The Power of Rituals

Fifty-two, 53, 54 . . . If I can make it to Dr. Deeley’s office in 72 steps I won’t have a cavity. Sixty-eight, 69, 70. Crap! I’ll go around the block again. I’ll take smaller steps. What’s the time? 2:15. Good. My appointment’s not until 3. I leave early because it takes me so long to do stuff. I have to make sure I do everything in the correct order and I had to brush my teeth really well this morning — 250 times up and down and then 250 times across front and back — until I see the blood.

My New Dentist (1986)

Last month, one of my molars started bothering me just enough to break my longstanding dental moratorium. My old dentist had wanted my wisdom teeth out, but I didn’t want to, and since I was soon to be off my mother’s dental plan, I just never did, but I did try to brush well.
     Then, I had my own dental plan, and still stayed away.
     Then, my tooth hurt.

My new dentist also thinks I should have my wisdom teeth out, but he’s not so insistent. And besides, he says he’ll send me to a specialist who offers intravenous Valium.

Image from The Awful Tooth (1938).

The Candy Cabinet

Early on I lost my sweet tooth. A gem of family lore, retold endlessly at holiday get-togethers, suggests how. As a tyke I found myself alone one day, exploring the bathroom. There was nothing interesting in the closet, only a pack of serviettes beneath the sink. Disappointed, I climbed onto the counter to crack the medicine cabinet. Ah, the marvels there, the colours and shapes! A bottle of white Smarties. A roll of mints, half-finished, smelling un-minty. A pack of chocolate—I made quick work of it. Call that two-sided luck, for by eschewing the Aspirin I’d gobbled the Ex-Lax.

Image: Mrs Prep

Coffee Crisps in the Dominion

Our dad gave Karen and me each a quarter to buy a candy bar. By ourselves. We were little enough that it was a big deal to go through the Dominion check-out on our own. I picked a Coffee Crisp: they were good those days, thicker, their hit of real coffee like a hint about being grown-up. The bigger deal was what happened at the cash. The lady said we had to pay 52 cents. We were shocked. “A candy bar’s a quarter!” we argued. “Taxes,” she said. “If it’s over 50 cents, there’s taxes.” Suddenly grown-up was looking bad.

Image: HuntersAlley on etsy.

Devils and Chocolates in Rouyn, Quebec

During the 1950s, Frank and Alice lived simply on their combined spoils of professional wrestling and moose hunting. But after Le Diable hung up his red cape, money became tight, so Alice went to work at Lowney’s. It put her off chocolate for the rest of her life. She’d tell us how after a run of higher quality chocolates the leavings were swept up by French-Canadian Oompa Loompas and reused in other, cheaper confections. This was a woman who could gut a muskie with her eyeteeth, but shake a box of Bridge Mixture within earshot and she’d go gippy.

Photo from TyFive.

Politics in a box of Smarties

For years, our friend Tim used to assign political affiliations to each of the colours in a box of Smarties: Tory Blues, Grit Reds, NDP Oranges, Commie Pinkos, Enviro Greens, Brown-shirted Fascists, fanatical Monarchist Purples, and Libertarian Yellows. Every box a mini election. Creating a seating plan for his own House of Commons, he would group the colours and line them up on a table, formulating coalition governments. After tallying up, sometimes the Tories would win, sometimes the fascists, occasionally the NDP, once the Greens, but never the Grits. No matter, he'd devoured each and every politician with relish.

The Candyman

As if working in a box downtown weren’t punishment enough, someone has decided our team might function more efficiently if we all just moved to shared cubicles, putting me back-to-back with a man who enjoys regular baby-talk calls with his new wife, whose nails apparently grow so fast he must clip them first thing every morning, who squeezes past my chair every hour for his cigarette breaks, and yet still finds the time every day to entirely fill his wastebasket with the cans and wrappings from an apparently non-stop intake of soda pop, chocolate bars, and economy-sized bags of candy.

Image from Ads of the World.

Et bron bron bron

Our choir mistress, Madame Catherine, was a Consecrated Virgin. I kid you not. She was a secular person who didn’t marry, but devoted her life to the Catholic Church. In her youth she’d fallen for a man who had a beautiful voice, but he left her for a Greek girl. One Christmas he returned to sing Oh Holy Night with her at midnight mass. Standing behind her in the choir loft, I remember how her tiny shoulders tightened when they sang the passage fall on your knees. I now know why we French celebrate Saint Catherine’s day by pulling taffy.

Photo from la Fédération 23 Cercle de Fermières La Sarre

The signs of a stroke include denial

The signs of a stroke include denial
That you’re having a stroke. That’s a little wild
Cuz all of the time you’re not having a stroke
You’re denying the stroke you’re so signfully having
So it seems until you can’t see the right side of
Anything and decide to order a gingerale.
You can’t be having a stroke if you’re at the Bad Dog
Theatre, Bloor and Oz, having a gingerale. In fact,
All signs from what you taste on the left
Are you’re having a Vernor’s, too warm
And too sweet, too watery like
The grave on the right.

Aren’t hospitals supposed to be restful?

A slim line of white beneath the door
Around me the old women snore
Voices up and down the corridor

Try to sleep
if only the machine that goes beep
WOULD STOP

Now our door bangs open,
Flood of light too bright
“Whatcha want Mary?”
“I’m wet,” my neighbour whispers.
The nurse sighs (Where do you think you are? A hospital?)
Thundering out the door, the angel in white goes.
The light still floods, but out the window glows
the moon — amid the night a treasure
I squeeze my eyes tight
Soon they’ll wake me to take my blood pressure.

The Fecal Transplant Movement

News today of an innovation in the treatment of C. difficile. It’s called a “fecal transplant” and involves inserting a healthy person’s stool inside a sick person’s gut. Health Canada has just issued guidelines in the hope of dissuading do-it-yourselfers.
     Ew.
     That’s directed at the DIY-ers (please, don’t linger over matters of technique) not the procedure itself, for C. difficile is a killer, and any advance is worthy. Solutions arise from unexpected sources: think penicillin from fungus, the crappy glue behind Post-its, or the failed drug that became Viagra.
     So embrace this movement, and amend your transplant donor card today.


Image: Clostridium difficile colonies, Centers for Disease Control

The Sands of Alberta

Back then, we were all more worried about Nuclear Winter than Global Warming, but the biggest issue by far was Acid Rain. To their credit, the folks at Syncrude actually took the time to scrub those particular emissions and had pallets of bright yellow sulphur to show for it.
    On our trip to Fort McMurray, they actually took us through the process of turning tar sand to fuel, beginning to end. Today, of course, this is regarded as one of the dirtiest ways of addressing our energy needs, but let me tell you, the sand it produces is impeccably clean.

Figure 1
My very own personal carbon sink . . . 180 grams of
never-to-be-processed tar sand. Vintage 1978.

Science fiction?

August 16, 2130

HALIFAX — The opening session of the 105th International Summit on Climate Change was interrupted today by Cyclone Mary, which stormed past Security and crashed the conference hall, sweeping dozens of the world’s top climatologists out to the Atlantic.
     “Great way to cover up the truth and silence scientists,” said surviving Summit delegate Dr. Will U. Listen. “It’s a Government plot.”
     “Nonsense!” said Prime Minister Dee Nial, from her office in Fort McMurray. “It’s just a tragic accident. But it does speak to the necessity of reframing the discussion from that of climate change to better weather forecasting.”

The Vinyl Mine

Another day in the vinyl mine, and we’re still following that vein of prog we discovered last month—nothing special really, just layer after layer of second- and third-rate songs packed tightly together around those increasingly rare gems.
     Is it any wonder they all died out? Though thank goodness they did, or there’d be no job for me, no fuel for the ships, and certainly no joy for the scouts who first traced these sounds back to their source, nor the agents who still fight for a chance just to gaze upon the remains of the creatures that produced them.

Detail from The Genealogy of Pop/Rock Music by Reebee Garofalo.

K-Tel Super Gold and other Delights

Although it’s never been rigorously tested, I claim an encyclopaedic knowledge of pop and country music from my salad days, circa 1972-1990. Yet my own vinyl collection was negligible. Even at the discerning age of 13 my albums were so few and nerdy that they nestled comfortably by the parental hi-fi with Marty Robbins, Perry Como and Mantovani. And I knew it. As my Cowsill’s Hair album looked cooler than Gary Lewis and the Playboys it always stayed at the head of the stack. Until I found Pete Townshend and imperial milk crates, then my world changed for the better.

Image from scandinavianconnection on eBay.

Post Apocalypse Bathing

If you turn when taking a shower at my mother’s house, you’ll knock a half-dozen plastic bottles off the shelves that line the lime green tub. Some of these, with congealed goo around their rims, I swear she’s had for over a decade. The seasons of her life are traced through these remedies: No-Frizz banana and egg-enriched conditioner, Relaxing Lavender foam bath, Moisturizing aloe vera body wash, Strawberry and kiwi rinse with colour-fast formula, Body Bounce medicated shampoo for thinning hair. She won’t throw them out; No doubt, goo will be in short supply post apocalypse.

Steamers and Buses in the First World

For her, the most memorable metaphor of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness was Marlow’s futile search for rivets, a frustrating task because they were everywhere, except where he wanted them. She thought of this often, like when she faced an empty coin purse in front of a parking meter, all the while knowing there was a bowl of change back home. Or when the toilet paper ran out in the downstairs loo but a surfeit of rolls were stacked upstairs. Or waiting for the 47 South Lansdowne bus. It’s not like she’d be eaten by cannibals but it still resonated.

The Saratoga Shuffle

I’ve been through Saratoga Springs maybe a half-dozen times, but I’ve heard it’s quite beautiful.
     They say Cornelius Vanderbilt would vacation here often, to take the waters and perhaps even dine at Cary Moon’s exclusive Lake House where, legend tells, the potato chip was invented just for him.
    But none of that for my mother, my sister, and me, back when Saratoga was the halfway point from New York to Montreal, and Greyhound would shunt us all off to the rest stop nearest the interchange, through the lone restaurant there, like so many cattle down the chute.
     “Thirty minutes, people!”

Photo by Bob Coolidge. December 1970.

Appaloosa Queen

I was a young 19 and it was my first overnight bus trip from the Soo to university. My seatmate was in her forties, with a sunhammered face and raw blonde curls. She told me a long story about how she’d been the first runner-up in the National Appaloosa Queen contest in 1970 something. I’d never met anyone like her, I felt sad and weirdly uncomfortable. She got out to smoke in Sudbury. When I woke up in Toronto, my head was on her shoulder.
     I’ve always liked purses with fringes. Guess I kind of wish I was a cowboy.

Getting the Hell Out

I stole the money from that bastard. Took the first bus west. She sat next to me. In Calgary we got off together to get breakfast — and suddenly she’s calling me ma. It hit me hard, you know? No one ever called me ma before. I was flattered. Tickled pink. I paid for her food. She said I was her spiritual mother and that her real ma beat her. She said a lot of things. We got on the bus. The driver shook me awake in Vancouver. She was gone and so was the money I stole from that bastard.