A Gust of Wind

            On Tuesday morning I had memorized the first two verses and choruses of "Bourrée de complexes” (Buried in Complexes) by Boris Vian.

            I made the thirteenth video recording of my daily song rehearsal. I haven’t had time to play back any of the videos for the last few days but my feeling is that there will be at least five songs good enough to upload to YouTube and that includes those that I translated. These days any song that I do well in English I also sing and play well in French and if I screw any songs up it's usually more in the playing than in the singing.

            At 11:00 I headed up to Yonge and St Clair for my appointment with Amy for my two months overdue haircut. I had to pee most of the way there and under normal pre-pandemic circumstances I would have stopped at any bar along the way to use the washroom, but I couldn’t and so I had to hold it.

            It took me between thirty five and forty minutes to ride up there and I was forty minutes early. I sat outside in the sun for five minutes because there were a couple of customers waiting near the desk and I wanted to socially distance myself from them. When I went inside Amy was at the front desk. After a friendly greeting she told me that haircuts are by appointment now. I informed her that I had an appointment and she seemed surprised. Another stylist pointed out my name on the calendar and that I was scheduled for noon. Despite the fact that I’d been told that Amy would be cutting hair on Tuesday she said that she’d been asked by her manager to answer the phones that day and so she couldn’t cut my hair.  She offered that one of the other stylists could do it but I told her that I only wanted her to cut my hair. She offered my Thursday and I said I’d take it but wanted to know if she was sure this time that she’d be cutting hair that day. She explained that since this was their first week back there had been some confusion in coordinating everybody but she assured me she could cut my hair on Thursday. I reminded her that it's a long bike ride up there from my place and asked if I could use the washroom. I had been worried that social distancing rules might make them say customers couldn’t use the washroom but there was no problem. As I was leaving Amy apologized again. I tugged on my hair at the back and said, “Just two more days with a pony tail!" She said, "You look good!"

            On my way down the hill from St Clair a father and his two preteen kids went by on their bikes. I passed them seconds later.

            At College a gust of wind lifted the blue, floral dress of an elderly woman up to the tops of her thighs before she quickly pulled it down. She had pretty nice legs as far as I could see in that second.

            At Gerrard the man and his kids passed me and went through the red light. He must have been teaching them how to break the rules all the way down. I couldn’t imagine how they otherwise could have caught up with me.

            I stopped at Freshco on the way home where I bought three bags of black grapes, two pints of strawberries, a half pint of raspberries, two cans of peaches, raspberry skyr, Greek yogourt, three bags of skim milk and a box of spoon size shredded wheat.

            I got home in time for lunch and had chick peas withy olive oil, seasoned salt and garlic.

            I took a siesta and slept fifteen minutes longer than usual, probably because of the hot bike ride.

            In the afternoon I skipped my exercises and worked on my journal.

            For dinner I had a potato, a chicken leg and gravy while watching, “Rainy Day”, which was the tenth episode of the 1957-1958 Alfred Hitchcock produced TV series “Suspicion". It's a strange story set on a plantation in British West Africa and involving George and Nigel, two Englishmen who are employed in some capacity on the plantation and live together in a bungalow there. The story begins on Christmas Eve and ends on New Years Eve and it is the rainy season. George and Nigel are just the two of them having a Christmas Party, singing carols, setting off crackers and drinking “giggle water" (champagne). They receive a visit from Colonel Selby who recounts that Major Featherstone recently made a pass at his wife and she hit him in the head with a hammer, putting him in the hospital. Later the colonel meets the major in a bar and apologizes to him for his wife’s behaviour. The major wonders how the colonel's wife had a hammer so handy and the colonel informs him that she always keeps it with her and sleeps with it under her pillow.

George loves life on the plantation while Nigel hates it for many reasons. One thing is that Nigel is always getting caught in the rain without a proper mackintosh. When they go to pick up their mail Nigel always gets a lot of letters but George never gets a single one. When they talk about it later George confesses that he has no family and no friends and so he has no one that would write to him or to whom he could write. Suddenly George makes an unusual request. He asks Nigel if he can buy one of his letters from him so he can feel like he’s gotten a letter of his own. Nigel thinks he's a bit crazy to ask this but they are friends and he feels sorry for George and so he agrees. Nigel fans out his letters like cards and George picks one at random. Nigel wants to make it a gift but George insists on paying. Later however when Nigel casually asks what was in the letter George tells him that he’d rather not say since it's his letter and he'd rather keep it private. Nigel thinks he's mad and argues that it's his letter. George gently informs him that he sold it to him and so now it is his letter. Nigel reminds him that he often tells him what is in the letters that people send him and George says he is grateful for that but that Nigel doesn’t show him ever letter that he receives. Some letters he keeps private and George doesn't insist on hearing about any of his letters. As the days pass Nigel becomes more and more obsessed with the contents of the letter that he’d sold to George while George insists in not divulging its contents. When Nigel catches George writing a letter he wonders whom he would be writing to since he doesn’t have any friends or family. George says he is answering the letter that he bought from him. Nigel angrily tells him that he can’t write letters to his friends. Nigel begins to imagine who the letter was from that he sold to George and thinks that it’s from a married woman named Maggie with whom he’d had an affair. Leading up to New Years Eve George buys two bottles of giggle water and has their cook prepare a nice private dinner for Nigel and him. He surprises Nigel with the set table and hopes that it will ease tensions between them, but by this time Nigel is in a frenzy and he angrily tips the table, the setting and the turtle soup over. George finally decides that there is nothing to be done to save their friendship but to go and get the letter. Nigel reaches for it but George says he is going to burn it. Nigel begins attacking George. He takes one of the champagne bottles and keeps hitting George until he kills him. He takes the letter and opens it to find it’s an ad for ordering raincoats by mail.