Unexpected Pleasure

I am not sure how the boys managed to purchase a case of beer. They were only about fifteen at the time. The boys consumed the beer secretly in the garage, but one of them decided to take one home. His mother found it, and the boy told her he had lifted it out of our fridge to sample ‘his first beer.’ A couple of days later the mother showed up with the boy. They brought a case of beer that the boy had been forced to pay for, to make up for the alleged ‘theft.’ Steve was quite pleased.

Leave it to Beaver

Unless you’re like Ron Howard or Drew Barrymore or that guy who played Baretta, it is very difficult for child actors to make that transition to adult movie star. Our neighbourhood is loaded with film people, including child actors. There’s one nearby whose career tanked after a Quiznos commercial. Now he is reduced to a morose and slightly tubby has-been. Maybe its just adolescence, but he hardly speaks anymore. Back in the day, we used to see him as a tiny boy, enjoying a gimlet with the wait staff at Domani, his little pudgy legs dangling from the bar stool.

Poor Jan Brady

Poor Jan Brady, the middle girl in a family too large really to even wonder who the middle child might be, teased by her stepbrothers, and forever in her sister’s shadow, the prettier one and more popular at school, who for the sake of a few extra years gets to date a different boy every episode.
     Poor Jan, who, if it weren’t for the glasses and the hair and the clothes, might have been invited too.
     Poor Jan, who could maybe put up with all of this if it weren’t for these hideous freckles . . . but the lemon juice does nothing!

Patronizing

It was a BBC production. Maybe a murder mystery. Privileged people in an elegant setting pursuing leisurely living in glamorous clothes. The actress wore a sinuous gown. Backless, revealing a large swatch of heavily freckled skin. I took note, being similarly speckled, myself. You don’t see a lot of freckled actresses. From time to time the gossip rags will have a photo spread of stars without make-up revealing a few who suffer from this hideous affliction. Like Julianne Moore. But on screen the ugliness is always carefully concealed. Patronizing people, however, will always tell me freckles are cute.

Wry and Ginger

At ten minutes past twelve Rebecca realized she had made a mistake by snogging with that redheaded guy. Some New Year’s Eve, she couldn’t even recall his name and now she had to slink back to her table of friends, tail between her legs and put up with their good-natured teasing. These were very upright individuals: most of them were in law school and all of them steadfast virgins or monogamous. Only Rebecca and their artist friend Paco brought new people into the fold. But not this guy, a Ginger Tosser for crying out loud. And probably a business student.

Reticulum

He wandered through the smoke and the noise and settled finally near a group he knew, more or less, with enough of them in the confusion that the sudden sight of her caught him off guard.
     He’d seen her in a swimsuit, for heaven’s sake, but something about that particular dress on this particular night made him feel as if something inside had come loose. Or was it the lipstick? Or the touch of colour around her eyes that set off the constellation of freckles that had settled upon her cheeks.
     Ten to the east and twelve to the west.

Femme Fatale

Joan pictured herself slouching elegantly in the shadowed corner, smoking a cigarette. Smoke curling up around her face; a slash of light revealing the sardonic look in her eyes. Men shuffling nearby waiting for an opening to talk to her. If they dared. “Men cluster to me, like moths around a flame,” she sung under her breath, mimicking Marlene Dietrich’s husky voice. But then there was the line, “Falling in love again, never wanted to…” Unfortunately, Joan could identify with that helplessness far more than the powerful image of the femme fatale that she would have preferred to evoke.

And Their Eyes Met Across a Crowded Room

Inviting Jim and Jane to the same party illustrated a considerable lapse of judgment on my part. Jane was a stinging nettle, an acquired taste at the best of times, but with a windbag like Jim in the room she was insufferable. Jim believed he was the most charming man alive and anyone who didn’t agree was mistaken. He started with an innocent jibe about her shoes and she took it up several notches with a comment about his bald head. They were drawn to each other, but in a way that a drunk man heads toward a pot hole.

Dear Friend…

Please forgive me for trying to break the friends-of-friends barrier, but I felt I’d gotten to know Pat and Mike well enough to invite them without your permission. And I’m sorry if I hurt your feelings by not inviting you, but this really was more of a couple thing and there were only two spaces left. And although I can appreciate how important you think it is to share these feelings with me, I certainly won’t be reciprocating, because the real reason I did not invite you is that I was pretty sure you’d have ruined it for everyone else.

With Friends Like That...

Every year Joan was forced to celebrate Sandy’s birthday. Not just getting together for a drink; It had to be a huge party, thrown by somebody else, often Joan, in Sandy’s honour. Joan knew impressively expensive gifts were expected. She had heard Sandy running down another friend for ‘cheaping out.’ Joan dreaded the event; she would stress for days over what to purchase for Sandy. For her 30th birthday, Joan decided people could make a fuss over her for once. The email she got back from Sandy said, “I’ve celebrated three of your birthdays with you, that is my quota.”

Fucked-Up Munchkins

Suzette and Jocelyn were older than their cousin and well past the doll stage. “Hey Bern, did you like The Wizard of Oz?”
     “Oh yeah,” said the little girl recalling the ruby shoes.
“Well, do you want to play it now, with your doll house?”
     This was Bernadette’s new Christmas present that her parents made from a grocery box, the tiny windows and doors and little picket fencing all hand-cut. But curiosity got the best of her so she consented.
     Shouting “TORNADO!” the two simultaneously jumped on the paper house, leaving Bernadette in a heap of tears and crushed cardboard.

Skyhook

The Cartoons had shown us that, if you attach a fishhook to the seat of your pants, you can use a rod and reel to pull yourself up by the ass and into the sky. And even though I knew Wile E. Coyote occasionally employed some pretty dodgy physics, for some reason this particular set-up made perfect sense, and I was eager to try it out . . . the moment I saw Jerry’s new tow truck. We attached the hook to the rear bumper, turned on the winch, and stepped back. Lesson learned: Always try things out first on other people’s toys.

Support

It is put away now, because it is brittle and fragile, but it was stuck on many fridges, in many places I lived through the years. A cartoon my mother cut out of a newspaper and sent me. A woman on a swing, her raised arms holding the ropes up by herself – those ropes not attached to a frame. Meant to represent how women are often their only support for themselves. That image gave me strength at times when I thought I might just have to give up. It is fitting that I it is now tucked out of sight.

Sacred to Us

I have a medicine bag that I keep by my bed and I bring with me on airplanes. It contains things sacred to me including a small dream catcher, a rosary and some Catholic pins, their meanings so important to my mother but lost to me. And stones. Stones from England, from Christian Island, from Egypt. I have a beautiful black one, heavy and round. It’s the stone I hold when I need to think. We all carry some form of medicine bag around with us. A collection of coins from grandfathers or buttons from grandmothers. Our children’s baby teeth.

Stone

I found a pebble today after dropping Nola at school—small, round and grey, with nothing much to distinguish it from any of the other dull rocks you might find on the shores of Lake Ontario, except that this one was found all alone by the recycling bins, probably come loose from one of the many projects that teachers just toss at the end of the year. Then thinking of all the stuff I’d once worked so hard on and lost, I wiped off the dirt, picked off the glue, and carried it home. It felt good in my hand.

Lost And Found

Joan watched Elliot taking a leak in the field beyond the roadside picnic area, their favourite spot to park and neck. Suddenly Elliot started laughing. He stooped to pick something up and came back to the car with a wide grin.
     “Remember last week when I got all paranoid because I saw a cop car coming?”
They were smoking really strong hash and Elliot had freaked, shooting the remainder of the hash out the car window. The cops had not even slowed down; they probably never noticed Elliot’s car, parked in the shadows.
     “I just found the hash I ditched!”

The Natural

As Cada’s field had a granite erratic, it had great potential as an archaeological site. It’s human nature to love big rocks. Since we hang out on them ancient folks probably did too. But I’d yet to find anything there until cousin Peter came surface collecting with me. After I finished my pedantic lecture about what to look for, Pete got out of his truck walked right up to that rock, stooped down and plucked a perfect triangular point from the ground, “Like this?” He said. Obviously, Pete had an affinity with Middle Woodland dope smokers I hadn’t counted on.

I Could’ve Been Boulder

My favourite photo of my high-school crush shows her sitting on a great big rock.
     Even then, after years of pining, I couldn’t say I was any closer to actually being her boyfriend, but I had managed a few outings that at least felt like dates . . . and one great coup, which was to have her drive me around in her parent’s Volvo on a grand tour of the glacial features of Southern Ontario in aid of my final geography project.
     Unfortunately, all I got was a lousy A . . . and the photo, which one classmate dubbed “the erotic on the erratic.”

Rock of Ages

The rock was probably about 100 feet offshore. After the first few feet there was no place to touch bottom because the lake floor dropped off sharply. On a calm day she would poke her face under as she swam, to see the sun playing on the submerged rock beds below. And then she would come to the behemoth, looming giant in the shifting green light below the surface. She would swim under water around it in awe of its silent majesty, then clamber up its side to perch on top and enjoy its soothing warmth, baking in the sun.

Ed’s Stone

When I was very young, Mon Oncle P’tit Cul brought me a fossil because he knew I liked rocks. It’s a huge black one with hundreds of brachiopods, a slice of the ocean floor from 500 million years ago. From the first I kept it close to me because it was a souvenir from my cherished uncle. I’ve carried that rock around for forty years and now Mon Oncle is a widower, like my father. The stone has its place on a shelf in our home, proof we exist for less than a second, the beat of a hummingbird’s wing.