Lego Bomb

            On Friday I couldn’t really relax after several days of working on my essay because I had to work at my job. I posed for my second and final booking with Brianne Service’s class. She's one of the newest of the new instructors that have been teaching at OCADU and she's certainly the nicest. One of the disappointing things about the college is that most of the really friendly old school teachers have retired but Brianne is surprisingly engaging.

            She makes me work though. I did 20 second poses, 30 second poses, one minute poses and ten minute poses before we finally returned to the pose that I’d begun last week with Deborah Blok on stage with me.

            During the long break Brianne sat down to tell me that she wanted four 5 minute foreshortened poses after we started again. I told her about Tom Philips, who died last year and how almost every time he pained or drew a model he would pick the position with the most foreshortening. When we got started I asked if she’d wanted only standing poses because I’d gotten the impression the students were fitting me into vertical boxes that they’d already drawn, but that wasn’t the case. She came up to me with a book that showed examples of foreshortened poses but I said, “I know how to do foreshortening.” She apologetically said, “Yes, you’re a professional” and took the book away.

            On my breaks I typed my lecture notes from Wednesday’s Romantic Literature class.

            After class Brianne asked if I was from Toronto. I told her that I was raised on a farm in New Brunswick. She said, “And now you’re a city boy!” We agreed that artists tend to prefer city life.

            I told Brianne that she looks something like Catherine O’Hara and asked her if anyone’s ever told her that before. She said she gets it all the time.

            After work I wanted to get the shopping out of the way at my two favourite supermarkets so I wouldn’t have to go out again all weekend. I stopped at Freshco first and as I was locking my bike a man got out of his car and approaching me with a smile he said, “Hi! Do you remember me?” I said, “You look familiar, but where do I know you from?" He said, “I was a teacher at Parkdale school when your son was a student there.” I said, “Daughter!” He said, “I thought for sure you had a son." "I have a daughter" "Maybe I've got the wrong person,” I told him that my daughter did go to Parkdale Public School. He said again that he’d thought that I’d had a son and I had the feeling that we would have gone back and forth forever if I didn’t tell him that my daughter is transgender. After that he said “daughter" and told me that he had always found she and I interesting because we were both so rebellious and that I was always fighting with the administration of the school to keep her from getting suspended. I told him that I hated the principal. He admitted that she was very tough. She was Finnish and so was her husband, who was also a minister.

            I related a couple of events that illustrate how fucked up the school system was. In Grade 2 at Parkdale School my daughter’s class had a play session and Astrid was building something with Lego. The teacher asked her what she was making and she told her, “I’m making a bomb to blow up the school”. The teacher suddenly got upset and told her she had to take it apart as if it was really going to blow up. I think that would piss off any kid and so it just made Astrid blow up even worse.

            Later in high school, my daughter was in an art class at a double desk with another student when she asked to borrow the kid’s eraser. For some reason the other student was worried about getting his eraser back and he actually reached into Astrid’s coat pocket and took out her keys to our home and said he was going to hold them until he got his eraser back. Astrid picked up a pair of scissors and pointed them at him and next thing you know the cops showed up and my 14-year-old child was being escorted out of the school in handcuffs. She spent six hours in a cell before I even found out about it and went to pick her up. This was all the fault of the Safe Schools Program started by Mike Harris that had put police officers in every school. It particularly targeted black kids but basically any kid that was different.

            We walked to the supermarket together and stood inside chatting while annoyed customers were trying to get around us. He said his name and I remember it starts with “Sar” and that he told me it’s Polish. The only name like that I can find on a list of Polish names is “Seweryn", so maybe that's it. He said he's retired now and just came back from kite surfing in Cuba. He says his pension is depressingly small but that Cuba is a very cheap place to vacation.

            We said goodbye a couple of times but ended up shopping and talking together for a while before I drifted off to get items that weren’t where he was lingering. We said goodbye again at the checkout.

            I bought three bags of grapes, several avocadoes, vine tomatoes, bananas, two jugs of orange juice, two bottles of Garden Cocktail and a pack of paper towels.

            Since my backpack and my bags were full I stopped at my place to unload them before heading down to No Frills. I bought seven bags of black sable grapes, a half pint of raspberries and some mouthwash.

            I must have chatted with Seweryn for a long time because it was time to make dinner when I got home. I had tomatoes and avocadoes as usual for my fast and watched The Rifleman.

            In this story a notorious gunfighter named Wes Carney has married Clair, an old friend of Lucas McCain’s late wife. They’ve decided to try to settle down and run a feed store in North Fork but because of Wes’s reputation, other gunfighters keep trying to draw him into a gunfight. He had been offered a sheriff’s job in another town but he had promised Clair that he would hang up his guns. He seems miserable and when a whole gang of outlaws threaten to take over the town he finally puts on his gun and helps Lucas and the marshal take them out. Clair realizes that she made a mistake to try to make him stop doing what he does best and so she agrees to let him take that sheriff’s job.