Creemore is on Sale!

            Every now and then during French song practice I’ll forget a line or phrase that I’ve done right at least a hundred times in a row, and yet two days later I’ll always have it back as if there had been no interruption in my memory.

            In the later afternoon on Wednesday I took a bike ride that most of the way out had me hot and sweaty. East of Main though I started to feel a breeze that made the rest of my trip to St Clair and Bexhill and the trip home much more pleasant.

            I stopped at Freshco on the way home to buy grapes, bananas, strawberries, raisin bread and yogourt.

            When I got home I took everything but my keys and $3.15 out of my pocket and went back out to buy a can of Creemore.

            The guy in front of me was buying several small green bottles of something and asked for a box but the cashier didn’t have any. He pointed at a box at her feet and said, “What about that one?” She explained, “That’s for receipts.” He argued, “Couldn’t you put the receipts in one of those plastic shopping baskets? You have plenty of those!” She looked at him with polite incredulity. He finally found a couple of shallow boxes that are usually for shrink wrapped cans and laid his bottles down in them.

I was very surprised when my Creemore rang up at $2.90. It turns out that there’s a sale on and eight individual cans are actually cheaper than a case of eight. 

On the way back in I checked the mail and there was a voter registration card for my daughter, even though she hasn’t lived in Ontario for at least five years.

I was exhausted after dinner, even though I still had two hours before bedtime. That bike ride in the heat seemed to really drain my energy.

I watched two episodes of The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis.

The first had the third appearance of Zelda Gilroy who continues to pursue Dobie despite him constantly rejecting her. They are sitting in the park as Dobie warns her of all of the things he will do to make her go away. He says, “I’ll stop washing and shaving!” and then Maynard arrives saying, “You rang?” Zelda tells Dobie and Maynard of her plan for Dobie’s survival. Since he has no prospects, she says, the only hope for him is if he goes back to the land and becomes a farmer. She tells Dobie that the first step is to enrol in biology at school so he can learn about plants and animals. Dobie agrees but insists that Maynard take biology and then live on the farm with him.  In their first biology class they are given a home assignment to each acquire a live chicken and to inject it with hormones over two months to observe the results. Dobie, Maynard and Zelda hide their chickens in the basement of the Gillis Grocery. After a few male hormone injections the hens begin to crow like roosters. Meanwhile Dobie meets a girl named Imogene whom he wants to date. He tries to break it off with Zelda but she calmly tells him it’s not going to happen. Zelda tells Maynard he’s going to have to inject the chickens himself and she gives him the instructions. He reads “2 ccs of hormones” as “2 cups”. Zelda finds Dobie reading poetry to Imogene in the park. Zelda immediately sits down beside Imogene and presents her with a transcript of Dobie’s grades, his last IQ test, his personality profile, record of attendance, a sample of his penmanship and the coup de grace, a picture of his father. Imogene immediately decides to dump Dobie. Back at the store a giant chicken smashes its way out of the basement and Dobie’s father has to kill it with a shotgun but after it’s dead it returns to normal size. However it leaves a monstrous egg behind.

In the second story Dobie is dating a girl named Myrna whose father, an ex-navy man, hates him because he trampled his prize flowers. But Myrna tells her father that Dobie is joining the navy so suddenly he loves him. The rumour gets around that Dobie is shipping out and so he begins to enjoy the attention. Dobie tries to tell Myrna’s father that he flunked his physical but her father pulls some strings so that he’ll pass. But since he’s underage his father has to sign a consent form. He does it because he thinks it’s what Dobie wants but it turns out he mistakenly and luckily signed his store inventory sheet.