Míriam Cólan

            The screaming homeless woman was screaming right under my window on Tuesday morning. I know that she can’t help herself but it’s very distracting during song practice.

            Someone across the street feeds the pigeons every day and there are sometimes a hundred there. A woman walking two dogs had to struggle hard with the leashes as the dogs lunched and suddenly there was an explosion of rock doves. They would settle seconds later and the dogs would lunge again causing the same sudden scattering. This went on a few times while stem rose from the grates nearby.

            I had almost made u my mind to go out to the supermarket and buy grapes because I’d run out, but better judgement prevailed. I had mandarin oranges and apples at home and I can always stop to buy grapes on my way home from class on Wednesday, so it would have been silly to go out just for grapes.

            I fished all my lecture notes out of my journal entries and created a separate file for them, which I began reading in preparation for my test on Thursday.

            I re-read John Clare’s "The Lament of Swordy Well", since it will be the last poem we will be looking at this year.

            I watched the penultimate episode of the first season of Peter Gunn. The story begins with an armoured car robbery. A car cuts off the armoured car and an inside man shoots the driver from the back where the money is. After the money is loaded into the car the inside man is shot. At Mother’s, Edie sings “Brief and Breezy” by Henry Mancini and Sammy Cahn. A woman named Maria, wearing mourning clothes comes to see Gunn. She wants to hire Gunn to take her brother’s casket to Mexico and to deliver it to her father. She can’t go because her father blames her for her brother’s death. She breaks down during their conversation and Gunn agrees to go. At the Mexico City airport, before Gunn can meet with Maria’s father Ramone, he is arrested and questioned by Captain Noriega about the coffin. After being released, a car with Ramone in the back is waiting for Gunn outside the police station. As Ramone did not come in to vouch for him to the police, Gunn is now suspicious. Ramone asks for the shipping certificate of the coffin but Gunn says he left it with the police. He leaves the car and punches one of Ramone’s men that tries to stop him. He is chased down an alley but escapes. Gunn goes back to the airport and bribes someone to let him into the storage area. He opens the coffin and finds no body but over a million dollars in cash. Noriega finds him there and after some discussion decides that Gunn probably did not steal the money. He suspects that it’s from the armoured car robbery. They arrange to work together. The money is removed from the coffin and Gunn gives Ramone the shipping certificate. When they find it empty they come after Gunn and take him to Ramone and Maria. She seems to be in charge. Gunn demands $100,000 in exchange for the money. Maria agrees. Gunn also demands an unarmed escort. Maria tells them to put heir guns down and Gunn starts swinging. Captain Noriega arrives but does not let his men interfere. After the last man is knocked out Gunn wonders why he didn’t help. Noriega explains, “I just wanted to see some good old American know how!” Talk about an unrealistic ending!

            Maria was played by Míriam Cólan, who played Al Pacino’s mother in Scarface even though she was only four years older than him. She received an Obie award for lifetime achievement in theatre in 1993.

            A very good Mexican dancer in a bar was played by Elvira Corona

Beachy Head

            On Monday I downloaded my professor’s essay: “Form and Loss in Charlotte Smith’s Elegiac Sonnets”. It wasn’t required but for future essays it might be a good idea to see how she likes to write them.

            It had been so warm the previous day that I was worried that I’d overdressed for my bike ride to class, but the temperature had dropped and so my extra layers were comfortable.

            The classroom was a mess when I arrived. I had to spread the desks out, raise the shades, throw away some garbage, raise the projector screen, find a table for Professor Weisman’s desk that didn’t look like someone had spilled their sticky lunch on it, put two lecterns together and dig some chalk out of my backpack to replace what had been stolen again.

            The professor told us that she was going for a root canal that afternoon.

            She was dismayed by the lack of attendance to her class because she goes to a lot of trouble to prepare her lectures and there were only 18 in attendance out of 40. She wanted our opinion as to whether she should take attendance and deduct marks for absence. I told her that since there are no participation marks then it wouldn’t make sense to deduct marks for non-participation. She said that in the fourth year seminars that she teaches there are participation marks and she takes attendance but that’s because the classes are smaller. She opined that taking attendance for a class of 40 is too much.

            We looked at Charlotte Smith’s long poem, “Beachy Head”. It was published posthumously in 1807 and some critics speculate that it is unfinished. Professor Weisman thinks that it is complete.

            Smith tries to establish a strong cultural voice for herself by writing both sonnets, Latinate and learned scientific footnotes, on botany, ornithology and geography, which had been elements of the high cultural preserve of men. She was a voracious reader and she was learned, erudite and scholarly, but not taken seriously. Her prefaces were apologetic.

            Beachy Head is a prospect poem like Tintern Abbey. A prospect poem starts off with the poet overlooking a natural landscape. In a Romantic prospect poem the natural scenes are invested with meaning because of the imaginative vitality of the poet. The activity of the mind is given primary attention.

            She’s at the top of Beachy Head, which is one of the first land points in England from France, though not as close as Dover.

            There are no geological similarities between southern England and northern France other than the chalky cliffs of Beachy Head.

            She is addressing the cliff she’s on and looking across to France.

England was at war from 1793 to 1815. War is an unnatural disunity.

Smith believed that a massive concussion, or earthquake had separated England from France but it was really a massive flood from a glacial lake.

The word “sublime” is contrasted with “beautiful”. That which is sublime is often terrifying and has ennobling grandeur and majesty like cascading waterfalls and cliffs.

The poem is in iambic pentameter, the most soothing and the closest to human speech.

Smith defines herself against the example of Wordsworth. She seems to be speaking of herself.

She is on top. “I would recline” is in the subjunctive. She is assuming ease by reclining.

I suggested that in reclining she makes herself as low as possible and yet she is still on top. She did not climb to get there but she is at the high point unobtrusively. She’s claimed the summit at the meridian of the sun. The enormous horizon that she sees can only be viewed from a height, both physically and culturally. People on the sea are beneath her.

Her aspiring fancy wanders sublime.

Time is sped up.

The poem is localized in time and place. She is specifying details of visionary fancy with localization.

She personifies contemplation and herself as the genius of contemplation.

Memory retraces the history of England.

Her footnotes are a supplement to her poetic vision. She fuses fancy with learned discourse.

She moves from history back to the prospect and to a peaceful, pastoral place but then inserts human criminality into it. The shepherds have to be criminals in order to make ends meet.

What is the significance of the interruption of the pastoral with the criminal?

I wrote that she’s placed a serpent into Wordsworth’s type of pastoral paradise. The one hut made of sea flints and not pastoral material is the home of the dealer in contraband. The fact that he braves snowstorms to perform his criminal tasks suggests desperation and necessity. She seems to be saying that the pastoral is not a secure setting.

Some have suggested that Wordsworth deliberately suppressed the evidence of industry in the setting he was describing in order to maintain the pastoral mood. The smoke from factories may have been visible from his point of view.

Smith takes her poem beyond the pastoral and departs from convention. It is contextualized by war.

From line 282 to 389, beginning with “I once was happy” she speaks about herself and the growth of her mind, much like Wordsworth. She would have read Tintern Abbey. Her work is more detailed, less sanitized and more contextualized than Wordsworth’s. We don’t get footnotes in Tintern Abbey.

Beginning with line 506 she talks about the hermit. Solitude is distinguished from being active and engaged like a poet sharing a prospect. She has a vision of unsanitized and unaestheticized poetic insight but still an aesthetic product of high culture. It’s not that it’s not consoling, because there is a lot to be consoled about.

At this point Professor Weisman gave us back our term papers. I got another A, though at 85% I just squeaked in. It was a much more ambitious paper than my previous one though. In this one I juggled and tied together sixteen poems while in the other I just talked about one. Her note said it was “Intelligent and interesting, with very fine textual analysis and critical thinking.

But she also said that I was capable of writing a stronger intro. I am not!

I didn’t stop at the supermarket on the way home but I probably should have because I’m running out of grapes.

That night I marinated a rack of pork ribs with ginger, garlic, soy sauce and honey and roasted them in the oven. I had two ribs with a potato, chopped onion and gravy while watching Peter Gunn.

In this story some hoods force their way into Mother’s after closing time. The staff is still there and one of the hoods asks Edie if she’s Edie Hart. She says she is and he shoots her in the shoulder. He says to “tell Peter Gunn that the three years are up” and then the hoods leave. After seeing Edie in the hospital, Gunn visits Lieutenant Jacoby, who’s still there from being shot two episodes ago. Jacoby tells Gunn that a man named Grayco, who Gunn put away for three years, just got out last week. Gunn goes to a club that Grayco used to co-own. The jazz trumpet player Pete Candoli is playing there. He questions the owner and is asked to leave. He punches the bouncer when he tries to force him out and then he leaves. Gunn goes to see Wolfgang, a man with a thick German accent who makes a living teaching English diction. When Gunn arrives Wolfgang is busy trying to teach his parrot Sam how to pronounce words properly. The parrot says, “Hi Pete!” when it sees Gunn. Wolfgang tells Gunn that Grayco is waiting for him at the River Warehouse. When he arrives the voice of Grayco calls from above and directs him up a ladder into a loft. One of the rungs on the ladder breaks but Gunn manages to hang on. At the top he finds the voice is from a tape recorder. Meanwhile a man on the ground knocks the ladder away so Gunn can’t get down with it. The man below starts shooting and Gunn fires back. Gunn jumps to avoid a bullet and winds up dropping his gun. He begins throwing heavy items down at his assailant. Gunn drops a heavy netting of rope on the gunman, jumps to some other netting hanging from the rafters and then drops to the ground. He jumps the man and they fight. Gunn is knocked backward. The man is about to throw a barrel at Gunn when he finds his gun and fires at the man’s shoulder. He’s about to force him to tell him where Grayco is when a policeman tells him to drop it. Gunn is arrested, which is odd, since altercations like this happen in every episode and the cops don’t seem to care. Gunn is told they will book him if he doesn’t back out of his war with Grayco, so he agrees. But when Gunn gets home one of Grayco’s men is waiting and he takes him to an amusement park that’s closed for the night. He meets Grayco on the merry-go-round. Grayco's man tries to hit Gunn from behind but Gunn throws him into Grayco, who falls back and lands against the switch that turns the merry-go-round on. Grayco fires at Gunn but shoots his own man in the back. They fight among the horsies as they go up and down until finally Gunn knocks Grayco off the ride and punches him until he's unconscious.

Mary Alan Hokanson

            Although I’d already gone to Freshco on Saturday, I went again on Sunday because it's the only place around to buy the strawberry-rhubarb pie I was craving. I also bought a half-pint of raspberries.

            I spent most of the day getting caught up on my journal.

            That night during dinner I watched an episode of Peter Gunn. This story begins with a lineman climbing a pole across from a large house. Inside a wealthy woman named Louise in a wheelchair is painting. Her male nurse Joe tells her it’s time for her to get to bed. It’s not nighttime and so she is obviously ill and in need of rest. She begs for a few more minutes and he gives in, saying he’ll go warm her milk. The man on the pole wires a lineman’s phone in to the pole and calls Louise. He tells her that he’s her next-door neighbour and he can see Joe lying unconscious on the ground outside. She goes to her window to look out and the lineman shoots her with a silencer. We learn later that Joe called the doctor and the police but when he learned that the gun they found was his he ran. Louise is alive but even more bedridden than before and dying. She hires Gunn to find Joe and clear him. At Mother’s a stoolie named Sean with a thick Irish accent and a cigarette that is more ashes than tobacco comes to sell Gunn information about Joe’s whereabouts. He takes him to a Christian mission with rooms upstairs but when Gunn enters Joe’s room he gets hit over the head and Joe runs. Sean tells Gunn that he ran errands for Joe to a gas station across town to ask a woman named Gloria for money. Gunn goes to see Gloria and discovers that she is Joe’s wife. Gloria’s mechanic Keller is the fake lineman that shot Louise. Later Keller tries to run Gunn over. Gunn goes back to the garage and finds Joe trying to break into the cash register. They fight but Joe gives up easily, saying he can’t run anymore. He says that Gloria initiated the plan for Joe to get hired by Louise and to compel her to put him in her will, but then he fell in love with her and asked Gloria for a divorce. Two days later Louise was shot. Just then Gloria and Keller arrive. Keller has a gun and he disarms Gunn. They are about to force them both into the van but Gunn pushes Keller, who falls on his gun and shoots himself. Joe corners Gloria and is about to kill her but Gunn talks him out of it. Joe is in the will but Louise dies having spent all of her money on medical care. All Joe receives are Louise’s paintings, which are worthless.

            Louise was played by Mary Alan Hokanson, whose career consisted of similar supporting parts, including as a secretary in Hitchcock’s “Strangers on a Train”.

            Gloria was played by Cece Whitney

The Ontario College of Art

            I didn’t go to the food bank on Saturday because I’d gotten some last minute work at OCADU. The gig was for the alumni open studio and so that would mean short poses and so I was a little worried because my shin is still bothering me ten days after slamming it into the opened door of a blue Subaru. The young guy that coordinated the event was a bit overly assertive with an inability to temper it with being human. He seemed like he’d be right at home in the army. There’s a core group of senior students that seem to volunteer for different roles for the session such as setting up the lights. I took a nap during my long break but the coordinator woke me up. I thought I had two minutes left but it turned out that it had been a fifteen-minute break instead of the usual twenty. One guy who has been in charge in the past thanked me at the end in a much more friendly way, saying that he knew that I was called at the last minute and so they really appreciated me coming, while the other guy just kind of mechanically thanked me.

            I stopped at Freshco on the way home where I bought grapes, a chicken, a ham, a pack of hot Italian sausages, milk, some spoon size shredded wheat and some Greek yogourt that was on sale.

            That night the wind was howling so loudly that I couldn’t hear the screaming woman. I think that it must have blown her away because I couldn’t see her or her cart on the corner.

            I had an egg with toast and a beer for dinner and watched Peter Gunn. This story begins with Lieutenant Jacoby being lured by a telephone call to leave the station and meet an informant. While walking he is shot and is in the hospital through the whole episode while Gunn tries to track down the shooters and who hired them. Captain Loomis tells Gunn that they’ve picked up the car. At Mother's Edie sings "You're Driving Me Crazy" by Walter Donaldson and "Straight to Baby" by Henry Mancini, Jay Livingston and Henry Evans. A woman comes to see Gunn but as she is about to speak with him a man walks in the door and steps between them to go into the club. When she sees him she panics and leaves. Gunn gets a call from a key maker named Alfie who says he saw the men that shot Jacoby but it would put his life in danger to be seen near a police station so he won’t go look at mug shots. Gunn offers to bring the mug book to him. He persuades a cop named Davis to breach regulations and let him take the book. It was the first speaking part for a Black person on Peter Gunn. Oddly, with all the jazz musicians that have played on the show, very few of them were Black either. When Gunn gets back to Alfie he finds him almost dead but he is able to say the name "Donniger". An armed man on the street forces Gunn into a car where he meets the mobster named Donniger. This is the man that scared the woman away from Gunn earlier. Donniger tells Gunn that he’d remain alive if he were to move to another state. Gunn goes to Captain Loomis’s address and is surprised when the woman that had run away answers the door. She is Dora, Loomis’s daughter. She tries to stop Gunn from coming in but he does anyway. She avoids his questions until there is a noise at the door. It’s Loomis and he’s been badly beaten. Loomis admits that he’s been on the take from Donnie. After his wife died Dora stayed on to take care of him. He felt that she’d been robbed of a life and so he wanted to have some money to leave her. Jacoby was hit because Donniger was afraid that the DA was going to give him Lommis’s job and since Jacoby can’t be bought it would be bad news for Donniger. Loomis gets a call of a car that’s circling the hospital where Jacoby is. When Loomis and Gunn arrive there is a man with a gun on the hospital steps. There is an exchange of fire and Gunn shoots him. Meanwhile Donniger tries to shoot Gunn but Loomis steps in front to take the bullet. Gunn shoots Donniger.

Frances Fong

            The elderly homeless woman with Torrette syndrome was just up the street by the eastbound streetcar shelter all night and into Friday morning, constantly screaming and banging on metal.

            Since I would be working on the next day and could stop at Freshco o my way home, I decided to switch my supermarkets and go to No Frills on Friday instead of Saturday. On my way I stopped at Freedom Mobile to pay for my phone service. There always seems to be a Tibetan customer talking in an Indian language to the guys behind the counter.

            I didn’t buy much at No Frills. I just got one bag of grapes, two half-pints of raspberries (one of which turned out to be way too soggy), some cinnamon-raisin bread and one container of yogourt.

            That night I had my last piece of chicken and watched Peter Gunn. This story begins with a man sitting on the sidewalk in Chinatown with a sign around his neck that reads “Silent Sy: I Am A Deaf Mute” as he sells pencils. He gets up and limps to the window of a shop called Wong’s and knocks on the window. Wong lets him in. Sy gives Wong a repair ticket and Wong reaches for an ornate Chinese fan. Sy tries to pay him $10 but Wong writes, “Hard job. $10 not enough.” Sy writes “How much?” Wong smiles with amusement and writes "$10,000", then he turns to put the fan back on the shelf. Sy grabs a knife from the counter, stabs Wong in the back and takes the fan. Next we see a performer named Lillian dancing and acting out a Chinese story on the stage of the Green Dragon while the club owner and her fiancé, Johnny tells the audience the story. There is a Chinese dragon about to devour Lillian’s character of Lady Windbell but a friendly willow tree gives her a magic fan with which she wards the dragon off. Sitting near Johnny and watching with delight is Sy and the fan is the one he killed for. In the audience are Peter Gunn and Edie. Johnny goes to sit with them and tells them that they’ve had nothing but trouble since the fan arrived. Lillian comes to the table and says that their marriage my not take place because Johnny’s father, Mr. Chang disapproves. He is the most powerful man in Chinatown. The fan was delivered secretly to Lillian a few days before and after that she got a call from someone telling her to guard the fan because it would pave the way to her happiness. Since then someone has already tried to take the fan. Gunn tells Lillian to go to her dressing room and to bring him back a package that looks like the fan is inside. Gunn sees a man follow her and so Gunn goes to the back too. He hears a scream and fights with a man that gets away but doesn’t get the fan. Gunn takes the package and Johnny sees him out where Sy is outside. He says Sy will do anything for Lillian because she chased some people away once that had been making fun of him. Gunn is followed but loses the man. When the man steps into a phone booth though, Gunn knocks it over with him in it and demands to know who sent him. It’s Johnny’s father, Li Chang. Gunn makes him take him to Chang, who is obviously played by an old white guy with a lot of make-up and very long fake fingernails. Chang says to Gunn, “If the terror of evil doers will honour one of my deplorable chairs by resting his divine body in it I can assure him that afterward the chair shall be burned so that no lesser being may use it.” After Gunn sits down Chang says, “If it were not that the king of finders out knows everything I should marvel that he has heard my lowly name.” Chang explains that he received a threatening note from Wong the shop owner threatening to expose something from Chang’s past. Chang went to see him and found his body but didn’t call the police because he didn’t want to be incriminated. Chang serves Gunn drugged tea. Gunn wakes up in his car outside Mother’s. Gunn goes to see Johnny and Lillian and asks Lillian to invite Sy in for a cup of coffee. Gunn tricks Sy into talking. Sy confesses that he had found out something about Chang’s criminal past in some old newspapers from 1905. He wanted to use that information to blackmail Chang into letting Johnny marry Lillian and so he had Wong use the newspapers to construct the fan. Gunn takes Lillian, Johnny and Sy to Chang. Chang had disapproved of Lillian because she was a dancer but he had never met her. Gunn introduces Chang to Lillian and Chang immediately gives them his blessing. Gunn has Sy throw the fan into the fire.

            Lillian was played by Frances Fong, who was born in Hawaii and later moved to California to pursue acting. She had a long career of supporting roles in television and film.

Bek Nelson

            On Thursday I had canned chickpeas for lunch and they were horrible. Some of the garbanzo skins were almost as tough as toenails. I don’t think I’ll take chickpeas from Arz again. I think they also gave me food poisoning.

            I spent a lot of time writing my review of Shab-e She’r and got it half done.

            I watched an episode of Peter Gunn. This story begins with an old man named Raleigh getting ready for bed in a big house full of medieval weapons. The only modern convenience we see his the stair lift chair that he sits on. It is halfway up when the halberd hung on the wall directly above him comes swinging down with the blade narrowly missing him. He clutches his heart. A day or so later Gunn arrives at Raleigh’s mansion. Raleigh tells him that his nephew Martin, whom he’d had put in prison for stealing from his company, is trying to kill him. Martin was just released from prison. Raleigh wants Gunn to find Martin. Gunn tries out the stair lift. The middle-aged nurse sees him and begins to giggle. She apologizes and explains that whenever things get serious she has this uncontrollable urge to laugh. She asks who he is and when he answers “Bozo the clown” she giggles and runs away. Gunn discovers that the lift has been sabotaged. Gunn goes looking for Martin and begins at Mother’s because it turns out that Martin is a guitarist. He finds out from one of the musicians there that Martin was engaged to a woman named Victoria. Gunn gets a call from someone claiming o be Martin who says he’s going to kill his uncle and then himself. Gunn goes to Raleigh’s house and as he’s arriving hears two shots. He finds Raleigh dead. Gunn goes to see Virginia and she’s kind of a beatnik photographer. As soon as he walks into her apartment she takes his picture. She asks, “What can I do for you subject?” “I’d like to ask you a few questions about your fiancé.” “Which one? I always have two or three.” When he says “Martin” it takes her a minute to find his picture among her gallery of men. She gives Gunn the photo with Martin’s address. Gunn goes to Martin’s room and finds him dead with a gun in his right hand. On his typewriter is a suicide note. He picks up Martin’s guitar and sees that it’s strung for a left-handed player. Gunn sneaks back into Raleigh’s house that night. He hides while Raleigh’s secretary Collins comes into the study and puts something in the safe. Raleigh suddenly grabs a medieval weapon and attacks the person in the shadows but Gunn knocks him down. Gunn accuses him of killing Raleigh and they begin to fight, with Collins grabbing various ancient weapons as they knock around the room until Gunn punches Collins and he falls back onto a sword.

            Virginia was played by Bek Nelson, who was married to Don Gordon, a close friend of Steve McQueen. Bek played the role of an alien from the planet Zirkon in the Three Stooges film, “Flying Saucer Daffy”.

Sonnets to Death

            On Wednesday morning as I was setting up the lectern for Professor Weisman she noticed that there was another lectern in the room this time and that she could use both because she had a lot of paperwork for teaching Charlotte Smith’s “Beachy Head", so I put them both side by side.

            She reminded us of our test next Thursday and that it would be 50 minutes long.

            We looked at more of Smith’s sonnets.

            The high lyric form of the sonnet had been the preserve of the cultural elite of men. In the renaissance there was a profusion of sonnet sequences by men that were burning in unrequited love. Not only did she appropriate the lyric prestige of the sonnet, she also brought it back from the grave.

            What does it mean for a woman to take up a form that traditionally codes woman?

            Establishing an authoritative voice was important for Catherine Smith, even though she needed money.

            The professor read Smith’s poem “Written in the Churchyard at Middleton in Sussex" and then she asked us to summarize it.

            I said that in the very first line she personifies the Moon as female and indicates that it is the Moon that initiates the invasion of the sea into the graves and the sweeping of the human bones over the beach, just as it was a woman that wrote that initiated the event by writing a poem about it. She humanizes the Moon but dehumanizes the human bones by scattering them on the beach among the seashells. She seems to imply that it is this depersonalization that had given the pieces of skeletons the peace that she herself craves.

            There is a Gothic tinge to this poem.

            Smith’s prefaces to her books emphasized her own sad history and her sorrow. She was a woman in desperate straits. Her husband was not nice but she does not come out and say that she divorced him because that would lower her social standing.

            She is writing about beach erosion and the continual encroachments of the sea.

            This is not an abstraction about nature. She knows real places and spaces and has a ground of real experience. This is not a pastoral, recuperative poem. The context cannot be escaped because of the footnotes being part of the composition. The reader is encouraged to make contact with the poet.

            We looked at the poem “To Night”. Again a woman poet is addressing a female figure of the personified night and the relationship is unrequited.

            She again envies the dead in suggesting that perhaps she will have consolation in heaven and laments for the living.

            I suggested that while the traditional sonnet abstracted women out of existence, Smith’s personified abstraction of impersonal elements such as the Moon and the night had the opposite effect and abstracts them into existence. Professor Weisman said that the way in which Smith personifies the Moon or the night is traditional and so she doesn’t add anything new to them.

            As I was getting ready to leave I asked the professor how Smith had the time to observe nature, to be well read and to write poetry too when she had twelve children. The professor told me that not all of Smith’s children survived.

On my way home from class I decided to swing by 14 Division to report last week’s accident. The reception desk looked abandoned but behind it was a window wall and an officer at a desk behind it came to find out what I wanted. It certainly wasn’t a warm reception. He didn’t understand why I was reporting an accident that I’d already reported on the phone. I told him that I was told somebody would call me. He said that my report would not go through 14 Division and that I should go to the police traffic services building at 9 Hanna. It’s been a few years since I’ve visited Liberty Village. I kept hearing how great it is down there but found that it’s still not a village and it's still ugly. I had a hell of a time finding 9 Hanna because it's not even on Hanna. The back of it is down an alley north of 5 Hanna but the front is south and east of 5 Hanna. What a crazy area! Once again there was no cop at reception but a guy at a desk behind a window and he didn’t even get up when he saw me but called, “Can I help you?” from his desk. It turns out that I’d been misdirected by 14 Division because they don’t handle accident reports at 9 Hanna. He gave me a phone number to call.

            After lunch of one piece of toast with peanut butter and another with tomato and cheese I called the number. I was on hold and talked to someone who transferred me to another department and I was on hold for half an hour. The person I’d spoken to said that they had tried to call me twice, but I hadn’t seen anything but 800 numbers when the phone rang. He said they would call me again and after about half an hour they did. A female cop took down my info but told me that I would have to call 14 Division in a few days even though that's where I went in the first place. She told me that I shouldn’t have asked for and accepted money from the guy that doored me because now he could say that an arrangement had been made. 

            That night I had an egg with toast and a beer and watched Peter Gunn. This story begins with a middle-aged man named Henry rigging the wiring in his basement and then flooding it. When his wife comes downstairs and steps in the water she is electrocuted. Later at Mother’s Edie is singing “Straight to Baby” by Henry Mancini, Jay Livingston and Ray Evans. Two wealthy sisters named Wilma and Irma walk in with their elderly and nerdish lawyer, whose name happens to be James Bond. They want Gunn to investigate Henry who is recently married to their sister Maggie. They think that he is after her money and might even kill her for it. Gunn goes to a restaurant where Henry and Maggie are dining and situates himself so that when he pays the club’s camera girl to take his own photograph, Maggie and Henry are in the shot. He takes the picture to a poker game full of shady characters and passes it around. None of the guys recognize Henry but one of them thinks Maggie is Detroit Dottie while another is sure that she’s Dixie Maddox the dealer. Finally it’s the straightest looking player who tells Gunn that the guy in the picture is Elmer Deagan whom he spent four years in Leavenworth with. He was in for blackmail. The guy he’s just beaten out of a large pot asks, “What were you in for?” He answers, “Gamblin on Sunday!”

            Gunn confirms through the police that Henry has done some time and lets the sisters know but he argues that everyone deserves a second chance. Wilma tells him to mind his own business and she tells Maggie that she won’t get a penny of her father’s money as long as she’s married to Henry.  Later Wilma gets into the family’s ancient car, which I think is a 1916 Baker upright electric. 

            As Wilma leaves the property and goes onto the street the wheel begins to come loose but the brakes don’t work. The car flips on its side and Wilma is killed. Gunn investigates the car and sees that the wheel and the brakes had been tampered with. He demands that Henry either meet him at Mother’s to talk about it or he would call the police. Henry agrees to meet him but that night as Gunn is parking in front of Mother’s he sees that he is in front of a hydrant and so he backs up. Just then a Molotov cocktail comes don from the roof across the street and explodes in front of Gunn’s car. Shortly after that Henry arrives in a cab. Gunn finds out from the police that Henry has been questioned in five different cities about the accidental death of five different wives. When Gunn is telling Maggie this they get a call that her sister Irma has died from gas asphyxiation in her bedroom. Maggie tells Gunn that she’s going to go to Reno and get a divorce but he follows her and it’s just a ruse. After she thinks she’s shaken her tail she arrives at a little house where she meets Henry, but Gunn has followed her there. He confronts Henry but it’s Maggie who pulls a gun. She admits that it was her who killed her sisters and who tried to bomb Gunn. Knowing that Gunn is the only one who can testify that he didn’t murder Wilma and Irma and so Henry changes his tone and calls Maggie stupid. She turns her gun to Henry and fires but misses. He grabs a lamp to throw at her but forgets that he’d rigged it to electrocute Maggie and he dies. Maggie says she knew he would kill her but maybe not today and it was the happiest she’d ever been. Gunn tells her she’ll probably get placed in a hospital and she admits that she’s ill. He asks how she knows about cars and Molotov cocktails and she says that she spent her whole life reading.

            Maggie was played by Jeanette Nolan who worked extensively in the golden age of radio and appeared on more than 300 TV shows. She was nominated for four Emmy awards.

            Wilma was played by Helen Wallace.

            Irma was plated by character actor Ellen Corby who had a long career and was even nominated for an Oscar but didn’t become well known until her role as Grandma Walton.