High School - Dancing With Kelly Osborne

To the reader: I know that this rambles. Forgive me. However, it is, more or less, deliberate. 100 years after Joyce I am single handedly trying to take stream of consciousness to the next level. I call it “stream of randomness…”

I wrote an article for an underground paper. That was in grade 10, or maybe grade 11. The guys were going to do an underground paper. So I wrote about the last school dance. It wasn’t straight, you know, what I wrote. Even then. I can’t remember what I wrote, well it was a long time ago. But I remember that it was clever. I gave it to Joel Beard. He gave it back. He wasn’t mean about it or anything, but it didn’t meet the standards of “seriousness” that they were trying to meet. School dance? I think they wanted to write about student revolution. Anyway the paper never saw the light of day. Too bad.

Not.

They should have accepted my article. The paper would have been a runaway best-seller.

I have been living my entire adult denying the reality of my adolescence. The main way I do that is by watching TV shows about adolescence. I don’t know how that works exactly. Perhaps I live the TV characters’ life vicariously. I started this process when I was actually in high school; I watched Room 222 every week.

As an adult I’ve watched Degrassi Junior High, Degrassi High, and Degrassi The Next Generation. I’ve watched Heartbreak High (an Australian show), and Life As We Know It, a short lived hour long weekly that featured a young, rather chubby, and artlessly charming Kelly Osborne as Deb. That was the best teen angst show ever.

And movies: American Graffiti, The Breakfast Club, Fast Times At Ridgemont High, Dazed And Confused, anything with Molly Ringwald.

In real life, though, the dances were not so much fun. I liked the music. We used to have live bands, and they were very loud. Some were cool, some weren’t. We actually had Mood Jga Jga play at our school once. They were a great band, but we didn’t know their music, and it wasn’t dance stuff. Mostly from grade 10 or so on we had music men. Some were cool. Some weren’t. They were very loud. It was ok then to smoke. It was walking into a dance, maybe I was in grade 8, that I found out who smoked. I remember seeing Paula Hair-Affair sitting against the wall, smoking. She was a brain, at school. It wasn’t the brains you expected to see smoking.

I danced sometimes. With girls. I don’t know how well I danced, but it doesn’t matter now, and it didn’t matter then. The first dance I ever danced was with a girl named Elsie. There was a rumour going around that I fancied her. We were both of us quite small. Maybe that’s why people hooked us up. But I had nothing to do with her.

That was in grade 7. I had nothing to do with the girls generally, because they were in a separate class. And I hadn’t been in any kind of social group that would have given me access to girls. The girls I’d known in grade 6 were outcasts like me mostly. But that didn’t help. It wasn’t like the outcasts wanted to hang out with other outcasts – not then anyway. Later, ok. But Elsie. It wasn’t at a dance per se. It was at a lunch hour sock hop, the first I was ever at, and probably the last they ever had. Maybe they saw me dancing with Elsie and vowed never to let it happen again. The song was Light My Fire, the José Feliciano version. Figures – it was too fast for a slow dance and too slow for a fast dance. Who picked the music, anyway.

The whole thing got away from me. I was missing stuff. I knew exactly more or less approximately what it was. I’m living with the fallout.

But I quit watching Degrassi. I got tired of it, I admit it. It got too heavy, like Ayn Rand for teenagers; the message finally overwhelmed the story. So I have to find some other way to deal.

My teachers, though, it was all their fault. I will save that, though, for another post…

My Bio - The Elementary Years

Mrs. Whistle was my grade 3 teacher. Once she said “bosh.” That’s a pretty funny word when you’re in grade 3. Trouble was, she said it to me. And she didn’t think it was funny. She was scolding me at the time, about the fact that I’d copied the questions on the math test. Not good. Don’t write the questions she’d said. But I guess I was confused, or distracted. I wrote the questions. And Mrs. Whistle wasn’t so happy. She was standing there yelling at me, and she said “… and you go and write all this bosh! which doesn’t make sense!… blah blah blah!…” And my friend DS whispered “bosh!” and started snickering. But I had to hold the laugh inside until it was safe.

She forgot me, Mrs. Whistle. I think she forgot everyone. Most teachers didn’t forget you, but once she’d done with you, you were history for Mrs. Whistle, and she had no recollection of you.

No so my grade 1 teacher, Mrs. UnreasonableRedhead. She got mad at me because I counted on my fingers. Once she sent me to the principal’s office.

The principal was Mrs. Perfume. She was very strict. Everyone was afraid of Mrs. Perfume. She was very thin. She had a sister who taught French in the high school. The sister was very unthin and her name was The Armoured Truck. But Mrs. Perfume was very thin.

She didn’t know why I’d been sent to her. That’s what I remember, anyway. I could be wrong. It was a very long time ago. Thing was, I hadn’t finished my arithmetic paper. That happened a lot. So finally Mrs.UnreasonableRedhead sent me off to the principal. I don’t know what she was trying to accomplish. Neither did Mrs. Perfume.

She didn’t forget me, Mrs. UnreasonableRedhead, not for years. She had a guilt complex about me. Good.

I was in the A class. Well, not in grade 1. In grade 1 it was all mixed up, while they sorted it out. Then I was in the A class grade 2 through grade 5. They had an A class, a B class, and a C class. It was all hush hush. It wasn’t on paper anywhere. Nobody talked about it. Nobody admitted it. But everyone knew it. The A class was the smart kids. The C class was the dumb kids, and the B class was the not so smart but not so dumb kids.

So I was in the A class notwithstanding my deficient mathematical skills. But then sometime before grade 6 I fell asleep. And so in grade 6 they put me in the B class and I wasn’t happy. I guess I was humiliated. What bothered me at the time was that I was leaving my friends behind. Looking back, it seems odd, that, because I’d had no friends – not really. I was more left out then not.

So there I was in grade 6, in the B class, and unhappy. I had a meeting with the principal. He assured me that I was not being demoted. He said it was a matter of space. They needed to move students around because there were too many students in the class. Funny, they chose me to move, no one else.

Academically, there was no question. I had become a hopeless screw up, daydreaming the day away and blowing all my tests, not handing things in, not doing homework etc etc.

But once I was settled, hey. I started making friends. That was new. Friends. There was Joel Beard, we were inseparable for that year. There was Jerry Hoodlum. He smoked Kools in grade 6. There was Z. A real character he was, introduced me to Hendrix and Cream. I learned cool stuff, like how to cheat on tests. The teacher’s name was Mrs. Toil. We gave her a nervous breakdown. She actually had the breakdown a few months into the next school year. But we primed her, so we get credit.

I did well in grade 6, at the beginning. The academic level was lower than what I was used to. I picked up on that right away. So I did well. Until I got involved with the aforementioned cast of characters. Then things started to slip.

There was an Israeli girl in our class. Her name was Nurit. After hearing her talk a few times I could imitate her accent exactly. So when we had a substitute I pretended that I was Israeli. Most guys around me kept a straight face while I stood up and spoke in the fake accent. But Brian KooKoo, he couldn’t stop laughing. Lucky he was facing me and not the teacher.

Mrs. Lenin was my grade 4 teacher. She said you will not remember me, or maybe you will just remember that I was the teacher who made you read. It’s true, she made us read. I read Treasure Island. Took me all year. She said “ducky.” Isn’t that just ducky, she’d say. And nix. I still say nix, and that’s why. Because my grade 4 teacher did it. The secret’s out…

My Bio - The Early Years

I was the only one of my siblings to attend nursery; I was too active for my mother, something like that – she had to get me out of the house. My siblings, let it be known, are all girls, so I have sisters, so of course they were easier. We all know that girls are easier than boys.

My older sister, though, really would have gone to nursery but for the fact that it didn’t exist then, so my mother sent her to kindergarten a year early, as a result of which she was a year older than her classmates from then on.

That, however, is not my problem.

I went to nursery, then to kindergarten, and I had the same teacher, Mrs. Z, for both years. And there was a second teacher that I vaguely recall, or a teacher’s aide maybe, Mrs. Tissue, something like that, my memory could be imperfect in regard to her actual name. I think she was older than Mrs. Z anyway, but maybe she wasn’t. I was small myself, so my perspective wasn’t perfect.

I could read, I’m not sure when I learned, but certainly in kindergarten I could read. My sister taught me, the same sister that was a year older than all the classmates, that sister, which makes sense because she is older than I am.

Let me say here that my sister is older than I am. When she taught me to read, she was 4 years my senior. Now she is just senior…

She taught me to read, and she taught me phonetically. In grade one, the teacher taught my classmates to read. She did not teach me, because I knew how already. But I observed that she did not teach reading phonetically, that is she did not teach the actual sounds of the letters, she taught holistically, by words. This says “cat,” this says “dog,” this says “holistic.” I didn’t get it. How will any one learn to read that way, I wondered. I still wonder. Some of my class mates went on the become doctors, I can’t prove that they ever learned to read.

I knew how to read in kindergarten. I was one of two such students, the other being IM. There was a difference though. IM publicized his knowledge; I did not publicize mine. I kept quiet, which I think was characteristic of me in those days. The teacher did not know that I could read. I did not tell her, nor, interestingly, did my parents.

I think that my parents knew that I could read then. I think so.

I wonder….

This is what I remember. It was the last day of kindergarten, and we went to the zoo. I remember going to Aunt Sally’s Farm, which was a kind of petting zoo wholly with the Assiniboine Park Zoo in Winnipeg. Aunt Sally’s Farm disappeared years and years ago, though it may have been revived, and I say that based on the results of googling “Aunt Sally’s Farm Winnipeg.”

Well on the way to the zoo, or on the way back, we were in the car, because that’s how we got to and from the zoo, in cars, and I was reading the signs, and I was reading them out loud: “Stop,” “Yield,” “no parking,” “men with hats crossing,” etc. And the teacher, with whom I was privileged to be in the same car, noticed. VSLP can read! She said. The last day of school and we find out that VSLP can read! I remember that. I was 6.

Another thing I remember about kindergarten. IM, the reader, and his friend PR. they used to steal my hat every morning before class, and toss it back and forth, and not give it back, and I would run back and forth trying to recover my hat, though I may have given up at some point, I don’t remember. I told my father about this, and his response was tell them I said not to.

I did that, you know. My father says don’t take my hat, I said. Oh! They said. Let us give it back right away they said! No, they didn’t. They did not say that. It made no difference to them whatsoever. They continued to torment me, until one day one of them said, I think it was PR, he said let’s give back his hat. And that was the end of that episode.

That’s it really. I will just share this one more bit of trivia. I got a ride to school, and I got a ride home. And we had some kind of arrangement to take other kids home. One was DK, and he would take the snow brush, because we live in Canada so our Car has an implement which on one side has a brush for snow, and on the other side has a scraper for ice, and he would take this thing, and my sister was in the car, not my older sister, because she was in school, grade 5, but my younger sister, the next younger one, because my most youngest one did not exist, and he would take this brush, and say, with glee, let’s brush her face!

And so my sister would whine and complain, she was very small, about 2 I guess, because she did not like to have her face brushed. And my father, who was driving, wasn’t crazy about it, and he’d say something like stop that. And so I guess we’d stop it. And when I say we, I mean he would stop it, because I had nothing to do with any face brushing activities. I was too busy reading the traffic signs…

Postscript: I googled IM, PR, and DK. The only one I found was IM, and he is a professor somewhere, and there is a picture of him wearing a hat.

The Walk

I got on the bus like I do every morning, but it isn’t morning, it’s 7:45 PM, 7:54 by the time I board the bus. And I didn’t get off at the Metro station, no, I got off at the stop that I used to get off at when we lived where lived 2 moves ago. Then I walked.

I walk toward the mountain, down deVimy, around some twists and turns and I come to Côte Ste Catherine, not to be confused with Ste. Catherine, which is downtown. Left one block takes me to Vincent d’Indy, named after not the most famous French composer in the world. And looking down Vincent d’Indy, one is face to face with Mount Royal. Toward the end of the road there is a steep climb up to Salle Claude Champagne, which is the university level concert hall of the U of M, where the Montreal Chamber Orchestra performs. One gets to Mont Royal Blvd, and the walk up to the hall is so steep that on performance nights there is a shuttle bus to take the concert goers up the hill, one short block.

I didn’t go up that hill. I took a sharp left and followed blvd Mont Royal, as it hugs the side of the actual Mount Royal, with its twists and turns, and trees and dark places. There are houses on the north side, which sit mostly on a downward slope; as one can imagine, they are patrician houses, priced probably in the millions should they ever go on the market. I look at them but they don’t fascinate me, they are money, that’s all, and money does not fascinate me.

The mountain, though, it fascinates me. Just where the road curves round toward the east, somewhere between leaving the U of M grounds and coming upon the cemetery, if one look to the right through the forest, one sees the a wall of rock, and that’s the Mount Royal, up close and impersonal, and maybe next time I’ll venture to explore, make my way through the trees, hope not to meet any skunks or hostile raccoons.

Further on there is a cemetery, and it slopes sharply upwards, and there were sprinklers going, and as I walked by I was accosted, if that’s the right word, and it isn’t, by the smell of newly watered grass. And there is no smell like that.

The cemetery, well, it’s quiet. But the whole walk is quiet, the very occasional pedestrian or bicycle scooting by, but almost totally bereft of cars. Quiet.

Well, would be quiet but for The Byrds blasting in my ears. The Byrds, then The Hollies. Life is too short to pass by an opportunity to listen to groovy sounds. Ok, so I actually took them out for a bit, the ear buds, to listen to the mountain. That was by the cemetery, and the mountain at that point sounded a lot like a few maintenance workers talking in Quebecois patois.

Past the cemetery is Mount Royal Park, but this is the wilderness end of the park. There are actually one or two trails that head up into the heart of the slope, and maybe next time I’ll venture off. I walked by this time though, thinking I’d never noticed those trails before. And that makes total sense, because this is the first time I’d walked by there while there was still some daylight.

As the mountain on the left slopes upward, so the road slopes downward and I could feel civilization just beyond, and after a few steps I see the traffic lights, and my streets meets up once again with Côte Ste Catherine (the streets curve every which way) and just beyond that is the great Montreal landmark street of Park Avenue (avenue du parc). And there are the people in Jeanne Mance Park, out for a picnic or a walk, or the people catching the bus, walking walking walking, biking, out to eat, to sit at outdoor cafés, to grab a beer and listen to jazz. I just missed the bus, but it’s ok, they are not far apart, and the weather is wonderful. I took the earbuds out as the Hollies album ended, and listened to the sunset, the traffic, the people. A young woman joins me at the bus stop, nods lightly in comradeship, and we commute without communicating.


Well the bus came, and I rode just up to Bernard, so I could get a cookie and coffee at Cheskie Bakery. A honkin’ big cookie it was, with what they call hazelnut cappuccino, but which is in fact just sweet coffee with flavour in it. What paradise.

Bernard Avenue is beautiful itself on a summer evening, with one outdoor café after another, and that will have to wait for another day…

More Images Of Boucherville

Must Be Spring...

They turned the fountains on
They turned the fountains on
Hi Ho The Posey Oh
They turned the fountains on...

Give Yoko A Chance...

I didn’t get the T-shirt and I’ve been sorry ever since. Now I can’t even find the brochure. I keep these things, and I have a file to keep them safe, but this is the second piece of memorabilia to disappear.

The event was called “Get Back! A Celebration of Winnipeg Rock” and it ran from November, 1995, until February, 1996. It was at the Manitoba Museum of Man and Nature, and it was way cool. Memorabilia from so many long defunct Winnipeg bands, The Shondels (no, not Tommy James & The Shondells), The Mongrels, The Eternals, The Dawgs, featuring future crown attorney George Demoissac, with whom I had several dust-ups in various criminal courts, The Fifth.

The show piece was John Lennon’s psychedelically painted Rolls Royce, the only exhibit that wasn’t Winnipeg based.

And so I was thinking about that this week while I meandered through Imagine Peace, an exhibit sponsored by Yoko Ono, commemorating the life and career of John Lennon (and Yoko Ono of course, but mostly John) during his “peace” years – 1969 – 1972. It is at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (Musée des beaux arts) and it is free.

The first thing that strikes me about it is that I’m not at all sure that it’s art, and I’m not sure that it’s meant to be art. But then, in a perverse kind of way, that in itself may be a kind of art. Yoko, after all, has always been an advocate of the promotion of the ordinary to the realm of art. There is a piece called “apple,” which is, and one can imagine it, an apple – an actual real edible apple, sitting on a plastic pedestal. This is a reproduction of a piece that originally appeared in 1966. The original, one may assume, has long since decayed, or has, perhaps, been eaten. There is also an exhibit called “The Wall Phone,” and it is, predictably, naught but a wall phone.

So here we have an exhibit which consists, apart from the odd Yoko-created apple or telephone, of wall mounted photos of John, John and Yoko, John Yoko and others etc, LP covers, picture sleeves from 45s, TV screens showing vintage footage of the Montreal bed-in at the Queen Elizabeth Hotel, the interview on Dick Cavett, documentary footage, etc, a sound system playing Give Peace A Chance, a white piano which was not Lennon’s (it’s just a white piano), and bed in which John and Yoko did not lie (it’s just a bed), a few dozen chess boards set up for real playing (it took me a while to realize that all the pieces where white), a promotional shelf hosted by Archambault with books that wouldn’t you love to go down to the store and buy, and the overriding theme is peace, Lennon the humanitarian, Lennon the idealist, Lennon who stood for causes and was abused and mistreated by the establishment, they wouldn’t let him get married in Paris, and the Americans would not let him in because of his criminal record (drugs, of course).

I was 12 when Give Peace A Chance had a spot on the local top 40, and I remember it well. And I remember Cold Turkey (which, now that I think of it, I don’t remember seeing any reference to at the exhibit). And I remember all those solo albums, especially Imagine and Some Time In New York City and Plastic Ono Band. And I remember hearing Happy Xmas (War Is Over) on the radio, and I remember how moving it was.

Imagine Peace, though, was not moving.

I was looking for the Lennon that I knew as an adolescent, the Lennon that who sang “those freaks was right when they said you was dead” about his erstwhile partner Paul McCartney, the Lennon that produced all that white noise on I Want You (She’s So Heavy) on Abbey Road, the Lennon that let his wife scream her head off in front on an undoubtedly bemused audience at the Toronto Rock And Roll Revival Festival in 1969, the Lennon that said he hoped Decca A & R man Dick Rowe “kicked himself to death” when asked by an interviewer if he thought said Mr. Rowe was kicking himself for turning The Beatles down in 1962, that same Lennon that campaigned for peace and meant every word of it. I was looking for the Lennon that would buy a Rolls, a symbol of affluence, and paint it in psychedelic colours, telling the world this is what I think of your symbols…

I was looking for the ambience, the feel, a sense of genuinness, something that would put me back there, get the feel of the bed-in, the real white piano, the real John Lennon, the smell of dope, the crumbling of The Beatles, of the “dream,” Nixon, Kent State, Revolution 9. I was looking for the Rolls Royce. What I got was a documentary presentation of something that happened long ago, about a wonderful guy gave himself selflessly, used his artistic talents for the betterment of the world. Very nice, but not very real, and not very convincing.

And they didn’t even sell t-shirts…

Breakfast At The Hospital...

Lavi, 1977

I got an email from a guy I haven’t seen nor heard from since 1977. He was my roommate, that was at Kibbutz Lavi, where I’d spent most of 9 months from the fall of 1975 until the spring of 1976. Then I went back for that summer, and everything was different.

At the end of July the H group was going home. The group had been together for a year, most were from England, some were from Scandinavia. So there we were, for some reason in my room, having a great party. We had a music box, and we had ELO, and Venus And Mars by Wings, and Wings At The Speed Of Sound. I remember not much. I was probably pretty drunk. There was girl named Deena K that I’d had a bit of a crush on. But I was dancing with Dina, who was, if I recall, Danish. And we dancing dancing dancing – all slow dances. And stuff. She invited me back to her room. I squirmed out of it. I can’t imagine why. She wasn’t Broom Hilda or anything.

Next morning I took off with Mike. Mike, who was Irish, had just gotten engaged to Juliet (her real name), who wasn’t. Mike was a wonderful guy. After he got engaged he went a bit off the deep end. He was still a wonderful guy, but now he was a wonderful guy with mental health issues. Still he and I took off, went south. Around noon we were sitting in the Beersheba bus station, eating soup. It was hot like crazy, the weather, not the soup - well, the soup too. But we agreed that eating hot soup cools you right off.

We got off the bus and ended up crossing the length of the Negev, got off at Eilat. It was a heat wave, in a city where heat wave was the permanent condition. It was so hot that street vendors could not sell water. We could barely move. So there we were, sitting on the beach, dressed in t-shirts and shorts, with our feet firmly implanted in the waters of the Gulf of Aquaba. We took turns getting up to buy soft drinks from one of the dozen vendors selling stuff by the beach. Tempo, Queen's, Coke. We’d each gulp down a bottle in 10 seconds. Go get another, Mike’d say. We’ve spent $20 on pop in 30 minutes, he’d say. Who cares I’d say.

We sat on that beach until sunset. We could not move. But I had a phone number on me. A friend of mine from back home was supposedly here. So I find a phone and dial, and there he is. Voila. He came to meet us and took us back to where he was staying. We had showers, I tried to have a cold shower but the water came out hot. We dressed and got whisked to a wedding celebration. There was a feast, champagne. It was crazy, we were beach bums, drinking champagne…

---

They would not give me a seat, the bastards. The first Friday night, wherever I tried to sit, the seat was “taken.” Hey, this group had been together since September, here it was May, and they had no place for interlopers. It took some doing to force myself among them. But I did it. Not only did I manage to get a seat at their cursed table, but I got myself into the group, not, of course, as an official member, after all I was just a lowly volunteer, but I was in. Lee was my roommate, the guy that sent me the email, and there was Rodney and Nigel, and a girl named Ruthie, and Joanne, Lee’s girlfriend, and Roxanne from Manchester, and a Swedish girl whose face I can still see but whose name escapes me.

---

I bought this LP that summer in some random record store in Tel Aviv. It's by Chava Alberstein and it's called "HALAILA HU SHIRIM" which literally means "the night is songs" but translates more accurately as "The Night Is Full Of Music." And they used to play that song on the radio so I knew it so I bought the LP.




But there was another song, at the end, called Song Of The Sea. And I didn't hear it until after I came home. And there was this place in Tel Aviv, a concourse, It was on Rechov Yaffo, that's Jaffa Road, which is a main street that runs along the Mediterranean. The concourse was actually built over the road, and it was between the Hilton Hotel, which was a fancy high rise, and the Marina Hotel, which was smaller, but fancy with an actual marina (boats) adjacent. And there was this screen that showed TV images. And I'd sit there by myself at night, with the warm breeze of the sea, and I'd go to one of the snack vendors and get coke, and I'd sit at a table, drinking coke, smoking Marlboroughs. And that song always reminded me of that place.

And now I listen, and it reminds me of the memory…

Busker

Playing flute under Westmount Square, Thursday, April 23, 2009, at around 1:30 PM...

It Won't Be In The Mail Until You Spell It Right...

I will share with you a quote. This is from page 164 of A Reading Diary by Alberto Manguel:

Dorothy Parker: “The two most welcome words in the English language are ‘Cheque enclosed.'”

I quote this not for its profundity, but for its spelling. I appreciate seeing “cheque” spelled correctly.

I got a letter from the school, the one my kids go to. It asked for a series of “post-dated checks.” I was scandalized. I suppose the secretary is American. Doesn’t matter, she needs a talking to.

Well that’s just from the office. But from the classroom… the kids bring home papers talking about color and honor, and I happen to know that the teachers are home spun Canadians. I suppose when a luminary such as Margaret Atwood uses spellings from south of the border, I can’t come down too hard on the teachers can I.

Yes I can. Maybe Atwood’s teachers didn’t teach right either.

Truly, though, a missing u or two isn’t so serious. But dropped consonants can drive me around the bend. I mean, the appointment was canceled. That just looks dumb to me. And when did worshipping become worshiping. That just looks plain wrong. I suppose if I were to explore a typical warehouse in Anytown, U.S.A, I would find a door marked “shiping and receiving?”

Then there are those brilliant entrepreneurs who insist on calling their businesses some variation of e-z not realizing that in Canada E-Z Storage, for example, would be pronounced “ee zed storage.” Maybe that’s what they meant. Maybe, on the other hand, it isn’t.

Alright I know, nitpicking, nitpicking. But you know? “Check” as a means of transferring money is obscene. And I don’t expect obscenities on letters I get from my kids’ school. Meanwhile my chequebook sits safely in my desk, guarded against those who can’t tell the difference between a beaver and an eagle…

New Libraries And Old Books

There is a display of seashells at the Eleanor London Public Library. There are some fancy well-furnished reading rooms, with comfy couches. There is art on the walls.

The library is open 365 days a year. There are 4 days when it closes at 5:00, and 361 days when it closes at 10:00. It opens at 10:00 AM every day. It is a 20 minute walk from home. As I said to a friend recently, the definition of paradise might be living in a community where the library is open every day until 10:00 PM.

I can’t complain, but here’s the thing. I also go to the big library downtown, the Grande Bibliotheque. It’s a newer building, but an older collection. And there’s the rub. The Eleanor London Public Library has a dearth of old books.

All the books in the fiction section are new. That’s not to say they were written or published last year, or in the last 10 years, or whatever, but one look tells me that they are all relatively new looking. They all have dust covers.

I went to find the shelf with McLean, that’s at the GB, because I wanted to read Stuart McLean, his Vinyl Café series. And I got to looking at what was on that particular shelf. And I saw the usual stuff: Larry McMurtry, Terry McMillan, Emma McLaughlin and Nicola Kraus, Katherine McMahon. But then there are these books that don’t have the usual paper cover covered in plastic; they are just the original cardboard covers. These are books written in the early part of the 20th century, by authors whose status was undoubtedly greater than then it is now. These are books that whose printing date might be 50 or more years ago.

So go find, at the Eleanor London Public Library, a book by Clark McMeekin. Not there. Nor a book by Michael McLaverty, nor by Donald McLean.

McMeekin was an American author from Kentucky, who wrote about Kentucky. McLaverty was Irish, so move over James Joyce. And McLean, who did not do American Pie, was Australian.

There is only one McLean novel on the shelf; it’s called No Man Is An Island. McLaverty is represented by The Choice, School For Hope, The Gamecock and Other Stories, and In This Thy Day. And McMeekin has three entries: The October Fox, Tyrone Of Kentucky, and Welcome Soldier!. I think McMeekin is indespensible for anyone who fancies American literature; the others are no slouches either.

It was total serendipity that led me to these authors, all undiscovered treasures. It would not happen at the Eleanor London Public Library. So as nice as it all is there, I will have to keep snooping around the dusty shelves of the downtown library picking up all those old volumes that don’t sport dustcovers. I will let you know what else I find.

And by the way, neither McMeekin nor McLean turn up anything on Amazon…

Random Musings, April 12, 2009

It is Easter Sunday and so IGA is closed. But the mall is open. The kosher butcher is open, which is interesting, because he is normally closed on Sunday. He was open last Sunday as well, the Sunday before Pesach*. It is cynical, it seems to me, to stay closed every Sunday except during the busy season. It’s practical I guess, but it seems that it’s practical for the business, not so much for the customer.

I went to the Pharmaprix, got some bathroom tissue, some chocolate, a bag of Bisli. Most of the stores are closed today.

That didn’t prevent hundreds of people from congregating at the mall. Seniors, dozens and dozens of seniors. This is, as my kids like to point out, a geriatric community.

But my mission was not accomplished. We need things, and I won’t be able to go back until tomorrow after lunch, because I have commitments tomorrow morning.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I finished that pulp novel by Jacqueline Park. She claims to have done much research, but her research didn’t turn up the fact that married Jewish women use a mikvah. That was as true in the 16th century as it is now, more true perhaps. There are other things that mark her as an outsider writing about a life she has no experience of.

And the story isn’t even that good.

The other book I finished reading is a history of disco, called Turn The Beat Around, A Secret History Of Disco. The book is by Peter Shapiro, and it’s kind of disjointed – a bit here, a piece there. 90% of the music I’m unfamiliar with, and much of it isn’t disco.

So I just started reading Driver’s Seat by Muriel Spark, and reading Muriel Spark is (almost) always inspiring. This was written in 1970, so it was before she started to burn out; I picked it up at Book Events in Alexis Nihon Plaza.

An aside: I found Book Events when I first came to this city, just before my first day of work, which was a half day on Wednesday afternoon, I detoured into Alexis Nihon and came upon the mid-mall book counter. In those days they sold a lot of tech books; they are all but gone now.

So Spark, I found it there, for $4.00, the original price was $18.99, and the book is a small paperback, just over 100 pages long. Wow. The Ariel Sharon autobiography I’m reading is a good read, but it would be better if the author (co-author presumably, or possibly an uncredited translator) didn’t keep using “insure” when he means “ensure;” once or twice he uses “assure.” It’s not that difficult, really. The random split infinitives don’t do him any credit either.

Then aside from that there is the diary by Alberto Manguel. It’s not all the interesting, but it’s fascinating, if that makes sense. It always impresses me how people can write about nothing, and do it well. I think that’s what I’m trying to accomplish here.

I’m certainly writing about nothing, I’m just not convinced that I’m doing it all that well…

*Passover

Of Pirates And Drug Stores...

I go to the pharmacy. I go at lunch time. Now that’s not so major. But the pharmacy, well, it’s kind of like a department store. It seems to have everything, even furniture.

We have 2 big pharmacies here; one is called Pharmaprix and the other is called Jean Coutu. Now Pharmaprix, it’s called Shopper’s Drug Mart in the rest of Canada. But here in Quebec it’s Pharmaprix, because Prix is a French word that means “price,” so pharmaprix must translate as something like “drugs you buy for a price.”

The other, Jean Coutu, is named for someone called Jean Coutu. There was a chat room that had theme night every Saturday, and one time it was pirates, and I logged in as Jean Coutu, and everyone thought that Jean Coutu was a pirate.

When I was a kid, I had a pirate record, William Bendix Sings and Tells Famous Pirate Stories. And there was one story about Jean Lafitte:

Jean Lafitte, Jean Lafitte, Jean Lafitte
Was a mighty buccaneer,
He was brave as brave as he could be
But he never went to sea.

(I saw a movie about Jean Lafitte once, and in the movie he did go to sea, and he even made a woman walk the plank.)

So I rewrote the song slightly;

Jean Coutu, Jean Coutu, Jean Coutu
Was a mighty buccaneer,
He was brave as brave as he could be
So he opened a pharmaceeeeee.


Who would think you could buy clothes at a pharmacy. You can. There is a big Jean Coutu at the corner of St. Mathieu and Ste. Catherine, and they sell shirts and ties and socks and underwear and t-shirts and knickers, mens and ladies. I bought a belt there. I was very happy about that, because I need a belt. Well, no, I don’t because I bought one at Jean Coutu. It was $10.00 and it is already coming apart. But I wear it and it serves its purpose. Hurray for Jean Coutu.

Now the Pharmaprix is ok. It sells drugs, as one would expect a pharmacy to do, and first aid and the like, and some groceries, though no produce, that would be pushing it for a pharmacy. At Pharmaprix you can get a digital camera, a water filter, cosmetics and fragrances, tissues. That’s another thing I get there – tissues.

It is, for me, a sojourn, my lunch hour adventure. What’s on sale this week? What new displays have they got? Umbrellas in the spring, gloves in the winter, lawn chairs in the summer, windshield fluid all year – the surprises are never-ending.

At Jean Coutu you can use your air miles card, but Pharmaprix has something better; it’s called an Optimum card. And it’s good because it actually gets you cash discounts every so often. First they ask if you have the card: Avez vous le carte optimum? Well you don’t have to be a French scholar to understand that. Then they say you have a $20 discount will you take it. And I say, oh no, you keep it. No I don’t. I say yes. Yes Indeed. Yes. I will take the $20 discount. Thank you yes. Please give me a $20 discount.

Then I head back to work, my arms full of tissues, fragrances, bandaids, batteries, digital cameras, iced tea, melting ice cream, and knickers. And I stuff it all away in my drawer, and sit down at my desk and go back to work, anticipating the day next week when I get to go back to the pharmacy.

And that pirate record, it had a story about Captain Kidd, and I don’t for sure remember the song, but it might have gone like this:

Captain Kidd was a pirate
A mighty pirate was he
He made everybody walk the plank
Then he went home to tea…

Happy Valentine's Day

The names in this story are made up. In fact, the entire story is made up. The only part that is not made up is that there was a sock hop last night at the neighbourhood community centre a few blocks from home. But I was not there, so the story is made up. But it may well have been exactly like this...


The first thing that caught our eye was an old couple, I’d say in their 60s. They were jiving to Shake Rattle & Roll, really jiving. They were having fun. That was key, fun.

It was as motley collection of couples as I’ve seen. Of course I had no idea what to expect. The last time I was at anything like this was about 30 years ago back then I used to go to socials, organized for young singles like me. And then we were all in the same age group.

This was organized for anyone who wanted to come. Most people came with a partner, but there was a healthy minority of singles. I watched from time to time, the awkwardness, the shyness, the sparkle in the eye when someone clicked.

There was one guy, let’s call him Jack, I’d say mid 30s, who was making himself very popular. All decked out in a turtleneck, jet black trousers, he kind of looked like a John Travolta wannabe, except for his face, which looked more like Dom Deluise, It seems that his goal was not to sit out a single dance, and I don’t know if he succeeded but he can’t be faulted for not trying.

The girls, though, they mostly didn’t take him seriously. One though, let’s call her Linda, she seemed to like him quite well. Poor Linda, maybe 25, hard to tell though, I’d say she weighs about 200 lbs., she seemed quite taken with Jack. She tried to get him for the slow dances (The Drifters’ This Magic Moment, Never My Love by The Association) but Jack seemed to be otherwise occupied at those exact moments.

There were young, and not so young, couples who were obviously dating, some who didn’t seem to know each other well, some who did. The married couples, though, were the ones having the most fun.

There were 15 dance contests, and all but 2 were won by married couples. We didn’t win any contests, we didn’t enter any contests, but we danced alright, fast ones, slow ones, medium ones.

And the music, well I have to give them credit, they kept the place going – The Happening followed by I’m A Believer followed by Paperback Writer, then slowing it down with To Love Somebody and Save Your Heart For Me. The sound system reminded me of those old high school dances, after they’d quit hiring flesh and blood bands – except for the volume. No way all those seniors could stand the volume we used to hear as teenagers.

Sheldon, he was there stag. He tried to line someone up for each of the slow dances. The women weren’t as interested as he’d hoped. Some were polite, they felt sorry for him, they danced with him, but they kept their distance. Others straight out declined. There was one woman, I call her Paula, she danced by herself the whole time. She was having a great time, she had friends of both genders, but she danced by herself.


And that old couple, they didn’t quit. Every time I looked there they were on the dance floor. They were still at it as Engelbert sang The Last Waltz, and the evening drew to a close…

No PC

My PC is in the shop. Of course I can post from any computer, but I am taking a break. I am using this excuse to spend way less time in front of my 19 inch CRT monitor. That's it. Of course I'm still updating my playlist on the other blog...

So I'm Reading...

I read. It’s a thing. Generally speaking I have four books going at any given time. My list shows three because I just finished one. The one I finished is called Disappearing Acts. It’s a novel by Terry McMillan, who also wrote Waiting To Exhale, and it’s not very good, but I read it and it’s done. So the next one up is called Buffalo Girls and it’s by Larry McMurtry, who I’ve been reading a lot of lately. It you going to read McMurtry, read The Last Picture Show.

So I read four books at once. Now I only have two eyes, and even using both at once, I can only read one book at any given instant. But what happens is this. After I read about 100 pages I switch. And I keep doing that, juggling four books that way. It’s not that complicated.

I read sometimes in the evening, always on the weekend, especially Friday night and Saturday afternoon, Saturday morning after I’m done with the paper. I always have a book in waiting rooms, in coffee shops, between classes when I go to school, which I haven’t done since 2000 and will undoubtedly not do again. And by big reading time is on public transit, to and from work, on the bus and on the metro, on the metro and on the bus, assuming I get a seat, and if I don’t fall asleep.

Usually I have two novels, the other one right now being Barnaby Rudge by Charles Dickens. I’m no great Dickens fan, though I’ve read Great Expectations and David Copperfield (“OH my lungs and liver!!”) and A Tale Of Two Cities. I’ve not read Oliver Twist nor A Christmas Carol. I don’t know if he does it in his other books, but in this one Dickens puts a lot of commas in weird places, doing what Lynn Truss calls “using a comma like a stupid person.” And so we have “When Barnaby returned with the bread, the sight of the pious old pilgrim smoking his pipe and making himself so thoroughly at home, appeared to surprise him even more.” Maybe punctuation was different then.

I read books about music, and they are usually fairly pathetic, but I read them anyway, and now it’s a biography of Hendrix which is better than average, and the other book I have going on now is from a collection that I inherited from someone, a collection of books about Israel and about the Holocaust, and some are a bit odd, but none are as odd as this one, a book called The Secret War Against The Jews, which is an unsettling combination of, one the one hand, phenomenally extensive and hard gotten research, and, on the other hand, the hysterical conspiracy theory ravings of the authors. Oh well.

Now that’s not it. I’m also reading a book about ASP.Net, and I read that at work, a few pages every day. And I’m reading a book from the Beth Zion library, and I read that during Saturday morning service when I have a few minutes. And there are one or two others that I catch a page of now and then.

And the sad thing is that my eyes are going. Oh yes. Old age is coming on. I’ve already been wearing reading glasses for five years, and it’s getting to where I’m just going to have replace my eyes.

Good. Then I can finish this other book about .net remoting….

Montréal Snow Storm, January 6, 2009

Lost At Lunch Hour

What do you do on your lunch hour when you work downtown?

Well, there are so many possibilities.

There are stores, many, many stores. So sometimes I will walk around and look at stores. The problem, though, is this. Many of these stores are small boutiques. And they don’t get too many shoppers. So the salespeople, they hover. They sit there, or stand around, and when you walk in the assault you. “can I help you?” they so unhelpfully ask. Or, this being Quebec, “Recherchez-vous quelque chose particulier ?” Oui, I say, watching them get excited. Je cherche ma femme, mais elle n’est pas ici. I am looking for my wife, but she is not here.

Prices tend to be very high in these boutiques. I could buy a new shirt for $175.00. Well, it’s a nice shirt.

When I’m not in the mood for salespeople, then I can pick a particular store, usually a big one, and spend my entire lunch hour there. The Bay is good. I look at men’s wear, but I don’t buy anything. I like looking at hats. Sometimes I try some on. Or else I look at jewellery. Jewellery? Yes. I’ve bought one or two pieces there, so I’ve delevoped a sort of weird familiarity with the jewellery department. Or I go up and look at electronics, but I don’t understand much of what they sell anymore.

If not the Bay I go to HMV superstore. I was much more interested in going there a few years ago, when I first came to this city. It’s not the best music store I’ve ever been to, but it’s one of the better ones, with not just the most obvious titles, and upstairs they have a jazz department, and a classical department, and they are across a narrow corridor from each other, and each one plays its own music, and they are completely soundproofed, so you can’t hear jazz from the classical section, or classical from the jazz section, and I guess everyone is happy. I like to go up there and walk back and forth from one to the other; it’s better than drugs.

Not that I would know…

They have museums, the Redpath Museum has rocks and minerals, and there is the Fine Arts Museum, and there are others if I want to spend money. But you can only go to the museums so many times before it gets kind of stale.

Not too many parks downtown, though there are few small squares, and they are not particularly quiet, and not too much quiet altogether, though for someone who has music on whenever I’m awake, I suppose I could be accused of disingenuousness for speaking of quiet. But back in Boucherville, I liked the quiet, I would go out at lunch time and walk along the St. Lawrence River, and enjoy the peace.

So I go out, and I explore: McGill, Cresent Avenue with its small galleries, The Concordia Bookstore. And not that it’s winter I explore the Underground City, the Cours de Mont Royal, the underground shopping malls. I walk from the Peel Metro station to the McGill Metro station, but when I walk back, I always end up at McGill again. This is a weird kind of maze they’ve concocted. So my challenge is to do the round trip without resorting the to actual Metro to get back.

And once I figure it out I will go into the breadcrumb business…

To Two Friends...

A and I work together. We are pals. She’s been listening to me whine a bit. And in the morning she stops by my desk with her thermos of special tea-like substance, made with ginseng, asks me if I’d like some, and fills my cup. Thank you, A, for making me feel like I’m worth paying attention to.

A, this is for you.

SC is my southern confidante. We are friends. So thanks SC. Thanks for sharing and for letting me share, thanks for understanding, thanks for allowing me to understand, thanks for sharing music, mine and yours, thanks for getting it, thanks for being there, on the other end of yahoo, on the other end of Bell Canada, for proving with me that a man and a woman can pursue romance together, but not with each other, and stay best friends. Oh, and thanks for calling me sweet…

SC this is for you.

And so is this.