Nita Talbot

            The snow from two days before was almost gone from my window view on Saturday morning, except for a tiny patch at the base of a pole near the Capital Espresso.

            This will probably be my last Saturday of not going to the food bank, as my essay is due on Wednesday and after that my writing time won’t be as precious.

            As usual on Saturday, at midday I went down to No Frills but compared to other weekends I bought very little. The only fruit picked up was a half pint of raspberries, since I had lots of grapes at home. I also have lots of meat and since there were no killer deals on body parts I skipped picking up any pieces of Bessie, Elmer or Chicken Little. I grabbed some yogourt, my weekly supply of mouthwash and one of those frozen gourmet apple-cinnamon pies that one has to finish baking oneself.

            There was a very talkative woman ahead of me at the checkout and her talking seemed to be the side effect of a mental condition. She seemed to feel compelled to give voice to every thought on the surface of her mind. She was telling the young, politely smiling and nodding hijabed cashier how much she loves to cook and what she was going to cook with the ingredients that she was buying. Suddenly she started telling the cashier what a nice leather jacket I was wearing. At my end of the belt were a half pint each of blueberries and raspberries that it looked like someone had abandoned. I picked them up and started putting them at the cashier’s station, explaining that someone had left them behind, but the talkative woman said they were hers, and so I passed them over to her. She explained that the belt must not have caught them with her other groceries and that she’d bought them because she loves blueberries and raspberries and now they are on sale and not $5 like they have been. Her bill was almost $100 and she said, “Holy samoley! I didn’t expect to buy this much, but I was hungry!” She used her credit card and explained that she has a very long password so it won’t be compromised. I was tempted to ask her what her password was just to see if she’d feel compelled to tell me.

            After getting home I went back out to the liquor store to buy two cans of Creemore. In the middle of the floor there was a clump of sod about the size of a tennis ball that must have shaken off from the tread of someone’s boot. There was still grass attached to it so I thought about telling the cashier that they’d better mow the lawn, but there was a big line-up behind me so I figured she’d rather just get through it without any complicated jokes that might need explaining.

            I leaned forward at the counter to look back at the clump of sod and I think the woman ahead of me, that was buying a shitload of booze, thought that I was trying to look at her credit card password. The people most afraid of thieves are the ones most likely to steal.

            A guy behind me was telling other people in line about a man that had gone with a hockey equipment bag into several LCBO stores throughout Southern Ontario and gotten away with $1000s worth of booze. If there is no security guard on duty or cops around to notify of a problem, the liquor store staff are not allowed to stop possible shoplifters or to search people’s bags. 

            At lunchtime I had a slice of toast with peanut butter and cheese.  I put the frozen pie in the oven but it took almost an hour for it to be done.

I worked for about an hour on my essay and pushed it into the required sixth page. I now have two paragraphs on William Blake’s symbolism of the sun and came up with some insights about a couple of his poems:

The merry activity of we children of the ecchoing green that is the Earth begins with sunrise; the sun presides over, nourishes and encourages our play, and even indirect and fading sunlight blesses our frolic. In “The Nurse’s Song” we are allowed by the solar nurse to continue our sport between the golden and the blue hours of twilight till the light is gone. In “The Ecchoing Green”, a poem that ends with sunset, Blake is describing the history and future of humanity, which begins at the dawn of man with the grace of the sun, persists and thrives (because wherever there is sun in harmony with rain, poverty and hunger cannot exist) and when its light no longer touches us there will be no more happy activity on our darkening green planet.

            I had an egg with toast and a beer for dinner while watching Peter Gunn. This story takes place on a carnival midway. A magician’s assistant named Trixie is supposed to disappear from an upright mock up of a mummy’s coffin. There is a puff of smoke and the magician fires a gun into the air but when he opens the box Trixie falls forward, dead. Apparently she was shot at the very moment the magician fired the blank. Lieutenant Jacoby arrests Trixie’s husband Franklin because he was heard threatening to kill her. The Baron, the carnival strongman fears for the life of Rowena, the woman he loves and hires Gunn to protect her. Rowena is the carnival exotic dancer and though she’s beautiful, her act is kind of a lame attempt at a belly dance in traditional costume. The Baron’s affections for Rowena are clearly not returned, as when she sees Gunn after work she begins flirting with him right away. She asks him to take her to dinner but when she says she wants to go to Mother’s, Gunn knows he’s in trouble, since his girlfriend Edie sings there. He tries to talk her out of Mother’s but the whole crew is going there and she insists. At Mother’s, Edie comes out and begins singing “Too Marvellous for Words” by Richard A. Whiting and Johnny Mercer, but she doesn’t sing it very happily after she sees Gunn with Rowena. 

            Edie comes to their table and Gunn stands. She tells him he might like her next number, which is called, “You’d Look Lovely In A Plaster Cast Blues”. He says, “I don’t usually go for special material. I sort of go for the old standards like, ‘You’ll Never Believe Me’”. Edie says, “I don’t think I know it” and walks away. Gunn sits down, not realizing that Edie has pulled his chair away and so he hits the floor. Gunn takes Rowena back to her tent and she kisses him before going inside. As Gunn is leaving, the Baron confronts him about the kiss and attacks him. Gunn judo throws the strongman all over the place. Until from inside of Rowena’s tent there is a scream followed by a gunshot. At first they find Rowena prone on the ground but it turns out the bullet just lightly creased her temple. Later while she and the rest of the crew are being questioned by Jacoby in the dinner tent, Gunn searches Rowena’s tent and finds a scrapbook, which clears up a lot of things for him. Rowena walks in and admits that she’d killed Trixie because she’d seen the scrapbook and threatened to blackmail her. She explains that the man in the pictures is her ex-husband. She’s about to tell Gunn his real name when she is shot in the back and killed. There is a chase through the midway and just as Sweetzer the carnival owner is about to shoot Gunn, Gunn turns and shoots him.

            Rowena was played by the always delightfully sultry Nita Talbot who portrayed Marya the Russian spy on seven episodes of Hogan’s Heroes.