A Proliferation of Popes

Yesterday two Popes lunched. We smiled; it seemed so sunny. We should've been afraid. I don’t mean just Catholics worried that Benedict might cleave the Church with a chance utterance about preferring pickerel to cod. Rather, as the moral majority of Star Trek viewers should've known, a space-time discontinuity had formed. Francis is but the first of the Popes who’ll be popping in from alternate dimensions. Come Tuesday, Popes will fill our screens, like in the old “Which twin has the Toni?” ads. About a week later, the exponentially-growing mass of Popes will tweak Earth off its orbit. Goodnight moon.

Intercourse

On our trip back from the Jersey Shore, we passed through the town of Intercourse, a small town in Pennsylvania with a shop on one side of the road—selling assorted knick-knacks and quilts made by the local Amish—and a lonely motel on the other. I insisted we stop, hoping to find something to add to my collection of kitschy souvenirs, but we really should have stayed overnight, if only to have the town come up in conversation one day, and so allow us to dismiss it with the weary cynicism of the seasoned traveller: “Been there, done that.”

The Potato Salad Mystery, part three

Adela rootled in the cutlery drawer, but her forks and spoons all lay dispiritedly in the still-clogged sink.
     “I hate my life,” she thought, turning back to the potato salad that she supposed the cleaning lady had left behind. It wheedled forth aioli and memories. Of a picnic spread on a chequered cloth on the Riviera, and a man feeding her fingerling potatoes with sandy, long-fingered hands and…
     Adela stopped short. “I've never had a boyfriend,” she thought crossly. “Let alone a cleaning lady.” Somehow, being near that salad was giving her memories of another life, better than her own.

Part one *  Part two

The Potato Salad Mystery, part two

Enticingly unctuous, the tang of aioli wafted up her nose and she found herself salivating. It was seven pm after all, and any ounce of satiety gained from that penitential gluten-free bean bake she scarfed at noon had long since evaporated. And here sat fingerling potatoes dotted with chives and dusty paprika. The temptation to eat this Trojan Horse of a supper was strong. But wasn’t it just last Saturday that she watched The Apartment? Who was in her house and left this behind? Could the cleaning lady be entertaining gentlemen on Tuesday afternoons, fueled by lust and high-end carbs?

Part one  *  Part three

So Hip It Hurts

After months of relatively unsuccessful chiropractic treatment on my hip, Dr. Ho now thinks it might be my sacroiliac that’s causing the pain.
      “There’s something we can try…” he says with a grin that suggests he’s as reluctant to tell me as I’ll be to hear it. And he’s right, because what he wants to do is inject anaesthetic directly into the joint, and if the pain goes away, it will confirm the underlying problem.
     Understand, shoving this needle into the base of my spine is just part of the diagnosis.
     I don’t even want to think about the cure.

Image based on a drawing posted to The Dance Training Project.

The Potato Salad Mystery, part one

When Adela Littleshank came home that night, the last thing she expected to find was a container of potato salad sitting on her kitchen table.
     She checked the back door: still locked. She yanked her bedroom closets open, peered under the bed, and inched the shower curtain back, ready to shriek: no one. Yet, in the kitchen, this potato salad, provenance unknown.
     Not quite unknown, she corrected herself; the salad bore the label of a rather upscale deli.
     It’s an upscale hallucination, she thought, poking the container to see if it was real. It was, and in fact, enticingly cool.

Part two  *  Part three

J + R

It wasn’t the sort of thing I normally did, but there was this wall, you see, down a long alley off Queen . . . a dull expanse of pale brick under decades of dirt, until someone had discovered—who knows when—that the brick had gone soft.
     And so began a long crude chronicle of young romance, white letters scratched into the grime, the successes and failures of those long gone and those still hanging onto the memory of a piece of gravel and a few minutes of carving for the ages to see, perhaps wishing now it hadn’t been so easy.
Photo © 2010 by The World Beckons. All rights reserved.

The Heart of the Storm

Outside the plate glass window, the storm slings flinty chips of snow into the shocked cheeks of the New Yorkers. It rips at Whole Foods sacks of tinned kidney beans and kelp snack storm provender; it snaps up five umbrellas – two floral, one stripy – at the corner of Ludlow and East Houston in a single skip of what must be a cold, cold heart.
     But inside the storm: il laboratorio del gelato, where a dish of spheres awaits. The marble grey is black sesame, slowly showing a toasty warmth; the off-white is lychee, its sweet breath perfumed like a succubus.

Image: Lynn Huang on foodspotting.

Seasons in the Sun

To this day, I have trouble getting all the way through Seasons in the Sun. It started in 1974, and although I am pretty sure Terry Jacks was singing of cancer or suicide or something like that, his song enjoyed a perversely high rotation at our classroom parties, probably because it was so perfect for rocking back and forth slowly and hanging onto a girl as tightly as you dared, amazed at the heat two bodies could generate, and telling her so, saying anything that came into your head, just to draw attention from this strange thing you were doing.

These weren’t the parties we’d had in Grade Six. Something new had taken over, pulled close the curtains, and turned out the lights. There was music, but no one dared dance, and so the girls at the record player would conspire to set up the most unlikely couples in what they called a “snowball.” They’d announce the names, and I’d have to slow-dance with Karen Carstairs for an excruciating three minutes and twenty-four seconds, then Beth Parker, and finally Brenda Duffy, except the joke’s on them because Brenda was probably the only girl in class at all interested in me.

The Shadow Stranger

Behind you, a stranger waits in the shadows. Not with a knife in hand, not with oiled whispers, nor with a trenchcoat lined with knockoff watches and a tale of woe. A quiet stranger, a stranger like you but unlike, with a left side like your right and vice versa. A stranger who kneels beneath your chair and leans her forehead against the wall, who licks at its white leaded paint and tastes the white as darkness, and dark as light. She hopes you’ll play a record soon. The sound of all that silence in the room just deafens her.

Photo by Melodie McDaniel
For other posts inspired by this image, see The Mag.

The Truth about Rudolph

My young friend Carrie’s favourite Christmas song is Rudolph. I can’t blame her. She’s grown up in an era of ardent anti-bullying messaging, and is a really nice person to boot. But here’s the thing, Carrie: Exactly when in history has a member of a visible minority group reviled by dominant society and excluded from joining in any children’s games suddenly been hailed with shouts of glee for saving the day? “Then all the reindeer loved him”? Not bloody likely. Odds are they kicked poor Rudolph to death with sharp little hooves the minute Santa went for the gin bottle.

Image: Animated Film Reviews.

Snotty

She shuffles through High Park everyday. The homeless lady in the long, mustard-coloured coat carries a green pop bottle and puffs on cigarettes, drawing rapidly the way a child would. Profoundly phlegmmy, she death-rattles into reams of toilet paper, leaving streamers in her wake or piled upon a bench.
     These soggy wads are canine quesadillas: white-soft on the outside, chewy and salty inside. It drives me crazy, but just imagine the one-sided conversation I would have, perhaps catching her on my way back to my warm, safe home: “Excuse me . . . my dogs eat your tissues, and it really, really bothers me . . . ”

Image from: Dog is My Co-pilot

It’s a Common Phrase Down Our Way

“Heureuse-année, grand nez!”  Admittedly a gambit, I said this to the young guy at our local cheese shop. I hear him speaking French all the time.
     Holding a wedge of Applewood, he hairied an eyeball. “I don’t understand what you’re saying.”
     I persevered. “You know . . . it’s New Years, I say ‘heureuse-année grand nez!’ and you respond, ‘Pareillement, grande dent!’”
     “What language is that?’
     “Fren-ch.”
     He asked where I was from, but others had entered the shop, and now I was just the crazy lady monopolizing the cheese-guy’s time.
     “Tecumseh.” My last attempt.
     “Oh.” He smiled, wondering where the hell was Tecumseh.

Image from: CafePress

Gimme the conch, Bitch

For years, I’ve quoted from Lord of the Flies without ever having read it. Last Sunday I finally finished this classic, in all its exquisitely nasty detail and immediately pondered a scenario where girls rather than boys were marooned on that island to fend for themselves. Well, forget hunting and pigs’ heads on spikes.  The beast would just have to be mollified with coconuts and flowers. And everyone would be cleaner with braids. But if my memory of the mean girl Petri dish that was St. Gregory’s serves, there would still be a Piggy, and she’d end up dead anyway.

Image based on a photo by Tono Baluguer.

That Fixed My Wagon

I bought a wagon from Home Hardware when I moved into this neighbourhood and have come to depend on it as much as any suburbanite depends on his minivan. I use it to go grocery shopping, I use it to get Nola to her dance classes, I use it to return my empties . . . but when one of those proverbial squeaky wheels finally gave out last month, the wheels were literally off my wagon for weeks, and I was grounded until I could figure a way to detach the parts that had rusted together, and then find my bearings . . . again, literally.

More wagon adventures here.
Photo by PLR Photo.

The Sand along the Streetcar Tracks

Those drifts of sand along the streetcar tracks? They’re from an ocean that covers Toronto in an alternate dimension. The sand sidles over, fine enough to reach us; the more you dwell on it, the more you’ll fathom the signs. Shell stations. Mhm. A suburban drywalled street named “Water”. An unaccountable odor of washed-up, long-popped seaweed.
     Lately that ocean’s been welling up again, resurging. Grinding memory into longing, then – and there – into here-and-now, and soon enough you'll find yourself scanning the shelves of Loblaws for a can of sardines that still opens with a key, salt slipping down your cheek.

Photo: David Heyburn.

Puff, the Magic Dragon, in a land of cottage cheese

Puff the Magic Dragon frolicked in the autumn mist in a land called Honah Lee, says the song. Good thing little Jackie Paper mostly brought him strings and sealing wax instead of cottage cheese. The low-fat no salt added pressed kind that lurks in squashy packages. Even with the munchies, Puff would’ve turned his snout up at the sight of this cheese smeared sadly into pumice-like Finn Crisp Caraway Ryes. Maybe he’d have liked my cauliflower cottage cheese mock frittata though. If you kinda squint looking at it, I’d whisper to Puff, it’s almost shiny. And the purple is onions.

Greeting Rituals of the Men of Anthro

Sociology’s forays into affirmative action have succeeded well enough that our hallways are peopled mostly with women. Our washroom, however, is exclusively male. The carpet leading toward it – past my door – has been beaten flat by the purposeful men of nearby Anthro. Each negotiates the twice- or thrice-daily greetings this affords in his own fashion. One nods abstractedly. Another pretends we’ve never met. It makes me miss “Edward”, now retired, who used to exchange Latin tags with me on his tos and fros. “Sic transit gloria mundi,” I might say, and he’d return with a random, gleeful “Ecce homo!”

Loosely inspired by Laurie Leclair’s “Housebroken.”

Housebroken

Deep in the garden, I was well-hidden. That’s when I overheard Joyce. Boy, did she hate dogs. It was only through a thin guise of familial rectitude that she tolerated Snickers, her great-aunt’s moribund poodle. With auntie freshly dead and the pooch dispatched she spoke with impunity. “I don’t miss those little turds, that’s for sure!” She didn’t specify whose turds but rather turned the conversation to me. “My neighbour goes and takes all these dogs away from Indians and finds homes for them here . . .”
     I bit my trowel.
     “Really, I’ll take my hat off to her . . .” she demurred, bare-headed.

Image from DogPoopSigns.

Nature Morte

August’s sand has snuck under the door and settled itself in the corner. The stove’s sticky from September’s chicken, and pots of unexpired goods keep naively fresh. She’s gone, but only just, so the rooms still vibrate with the newly-empty. Clacking puzzle pieces, an iced and boozy tipple melting in a highball glass and a charm bracelet’s silvery scrape on wood, like a handful of tight-fisted but tumbling coins, all betray the ghostly remains of happier days. It is such an odd time of life; not dead but not really alive. A still life, waiting. And everybody else waits, too.

 Original image by Yvonne Boothroyd

The NHL Fan Lockout

NHL Commissioner Patrick Bateman today upped the ante in the league’s lockout of hockey fans, calling their demands “unrealistic and naïve.” The NHL is demanding that fans accept a long-term expectations cap, and is pushing hard for acquiescence to the owners’ agenda: an overpriced, overlong regular season of largely meaningless games, the embrace of the neutral zone trap, and playoffs that last until the start of hurricane season. Observers expect fans to roll over and capitulate quickly. A fan spokesman confirmed this, saying he does not envision strike action. “The only fight we want,” he said, “is on the ice.”

Image: Chris Young/The Canadian Press

My laptop was a cat in an earlier life

My Dell Latitude E6510 laptop, I am convinced, was 99% cat in an earlier life. Calculating, passive aggressive, needy, needling, and fuck-you indifferent. Which makes me, in an earlier life, a would-be animal abuser. (“Would-be” because, even in my ire, I realize that slamming 6.6 pounds of “durability, security, and performance” into the wall won't help.)
     The other 1% is pure heart-melting dog, showing up right when I hit “Turn off computer." The screen starts fading hopefully to grey, like a dog with its leash in its mouth, asking if I really mean it. And each time, yes, I do.

Image: Trollable.

She is My Daughter Too

Malala Yousafzai is a fourteen year old schoolgirl. For this, she was yesterday shot twice by the Taliban in Pakistan. As I write, she is in critical condition. Whichever God you pray to, pray for her.
     How has it come to this – that attending school can mark a child for execution? A spokesman for the Taliban (“the students”) says “Let this be a lesson.” Yes, a lesson, but not the hateful one he draws. “Malala is my daughter,” says Pakistani Prime Minister Ashraf. “She is Pakistan’s daughter.” And she is my daughter, too – and yours, if you believe in humanity.

Image: Hazart Ali Bacha/Reuters

Your Mess, Not Mine

In Kindergarten we were told we could use the paints anytime we wanted for our craft projects, provided we cleaned everything up afterwards: the brushes, the paint pots, the water jar, and any other mess that we made.
     My solution was to not make a mess in the first place.
     I stopped using paint and fell back on crayons for everything. Crayons were neater; and we each had our own set, so I would never be saddled with anyone’s mess but my own.
     The question is: did school make me this way or did I have these hang-ups going in?

Photo by Grzegorz Ślemp on iStockphoto.

The View Inside Dad’s Window

The recliner faces the flickering SONY. At its left a waste-paper basket and arm caddy holding a TV Guide, Kleenex and a back-scratcher. At the right a side table with more Kleenex, a glass containing manicuring tools, gum, a pen for the crossword, clown-button remotes and the phone. A dish supporting a cemented lump of peppermints promises a taste somewhere between sidewalk chalk and the Eucharist. This is the command centre for the elderly. We may progress from highchair to school desk, Poäng to Eames, but we end up here, camouflaged in an acrylic afghan and battling our own mortality.

 Image: canoe.ca

The View from Dad’s Window

In the twenty years that we knew him, Dusty Rusty changed neither his clothes nor his habits. He was always a little sour dishrag of a man who sat bolt-upright watching television in his Cinema Noir fish bowl of stained wallpaper and cigarette smoke. Everything about him was tidy-filthy, like the perfectly folded Elliot Lake Standard he used for cannibalized butts waiting to be rerolled into damp but serviceable smokes. Age and loneliness had made Russ a shower, and his uncanny ability to simultaneously entertain and repulse never disappointed. Particularly so on the day he showed us his personal groomer.

Image based on Ashtray Full of Cigarette Butts from 123RF

Conundrum (Lament for Modern Man #3)

From Sharp’s Q&A column, a pressing man-issue: bushy eyebrows – pluck or wax?
      Let me take this one.
      First – grow a pair. Then slip into the chair for a haircut at Joe’s in Little Italy. Joe has been clipping my remnants these many years. He decides, unbidden, if my eyebrows are too bushy. Scissors flashing, he’ll suddenly freeze, blades hovering and open before my eyeballs, to study the evidence, then carefully reach forward to snip one briar, then (for balance) the other. He’ll even clip an errant nostril hair, or something suspicious inside my ear. Disconcerting, manly, effective – and pain free.

Image:  Angie Muccillo

For the original inspiration for this series, see here.
For Part 2, see here.

The Häagen-Dazs Grapefruit Question

Of course any nutritionist worth their salt substitute could tell you a grapefruit is more healthful than Häagen-Dazs and blah blah blah. But what if it’s your charted destiny to consume coffee icecream blanketed in cinnamon, ideally having liberated it from Kitchen Table at 11:30 pm? (The walk there being exercise. Ish.)
     Then, the pressing question for nutritionists is actually:
     If, in a feat of extraordinary restraint, you’ve kept a quarter of the pint to scrape out of the container next morning for breakfast, wouldn’t mounding on 47 extra calories worth of grapefruit be somehow injudicious?

P.S. Never skip breakfast.

Joyride

Saturday mornings are up at 8:15, dress, and drag my daughter to dance . . . except for the Saturday I awake to the realization that, although I took the wagon to school yesterday, I never did bring it home . . . it’s been out all day and all night, and I have no other way to get Nola to class in time. So today, it’s get dressed, rush to the schoolyard, and worry until . . . it’s still there! Five feet from where I left it—a rail is missing, but I find that nearby—like someone took my wagon out for a very short joyride.

Manvertisements (Lament for Modern Man #2)

Dapper fashionisto poses on Italian scooter, sockless, helmetless. Obviously, he lives life on the edge (helmetless – in the city!). A beautiful woman gazes quizzically upon him (thinking, “Is this it? I should have scarfed that tub of Häagen-Dazs last night after all.”). Another ad features a kohl-eyed boy in a frilly tux; most of his face is obscured by a whopper bang. He’s shilling for some chichi scent, but selling lifestyle.
     Fashion slaves unite! Why seek inspiration from glossy manvertisements?  Take my free advice.  Forget the über-bang, and never, ever, smell like a girl. (I realize I’m becoming my Dad.)

Image: © SHARP FOR MEN
(For context, see the original Lament.)

Are you slinging me a porker?

What’s up with the Man Hats? Any knob can’t just enter Sherway Mall, buy a trilby and emerge a hipster. In fact, my friend Stephen who rocks a master-class wardrobe wouldn’t be caught dead in any of these lids. Sadder still, these heinous things can be spotted perched like plaid pixies on hairy toadstools while their douchie owners peruse a menu. Given my own wonky stylings, I shouldn’t cast sartorial stones, so I’ll just put this down to the priggishness of age: By all means Dude, wear your stupid hat, but take it off when you’re eating that fish taco.

Image of the dreaded Alpine hat,
taken from The New Adventures of Steven Fry.

Lament for the Modern Man

This week, another glossy men’s magazine thumped onto my porch, concealed discretely between sections of my newspaper. Yes, a newspaper – how retro! And no, not that kind of men’s magazine. This one’s full of beauty tips and lifestyle advice for the modern man. On the cover, a banner announcing thirty-seven pages of power suits. (Wassa matter, pretty boy, yo’ momma don’t dress you no mo’?) Inside, man recipes, and a saccharine review of whisky, calculated not to offend any potential advertiser or region. Read up, and you too can namedrop.
     What is a man without his own opinion? A market.

Image: Sharp Magazine
(For Part 2, see here)

Just One Canadian

Citizens of the world! Before boarding any vehicle, look to your left. Look to your right. If you spot even one maple leaf patch in the queue, step aside. Studies have found Canadians on board in nearly every calamity in recorded history. When a twin-engine plane crashes in Sitka, there are six Canadians on board. When a cruise ship sinks in the Antarctic, six again. When the Jamaican tarmac is overshot, a Colombian bus veers from the road, or lightning smites an Air France jet: Canadians on board. In threes, in twos, in humble ones. It takes just one Canadian.

Image: Proton Charging.

The Lawyer’s Gone to Fat

Last time I saw Rob, he’d just finished a course in legal ethics. He was studying to become a lawyer and had been taught, for instance, that it is wrong to take on a divorce case and use information you receive from the husband to seduce his wife.
     Remarkably, he told me this one week after I’d broken up with my first girlfriend, one week before I learned he’d taken all I’d told him of that relationship and decided to ask her out.
     He, at least, knew what he was getting himself into, but I wonder if she ever did.

And so it was, years later, that one of my many spies encountered my first girlfriend’s next boyfriend downtown and reported back that he had gone to fat. Forget that she and I were last together a lifetime ago, and ignore the fact that she and her fat lawyer had by then lived together longer than she and I had ever dated, even now these furtive sightings help pass the time over beer with my high-school friends as they tease out the small lingering pleasure I can still enjoy hearing the details of the poor choices she made after me.


Inspired by Husky Cross. Photo by ZoneCreative/iStockphoto.
 

Midtown Moment

Recently dear friends took us to a wine tasting, a treat for Rich’s birthday and a chance to leave our neighbourhood. Although Roncesvalles is fast becoming a Mecca for every brunching douchebag from Mississauga, at least for the moment, it’s familiar. But in crossing the pristine threshold of the Summerhill LCBO we stepped out of the wardrobe: So many clean, white people in one room. A veritable casting-call for Williams Sonoma. I caught Rich eyeing a man beetling around in tight denim and red gingham.
     “Wear socks, you prat,” he breathed; hoping a cheeky rioja would wash the image away.

Image: Lucy Learns

Cue the Psychedelic Furs

It’s September soon and I’m longing to turn back time. Not to when Dan was little—I still shudder when I cross through our local park with its elephantine graveyard of extruded plastic toys and loathsome Strollertariat. I don’t want to relive his babyhood or be a new mom again, but rather, I want to be the one finishing high school and courting universities. I’m jealous of his youth. Middle age certainly has its perks: financial solvency, unconditional love and better stuff, but being blasé over the new IKEA catalogue is cold comfort for the phantom pain of imagined regret.

Image: Mars Water

Husky Cross

Again I saw That Woman with one of my rez dogs. She’s with That Man, the one who had a cable access show on Toronto architecture; the one who crawled up his own arse to retrieve his triangular scale and got lost. She won’t let her dog play with other dogs. In a First World quandary, I spend the afternoon wondering why her behavior bothers me. Is it because it’s antisocial and cruel to the dog? Or is her snub proof that she senses, and is repulsed by, my debilitating need to be liked? Either way, she’s an epic twat. 

Image by Peace Love et Chocolat.

Crush

Have your ever wanted someone so badly you grew at the merest thought of them?
     Whereby, your daily bike route has you cycle past a row of brownstones not knowing, yet innately aware of where they live?
     Not obsessed yet comfortably possessed by them. Their air, their smiling nod from across the room. Their musing ways falling suddenly silent, focussed,  gathering thoughts before delivering a beguiling reply bringing the house down in bubbling laughter.
     Azure blue eyes, hair like a wheat field that crowns an effervescent spirit.
     Have you ever had a parched heart quenched by the memory of another?

Image by Cec LePage

See Girl Run

See Girl run. Run, Girl, run. Don’t look back.
     Don’t see Charles run. Seeing Charles will put a Girl right off her pace. Scary scary Charles.
     Charles is married to Camiller. Camiller wears scary scary hats. You have to wear scary hats if Charles catches up with you. That’s what happens to a Girl if a Royal gets too close.
     Or she gets like Dianer. The first wife. Thin, then dead.
     So, run, Girl, run. Get a gold medal at London 2012. Gold medals are better than glitter. Gold gets Girls lots of shiny endorsements! No scary hats! No dead!

Image: Prince Charles Chases Bubble Girl.

Fifty Words on Fifty

Meditate
Incubate
Gossip less
Manage stress

Unconsume
Don’t presume
More think, less drink

Jettison pharmedicine
Cultivate and satiate

Include
Denude
Preclude the attitude

Dust the coal, reveal the sparkle
Of diamond words, less matriarchal

Fewer blocks, more swerves
Less edge, more curves

More lean, less screen

Judge discretely
Love completely


Laurie’s birthday card by Rosa Zumbansen

Neither a borrower . . .

I found him crying by the phone moments after his brother had refused to lend him more money, so of course he asked me. “I’ll walk you to the bank,” he said in that anything-to-help tone they get when they’re beginning to worry their last chance might just back out the door. And don’t kid yourself, normally I would have, except that now I was his very best friend—at least as long as it took us to get there—and by then I figured it was well worth the money just to be rid of him for a while.

. . . nor a lender be.

But it wasn’t enough that I’d loaned him the money, he wanted me with him as he spent it, as if to let me know just how much he now valued our time together. And here I was feeling pretty good about myself anyway, having just saved him from an angry landlady, perhaps, or a week without food, and so I tagged along if only to learn that the very first thing one buys in such desperate circumstances are cassette tapes to mix the music for the big party you’re planning and that, second, it’s probably best not to know.

Illustration by Justin Orris.

Party Walled

Cathie and Patty were neighbours and best friends. Childless Patty helped with Halloween costumes and car rides to soccer; she even dressed her Lawn Goose in a Fern Falcons T-shirt in an avuncular show of school spirit. In return, Cathie flew a novelty flag emblazoned with a Golden Labrador that bore a striking resemblance to Wasilla, Patty’s dog.  Then suddenly a painful falling out involving a candy-stuck Mary Maxim catalogue. Now they are just neighbours. The banner came down and was replaced by silkscreened Sunflowers. The bird reverted back to his yellow Sou’wester, perennially braced for the stormy weather ahead.

Image by RipNRollRugs on Etsy

Bon Voyage

Early morning a friend calls announcing he’s leaving NYC. Self preservation made the decision. Taking a lung filled breath, I sigh selfishly, quietly. The town taking more than it once gave, The Big Apple’s now sauce. His flight is set South to regroup, reenergize, replace woes with renewed vision that the pavement beat out of him. As my day started on this path, the avalanche continued its ominous stretch, like a train wreck, broiling blue skies into tar with Murphy’s Law as an ally. Evening settling into night, heavy eyed, wrung out, thinking of him, I smile, “Phoenix.”

Image: Detail of a painting by David Cunningham,
oil on wood panel, private collection.

Dupont

Robert Jeffrey’s career as a subway operator ended abruptly during the late evening rush hour of August 11, 1995, when he sped through three red signals and plowed into a train waiting to enter Dupont station

with such force that the two trains integrated themselves with each other for 18 feet. Three passengers died and dozens were injured, but Mr. Jeffrey survived to appear on the news that night where we’d eventually learn that he’d only been on the job two days but had already learned how to override the safety systems and turn a hot summer night into hell.

Photo by Danielle Scott