The Quarters All Bouncing

Perhaps the last story my father ever told me was of the poker he’d played on a deep-sea fishing trip off the Jersey Shore, pushing through the waves to where the fish were, with the quarters all bouncing around on the table.

He’d come to Toronto for his first visit in years, and though I was still too young to share a beer with him, I must’ve told him of the penny-ante games I’d play with my friends.
     I’d like to think now I could drink him under the table.
     I’d like to think now I could whip his ass.

Inspired by History Class. Image by the craiyon AI.

History Class

Tell me the stories, the stories of old,
Of arrows in eyes, and conquerors bold,
Of far away lands, with spices and gold.
Tell me the stories of Ethiopia's Queen,
Who visited Solomon, tribute to bring.
Tell me the stories of ships on the sea,
And beacons on hills, and wind blowing hard.
Tell me the stories of mountains to climb,
And challenges met, and challenges failed.
Tell me the stories of places yet to explore.
Tell me the stories, the stories of today,
Tell me of tragedy, tell me of joy,
Tell me the stories of all that has been.

Inspired by Brentrance. Image from the Bayeaux Museum.

Casey and Finnegan and Davey and Goliath

Casey was happy in the early years of their residence at the Home for Retired Child Puppet and Claymation Performers. At first they and Finnegan made fast friends with Davey and Goliath, but tensions soon arose between the two children. Davey objected to the veggie treats Casey fed Goliath; indeed, to vegetarianism in general. And he never took to Finnegan, who was a silent farter. Eventually, Casey and Davey quarrelled over everything—identity issues, gender rights, Roe v. Wade, and Davey’s stubborn denial of who he was. Casey moved back to the city. They had to be true to themself.

Inspired by Mr. Wind-down. Images: CBC for Mister Dressup’s Casey and Finnegan, IMDB for Davey and Goliath.

Mr. Wind-down

No matter how long I stayed on the night shift, I’d always have trouble getting to sleep the next day. Beer helped a little, even if it did catch me drinking at 9:00 in the morning, in front of the very same television I’d grown up on: the Friendly Giant and his bigger chair for two more to curl up in, or Mr. Dressup gently guiding Casey and Finnegan through the same fears I’d had as a six-year-old . . . a lifetime of make-believe away from that cold neon room full of terminals and tape-drives and the same dreary job every night.

Inspired by Eye eye, Captain Gerry. The 1965 photo of Rod Coneybeare just doing his job is buried somewhere in the CBC Still Photos Collection, but I could not find the link.

Eye eye, Captain Gerry.

Dad had a false eye. It usually pained him. So after a long day at Chryslers, after he donned those beige Phentex slippers, while he cracked open that Molson Ex, and before the first cigar, he’d plop his eye out. And because as a family we were impervious to social niceties that dictated we be discrete with things like false teeth and glass eyes, Old Wally spent his evenings decanted in a shot glass and bobbling on the rim of the bathroom sink. One brown eye, staring up at unsuspecting visitors, daring them to scoff that bottle of Old Spice.

Inspired by Brentrance. Image of “Wally” generated by DALL·E mini.

Brentrance

In 1065, the European Union brought King Harold of Little England and William of Normandy to Brussels to discuss their dispute.
     “We won’t have your smelly garlic or your fizzy champagne,” Harold huffed. “Little Englanders are happy with turnips and beer.”
     “Suit yourself,” William said.
     “We don’t want your snivelly continental measurements. We will live and die with sturdy pounds and pints.”
     William shrugged.
     “Finally. We don’t want any of you people coming across. England is closed to foreigners.”
     Hmph, William thought. We’ll see about that. Mon Dieu, this guy really needs a poke in the eye with a stick.

Inspired by Propaganda. Image of King Harold, struck in the eye, from the Bayeux Tapestry.

Flying Home

Fly home now,
not with metal, and bolted bits,
but wings of wind and sunbeam.
Go home, in full flight,
like the birds you envied.
Another Tower has control,
and orders your direction.
Your instruments are set,
and you are going home.
You radioed to land,
not knowing that last landing
would end as it did.
It was the plane lost control,
and you were taken away,
following the orders of another Tower.
Did you look back?
Did you look down?
Don't look back, don't look down.
Fly on, toward the stars,
Toward the final freedom,
On your final flight.

Inspired by Eridanus. Photo by Simon Alvinge (Dreamland Media).

Propaganda

Before we got to see the Bayeux Tapestry—all 244 feet of it—mounted under glass—we had to weave our way through a room full of informational panels (which were just as long) about the tapestry and its commemoration of the Battle of Hastings in which William of Normandy beat the horrible Anglo Saxon Harold Godwinson, depicting Harold’s death with an arrow through his eye, and how the cloth tries to stitch into history the righteousness of the Norman cause and why its invasion of England was justified. It seems propaganda in support of male ego is nothing new.

Inspired by That Single Drop.

That Single Drop

William the Conqueror was the first Norman king of England, reigning from 1066 until his death in 1087 . . . and, at least according to my family tree, my great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandfather. 

     If you’re my age, you’re lucky to have even a photo or two of your own great-grandparents, but here I am with my greatest granddad only immortalized on the mother-loving Bayeux Tapestry!

Or, just maybe I‘ll reflect on the math that tells me that, twenty-nine generations on, I could very well have more than a billion such great-grandparents, and—really—how many drops of potentially royal blood can one body hold?

Inspired by Vive la Même Chose.

Vive la Même Chose

My DNA results were curious. Mostly Spanishy with a titillating 4% Turkish. This was 2016. Timely, as it saved me from Boydenesque embarrassment. Never again would I repeat (with caveats) our family’s «Grand-mère Zepherine était indignée» story. But then they sent an update. Ninety-four percent French Canadian. NINETY-FOUR PERCENT. Generations of snogging Habitants, lumberjacks, spade-welding Welland canalers, bootleggers and the women who made their bail. They all contributed to Barely Bilingual Me. No Basque whalers, Ottoman anarchists, nor clan mothers. A predictable tête de couchon of sameness. But just maybe, some Viking-Pirate made up that vestigial 1% Dane?

Image of Me from Ancestry.com. Inspired by One Copes.

Inventors in Heaven

“What’s he even doing here?” 

     Tesla tsk-tsked. “They gave him credit for inventing vodka.” 

     “What rubbish,” Edison spat. “Smirnoff bought his way in. And even if vodka were legit—here of all places!—it’s no light bulb.” 

     Marconi tuned the old grumps out. Always bickering, yet completely united in their snobbery. They had too much time on their hands. Who knew heaven was dry?! 

     Marconi kept himself busy puttering with radio-telepathy and people-watching—the Inventor’s Wing was chock-full of characters. Recently he’d been observing Smirnoff himself, curious about what he was cooking up on the sly with that American, Zamboni. 

Inspired by Inspiration and the heaven I imagined in Geronimo and J-Section. The next installment is here. Image: Historical Artwork Of The Mechanics Of The Heavens, by Science Photo Library, based on a medieval artwork.

Mariupol

Circles of steel, circling trucks,
Circles of steel, circling tanks,
Circles of steel, circling guns,
Circles circling circles,
Trucks and tanks and guns,
Circles of steel, circling the city,
Circles of steel, tightening circles,
Circles of steel, circles of boots,
Circles of boots, marching,
Marching past new graves,
Circles above, steel in the air,
Circles within circles within circles,
Circles of fear within circles of hatred,
Hatred encircling, hatred reflected,
Circles of fear, coming with steel,
Circles of youth, turned to old age,
Circles of steel, encircling steel,
Pain within steel, tears within steel,
No sunlight penetrates the hard steel.

Sadly, the war in Ukraine continues to inspire. The image of a hospital window cracked from shelling in Mariupol was shot by Evgeniy Maloletka of the Associated Press.

Margibutt

Independently of the “I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter!” folks, my father-in-law, post-heart attack, came up with “Margibutt”– his own margarine/butter combo. The dinner table erupted with laughter and ever since then any get-rich-quick scheme talked up in the family is labelled a “margibutt.” My hubby’s got a whole file folder of them on his laptop. We used the term so often over the years that when my adult son called a work colleague’s idea a “margibutt” and got a blank look, he was amazed to find out that it was not in fact in any dictionary.

Inspired by Inspiration. Image from icantbelieveitsnotbutter.com.

Inspiration

The Think Tank was a plastic sphere containing 13,000 words printed on thin plastic strips. It had a window through which you could see the words and a knob on each side to stir them up. The idea was to watch as they churned past and wait for your lateral-thinking circuits to kick in.

I remember using one once in Mrs. Applebaum’s class; but its inventor, Savo Bojicic, had to live with them every day. Those words were all cut by hand, and they followed him everywhere. Said Savo: “I couldn’t reach into my pocket without pulling out a few.”

Inspired by my wish for a long-forgotten gizmo designed to inspire me. Photos from Shirley on Kijiji, who is looking to complete her Think Tank collection; and Welmas on eBay, who is looking to sell one.

The COVIDteen (Easter) Rabbit

It was bound to happen. By day, Dan works with electrical contractors and plays in a band at night. Rich teaches tiny little Petrie Dishes karate. I’m not out much but I’m kissy-huggy. So, Rich on Ash Wednesday, me and Dan on Good Friday. Anticipating my own fall, I did all my Easter shopping on Thursday, including spending a small fortune on chocolate. COVID time is different, it’s slower and the illness has its own feeling-shitty-feeling-good-feeling shitty again cadence. It’s perpetually 2:00 P.M. and I’m in this guilt free cycle of Read-Knit-Snooze-Pee. But I won’t die. Because science. Because vaccines.

Inspired by We’ll always have Downsview. Image “Easter Surprize” by L. Leclair.

The All-In Simulation

We used to live in the Base Case. Our birthright was peace, prosperity, and sanity in governance and public discourse. Now I wonder if someone’s running what-if scenarios. “Let’s see how they react to a cascade of catastrophic ‘natural’ events.” “Let’s make a sociopathic narcissist their most powerful leader.” “Let’s see how they deal with a pandemic.” “Let’s have a nuclear-armed megalomaniac go batshit rogue and launch a war.” 

     “Now let’s combine them all.” 

     Maybe we’re characters in a simulated reality, where real people run worse case scenarios on us virtuals. Hopefully they’ll get things right by watching us fail.

Inspired by 2022. Image from a poster for 20th Century Studios’s 2021 film Free Guy.

2022

Somewhere a child skips in a field of sunflowers, 

Beneath blue sky, with yellow sun.

Somewhere a child twirls a sunflower

Toward a blue butterfly.

Somewhere a woman bakes bread,

From the wheat growing beside sunflowers,

And makes jam from blue berries.

Somewhere a man joins friends in a cafe,

With yellow curtains and blue napkins.

Somewhere lovers embrace beside blue water,

And beneath yellow sun.

Somewhere a teacher shows students

The twirls of petals in a sunflower.

Somewhere a boy looks up at blue sky,

While letting his fishing rod lie still.

Somewhere, but not in Kyiv. 

Not today.

Inspired by Nyet Nyet, Mad Putin. Photo by alain01789 on Flickr.

The Last Shopping Trip

We need bread and eggs. Mom won’t wait in the car, but drags herself with her walker across the parking lot. Inside she stops to catch her breath—pneumonic tendrils even then claiming her lungs, though we don’t know it. In Baked Goods she tosses in our cart cinnamon swirls, lemon tarts and pecan coffee cake—diabetes be damned. I lose her, like a kindergartener, to the dollar-store aisle, where she emerges smiling, with pink paper streamers, four green-checkered placemats, batteries and a hand mixer. The cashier rings us up—$350. “That’s with the seniors’ discount,” I scold. She giggles.

Slightly inspired by We’ll always have Downsview. Photo of Mom (left) and me goofing around, about a month before she died.

We’ll always have Downsview…

Toronto’s been through this all before: Spring 2003, when SARS-Cov-1 appeared out of nowhere and started killing people. Almost entirely in hospitals, granted, but I had a friend who worked in one and told me of the morning screenings and the mandatory masks. He was appalled by the fearmongering he’d heard on the news, and he laughed at the minuscule chance the average person had of catching this new disease.
     I told him I agreed with him, but I told him through the glass of my front door, and I pointed to where I’d left his stuff on the lawn.

The story was inspired by One Copes; the title by this. The image is from the CDC.

Nyet Nyet, Mad Putin

There is a crooked man, holding sway in Rus today
He’s a hate-filled snake, and he wants Ukraine to pay
World leaders look at him with fear and outright shock
But to Moscow oligarchs he has such a giant [CENSORED]

Da-da, Vlad Putin
Tyrant on the Russian scene
Nobody dared to tangle with him

So he figured he would win
With his Spetsnaz and his tanks
But he didn’t factor in
The corruption in his ranks

Hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, oops

F-you, Vlad Putin
Little man and would-be Czar
You’ll rue the day you started a [CENSORED-IN-RUSSIA]

Sung to the tune of Bony M’s 1978 hit Rasputin. Inspired by Black Swans and 2012’s Dead Dictator, half of my “World Dictators in Poetry” series. It is illegal in Russia to call Putin’s war in Ukraine a “war.” Image from the President of Russia website press service.

Black Swan II

It was happy hour at the Black Swan and the masks had come off. Mark pressed Flora against the wall, crushing her overheated body. He mumbled in her ear — no doubt vaingloriously extolling his attributes, but she was too busy avoiding his foul breath to listen. She was parched and was reaching for her glass on the ledge, when someone knocked it over, flooding them both with beer and making a sticky situation even stickier. She was wriggling out of his grasp, when the fire alarm went off. Smoke was coming from the kitchen. And in the corner, someone coughed.

Inspired by Black Swans. Photo by Primal Frog.

Black Swans

    “May you live in interesting times.”
     This is a curse, purported to be of Chinese origin, although that, like everything on the internet, is debatable. Let’s at least agree that these are interesting times. Within the last two years we have experienced, in biblical proportions, droughts, floods, fires and pestilence. Now there is a bloody war, started by a man intent on reconstituting a fallen, unlamented empire and threatening nuclear war to get his way.

An unexpected event with massive, catastrophic consequences is called a “black swan.” They used to be rare as hen’s teeth. Now they come in flocks.

This post hearkens back to the days of Close Encounters of the Bird Kind, when avian conflict (and avian flu) were all we had to worry about. The photo is by Dorothe Wouters.

My Mixed Metafort

Furnishing my first apartment was a bit like assembling a puzzle with no box, a bunch of missing pieces, and the vaguest idea of how it should look. Particularly hard was the living room with its three doors leading in and two windows looking out; but in the end it all came together, a perfect picture I can still conjure up when I need it. Hey, I still have most of the pieces, and every few years, when the family’s out of town, I’ll pull them together like a pillow fort and spend the week living my best bachelor life.

Inspired by Inca Hoots and This Bit of Innocent Play. Image by Orbon Alija on iStock.

Inca Hoots

Studying anthropology was the best part about early adulthood. Everything I learned was an exotic one-eighty from my daily ration of Bambi bread. But initially, I jumped into it with the same cray-cray-chutzpah that my younger self reserved for piracy. Just as my seamstress mom enabled my swashbuckling wardrobe, Windsor’s Casa Chavela transformed my tiny bedroom into a Rider Haggard-Indiana Jones-Nabob Coffee Commercial pastiche of serapes, wind chimes, carved figurines and not-safe-for-food decorative ceramics. Thankfully, my limited disposable income and nagging sense of cultural appropriation put a stop to it, as I was one El Condor Pasa away from loco.

Inspired by Transit Life List. Photo, All that's Left, by L. Leclair.

Transit Life List

The subway brims with exotica—though you must be vigilant as a birder in a wetland to find it. Once, at rush hour, I spotted George Chuvalo on my car. He stood swaying, clutching a thin strap in a fist like a ham. He’d gone the distance with Ali, and nobody recognized him. Another time, early evening, few around, former PM John Turner sat down across from me at King, nodded agreeably, and opened his paper. No security, nada. Then there was the famous theatre actress who looked up, met my eye, and smiled. Fan-boy that I was, I blushed.

Inspired by The escalators at Henri-Bourassa. Image by Graeme Roy, The Canadian Press.

The escalators at Henri-Bourassa

Early ’70s, two little girls, Lianne and I, gleefully take the Metro downtown to La Ronde. Mom has no car. Heart skips a beat when I jump the gap to land on the first step of the long escalator at Henri-Bourassa station, taking us down and down and down. At the bottom, we press the button on the machine too many times, watch the paper transfers spew out, collect them, stuff them in our pockets, wait for Mom still riding the escalator, look up and see her—cat’s eye glasses, dark curls around her shoulders. How young she was.

Inspired by Dundas. Image of the Henri-Bourassa Station escalators by André Querry.

Dundas

On the subway back to kindergarten, I’m reminded of Mrs. Sévigny teaching us a new way to draw. Black was the “magic” crayon, and she wanted us to use it to outline our pictures and colour in later. This worked well enough with darker colours, but not so much with yellow, which mixed with the smears and speckles of black to create an unpleasant mess and just a hint of bile. And you’d think if even five year-old me could see this and remember it all these years later, why not the guy who designed the tiles for Dundas station?

Inspired by Boggle Boy. Photo by Chung Ho Leung.

Boggle Boy

Having a carless childhood, Dan got very good at the subway game: Reworking the station names into smaller words and counting how many we could get out before the car left the station. The fun started at Dundas West: Sad, wad, wads, sweat, sunset. Lansdowne Station…land, down, downs, dew, swan. The trip to Scarborough a pedagogical feast until Castle Frank. A knit eyebrow and a bouncing foot telegraphing an internal, imaginary struggle between Professor Calculus and Captain Underpants. Then a gamy smile: Stank, Fart, Farts!!! Proving once again that you can lead an arse to Warden but you can’t make it think.

Inspired by High Roller. Photo by Roy.

High Roller

I’d been living the good life but things turned quickly. Property, that’s what did me in. I was inexorably drawn to high-end real estate, and now all I had left was a tux, a silver roadster and a thousand dollars in crinkled small bills. Nothing for it but to roll the dice.

     A burst of mocking laughter. “Vroom, vroom . . . ” My eyes scanned ahead and I saw where I was headed. I counted it out, crossed the railway, missed a final Chance and slammed into destiny. The grin on Victor’s face was insufferable. “Boardwalk, one hotel. That’ll be two thousand bucks.”

Image from Cool Material. Inspired by This Bit of Innocent Play.

This Bit of Innocent Play

My cardboard doll house with its miniature kitchen with its miniature rag rug, where everything is imperfect and definitely not square or even to proper scale and who cares anyways, sits in a corner of my home office. Started and then abandoned (for now). Covered in dust, lopsided and forlorn, it is chewed on occasionally by the cat—but even she gets bored of it. I will not throw it out—this bit of innocent play. It’s hopeful. It speaks to me of life devoid of the mundane worries and existential global crises that crush me incrementally each day. 

Inspired by the playhouse in Four Very Short Stories about William Shatner.

Four Very Short Stories about William Shatner

Considering she’d never met the man, my mother certainly had her share of William Shatner stories. There’s the one where they’d both gone to the same high school in Montréal, even if they were seven years apart. There’s another where she first saw him perform at the Mountain Playhouse; and then maybe the early years in Stratford, but she’d lost all her programmes to a basement flood and couldn’t be sure. Oh, and one more about how she had to convince 11-year-old me it really was Captain Kirk in those Loblaw’s commercials, because he looked so weird out of uniform.

Inspired by Winter Whiteouts and Memory Blizzards. The 1950 photo of the Mountain Playhouse is from the Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec, where I also found one of the Playhouse programmes from 1952, which lists Mr. Shatner in two roles: “Richard Stanley” in The Man Who Came to Dinner and as the Assistant Manager of the Playhouse itself.