Mermaid

            On Monday in the late morning I rode up to Sham Florists in the rain because my daughter wanted to know what florist they’d connected with in Montreal to send the flowers I’d ordered for her birthday last year. I’d somehow gotten the impression that they were at Brock and Dundas but they weren’t and so I continued up to College where they weren’t either. I suddenly remembered that they are at Dundas and Dufferin and so I pedaled along College and then south. The man behind the counter was not whom I’d dealt with last year. He couldn’t find Astrid’s name on his computer but said he could look through the paperwork if he knew the exact date of delivery. I told him it had been either May 16 or 17. He told me he was all alone in the store that day and that he would try to look for the information before the afternoon and so I should call him at around 16:00. I assume that even the day after Mothers Day is pretty busy for florists so it was understandable that it would take a while. When I called him back in the afternoon he still hadn’t gotten to it and so he said to call on Tuesday afternoon.

            I got caught up on my journal.

            Because of the rain I stayed home.

            I reviewed the recording of my song practice from August 3, 2017. About half of the video was taken up by me practicing “Sixteen Tons of Dogma”. Watching an old video of yourself struggling with something that is less of a struggle now is like watching your own child. I kind of felt like stepping into the screen and giving myself a hug. The only song that came out all right was “Jeunes Femmes et les Vieux Messieurs” but one can see the metal of my zipper. Usually I would have had my undershirt  pulled down over that area but I guess it climbed up.

            I weighed 90.7 kilos before dinner. I would think I’d weigh less when I’m hungry.

            I boiled a carrot and a potato and heated a chicken leg for dinner with gravy.

            I watched two episodes of Sea Hunt.

            In the first story Mike is training two members of the Florida Highway Patrol to be skin divers. He’s also teaching them underwater self-defence. Meanwhile there is a scuba diving criminal robbing boats and shoreline houses. Mike interviews Waco, the old man who runs the local scuba equipment rental place. Waco has 19 regular rental customers and he gives Mike a detailed description of all of them from memory. Based on the description by a young woman who was robbed, the closest match is a local mechanic named Herb Warren. Mike goes back to Waco and puts tracing liquid on Warren’s tanks so that anything they rub against will show under a black light that he’s been there. Waco phones the police next time warren takes his tanks and tells them the area toward which he’s headed. Warren robs a house and is about to emerge from the water to get to his boat when he sees Mike and the cop. They chase and capture him and the house that was robbed shows evidence of the tracing liquid. But whomever they used as an underwater stand-in for the actor that played Warren was not short and stocky like him.

            In the second story Mike is helping two married friends, Marie and Alex, dive for sponges when he approaches an underwater cave and hears music coming from inside. Suddenly an incredible force begins to suck him inside but he grabs the overhanging rocks and manages to struggle free of the current. His friends tell him that he’d found the Cave of the Mermaid where Marie’s uncle died and so have many other divers. Only one man has survived and now Nick wanders the docks in a daze. He says he saw the mermaid smiling at him before he blacked out. Not believing in mermaids, Mike decides to solve the mystery but on his second attempt he comes even closer to being violently sucked into the cave. He begins to study the currents of that area and thinks he’s figured out a time when they are less strong. He enters the cave and finds it rich with sponges. He sees the bodies of dead divers, the music being made by the clanking of an old anchor chain as the current passes through it and he sees that the mermaid is the carved figure of a woman that had broken off from the prow of an old wreck.