Drip

            On Monday morning I finished working out the chords for the verses of “Les filles n'ont aucun dégoût” and started on the chorus.  I probably would have finished it if I hadn’t gone to the washroom and stepped with my socks on in a puddle. I grabbed a sponge and started soaking up the water. It was mostly under the bathroom sink where I discovered a leak. I used paper towels to dry up the rest of the moisture and put a bucket under the drip. I tried shutting off the valves under the sink but the drip was the same either way and it didn’t increase when the tap was running either.

            A little later when I went back to the washroom it was wet again and on closer inspection I saw that there was a hole in the pipe above the leak and it was spraying a mist to the left. I moved the bucket as far to the left as I could and still have it catching the drip. In a few minutes I checked again and the bucket wasn’t catching all the spray. I put two plastic containers to the left of the bucket.

            At 9:30 I called my landlord to tell him about the leak but he made me mad because the first thing he did was complain that everything that goes wrong happens in my apartment. I told him to stop blaming and to come and fix the leak. He yelled for a few seconds and finally said he’d call a plumber. He called me back a little later and told me to wrap a towel around the place where it was spraying so the water would drip down. That was a good idea and it worked to help keep the floor and the cabinet under the sink dry until the plumber came in the late morning.

            He was a young guy who introduced himself as Tony. As we poked our heads under the sink I saw that it was also leaking from the bottom of the sink. But when he left for his truck to get some tools I realized that the drip in the pipe was actually just caused by the water running down from the spray hole and what I’d thought was a leak in the bottom of the sink was really just from the spot where most of the spray was hitting and then the accumulated water was dripping down from there. Tony asked me how long I’ve been living here and I told him 22 years. He said, “If you don’t mind my asking, how much rent do you pay?” I told him $619. 70 and we speculated that the landlord would probably raise the rent to $1000 if I ever moved out.

            It took Tony just a few minutes to change the flexible pipe that had gotten rusted and he was on his way.

            Because of the leak the early part of the day got away from me.

            Instead of lunch I just ate some grapes and took a siesta.

            I did my gluteus muscle exercises for the first time in three days.

            I got caught up on my journal and after 17:00 I got ready to ride downtown to the OISE Library to return and renew some books.

            This was the longest bike ride I’d taken in several weeks. I would probably be sore on Tuesday morning but it was nice to get out and ride my bike.

            There was a bit of a flood at Spadina and Bloor as I rode through a brown pond to wait at the lights.

            After renewing my books the librarian said, “I guess I’ll see you in six months!” I said, “You mean six weeks don’t you?” and he confirmed that.

            I rode down St George to College, across to Spadina and south to Queen.

            I stopped at Freshco to buy yogourt and also grabbed a litre of olive oil for $6.

            When I was putting my stuff away a familiar shouting woman was calling someone a “little piece of shit”. Nobody ever gets called a “big piece of shit”. It’s as if it would be less of an insult to be a large turd than a small one.

            I grilled the three fresh chicken breasts that I got from the food bank on Saturday. I boiled two small potatoes, sautéed an orange pepper and heated some gravy. I had dinner while watching a United States Steel Hour teleplay.

            I was surprised that the story, “The Two World’s of Charlie Gordon” is adapted from a story by Daniel Keyes called “Flowers for Algernon”, which I read for my Science Fiction course in the fall of 2014. Charlie is a learning handicapped adult. He has a teacher named Jane Rollins. A laboratory selects for an experimental brain surgery that may make Charlie smarter and Jane is hired to instruct him if the experiment is a success. It is successful and Charlie grows gradually smarter until he becomes a genius. At that point he becomes the lover of Jane Rollins. But it turns out that the results are only temporary and Charlie gradually slips back to his previous state. He does have some faint memories of things he learned while he was intelligent. Jane encourages him to keep trying to learn because whatever knowledge he acquires from his own efforts are permanent.

            Charlie was played quite well by Cliff Robertson.

            Jane was played by Mona Freeman, who started modelling while still in high school and was discovered by Howard Hughes. Because she photographed young she got teen roles long after she was no longer a teenager. She retired from film work in the late 50s and worked in television. She said one could learn more about acting from five minutes of television than from working on an entire film.

            Jane’s last name in the original story was Kinnian. It’s told in the first person and so the spelling and grammar reflect the different stages of Charlie’s development and regression.