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. 
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.
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.
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. 
Have your ever wanted someone so badly you grew at the merest thought of them?
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.
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.” 
This heat, is the hot that is all encompassing, forever touching and licking you salty to saltier. It’s pore awakening, lung breaking, dripping, sticking, shrilling things like: “Don’t even look at me” sort of scorch. “Even your balls call it getting too close.” Ceiling fan spinning overhead mixing tepid air hot, just whirling the atmosphere dizzy. Sexy barely there outfits on bikes, shinny reflective surfaces wet your vision. Walkers, snail through the city streets being slowed by the gum stretching along relentlessly a pink string growing blacker with every slumbrous step, collecting all manner of memories with them.
It was a bright Saturday morning and there I was, a corduroyed butterball, warbling away in the back seat, my lazy eye lost in the middle distance of incipient stardom. Dad and I drove along Tecumseh Road to Ajax Lumber, parking next to the totem pole. Then it dawned on me: I was being kidnapped, sold into slavery or worse, sent to Mémé’s house in Vanier. That pole was the port-key, one touch of its bogus eagle-beak and a life of incessant embroidery, rosary recitations and unilingual servitude awaited me. Hell’s demons had nothing on grandma and Peanut, her Chihuahua.
Sunday sings a sleepy song. Southern exposure shoots shards of hot white flood-like brightness, blinding the portraits hung on Victorian plum walls. No dark shadows lurking, pure crisp lines dancing undisturbed over last night’s array of tossed lingerie and slightly sipped flutes of champagne whose sparkles fizzled their final pop hours ago. Dormant pools in finely cut crystal becomes alive. Refractions set ablaze a spectrum of color on a skin-toned landscape. It’s a tango, imprisoning a prism of color over flesh barely covered by slippery satin sheets. We ponder the method of this muse that shakes us awake, squinting.
Death passed me by that morning, sped right past the Market knocking the generator into my wheel and tossing me into the traffic on Front Street. Or so I was told, because all I recall was the unearthly clatter, then nothing—no darkness, no light, just nothing at all till I found myself coming back to my senses and already walking around. And so I doubt now I’ll even notice death when it finally does come, just the last thing that happens before, like the last thing you remember before falling asleep, except this time you won’t be waking up.
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.
Believe it or not, but when you grow up in New Jersey, there comes a point when New York City loses its allure and becomes just another place for school trips, birthday parties, or maybe a family outing to the Museum of Natural History in your father’s nicotine-stained Oldsmobile.
