A Woman of the World

            Wednesday was warm enough for me to dry my laundry on the railing of the deck, so I washed it in the tub. While it was soaking I rode down to the Bank of Montreal at King and Dufferin to take $2 out of my account because I already had $1.05 and I wanted to buy a can of Creemore.

            When I got back there was an orange and black tortoiseshell cat in my hallway. I was pretty sure she was under the care of the guy who lives in the second floor apartment at the back of the property next to ours, since I’d seen her hanging around while he was sitting outside smoking a couple of weeks before. She was pretty cautious about getting too close to me. I held out my hand and she sniffed me but she didn’t look like she wanted me to pat her. I left my apartment door open while I went over to the liquor store and when I came back she was still in the hall.

            The cat was hanging around the deck or the hallway all day. She came into my apartment a few times but never stayed long. When she was in the hall and I had to go check on my clothes she thought she was being chased out and hissed at me when I stepped out into the deck.

            Later that afternoon I saw the guy next door standing out on his little piece of roof calling “Inca! Inca! Inca!” He has a little space where he sits and smokes cigarettes on a plastic chair or chars smoky meat on a hibachi on a sad, sagging, ragged fibreboard kids desk. The area would be about half the size of my living room if not for the ventilator that sticks up from the now closed Chinese restaurant below and what looks like a year’s worth of beer cans collected in bags and piled up to one side. I recall that there was an attractive young woman living with him last year who’d made the little tar-floored section look like a nice little patio with plants, decorations and lights, but I guess she moved out. I asked if he was calling for his cat and he admitted that he’d accidentally locked her out when he left for work and she’d been outside all day and that she’s pretty old. Inca came to him from one of the adjacent roofs on the opposite side and he picked her up in his arms. I told him that I still have kitty litter and food left over from my cats if he ever wants any.

            I watched a couple of episodes from the sixth season of Leave It To Beaver. That season is different from the others, as if the writers, directors and producers knew for the whole year that it was the final one. Stories in previous seasons always tried to end on a funny not, either with a one-liner or a pillow fight between Beaver and Wally. In the sixth season they sometimes just end at what looks like the middle of a scene.

            In one of the shows I watched that night Beaver had been invited to represent his school on a teen panel, talking about issues of concern to teenagers like having one’s own phone. His brother came home on a free period to watch the show with his mother, his father took a break to watch the show at work, and Beaver’s teacher had brought in a television to the classroom to watch it as well. At about eleven seconds to show time Beaver asked to go get a drink of water so he didn’t hear the director tell the kids that the show would be taped and aired the following week. When Beaver returned to school everyone was mad at him because they thought he’d lied about being on TV. Only Beaver’s friend Gilbert believed that Beaver had thought he’d been on television and said that it sounded like an episode of the Twilight Zone where characters experience events or see things that no one else does.

            The second episode that I watched had a funny situation because there was a girl selling tickets at the movie theatre that Wally got up the nerve to ask for a date. She’d told him that she couldn’t meet him that day because she had to go shopping with her aunt. Later on though Beaver and Gilbert looked through the window of a bar and saw her sitting in a booth, drinking beer and smoking cigarettes with a tough looking older guy. Beaver gasped and exclaimed, “I think she’s what’s called a ‘woman of the world!’ I haven’t felt this weird since I found out there are four Lassies!”