New Roommate

            Confucius says: “He who wears last pair of clean underwear must go to laundromat.” So on Wednesday I did my laundry. As I was getting ready to leave my next door neighbour Benji arrived in the hall from outside with a tall young Sikh technician from Bell. Benji explained that he’d just arranged a contract with Bell to get internet, phone and television for $100 a month for a year. I warned him that they weren’t going to warn him when the year is up. They’ll just send him a bigger bill and hope he doesn’t notice.             
            The tech guy took off his colourful shoes and left them outside Benji’s door and went out onto the roof to work in a cable box two buildings away. I don’t think he was barefoot, so either the shoes he left slipped on top of another pair or he totally changed pairs before going out back. I don’t think it’s a Sikh thing religiously to remove one’s shoes but it might have been cultural. Benji explained later that they were just overshoes the technicians wear when they’re tramping around in the dirt and then take off before entering homes. I’d never noticed a cable guy do that before. Maybe it’s a new thing that started after I told Bell to fuck off.

            Benji said the mailmen might be going on strike. I asked him if the mail women would be going on strike too.

            At the Laundromat I didn’t see an attendant for the first time ever. I needed a third loonie for the top-loading washing machine but nobody had one. One Tibetan guy I asked didn’t seem to know what a loonie was. But then the Korean or Japanese attendant arrived, though I didn’t recognize him at first. He was dressed differently and wheeling something into the Laundromat and so at first I thought he was delivering something. Then I realized he was carting in a bag of golf clubs. He had either just come from golfing or was planning on going after his shift as he was wearing golfing clothes, including a white belt and a fluorescent green golf shirt with horizontal white stripes. I stood behind him holding out four quarters and waiting for him to get into work mode and notice me, but he spent a considerable amount of time carefully removing several clubs from his bag and laying them out on his work table. Finally he turned and saw me and then gave me my dollar.

            A little boy was making change in the machine for his mother but he dropped quarters on the floor about ten times while he was getting them out of the slot.

            On my way home, at Jameson and Queen I noticed a woman that I used to see every week a couple of years ago in the food bank line-up, but now she was in a wheelchair. After my laundry was done I put some of it away and then had lunch. I ate a few blue tortilla chips with about six teaspoons of sour cream and some hot sauce.

            A new plant has sprouted up beside the little lemon tree that I’ve had for almost twenty years. The one lemon tree resulted from planting several lemon seeds, though it never flowered and never grew taller than two-thirds of a meter. I don't know what is growing beside it but I did plant a peach seed that had come loose from an opened pit. I guess it’s possible that what is growing is just some seed that blew in through the window. We’ll see.   

           I watched the first episode of Perry Mason. A woman named Evelyn finds a gun in her hotel room that isn’t hers. Since she has been falsely accused of a crime in the past she is worried and calls Perry Mason. He tells her to go to a motel for the night and bring him the gun in the morning but while she is driving a man in a white hood tries to force him off the road. She fires the gun twice at his car to scare him off and immediately goes to see Mason. Later a man is found dead from a bullet to the head in a car in the ditch. The hood is found with him but it has no bullet hole. The gun is traced to a wealthy businessman named Mervin Aldritch who is engaged to an actress named Helene Chaney. He’d bought two identical guns, one for himself and the other for Helene. Mason goes to show Aldritch the gun and asks him to check to see if his had been stolen. He leaves with the gun Mason had handed him and comes back saying that his gun has been stolen from his glove compartment. But prior to handing Aldritch the gun Perry marked it with a file so he knows that Aldritch brought back the wrong gun. Evelyn is arrested for murder because Harry Marrell, the man in the hood, owed her $1500 so the police believe she had a motive to kill him. When she’d previously confronted Marrell about the money he’d said he would give it to her if she met him at a certain motel. She went there and ended up getting framed for stealing the jewelry of Helene Chaney. It turns out that the motel owner had been promised $500 by Merrell to frame Evelyn, but he didn’t pay him so the motel owner killed Merrell and took his money.

            Perry Mason was one of my mother’s favourite shows, if not her favourite.