Streets Paved With Golden Leaves

            I had to work early on Tuesday morning and so I had to shorten a lot of my songs during practice.
            I managed to eat a couple of oranges and some yogourt with honey, but I had to leave an almost full cup of coffee on my desk.

            It had been raining and quite windy from the time I got up until just before I left. The rain and the wind had knocked so many yellow leaves off the trees that the side streets looked like they were paved with gold. As I was climbing Brock and about to turn right on Dundas a big gust of wind knocked a large flock of leaves loose and they were flying around in formation like a murmuration of sparrows.

            I worked for Greg Damery and I suspected that he would be surprised to see me because I'd already worked for him for two Tuesday's in a row. When I'd gotten home from work last Tuesday there was an email from Tracy, the model coordinator, asking me if I wanted to work for Greg on November 6th and 14^th. I took the work because there is so little but I figured Greg probably wanted a female model after having a male for two weeks in a row. So when he saw me walk in he was a bit pissed off at Tracy for booking me twice. He asked me to tell her next time she does something like that. I gently told him that I wasn't going to tell her anything because I wasn't going to look a gift horse in the mouth. He told me that I'm part of a small block of models that he's requested and so I wouldn't lose any work but I don't think there's any guarantee that Tracy would give me the same amount of work if she didn't make a mistake.

            I just posed with my shirt off because the focus was on hands for this class.

            After Greg's class I stayed in the same room to work for Echo Railton. She's very easy going and pleasant. She told me it was good to see me again and I believed her. She didn't need me to remove any clothing at all because it was a portrait class but there were short poses to start.

            After that I had time to ride home and have a quick lunch and then go to bed for an hour and a half before going to work again. As I was getting ready to leave for work I put a potato in a pot to boil for fifteen minutes so all I’d have to do was heat it up when I got home that night.

            There was a student run open studio for painting just cleaning up when I arrived but the instructor that I worked for, Crawford Noble was already there. When he introduced himself he said, “I think you worked for me last year.” I said, “Well, I was here last year.” He said, “You were here when I was a student." The previous group left a lot of props behind without cleaning up after themselves, including a heavy leather couch on my stage, which would have been in my way since I was doing short poses, so Crawford helped me take it off.

            Once I started working I suddenly remembered that I’d forgotten to turn the stove off at home. There was nothing I could do but wait for work to be over, rush home and hope for the best but I could smell burnt food for the rest of the night. I was going to suggest to Crawford that I skip my fifteen or twenty minute coffee break and leave a little early but he ended the drawing session an hour ahead of time anyway.

            The wind was against me on the way home but I had mostly green lights. I could smell something burnt blowing towards me all the way home but my building was still there when I approached it and there were no fire trucks. Once I was in the hallway outside my apartment I could smell of something having burned but there was no smoke anymore. I took the pot off the stove. The sliced potato looked like tiny little wedges of black limes but the pot wasn’t as black on the bottom as I’d expected it to be.

            I heated a chicken leg for dinner and had it with some potato chips and salsa while watching Peter Gunn. Almost all of these stories begin with a man in a suit walking. This guy in a suit is a popular boxer named Tony. He leaves his gym and gets into a car. Then a car drives up and a man with a shotgun kills Tony. Nobody can figure out who killed Tony because he was so well liked that nobody had a reason. Gunn suspects Tony's friend Gino who has been drinking heavily since Tony died. Gino was a much less talented boxer than Tony but Tony always took care of him and he also made Gino the beneficiary of a $10,000 insurance policy. Gunn realizes that this was a professional hit that Gino could not afford and then he realizes that Tony had been driving Gino's Car that night and that the hit had been meant for Gino. Gunn goes to the gym where the owner has two of his men in the ring with Gino, about to beat him to death. Apparently this was all over a stripper named Sharon. Gino shows that he's not a bad fighter after all as he takes on the two men but they eventually get the upper hand. The boss says to finish him when Gunn knocks out the boss and hits the lights. Gunn shoots one of the men and Gino shoots the other before he can kill Gunn.

Sharon was played by Larri Thomas, who was also a dancer and worked as a stand-in for Julie Andrews in The Sound of Music and Mary Poppins.