The 13th installment in my series of short-short stories, The Lazy Allen Stories, is now up on my stories page. It’s called The Fall. I encourage you to take a few minutes and check it out. All the stories are listed in the menu at the top of the page should you want to read more.
I post these things and I don’t hear much back. I’d love to know what you think.
Yesterday was our 15th Anniversary. Time for some family selfies. Tuffy P dug out her wedding dress and slipped in on over her plaid shirt. Perfect for a rainy evening.
In this photo, Georgie gets whacked by Jacques….
….and here The Partners are the stars of the show
Yesterday got off to a strange start. The construction crew across the street left a gasoline can sitting beside the road outside their construction fence, and another one sitting on the porch of one of the unfinished houses, an invitation for a neighbourhood fire. I’m looking forward to the day when these guys finish and get out here. I’m really getting tired of all the construction.
Through the morning, the street filled up with an extensive film crew, who are shooting a feature film called Legacy. They set up a base camp on Twenty Third Street, with trucks parked up most of the length of the street. On Twenty Seventh they were filming up the street and filled every available parking spot on both sides of the street from Lake Prom up to Jasmine. Off-duty police were stationed at top and bottom of the shoot, controlling traffic. I suppose there is some value to the City to have films made in Toronto, (and hopefully the neighbours whose lawns and homes were invaded were suitably compensated) but between the film gang and the construction crews, our quiet street was quite a zoo yesterday. They didn’t pack up until after 11.
We were gone for a while – we went out to Anatolia for some delicious Turkish food to celebrate our anniversary. When we came back there was a tractor-trailer on the street with an NYPD police car on the trailer. It was really chaotic. People were wandering about the middle of the street, other people jockeying vehicles around. I suppose this is exciting to some people, but I’d just as soon they filmed elsewhere.
Back in the day, when I lived in the old casket factory building on Niagara Street, there were film crews around all the time. One morning I was sitting on the sofa in my studio, reading a novel, with my cat William purring on my lap, when we heard them out in the hallway. “OK, QUIETTTTTT. READY……ROLLING”. At that point, William jumped off my lap, ran over to the door and let out a blood-curdling scream. “What the hell was that?” “I don’t know. TAKE TWO. QUIETTTTTT. READY…..ROLLING.” William let out another screech on cue. This happened 3 or 4 times. Then somebody had a bright idea, and tried to bribe him by sliding a slice of ham under my studio door. I snuck over to the door and tugged the ham in as it was offered. “OK, QUIETTTTT. READY….ROLLING.” Again, William let out a scream so loud you would hardly believe it came from a cat. He was having a great time. Finally they switched to PLAN B. When I left my studio there was sound baffling covering my door and the wall along my studio. What fun.
Everybody who fly-fished the river knew him. His old pick-up with camper would be parked at the side of the road and John would be inside waiting for the evening hatch. He was always happy to have a visitor, to chat for a while before he started fishing. There would usually be dodgy coffee, made with river water.
John was an old school fly fisherman – he loved his long bamboo rods and his tiny wet flies. He’d tell you the right way to fish, even if you didn’t ask.
The camper truck won’t be parked by the river any more. John passed recently, at a trout stream of course. Last evening the usual cranks who haunt The River got together streamside, along with John’s daughter, to see him off. It was a lovely evening and a fitting tribute.
Tight lines John P. RIP.
I came to read this book through an unlikely coincidence. I was walking to a restaurant to meet up with some folks I worked with before my retirement from the workaday world. I was a little early, and along my walk came across a “fiercely independent bookstore”. How could I not stop in? I walked into the store and my eyes immediately fell upon a book called The Parcel. I was on my way to meet up with one current and two former Canada Post employees. It seemed to me that reading a book called The Parcel was just right.
I bought the book without knowing a thing about it, and continued on my way to see my friends. I didn’t know what to expect from the book but I never could have expected the book I came to read. The term “parcel” was used to describe a young girl sold into sex slavery. The book told the story of Madhu, who was a “hijra” – a eunuch in Mumbai’s Kamathipura red light district. Madhu was as beggar and a former prostitute. She also had a role in preparing children for sex slavery.
This book is very difficult to read. Irani takes us into the mind of Madhu, and ventures into her past (we learn that as a hijra, the “third sex”, Madhu was “he” prior to castration and “she” after), and as ugly and sad as her world is, she and her life are presented with great compassion.
This is a book I likely would not have chosen to read, had I paid any attention to what it was about, instead of buying it on impulse based on happenstance. I’m glad I read it though. It is a very unusual novel, a compelling, fascinating and horrifying read all at once.
How many bullets do you need to make a good David and Goliath flick? If the evil guy who is oppressing the poor but unskilled villagers is really, really, supremely nasty, you need truckloads of bullets. Explosives too. I’m talking about the current remake of the 1960 western, The Magnificent Seven – which was the Hollywood version of Akira Kurosawa’s wonderful 1954 flick, Seven Samurai.
This is a year for the David and Goliath movie. We recently watched Hell or High Water, about two brothers who rob the big bad bank in order to pay back the loan and save the farm. There many people these days who feel oppressed by the “one percent” and want to fight back someway, somehow. Magnificent Seven reflects that feeling of helplessness and frustration, a feeling the only choice is to fight.
The villagers seek help, enlisting the toughest, baddest dudes around. They’re killers all, but killers with a code of honour, a motley crew of bad-assess, each with his own reason for being there, each with his own flaws, his own quirky personality.
The message here is that fighting the evil oppressor takes everything you’ve got, every bit of preparation, the element of surprise, an all or nothing strategy, plenty of bullets and explosives, a lot of heart and a willingness to take a stand and die for it.
“I seek righteousness – but I’ll take revenge.”
The first Magnificent Seven suffered from the larger than life personalities of the actors, which got in the way of the story. I felt I was watching not the characters but Yul Brynner, Steve McQueen, Eli Wallach and so on. Sure, the remake has a collection of well-known celebrities too, including Denzel on a horse, but watching it, I wasn’t so caught up in the egos of the actors. It’s quite a diverse bunch this time around, and I like that. I would have liked to see more character development, but that would have got in the way of the violence, gunfire and explosions.
We left the theater reeling from the onslaught of battle. The violence happened so fast and so relentlessly it was impossible to process any individual bits of action. It was overwhelming. I guess that’s the point. Revolution is overwhelming.
This morning we attended funeral service for Nick Badyk. When we moved to Twenty Seventh Street, Nick was our neighbour to the south. You might call him an elder in the Long Branch community – he lived in that modest bungalow for 70 years. He moved here when Long Branch was cottage country for Toronto. When Nick moved to the street, his was among the first of the houses around, and Twenty Seventh Street was a dirt road. I remember Nick telling us when he moved in he could lock his arms around what is now a giant silver maple in the front yard.
I learned today Nick paid for the house with winnings from a poker game. I love that! Nick’s house is gone now, replaced by a huge new home under construction next door, but the memories and the history are still with us.
Nick was a machinist. When we moved next door, he was already long retired. Nick loved nature and he loved fishing. His friend Art used to come by and off they would go to their special places. At the funeral home, they had Nick’s fishin’ rod leaning up against the casket.
Nick was a very independent fellow. He didn’t want us neighbours cutting his lawn. A little help with snow shoveling, however, was acceptable.
Nick was a good man, a good neighbour, and our friend. We miss him. I’m glad we had a chance to see Nick’s family again today, and celebrate his life with them.
RIP Nick.
Back in the day there was always John Bentley Mays reviewing art in the Globe. I read his reviews regularly – it seems to me I disagreed with him on a regular basis – but I have to hand it to the guy, he was out there looking at exhibitions and writing about them. We need more people like that. Here’s his obit in the Globe. RIP Mr. Mays.
Tuffy P and I loaded up the Newfs and drove up to a forest we know, not too far north of the City. My brother the trout, Salvelinas fontinalis, introduced us to this place, and it’s turned out to be a reliable spot to look for certain edible mushrooms. Our primary goal today was to do some drawing and painting in the forest. 
There are plenty of challenges involved with working in the landscape. You can see one of them in the photo above. The forest canopy adds an always changing network of shadows to the drawing surface.
The temperature was perfect, though, and the bugs were moderate (they seem to be more attracted to Tuffy P than to me). If anyone is interested in my forest (and garden) drawings by the way, they’re available via yumart.
Of course, while out in the woods I took the opportunity, with my Newfie dog assistants, to look around for tasty edible mushrooms.
Lobsters!
I found about a dozen Hypomyces lactifluorum – the so-called lobster mushrooms. I also found about half a dozen small but perfect Hydnum repandum – toothed mushrooms we call hedgehogs. I consider both to be among the choicest mushrooms I collect each season. Most years I start finding lobsters at some point in July. August is usually best and then they decrease into September. This season I found a couple lobsters earlier this month and nothing at all before that, and today’s finds were the first hedgehogs of the season for me. Most of the mushrooms in this area are to be found in a fairly small chunk of the larger forest, and so I collected what mushrooms were available in 20 minutes or so.
Before leaving home for the forest, I fired up our charcoal bbq and fire-roasted a good bunch of plum tomatoes in anticipation of a pasta dinner after drawing. I was pretty happy that I’d be able to enhance the pasta with some wild mushrooms.
I used all the hedgehogs for the pasta and a handful of lobsters as well. My pasta sauce also included some fresh garlic, fennel, a red pepper and loads of fresh basil (2 varieties), oregano, thyme and parsley. I used tortiglioni pasta. I tightened up the sauce with a generous amount of Parmigiano-Reggiano after cooking and drizzled on some super-delicious Salah’s Gold olive oil.
An awesome day all around.
The doorbell rang and I headed to the front door to answer it with the dogs at my heels. We weren’t expecting anyone. It might have been the folks from the local Kingdom Hall again, or perhaps the fellow who goes door to door aerating lawns, or maybe yet another real estate agent who has come to tell me he or she has an interested buyer for our home – but it wasn’t.
Instead it was a fellow who introduced himself as a writer and an adventurer who has come from Newfoundland to carry on what he claimed was a Newfoundland tradition, flogging his books door to door. My first thought was that he might have just come from Newfoundland but he wasn’t from Newfoundland. He put the accent on the first syllable, but everyone I’ve met from the Rock has told me it’s NewfoundLAND, underSTAND? He accent seemed like it was from England somewhere. I wasn’t exactly buying the idea that selling books door to door was a Newfoundland tradition either. I just said, “you’re a writer?”
He asked, “can I flog my book?…can I tell you about it?” He went on to say it was about his adventures traveling in Labrador. By this time, Tuffy P was also at the door. He showed us a laminated sheet of newspaper clippings. This was all ringing a bell. I was sure I had in fact seen articles about him or perhaps television clips about his travels.
We did the only reasonable thing. We invited him in and offered him a lemon square (Tuffy had just bought some at More Than Pies down on Lakeshore), and we chatted a bit. His name is Bernie Howgate, as it turned out. We bought his book, Journey through Labrador, which he signed for us. He’s quite a character. He writes about his own adventures, self-publishes and goes around selling his books door-to-door. Now that’s a man with an independent spirit!
I hope the lemon square gave Bernie a bit of a burst of energy and I hope some other Long Branchers bought his books as well. He’s been a travel writer and adventurer for a long time now. The life he’s chosen is of his own making, and he hustles selling his books. Who ever heard of someone “flogging books”, as he put it, door to door? I’m sure he’s experienced some amazing highs and lows and some hard winters along the way. I’m glad we had a chance to chat with him, and I’m looking forward to reading Journey through Labrador.
Has Bernie ever knocked on your door?
As a side note, after meeting Bernie, I found myself thinking of another fellow who used to self-publish and sell his books in an unusual way – by setting up on the streets of Toronto. If you’re my age and you lived in Toronto in the 80s and the first half of the 90s, you’ve likely had an encounter or two with the late Crad Kilodney. Somewhere around the house Tuffy P has a rare cassette tape Kilodney gave her one day while he was out hawking his books. He taped many of his encounters with the public. Kilodney was quite a curiosity. In some point in the late 80s, he submitted a number of stories by famous Canadian authors under different, sometimes absurd names, to the CBC literary competition. Of course the jury screened them all out.
I have a lot of respect for people with independent spirits, folks who don’t fit the mold and instead – against all odds – offer up their unique visions of the world to the community at large, people who push the workaday world aside and forge their own path.
Home-made mac & cheese
Rapini with garlic and bacon
Home-made mac & cheese might be the ultimate comfort food. I spice mine up a little with smoked papikra and hot mustard powder, and make a little crunchy topping with panko bread crumbs, butter and some good Parmesan cheese roughly grated. It’s easy to make. There are a squillion recipes online. The only danger is not having enough sauce for the amount of pasta, as that will result in a dry dish. Today’s batch was cheesy-fantastic.
We picked up the rapini at a veggie stand on the way back from our trip to McMichael Canadian Collection this afternoon. I cooked it up in a wok with some chopped up bacon and plenty of garlic. Perfect with the mac & cheese.
27th Street 