The good life

32,000 km in, I looked under the hood of my '06 Matrix for the first time. To my surprise, design modifications had resulted, apparently, in the rotation of the waterpump and fan belt 90 degrees to the left as I faced them. I could hear a high-pitched peach. That was Friday.

This morning I handed over the key to the boys at Taylor Toyota and ran home. The first leg took me south through the warehouse district until--what the H.!--no sidewalk on the east side of Broad. By the end of the second leg I'd passed downtown. One more leg to Hillsdale.

Here I considered the principles of urban development, whereby the developer calls for a new bridge to feed its planned subdivision south of Wascana creek in the 50s. The City refuses; the developer builds it anyway, a quarter-mile east, and tries for the next 20 years (without sucess) to the get the City to pay for it.

I crossed that bridge when I came to it and splintered on home past houses new in '59, easements fenced shut.

Baffling

You cannot baffle sound, I said as H stopped for the light. That's not the right verb. A van idled in front, its exhaust heading east as I went on. Muffle, yes. But baffle? No way. How can sound be confused? Dementia? Too much to drink? Pulling a rabbit out of a hat might do it, I said. That's always baffled me. As we followed the van down the street he told me about baffles in mufflers. Oh please, I said, shaking my head, I'll look it up when we get home. That was Friday.

A little while ago H walked in, told me he's off to Canadian Tire. Needs a few things. He went over the list. I wasn't really listening. Drive carefully, I said like I always do. On his way out, he stopped. Turned. Hey, did you look up baffle? I faced him, gave him the what-a-waste-of-time stare, then pulled the OED down. What I found baffled me. He grinned and sped off. Teeth baffled the growl.

Dotted lines

I've taken to placing my face on the windowsill while I play backgammon on the internet. I've tried it a number of way, pointing the face left along the alley or, for a moment, 80 degrees up. Sometimes I stand there behind it.

(In the words of Alfred Hitchcock, "First I did it [insert himself into his own films] because I couldn't afford to hire anyone else, then because it brought good luck, finally because everyone expected me to.")

Over there, the face has it pretty good, perpendicular to the alley, porous to the wind. Every once in a while a jet takes off, a family piles into their minivan.

(If I were a Hitchcock film, I'd include the hotel parking lot for sure.)

Then I'll pull it down and change it, push on the chin, rub across the forehead--anything to avoid its resting pose: a down-turned mouth, a long face.

Frown lines

You can't miss the two coulees between my eyebrows. They look especially deep this morning. What's the matter, people often ask. Nothing, I reply. Just thinking. I don't tell them the coulees are the result of my mind's glacial drainage. Years of erosion. Sure, when I frown they deepen, but that's ok because it means I'm looking. That's my job. And if I look closely enough, close enough to peer into them, I just might see poplar. Chokecherries. Hawthorn. Great horned owls might hunt there, passing shadows over the deer that are bedded down. I might see deer trails, trails I'd love to follow even though I'd have to duck. There I'd be sheltered. And if I squint I might be able to see foxholes on the steepest sides. They're hard to see in the dappled light. I know. Squinting only makes the coulees grow deeper, but squint I must to find my way down.

This is a morning to build in

Just my wild luck, born into a countryside where all we can love is sky and its dim weathers, as glimpsed from my balcony.

If I sit here long enough I think I've named it all but never can. Here's LORAAS DISPOSAL for the third time this month, preying on corner matter. I'm back of things. What used to be the Imperial 400 is now, or will be soon, a Holiday Inn Express.

What was your summer job? It was remembering Bomber fans at the Imperial 400, in full party blow, four hours to kick-off.

The bus is coming

August is a month of rising tension. I can't remember a time when it was not. Each of the 31 days feels like another twist of the tuner. It's only the 17th and already I'm tight against the frets. Taut. The finger of summer is pressing down.

It's time. I chase down flyers. Back-to-school sales. I want to buy Hilroy scribblers. I want new shoes. New jeans. HB pencils. Prune plums for my lunch.

This morning I woke up in a panic. I was late. I could hear the school bus coming. The rising roar as it crested the hill and sped towards the farm.

Even now, after more than 25 years, I can see the bus driver's face so clearly I could draw him, one hand on the wheel, the other opening the door. I can hear the radio. The static. It's tuned to CHAB.

I'll sit close to the front. Next to the window. I know down the road I'll hear Chickenman. I'm waiting.

What I never talk about

My cousin on a horse chased me through the bush back of his farm. I hadn't yet discovered that there is no nature outside us, only that inside. Instead I discovered panic. Didn't help that my cousin was laughing.

Words might describe the moment now, but no words passed between us at the time. We ate flapper pie either before or after. I took 35 cents off grandpa at Thirty-one.

Perhaps certain details have become transposed over time, turning me into the one on the horse, but I don't think so. (Either way, we're never neutral.)

Once in a while I'll offer food to some horse, which usually takes it. But first I extract a promise from the horse that it won't chase me.

Tonight we went horseback riding

I can't remember what we were talking about at the time, but somehow during our walk horses came up. The imaginary ones we rode through childhood. You did that as a kid, right, H asked as he shook the invisible reins and galloped off down the road, slapping his backside to make his horse gallop faster. And it did. Likely a quarter horse. Good at barrel racing, I bet. I nudged my nag in the flanks a few times before it budged. It bucked a bit, reared up, and then took off. Off I galloped down the backstretch, slapping my backside, but H was ahead by a good ten lengths and pulling away. There's no way my horse could catch him. But it did pretty good for a Shetland.

No relation to me

Sun gives way to the backside of a quarter moon. Bikers of the weekends only persuasion roar south on Albert Street. The moment I remove my glasses they roar back.

I began to work (some kind of writing work) on Hillsdale today, the day I read in the Archives about the new Broad Street bridge F.W. Hill (who died just two or three weeks ago) wanted to build to link to his development south of Wascana Lake. He went ahead and built it. This was 1959.

Suburbs in Don Mills and Winnipeg were presented as how good life in a suburb like Hillsdale could be. Taxes from the new development would allow the City to repay Hill's company in ten years, was the idea Hill proposed.

Dad and Mom and three of us kids moved into Hillsdale in August, 1961.

I've been craving eggs all day

I blame the truckers. This morning, half-awake, I could hear a semi idling. Changing drivers, I imagine, or maybe the driver was grabbing breakfast at The Prospector Inn down the street. I turned over, knowing the diesel engine would lull me back to sleep as they've been doing for months now. They must have a contract to haul high-grade sand around the clock. The semis now act as my alarm. My sedative.

The cat, hearing me move, jumped on the bed and began to purr along with the engine, bunting me the whole time. I ignored her, but that only egged her on. Unable to doze back off, I began to wonder how many hourglasses a truckload of sand could fill. Simple enough to calculate if one knew how much the trailer holds and the volume of sand each hourglass requires. But there are variables. I suspect no two grains of sand were created equal. It's the matter of three-dimensional space. How much is occupied. And no two loads weigh the same. Consider the axles. No one has time for this.

After a while the semi pulled away, shifting quietly. How much time is it hauling, I wondered as the cat bunted me again. Maybe a few years' worth. Or maybe just three minutes. Just enough to fill one giant egg timer. It would take one helluva giant to turn it over.

4:30 in the morning one day in Kelowna

I reached with my hockey stick to pull the trap out from under my trailer, careful to keep the thing at arm’s length. I maneuvered it onto the back of my pick-up and headed up Chute Road, which lead, I knew, to some fishing roads far back in the hills. “And there, little buddy,” I felt like saying to the varmint bouncing along inside that trap, “you and your skunk buddies can nest all you want.”

By the time I pulled over a couple of miles above the town, the sun had almost risen. With the hockey stick again, I lowered the trap to the ground and stood as far back as I could while releasing the trapdoor.

The second it sprang open, out sprang Twinky, the neighbour's cat, wild-looking as hell. He vanished into the bush and hasn't yet come out.

Under the impression

These words came to mind this morning when I saw the fresh tracks in my garden. Fox, coyote, or the neighbourhood dog that pees on my peony, I can't tell, but it was running, and on the way by it must have brushed the lilies and now has lily-poo on its coat. Just like me. Damn lilies.

Under the impression. What an odd way to begin. That always precedes the assumption. We wait for it. Humour us, the utterers of these words, for we're all under the same impression sometimes. That paws sink in the mud and mud wells up between the pads and sticks in the hair should go without saying. Unfortunately there's more to it. Ask the johnny-jump-up how it felt to be trampled. How it feels. Its bloom is now ruined, the purple and yellow petals torn. Part of one missing.

So it goes. Somewhere the animal sits, resting, cleaning its feet, pulling mud balls out with its teeth. This I know. I don't even have to close my eyes to see its canines. No sign of the petal though. Not that I was under the impression that I'd see it. Not yet.

Bone Deduction

Bone is a dangerous word. If I think it, I become afraid. But not at first. First it's my nickname, short for Mr.Trombone, what my high school classmates called me after seeing me front row right side in the Lions marching band, halftime of Rider games. I liked the name from the start, and soon worked out a visual signature to go with it: a cartoon bone, with two rounded knobs at each end. It was simple and effective--quite elegant, in fact. If you start pulling the endplugs off the hollow tubes that form the frame of the desks over at Campbell Collegiate, located a half mile east of here, you'll eventually come to certain documents I stuffed in there, all of them signed with Bone (the symbol, not the word).

The other bone is the dangerous one, the one I broke three times as a boy aged 9-13. A cyst in my humerus. Why my parents kept me out of organized sports, I found out years later. The cyst used to "grow back" which is why, we used to say, I kept breaking the arm. And you know how it is for shy kids. They activate fears that few others can detect. They imagine that, for example, the bone is defective, storing and eventually releasing, during the latter decades of the owner's life, clusters of harmful cells that will take the body in one direction only.

This afternoon running I felt my bones haul my body round the lake. At times I could hear them grunting. Occasionally they missed a step. The bones in their plodding sleeves wanted to stop sooner than I let them.

I think I'll show up at that bone reunion, after my friends and I have all passed on. We'll remember from one another's bones.

August is here

I felt it in my bones when I woke up this morning. In the joints. The articulations. I swear some bricklaying god has sucked out my marrow, mixed it with lime and sand. Read between the bricks. I am what bonds them.

It's hard. All this traveling. Growing older. The garden has grown wild in my absence. Unruly. The delphiniums are blue, hunched over. Too much rain. I don't want to deal with it. Not yet. It's too cool out there. The humidity too high.

No doubt August will be sticky. Even the books on my desk have that feel. The magazines. The papers. My manuscript. The filing cabinet. The handle. The bottom drawer sticks a bit when I open it, rattles when I throw the manuscript in. Closes easily.