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.

Winter Whiteouts and Memory Blizzards

The theme is music and I’m supposed to follow the lead and the cursor’s blinking and I’m stewing over whiteouts and car rentals and another trip to the frozen prairie to move a loved one into long term care. I made the fateful decision and now must see it through—and I’ve got nothing, absolutely nothing for the blog.
     Suddenly I overhear a snippet of an old song on seasonal rotation and the memories come flooding. Lost and out of reach to her, suddenly vivid and alive to me. Yes, I‘ll be home for Christmas, if only in my dreams.

Sheet music by Melrose Music Corp., ca. 1943. Author’s note: To accommodate travel requirements, I wrote this contribution before Nancy posted her delightful ode to summer flowers. On the day this appears on the blog I will be in Saskatchewan, where in December there are no snowdrops but those falling from the sky.

Momentary Sunshine

In the big backyard of her parents’ suburban house, Zinnia chases after her older sisters Hyacinth and Magnolia, but they are mean and refuse to be caught and they laugh at her.
     “Maggie, wait!“ Zinnia whines. “Cinth, slow down!”
     But they're already gone out the side gate, locking it behind them. Zinnia falls on the grass and rips off the sunhat her mother insisted on. She closes her eyes, tilts her head up, and in the warmth of the summer afternoon sun, forgets for a moment her constantly teasing sisters and how she loves and hates them at the same time.

Inspired by You Are My Sunshine.

You Are My Sunshine

There’s this young guy, spends way too much time downtown and way too much money at Funland, and he sees this old guy, night after night, begging in a doorway off Yonge, strumming his ukulele, singing the same sad song to a little stuffed dog, just trying to make change for a meal. And it works for a while, until the strings start breaking—no money for strings—even after some punk steals his uke, he sits there still, strumming those invisible strings, still singing that same sad song to his little stuffed dog: “ . . . please don’t take my sunshine away.”

Inspired first by Your Report on the Subway, a Toronto moment Kathy captured back in January 2016. Now, almost six years later, Laurie’s It’s Raining Mensches got me to finally write down this very old and very sad memory of mine. The photo is by Ciatus, who has an album on Fickr that perfectly captures the Yonge Street on which this story unfolds.

It’s Raining Mensches

Living with a dying dog is hard. One day Siko is fine. The next day he chews off his toes because his leg hurts him so. Between fetching pills and bandages, Rich and I are such regulars at our pharmacy that we can anticipate its demographic-pleasing Best-of-the-Eighties playlist. Last month I ugly-cried into my face mask while sing-sobbing to The Weather Girls. But friends have been so wonderful with dinners, dog treats, waived veterinarian fees, high-end meat and pots of honey. Because of all this kindness, Siko’s toes are pinky-new and he is with us for a little while longer.

Inspired by What kind of music do you like?
Photo: “Good Boy” by Laurie Leclair.

What kind of music do you like?

To answer this question, I mentally ran through my—I was going to say Spotify playlist, but who am I kidding?—CD collection: Sarah Vaughan, jazz and opera compilations, Edith Piaf, Guardians of the Galaxy and Shrek sound tracks, Christmas muzak, Stan Rogers, Queen, some Beatles, Mozart, Maroon 5, KD Lang, Joni Mitchell, The Clash, MuchDance 2009, and a well-played double-CD set of Jesus Christ Superstar show tunes, the lyrics of which are drilled into my kids’ heads for life. Do I have any discernible musical taste at all? “Ugh, well...,” I stalled, but thankfully the conversation had moved on.

Inspired by First Church of Christ, Superstar.

First Church of Christ, Superstar

Towards the end of her marriage, my mother started attending church again . . . not—as you might expect—the Church of England, but rather the First Church of Christ, Scientist.

     I hadn’t been to church since my christening, and so it was all quite new to me, especially the part about all the secret Christian Science celebrities! Jean Stapleton—of Archie Bunker fame—was a Christian Scientist. The Monkee’s Mike Nesmith. Doris Day! But the only real star to ever visit our church was Ginger Rogers—twice—while she was refining her new show, downtown, at the Royal York’s Imperial Room.

Inspired by Feast of the Epiphany. The image is of an invitation to a free lecture on Christian Science, signed—in pencil—by Ginger Rogers on Sunday, February 15, 1976.

Feast of the Epiphany

Yesterday Soo asked me when I stopped being a Catholic. I told her early undergrad. But the question provoked: Apart from an enforced baptism at three weeks old, why was I EVER a Catholic? I loved the stained glass, the rosaries, alters full of Christmas poinsettias and Easter lilies, candles. After she left I bought a pair of lug-soled leather loafers embellished with a Channel-esque gold chain across their vamps. And then it dawned: It was the bling. I loved the bling. And it’s amazing how seamlessly Catholic guilt segues into buyer’s remorse. Fits like a glove, or a shoe.

Inspired by Heresy Above. Little Laurie by Roy Schulze and Laurie Leclair, based on a photo by G. Leclair.

Heresy Above

All this talk of stars and movement made him nauseous. Or was it Galileo’s voice? The fool was droning on about the earth revolving around the sun. A ridiculous notion; and if it wasn’t nipped in the bud some nutbar might eventually question Genesis itself.

The Pope glanced at his sundial. His next audience was with a delegation of Bohemians pushing Saint Barbara for patron saint of miners. Jesus. A woman—what next? 

     “Just kiss the ring and go,” he told Galileo curtly, wondering what he would tell the faithful at the “Make Rome Great Again” rally later that afternoon.

Inspired by Starry Night. Image: Galileo before the Holy Office by Joseph-Nicolas Robert-Fleury

Starry Night

I lay on my back on the canoe, and it was so dark, you couldn’t see where the water ended and the sky began. I looked up at the Milky Way as he talked about the Great Bear, the Swan, the Dragon, the double star here, the star cluster there. But I wanted him to shut up so I could hear his paddle as it broke the void, plunged deep, came up behind, and dripped, dripped forward to be plunged again. I wanted to relax into the rhythm. I didn’t want any talk. I didn’t want to hear what I didn’t know.

Inspired by Space 1977. Photo by NASA.

Space 1977

Our new apartment got its TV the old-fashioned way, from a big old antenna on top. Cable might’ve given us a few more channels, but even my little black-and-white set, with its rabbit ears and its UHF loop, was able to pull in as much Star Trek as the airwaves could hold, because Star Trek was what I cared about most, and here I was getting it two times a day! . . . Channel 9, when I got home from school, then again, after supper, while mom watched her news. 

     She concerned herself with current affairs. I was looking to the future.

Inspired by Hamlet Hamlet do be a Lamblet. Excerpt from Star Week, April 30, 1977.

Hamlet Hamlet do be a Lamblet

I sunk my tetracycline-stained teeth into Shakespeare by watching the Hamlet episode of Gilligan’s Island. Along with a fleeting interest in The Bard, that show sparked an obsession with tropical islands, a gateway eccentricity to my pirate phase. Although the Drouillard Road locals could’ve rocked a parrot or a wooden leg, Windsor in 1967 was no ocean paradise. So imagine the five-year-old serendipity when I spotted a cookie bag emblazoned with palm trees and clipper ships. Those coconut cremes were in my mom’s shopping cart before she knew what hit her. Desert Isle–Dessert Aisle? It could work: It had to.

Inspired by The Be All and End All. Image from Wikipedia.

The Be All to End All

To be, or not to be, a drabbler, that is the question. Whither the point to suffer the mind, spill ink upon blank page, then feel the slings and arrows of outrageous critics? (Or worse, feel none, and be unheard, unread, which marks perchance calamity for so brief a composition.)
     Devoutly to be wish’d: To be a drabbler no more, and by our silence bid an end to the heart-ache of a hundred measly words, the contrivances of plot and rickety premise, the sly shuffle with hyphens and compound-words.
     To drabble, or not to drabble: ay, there be the rub.

Notes: (1) So far this month we have been on a bee/b/be of sorts. Check the archive here. (2) A “drabble,” by the way, is (according to Wikipedia) “a short work of fiction of precisely one hundred words in length”—witness the confections served on this blogsite. “The purpose of a drabble is brevity, testing the author’s ability to express interesting and meaningful ideas in a confined space.” We make no claims regarding interesting or meaningful and vouch only for the hundred words (though sometimes we cheat with sneaky hyphens or made-up compound words, these end notes being a case-in-point).

Inspired by More Bs. Image of Sarah Bernhardt as Hamlet, 1899, from the Shakespeare Centre Library, Stratford-upon-Avon