next I pulled all the thumbtacks out that had been holding the folded upper parts of the curtains on top of the window frame. Once the curtains were unravelled I was surprised to discover that they were far too long to hang from the curtain rod at the level that I’d placed the coat hooks.

            The loops of the curtains were quite long, so I decided to tie each of them in a knot to shorten them, but they still weren’t short enough. I held the rod with the curtains hanging from it up until the hem skirted the top off the radiator cover that I was standing on. I marked how high on the wall the rod would have to be and saw that it was 31 centimetres above the window frame. That meant that I couldn’t use the coat hooks after all because the screws that they required were too small to grip anything inside the wall. I needed to find an entirely different solution.

            I took a break from working on the curtain rod problem and went out to the liquor store to buy three cans of Creemore. Then I rode to Freshco where I bought bananas, pears, strawberries, a tomato, four chicken legs for $3, milk and yogourt.

            When I got home, after putting away my groceries I got back to work on finding an answer to my curtain rod attachment problem. I found a few L-brackets, with two larger screw holes on each arm, that I’d bought years ago to repair drawers that were falling apart. I thought about possibly bending one arm of each bracket so that it curved up enough to hold the rod. I thought about going up the street to Bike Pirates to ask if I could use their vice but I thought it would be too easy to do an uneven bend and difficult to get the exact same bend for each bracket without a machine doing it. Besides, Bike Pirates was closed on Fridays. I dug through my junk drawers some more and found two rubber O-rings for attaching bicycle bells or horns to handlebars. Suddenly I started to feel very clever. The idea that came to me was to screw the two L-brackets into the wall with the top arm extending away from the wall and then to use the screw and bolt combo that was already part of each O-ring to attach them to each side of the outer screw holes of the extended bracket arms.

            I spent some time measuring in order to make sure the brackets would be in the right positions so the rod wouldn’t be slanted. I screwed them in into the wall and they held but I think eventually I might have to re-secure them with screw plugs. Then I attached the O-rings and they looked and worked great as rod holders. I really felt like I’d given myself the present of doing something innovative on my birthday.

            The next problem though was that there was only a finger width between the rings and the ends of the dowel, so when I tried to open or close the curtains, one end would slip out of its ring. I went back to my junk drawer and almost right away found my solution: two matching four centimetre long wooden cone dowels with screws already attached. I screwed one into each end of the curtain rod with the widest part on the inside. That way there was enough to catch on the outside of the ring so the rod wouldn’t slip out just from moving the curtain.

            My final problem was that the curtains were too narrow to fully close by coming together in the middle. I figured that this was because I had bunched them up a bit when I’d tied knots in the loops. So I untied each loop and that released them enough for the curtains to come together. It was very satisfying to gat something accomplished on my birthday and to now have curtains that would now easily open and close too.

Hunting Buddies

            Early Thursday afternoon I had an appointment to pick up my new denture and to get a cleaning at my dentist’s office. It had been raining hard ever since I’d gotten up that morning and it hadn’t let up by the time I had to leave. I had dreaded riding in that wet mess but it was almost a relief to be totally soaked after a few blocks because since I was already as soggy as I could get there was no more drenching to be apprehensive about. But then once I was on Dundas it started to go down my boots and so I’d found another level of being sodden after all.

            The receptionist was talking to someone when I arrived and directed me to sit in the waiting area. About five minutes later, Dr. He gestured for me to follow him. When I walked into the treatment room I asked him to confirm that I could also get a cleaning and he told me that the office was looking into that. He informed me that my Green Shield insurance policy only allows for one cleaning a year and my last cleaning was in June, so I might not be eligible yet.

            I sat down and he showed me my new denture but I was surprised and said, “I thought that it was supposed to be two teeth!” Dr He was puzzled and repeated, “Two teeth?” I told him that the assistant, Hilberto, had told me that the denture was going to be for my missing tooth and for the next missing one on the upper right. Just then Hilberto walked in and I reminded him and confirmed that he’d thought that was what it was going to be, then he left. I told Dr. He that I remembered him having said that it was going to be for “Two teeth” and so I’d asked Hilberto what he’d meant. Dr. He wanted to know why I hadn’t just asked him. I explained that I’d thought that Hilberto knew but Dr. He responded that assistants don’t know anything. Then he finally remembered why he’d said “two teeth”. He’d meant that the clasp would range over the width of two teeth above the denture.

            The new denture had a different shaped clasp than the first one. While the other clasp looked like pterodactyl wings, this one had parts that pointed down making it look more like it had bat wings. When I put it in the bite was off and so I had to remove it a few times after biting into an impression sheet for him to grind it down. After a couple of times it was fine.

            He stressed that this denture might eventually also start falling out and the best option for me would be an implant. I told him I couldn’t even afford to go down to Buffalo to get an implant for $1000. He didn’t believe one could get an implant in the States for that cheap.

            I was about to leave when he reminded me that I’d asked for a cleaning and told me that the office had found that I could get a cleaning now under my coverage. I sat back down, but then he told me that I would have to pay some of the fee. I told him that I’d been coming there ever since 2010 and had never had to pay. He informed me that they are cracking down and that he could get punished if he treated me for free. I asked if that was the case with all types of treatment and he confirmed that it was. I said that might mean that I wouldn’t be able to come back there at all. He just responded with, “Sorry”.

            I stopped at reception to inquire on this issue. The young woman told me that the college and my insurance provider have gotten stricter. She stated that all these years that I’ve gotten fully covered I should have only been covered for 70% of the fees. If insisted that if they let me have any more free work then they could be shut down. She offered that if I were able to pay as little as $40 though, I could probably get a cleaning from Dr. He.

            I left feeling a bit depressed. I might have to try another dental clinic to see if I can get free work done again. I guess there is also the possibility of going to a dental school to get work done. Maybe that would be the solution to getting an implant as well.

            The denture felt pretty firm as I rode home in the rain and removing it was harder than the old one, so maybe it will at least last until after my performance on June 3^rd.

            I changed into some dry clothes and made lunch. I’d cooked some chickpeas before leaving for the dentist’s office. When I got back I sautéed some onions and garlic, then added them to the beans. I added some chopped tomatoes and tomato paste, as well as paprika and cayenne. It made a pretty good soup. After eating I took a siesta.

            That evening I had to work up the street at Artists 25. It was nice that the rain had stopped but it was still a little chillier than it had been the day before, so I wore my motorcycle jacket.

            The door was unlocked and the studio was empty when I arrived. Cy walked in a few minutes later. I guessed he’d opened up before and then gone out to buy something. I told him that while he’d been out a bunch of guys came in and took a lot of valuable stuff and told me that Cy said it was okay. He confirmed that it was fine with him.

            Two female members of the group who are usually there when I work at A-25 came to draw me this time as well. One of them declared that she had only come that night because I’m such a great model and she knew that I was going to be posing. That was nice to hear.

            I told Cy about George Elliot Clarke having gotten lost trying to find the U of T Mississauga campus and we discussed other people we’ve known that have no sense of direction. An ex-girlfriend of mine could stand at the corner of Yonge and Queen without knowing which way was north and he said he knew someone like that as well.

            At the end of the night I told them that I’d seen a dead coyote in Toronto on my way out to Mississauga. That led to a discussion about how smart coyotes seem to be. They have the most complex vocabulary of any mammal in North America and they even make friends with other species in the wild. They have been seen snuggling up to badgers on the prairie and they help each other hunt for rats.

            I got paid $45 and I mentioned that I especially appreciated having some money on the day before my birthday.

Look Happy

            On Wednesday I knew that Nick Cushing was going to be coming into town from Hamilton and in the late morning he sent me a message to let me know that he would be here at around 12:30. Close to that time I received a call and I thought it was him but it turned out to be someone from my dentist’s office. The woman told me that she was calling to confirm my appointment for Thursday at 13:00. I told her I hadn’t made an appointment but wondered if this had something to do with my denture. She confirmed that my artificial teeth had arrived so I told her that I could take the appointment but asked if I could also have a cleaning when I came in. She said I could, so I knew what I would be doing early the next afternoon.

            I vacuumed half of the kitchen and the entire bathroom, and then cleaned the bathroom sink. It seems that baking soda works better than Comet or Ajax for removing stains from the basin. I was about to start cleaning the toilet when Nick called. I tried to answer the phone but it stopped ringing while I was trying to unblacken it. I looked out the window and he was downstairs anyway so I let him in.

            Nick had brought along some software that I needed for video editing, as well as a copy of Photoshop. After chatting over tea in the kitchen we started installing the video editor but the installation took a long time and Nick had art supplies to buy for making tiki masks, so he left. I heated up the potato and ground chicken soup that I’d made the night before and had it wit two pretzels, then I took a siesta.

            After 45 minutes Nick called to say that he’d decided to not leave town right away and offered to come back over to show me how the program worked. I said okay and went back to bed for about fifteen minutes until the phone vibrated, but call display showed an 866 area code, which meant that it was a bill collector, so I lay back down and let it finish ringing. Shortly after that I heard Nick shouting “Christian!” up at my window. He had just called but it must have been while the other call had been coming through. Another coincidence was that while he’d been shouting up at my window the same woman who’d looked at him funny the last time he’d shouted up was also walking by again.

            We opened Corel Video Studio and selected a file that I wanted to edit but the sound and video would not synchronize inside the program, so all the bells and whistles of the program itself were meaningless to me if I couldn’t apply them. The main reason though for Nick bringing me the program was in order for it to automatically install the codecs that I needed in order to be able to use Windows Movie Maker to edit my videos. I opened Movie Maker, imported the same video and this time it worked, and in sync, so installing Corel Studio was worth it just for that. Nick said that even after Studio is uninstalled the codecs would still be on my computer.

            We also installed Photoshop and Nick showed me the basics of how it works. I opened my book cover in it to see if Photoshop had solutions to some of the problems I’ve had completing that project with Microsoft Paint. In most cases it seems that Photoshop would have been better to start the project with, but it’s not as good for manipulating pieces that have already been put together. There are a couple of functions though, such as “smudging” and the ability to alter the angle of things, that I might be able to utilize.

            We chatted until I had to get ready to go to work, and then Nick left.

            I was scheduled to work for a photography class that evening at OCADU but as I was preparing to leave I remembered that there was a new release form that I was sent that I had to sign to indicate that I wouldn’t sue them for reproducing my photographic image. The form was an attachment in the model coordinator’s email, but when I tried to print it I only ended up with the left half of the form. I tried a few things and then finally saw there was an option to open it in Google documents, then I copied and pasted it into Word, changed the font so it would be all on one page and then printed it.

            I only had to work from 19:30 to 21:30 but I would get paid for three hours anyway. The instructor was a guy named Surendra for whom I remember having worked a couple of times a few years ago. Back then he had a tendency to pose the models by hand, so I told him that it was inappropriate and he said he wouldn’t do it, but then ended up doing it anyway, so I complained to the coordinator. This time he directed me with words and hand gestures like he is supposed to do but he still poked me a few times with the light meter.

            When I arrived in the classroom he was critiquing photographs that his students had taken. This was obviously a continuing studies class since they were all middle-aged. Finishing his look at their homework overlapped into my work time a few minutes. He started by demonstrating how to light me and how to use a light meter and the lit part of me and on the shadowed part in order to work out what F-stop to use. When he took sample photos he had to ask me a few times to look happier, so I imagined feathers coming out of his head in order to make myself smile.

            Then the students took turns shooting me and some were less nervous about it than others. One made me smile by telling me that I was very easy to photograph. Another guy remembered drawing me about 23 years ago when he was taking 1^st year illustration at Sheridan College. I was glad that no one asked me to smile with my mouth open because since I’d forgotten to put in my denture before leaving home, I would have refused.

"Those Nice Young Men In Their Clean White Coats"

            On Tuesday evening I took my first bike ride since Saturday. It started to rain a bit just as I was getting ready to go but had stopped by the time I’d gotten rolling. It was quite a bit chillier than it had been the week before and so I wore an unbuttoned long sleeved shirt over my tank top but I had shorts on. I went as far as Yonge Street but only went south as far as College because Dundas is generally a boring route home and Queen has too many busses on it until September. Once I got to Dovercourt I descended to Queen because I wanted to stop at Freshco on the way home. I only had a toonie to spend and so though I didn’t have any fruit at home I decided to get a container of zero fat yogourt instead.

            For dinner I sautéed some garlic and onions, poured a carton of chicken broth on top of that and then opened up the container of frozen ground chicken that I’d gotten a while ago from the food bank and heated it in the broth until it was thawed. After that I poured it all from the frying pan into a pot, added three cut up three potatoes and let everything boil for the next half hour. It turned out pretty tasty.

            I got rid of a bunch of torrents that I’d started downloading a year ago but had either not even gotten past 0% or never reached 100%. I played the ones that had gotten to over 30%, though only some of them would something. The only real keeper among them was 97% of an episode of the George Burns and Gracie Allen Show. Not so much for the silly story but for the segment at the end where they do a dialogue onstage similar to heir old vaudeville routine. Gracie was telling George about the last four of her Aunt Clara’s nine husbands. For number six he had placed an ad in the paper looking for a man that was young, tall, handsome and brave. Several men answered it but she picked Earnest, who was short, old, bald and knock-kneed. George asked why she’d picked him and Gracie answered that she figured that if he was brave enough to answer that ad it made up for the rest. Husband number eight, Uncle Leo was a doctor and a fine man but when he started coming home and repeating the things that his patients said to him every day it made her very nervous, so she left him. George wondered why that bothered her. Gracie explained that he was a tree surgeon. George inquired, “Who came after Uncle Leo?” “A couple of men in white coats.”

I Wonder Why Birds Attack Squirrels

            My knee didn’t bother me much on Monday morning but there was a little twinge so I decided to rest it from riding for another day.

            For two mornings in a row while doing song practice and looking out the window I have seen a squirrel on the opposite side of the street scurry along the power line from the east and try to cross Dunn Avenue. Both times though it has been turned back and attacked on the line near the traffic light by an angry little sparrow about half its size but with the advantage of height being much less of a danger for it so far from a tree. If the bushy tailed rodent were to be knocked off the wire, grabbing the side of the wooden pole wouldn’t have been as sure a thing as being knocked from an upper tree limb and catching onto a lower one, so the squirrel retreated both times. The sparrow must have been defending a nearby nest and it’s interesting that pigeons roost in the same area but I’ve never seen sparrows attack them. I guess it’s because they know they aren’t a threat, whereas, though I’d always thought that squirrels were vegetarians, upon looking it up I discovered that they eat eggs and even nestlings. That may very well have been its reason for crossing on the wire in the first place.

            I didn’t realize that sparrows were that aggressive at defending their nests. The red winged blackbirds are the ones in Toronto with the reputation for dive-bombing people if they get too close to their nests. I got attacked myself once down by Sunnyside Beach. I’ve notice that lately the blackbirds are more frequently landing on the wire in front of my window and doing their complex mating calls.

            That evening I didn’t go for a bike ride but exercised while listening to another episode of Amos and Andy. Andy and Kingfish were in the elevator of a department store and the operator called out “Home furnishings!” but then added that there weren’t any home furnishings. I guess this was a reference to shortages due to the war, although the war had ended the year before that.

The Delta Rhythm Boys

            As I predicted, after my 49-kilometre bike ride out to and back from the Mississauga campus the previous day, on Sunday I had an ache in my left knee. But it really wasn’t as bad as I’d expected and it only hurt a bit when I got up. I thought it wise though not to do any pedalling that day though and instead I just did some knee exercises in the late afternoon while listening to a funny episode of Amos and Andy from 1946.

            Kingfish’s wife Sapphire, in her continuing efforts to get her husband working, made him an appointment for an interview for a job as an insurance salesman. He went there already determined to not get the job. He first of all told the man he didn’t like to walk. The man told him he could get an office. Kingfish said he preferred his bed. The interviewer informed him that some of their salesmen do 90% of their business by telephone from the bedside. Kingfish asked, “Yeah, but they gotta wake up to do it don’t they?”

            Kingfish was sold on the job and the first thing he tried to do was to sell Andy a burial insurance plan, telling him that their slogan was, “Be covered when you is covered!” Kingfish wanted to show Andy some photos of burial plots but forgot his briefcase at home. Just then Lightning came in and he asked him to travel the two blocks to fetch it for him. He said he’d be back in a couple of hours. Then there was a song by the Delta Rhythm Boys: “They call him Lightning but it’s not because he’s fast … He can’t keep working steady, he just sleeps for all he’s worth but when his wife says supper’s ready he’s the fastest man on Earth … He’s always drowsy looking, he retires at half past five but when he smells fried chicken cookin, there’s the fastest man alive …”

            Next Kingfish tried to sell Andy a life insurance policy that would protect him from all kinds of accidents, including explosion and collision. Andy asked, “What’s the difference?” Kingfish told him, “With a collision, there you is, but with an explosion, where is you?” He said that the life policy has the “double indemnity feature”, which promises double indemnity if you die in your sleep while dreaming about falling and hitting the ground.

            Later Andy was talking to Hattie McDaniel and she told him that after 40 you got to eat like a rabbit and work like a dog to keep from looking like a horse.

            After my knee exercises I got dressed and went out to the liquor store to buy one can of beer. When I got there an LCBO employee was just closing the gate. I’d forgotten that it was Sunday. The guy in front of me asked if they were closed. The employee barked, “18:00 o’clock! Five minutes my friend! Let’s roll, roll, roll! Hurry up!” I wasn’t there to shop because I knew exactly what I wanted. I already had my can of Creemore and was standing in line when I heard the same guy walking around and calling out, “Two minutes!”

A Dead Coyote and a Day with a Friend

            On Saturday morning I had to skip going to the food bank because I’d been invited by my friend Hans (Dutch) Jongman to the evening banquet at the 40^th annual Haiku Canada conference. It’s held in a different part of Canada every year but this time around it was at the University of Toronto’s Mississauga campus. I wanted to get there earlier than the dinner because I knew that Dutch would be launching and reading from his new book, “Shift Change” sometime after 11:00. There were several authors launching books that day and on the agenda that Dutch had sent me, and I was hoping that since their names weren’t listed in alphabetical order and “Hans Jongman” was near the bottom, that it meant the names were arranged in order of appearance and so I wouldn’t miss him.

            I started getting ready to leave once I’d finished my regular morning routine, which includes song practice, memorizing French songs and rehearsing for my June 3^rd guest spot at the Words and Music Salon.  At 9:30 I took a shower, then I packed a lunch and mixed some homemade Gatorade out of water, brown sugar, lemon juice and salt in a Mason jar. This was going to be the longest bike ride I’d taken in a long time so I was sure I’d need to replenish my body’s fluids and electrolytes after an hour and a half of riding.

            I only wore my shorts and a tank top but I’d stuffed my hoody into my backpack as well because I knew I’d probably be riding home after sunset when it was probably going to be a lot cooler. I walked my bike out to the curb and swung on to start riding, but the back wheel didn’t move. It had gone off balance and was dragging against the left side of my frame. So I carried it back upstairs and turned it upside down in the hallway of the second floor and dug out the number 15 socket wrench that Nick Cushing had given me a few weeks before. I loosened the locknuts and rebalanced the wheel as I tightened them again. I had done this task as well on the previous evening to try to correct a regular, soft ticking sound that I’d been hearing on my bike rides. It hadn’t helped and it looked like I hadn’t rebalanced it properly then. This time I was extra careful and it only took me about five minutes and a greasy hand wash to get successfully rolling on my way to Mississauga of all places.

            I took the Queensway and though it was a sunny day there was quite a chill riding on the breeze, especially near the lake. Near the Humber River I was surprised to see a large, dead coyote in the middle of the road. I’d seen them alive when my ex-girlfriend’s headlights interrupted a pack of them that were feasting on a deer carcass at her place in Kettleby, but I’d never seen a coyote corpse before.

            I had not travelled that far west for a few years but near Royal York a second hand bookstore that I’d remembered had a sign up that read “Closing Sale” was still open with the same sign on display.

            As I rode along, since I was headed to a haiku conference, I was inspired to compose a haiku, though when I think about it, it doesn’t quite fit into a single moment and so it’s merely haikuesque:

out of business on the Queensway

a book store

and a dead coyote

            
            Even though I was still in Toronto, it started feeling like I was already in the suburbs once I’d passed Islington because the businesses became increasingly more industrial except for the big box stores and the fast food chains.

            Riding my bike through Mississauga, besides charm, character and culture what is also always conspicuously absent are other cyclists.  On the entire trip the only other riders I saw were and older guy with a long beard on the side street pedalling a bike with a trailer and a woman in a hijab waiting to walk her bike across the Queensway.

            For quite a while along the Queensway in Mississauga it followed a long row of transmission towers, then it changed to a snooty gaited community with big ugly new looking houses. After that it was more village-like (Cooksville?) with a little old steepled community church before it turned to woods and finally came to an end. Then it changed its name to Glengarry before curving up to Dundas where I turned left and continued on to Mississauga Road then north about a block to the long campus entrance.

            Being a student at the downtown U of T campus I’m used to the character and atmosphere of the old university buildings. I took an immediate dislike to the Mississauga campus with its sterile architecture. I’m not against all modern buildings. I think the Robarts Library downtown, for instance, has a powerful design, but the glass and concrete buildings at U of T Mississauga have very little going for them from an aesthetic standpoint.

            I stopped at the first important looking building I saw and went inside to inquire at reception if they knew where Haiku Canada was throwing their shindig. The guy I spoke to looked it up and told me that it was in room 260 in the Instructional Building, which was two more buildings along that road.

            When I got to the room there was a reading going on, so I didn’t walk in. I stood outside and listened while drinking half of my homemade Gatorade. The woman that was reading got emotional near the end because of the subject of one of her poems and began to cry.

            After her reading there was a lunch break. Terry Ann Carter, who turns out to be the current president of Haiku Canada noticed me in the hall and approached me in a friendly way to find out what I was doing there. I told her that Hans Jongman had invited me and she invited me inside, though I think she might have welcomed me in anyway. Dutch was glad to see me and also Marshall Hryciuk, who I know through Dutch, got up to come over and give me a firm handshake and tell me that I was just in time for lunch. They had ordered pizza and so Dutch put some money in for both his and mine and I ate a couple of slices while he introduced me to some of the other members. Some people remembered me from a few years before when Dutch had first invited me to the conference when it was held on one of the Seneca College campuses. We chatted for most of lunch with Richard Stevenson, from Lethbridge, Alberta, who in addition to his poetry projects and several children’s books had also written a book about Canadian serial killer Clifford Olson and a poetry book about the life of Miles Davis. I asked if he’d mentioned Juliette Greco in his book, since I knew that the French singer of whom Jean Paul Sartre said had millions of poems in her voice and who was known as “The muse of existentialism” had been Davis’s lover for a time while he lived in Paris in the 1950s.

            When lunch was over I found a chair and took a seat next to Dutch.

            The next reading was from Guy Simner, who cut a striking figure with his bald head and jet-black Abe Lincoln style chin whiskers. He was accompanied by a multi-instrumentalist who also translated and recited some of Guy’s haiku in Ojibwe and also by a woman from Iran who translated and spoke other of his haiku in Persian and even mimed a couple of poems. I thought that some of Guy’s haiku were quite good. The only one that I remember though, but which I can only paraphrase went something like:

my sons, dressed as prospectors

dig for Yukon Gold

potatoes

            Then we heard Vickie McCullogh speak about a book she’d put together that featured the poetry of a female author who had died without a lot of recognition. She spent way too much time talking about her encounters with the author and her efforts to put together a book about her that there was very little time left over to read the poet’s haiku. I was drifting off during her tiresome ramble. It would have promoted the book better to have simply spent all her time reading the poetry.

            One thing I noticed was that Haiku Canada seems to have a membership that for the most part is not getting any younger. Even newer members tend to be about the same age as the more senior members. Unless they get some fresh blood in it’s going to keep looking like a guild for those in their golden years.

            Then there was another break because the coffee they’d ordered from Tim Hortons had arrived. I spent the time reading a section from the Hans Jongman book, “Swooning”. The book is his autobiography, written in the form of several haiban, which is a short prose piece accompanied by a complimentary haiku. About halfway through the book the young Hans meets Farida, the woman who was soon to become his wife of what will be fifty years in 2018. In the centre of the book Dutch inserted a piece that he’d transcribed from an oral account by Farida of her own life. I had known that Farida was Egyptian but until reading this section I had not heard about the rough and loveless childhood she’d had before moving to Holland where she eventually met Dutch.

            After the break, Hans Jongman was introduced. He read from both “Swooning” and “Shift Change”. Not very many haiku poets have as much experience at reading their work aloud in front of audiences as Dutch does. He has clearly benefited from all of that practice and has developed a relaxed, smooth style, with good enunciation.

            I found the prose that Dutch read from his earlier work to be generally better than that from Shift Change. I think it to be the case with a lot of writers that memories of childhood tends to call forth stronger imagery and more potent writing. And yet my impression of the accompanying haiku that he read from Shift Change is that it stood out more than that from Swooning.

            At the end of his set, Dutch did something that seemed totally out of character from my experience of him. He turned the haiku at the end of a well-written haiban called “The Carilloneur” into a performance piece. First he bent over and it looked like he was about to take his t-shirt off and one of the women said, “Oh no!” But instead pulled the top of his shirt up over his head and arched his back to look like Quasimodo. Then he mimed the pulling of a rope to ring a church bell three times and recited:

change ringing of bells

up and down goes

the stock market

            The final reading came from the MC for that day, Anna Yin, who spent most of her set showing a very boring montage video featuring images of her. I think it would have been more appropriate if she’d shown the video as a backdrop while she read poetry.
            Next on the agenda was something called “The gingko walk” which was supposed to involve people going out to be inspired to write haiku while experiencing the nature on the campus. Everyone that Dutch talked with about a group walk said that they’d planned on either taking a nap or resting up in some other way before the banquet. I think Dutch was a little disappointed. I was feeling a little sleepy myself after my long bike ride followed by the readings, but I’d come out to hang out with Dutch and was also hoping that the walk might perk me up.

            First of all we went over to the front of the building so I could show Dutch the bicycle I’d built. He was impressed and confessed that he only rides one from Canadian Tire. He said that if he had a better bike it might compel him to wear a helmet, I didn’t understand why that would be the case. I guess he meant that if he rode faster he would be more at risk.

            We strolled around the campus and although it was nice out there was a bit of a chill blowing around. It was just uncomfortable enough to understand why we couldn’t see anyone else from the conference out walking.

            In the parking lot there was a large red van that had once belonged to Rogers Communications but the company name had been painted over. Dutch told me it belonged to Marshall Hryciuk and his wife Karen Sohne, who are sort of like the king and queen of Japanese poetry in Canada. Some members of Haiku Canada rented rooms on the campus for the weekend but Marshall and Karen sleep in their van and were probably napping there as we passed.

            Dutch and I chatted in a courtyard surrounded by four buildings about the Dutch haiku scene. He said that it’s really big over there but that he hasn’t been able to break into presenting his Dutch language work to that audience. He offered the view that a lot of the Dutch poets are assholes. He also expressed some contempt for the Dutch language itself and surprised me by declaring that English is the most beautiful language in the world. I offered that French is pretty nice.

            As we stepped around the concrete island of the Mississauga campus we kept looking for a pathway that would lead to some kind of nature trail but there was surprisingly nothing. The buildings were surrounded by trees but there didn’t seem to be any welcoming interplay between the two worlds. Finally we crossed a road and found our way into a wooded area. The first thing we noticed was the strong fragrance coming from inside the bosk. It smelled very much like cedar and yet I saw no cedars anywhere. The smell seemed to be coming from an ancient trunk that looked like it had been hit by a bomb. If it had been still standing it would have been the tallest and thickest hardwood in that little forest.  Dutch pointed out that it had definitely been on fire. The stump was all charred and hollowed out and nearby, probably lying exactly where it had fallen was the blackened trunk that had once given the tree its majesty before it had gone to timber without the clean mercy of an axe.

            We heard a loud sound that registered to me as the patterned utterance of some kind of bird. It went “Whe whe wheaaaahhh!” followed by a kind of spooky staccato creaking song like the mating call of a haunted door hinge. Dutch was doubtful that it was a bird but I’d heard some very complex and almost mechanical noises being composed by the beaks of blackbirds. As we looked in the direction of the lamentation though it started to become evident that the disturbance was coming from the death throes of another broken tree whose agonized, shattered, groaning body was leaning and hanging like a nearly passed out drunk at an angle of 10:00 o’clock in the arms of its firmly staid living twin. The sound we were hearing seemed to be coming from a large fractured limb that was hanging precariously from the leaning tower and swinging like a tortured pendulum that when the breeze picked up made macabre music because of the play of ruptured wood against mangled wood that looked like it could fall at any time.

            Here’s my haiku for that day:

creaking dead tree

held up by its silent twin

I walk on a tender limb

            Dutch and I left the woods and headed back to room 260 where we found Guy Simner alone and packing up his equipment to leave. On seeing Guy close up I realized that he is probably older than most of the other Haiku Canada members and so I concluded that he must dye his beard black. Looking him up online later on I saw from photos over the last couple of decades that he’s had the beard in that Abe Lincoln style for a long time but has only recently transformed it from its natural white state to the coal dark shade that he now rocks.

            Terry Ann arrived and wanted us to make sure that the door to the room was locked properly since it was full of everyone’s books and the group wouldn’t be returning there until the next morning. The problem was though that when we closed the door it did not lock. This led to a search for maintenance or security to see if they could rectify the problem. Terry Ann finally located someone in uniform that was sure she could lock the door with her card but that didn’t work either. She called the campus police and Novelette assured us that she would wait by the door until they arrived to lock the door. We asked the woman’s name and she said it was Novelette. Terry Ann thought that was neat since we were all writers. I looked it up later and found that a novelette falls in word count somewhere between a short story and a novella.

            On our way out of the building we met the campus police. They told us how much they love Novelette and then gave us all campus police pens since they had their phone number on them.

            We walked a short ways together but then Terry Ann said she was going to go to her room and change for dinner. This got Dutch worried and he asked if we were required to dress up. She assured us that wasn’t the case and that it was just a woman thing that compelled her to want to change into a skirt.

            Dutch and I headed towards the Davis building where the banquet was supposed to happen. We followed the arrows and walked into a structure. The map on the wall said the faculty club was in room 28 on level 3, so we took the elevator and found that room 28 was an electrical room. We walked the halls for a while and whatever rooms weren’t under construction were science labs. We left the building and then retraced our steps to see if we’d been in the right building. Following the arrows again we discovered that we’d gone into the wrong place. We finally found the Davis building and the faculty Lounge but the weird thing was that the map downstairs in the Davis building was the exact same layout as in the other building we’d searched and that the faculty lounge here was also room 28 on the third level.

            Dutch bought me a beer and one for himself. That was his limit because he had to drive home after dinner. There were still quite a few free tables and so we sat down near the window and the buffet. A guy in his thirties named Brian joined us who had gone to university abroad and travelled throughout Europe. We chatted about the differences between Europe and Canada. He said that he was glad to be back here. He made the odd comment that Amsterdam is like Disneyland. I have been to Amsterdam and having seen lots of film footage of Disneyland I can’t see any remote similarity. I guess he meant that Amsterdam is very commercial now.

            Karen Sohne came to our table, put her hand on my shoulder and asked if this was table for all the studly single men. She seemed so much more upbeat than she’d been earlier that I wondered if the nap had been that magical or if she and Marshall had tipped a few drinks in the van.

            When the buffet opened, Anna announced that we would be lining up in order of tables. Marshall and Karen’s table got up first and then everybody else in the room lined up with no order at all.

            The food was good. The meat dish I think was braised Cornish hen; there was a nice lasagne, potatoes au gratin, an oriental noodle salad and a salad bar and bread after that but my plate was full. There were a variety of cheesecakes put out one at a time for dessert and coffee. As Dutch and I took the last two slices of a cherry cheesecake and lined up for coffee a waitress went past us with a delicious looking one of mocha. Dutch’s head turned covetously after it but we were stuck with our selections. It was perhaps a metaphor for all romantic commitments and so maybe was the fact that the cherry turned out to be quite satisfying after all.

            Our toastmaster of the evening was supposed to have been George Elliot Clarke but he had not arrived before, during or after dinner. I had mentioned it to him once at the end of March and once more on April 4^th on the last day of his Canadian Poetry course. I had also discussed it with Giovanna Riccio, who confirmed that she was definitely coming there with him, so it was fairly certain he hadn’t forgotten. Dutch wondered if he’d gotten lost but that seemed impossible to me. I assumed that as a U of T professor of several years he had probably lectured out there on more than one occasion. But a little later Anna announced that George had messaged her that he had indeed gotten lost and given up, with an added confession that on a previous occasion when he had been scheduled to be there he had also gotten lost. I guess I wasn’t that surprised that George would have gotten lost. He often gets lost as well during his lectures though he always takes his students someplace interesting nonetheless. I had no problem finding the place since all I had to do was look it up on an online map, see that I had to get to Mississauga Road and Dundas and then follow the signs. I suppose it’s different when one is driving a car like George and has to take the right exit off the highway before getting one’s bearings.

            Without George Elliot Clarke to officiate, a former president of Haiku Canada got up and took on the job. He decided to just leave the evening over to members coming up and talking about their experiences with Haiku Canada, and he went first. It turns out that he’s a lawyer. He said that he has handled murder trials and appealed to some very difficult judges but he was never more intimidated and humbled than he was by his first experiences with the poets he’s met in Haiku Canada.

            During the rest of the evening about a third of the people there got up to talk about how Haiku Canada had changed their lives, including Hans Jongman. A woman that was sitting to my left leaned over and asked me how this event compared to other poetry gatherings I’d attended. I told her that this one was much more like a club. Throughout the course of the testimonials, from time to time she would pass me a note. The first one read: “Not just a club, a religion”. I would agree that there is something slightly cultish about Haiku Canada, albeit in a less mind-stealing way. After a while she passed me another: “Or maybe it’s just a kind of timidity in keeping with the form?” In between speakers I tilted over and opined that there’s a little bit of AA in there too. Her final note read: “It’s a way to be a personality while hiding something subtle in your pocket.”

            On the way out I asked Dutch if he would help me find where I’d locked my bicycle, since it was after dark and the landmarks all appeared different. I walked with him to his car and he told me where I had to go from there. Then he reached into his trunk and gave me the author’s copies of his two books. Then we hugged and said goodnight.

            It had gotten quite chilly and I was still wearing shorts but at least I had my hoody on. I walked to my bike and set up the flashers at the front and back. The night before that I had slapped them both on the handlebar just so I wouldn’t forget them the next day.

            It’s not much fun riding a bicycle on the streets of Mississauga in the daylight, let alone in the black of night. I was definitely the only fool pedalling out there. But one goes into a home zone to some degree and the time passes. The cold wasn’t too bad once I got rolling but at around Hurontario I started to feel raindrops. Those drops increased to a splattering that followed me the rest of the way through Mississauga. My ass was also getting pretty sore.

            I was relieved when I saw a sign welcoming me to Toronto because I’d always thought that the boundary line was Kipling Avenue. I was quite disappointed to see my illusion shattered when the next road I passed turned out to be The West Mall. Once I did cross Kipling the rain stopped and it was nice that I hadn’t gotten wet the whole time it had been falling.

            Once I’d reached Royal York I was comforted by more familiar landmarks but discomforted by an aching left knee. As I passed the House of Lancaster several young women were running out of the club into a waiting black SUV limousine and a few more were crossing the street with the same destination while calling out to the other girls. I felt a sense of being home when I crossed Roncesvalles into Parkdale and passed a young drunken couple arguing on the street. She was sitting on the steps of the Our Lady of Lebanon Catholic Church and turned back towards her purse, which was a couple of steps higher. Her boyfriend was standing in the middle of the street wearing a crusty punk coat and pants and a big backpack, accusing her of showing the world her ass just as I rode between them. “You’re embarrassing!” she called back as I passed.

            I made it home at almost exactly 23:00 and I knew that on Sunday I would be nursing a sore knee.