Flat

For a few years my sister and I lived in an apartment (part of a triplex). This was just after we'd moved to Toronto and before we bought a house of our own.  It was located just south of the TTC place where they later set up the Wychwood Barns complex. Back then they kept old buses and streetcars there before junking them.  As a result, they had regular patrols to deter thieves, with the result that nearby houses were also safe from burglars.

Our apartment was on the second of three stories.  The downstairs neighbors once complained about the noise--slamming doors and such--but I noticed that one night they watched the Oscars show with a bunch of friends and whenever their favorite movie won they'd cheer loudly. (This was back when the Oscars show went on past midnight.)

The apartment's furnishings were somewhat old-fashioned.  We got heat from a radiator with white coils.  And our refrigeration was the sort that you had to defrost once in a while.  In the back yard was a pear tree, though it had seen better days.  There was a loud-mouthed neighbor you could often hear yelling at his wife in Russian.

Mice

My mother was terribly afraid of mice.  Just mentioning the word "mouse" freaked her out.  She might have made a good Victorian lady.

We used to have a problem with mice in our house.  Once I managed to catch one in my glasses case and release him outdoors. (What was I going to do, kill him?) I was surprised how little it was.

In one of James Thurber's stories, he wrote about an eccentric relative who'd leave food next to the mouseholes! (Mother liked Thurber.)

I once saw a cartoon of a cat singing:

Love to eat them mousies!

Mousies what I love to eat!

Bite their little heads off,

Nibble on their tiny feet!

The dentist

Dentistry isn't my favorite subject.  It reminds me that I'm naturally a coward.  Recently my current dentist mentioned that one of my old fillings was unusually close to a nerve.  I think I remember getting that one!

I remember getting my wisdom teeth pulled when I was about thirty.  The hard part is waiting hours for the local anaesthetic to wear off.  It's like being punched in the mouth times a thousand! I'll soon be getting root canal work, which doesn't sound fun.

I suppose that sugar causes tooth decay because there's a curse on it:  growing sugar cane is backbreaking work, and it was mostly sugar production that led to the big increase in New World slavery in the 17th and 18th centuries.

I still have all my non-wisdom teeth, but they're somewhat crooked, and I've thought of getting them straightened.  But it's likely to cost a lot of money, and I don't know if it's worth it at my age.

Once I was eating ice cream and a jagged little piece of plastic from the container got into it. When I felt it in my mouth, I thought it was one of my teeth and got quite a fright!

Mirrors

When I was in London, England, twenty years ago, I was in the Victoria & Albert Museum's glassware section once.  I was thinking, "There's an Englishman walking toward me," but it turned out I was walking toward a mirror!  I wonder if many people have had that experience? (It happened with the southern belle in the Civil War novel Cold Mountain.) I suppose it's a sign of maturity.

The medicine cabinet in our bathroom has three little doors in front of it, each with a mirror surface.  I've found that if I open them at the right angles, I can see the top of my head!

When European explorers found new lands, the indigenous people they met were often afraid of the mirrors they sometimes carried. The latter felt that if something could capture your image, it might capture your spirit too. First Nations people in Canada often dreaded cameras for the same reason.

There's an epigram in Classical Greek about an aging courtesan dedicating mirror:

Lahis, who laughed at Greece, with young lovers crowding 

Her door, dedicates this mirror to Aphrodite:

For what I used to see, I no longer can,

And what I do see, I no longer want to!

When I was twelve

I didn't have an easy time when I was twelve.  In school, I was the sensitive kid who was expected to ignore the meaner classmates. But I got angrier and angrier, and around this time I started getting into fights.

At this time I saw The Sword in the Stone, the Disney animated movie of T.H. White's book about King Arthur's childhood under Merlin's tutelage.  That movie meant a lot to me because I identified with the young hero. (I also liked the slapstick remake of The Three Musketeers that year more than I expected.)

This was in 1974, at the time of the energy crisis, when gas stations attracted long lineups of hoarders anticipating shortages. In the long run, the energy crisis was actually the best thing that ever happened to the Western world, because it got people serious about conversation, at least for a while. (Shame that the lesson got unlearned in the '80s!) What if they'd rationed gasoline, as some people wanted to do?  It was also the year of Nixon's resignation speech, which I heard on a car radio in a Cape Breton Campground.

And it was the year when Mikhail Barishnykov defected from the Soviet Union in Toronto.  We saw the Bolshoi Ballet tour he'd abandoned a few weeks later in Nova Scotia:  they had to change the program, and Mother's said they seemed demoralized.

That was the year of the college fad of streaking (running around nude). One hit single was the depressing song "Billy, Don't Be a Hero." And I recall hearing some funny Cheech & Chong routines on the radio.

I also failed a swimming course that fall, which was very discouraging.  I should have quit it, but I didn't want to be a quitter!

Daydreamers

When I was a kid I spent a lot of time in dreams.  I haven't done that so much in recent years, but I've had a few idle fantasies.  I think I'd like to go to China and get a job introducing western movies to Chinese audiences.  I don't suppose there's any demand for such people (my sister says all China wants to see movies like The Fast and the Furious) but I think I'd be good at it anyway!

And recently I was thinking that if I had a wife or girlfriend we should visit the state of Maine and climb up Mt. Katahdin at the northern end of the Appalachian Trail.  It would also be fun to climb the mountains in Maine's Acadia National Park or Cape Breton.

If I were rich, my big indulgence would be travel.  I was fantasizing about travelling on a cruise ship around the world, though that might get boring eventually.  I've recently been dreaming at night of visiting Russia, which is odd because in daytime I'm not interested in it.

Now if I were a billionaire, I'd buy some land in the Laurentians and hire sculptors to build an equivalent of the grotesque statues in Italy's Bomarzo Gardens.  It would be great to build a statue of Glooscap, the hero of Micmac nation legend, to be seen from a distance sailing away on his whale.  And I'd also like a statue of Humphrey Gilbert at the prow of his ship pointing upward, about to hit a rock face! And one of King Lear ranging on the moor...

The tchotchke that won't go away

I've accumulated a bit of junk over the years.  I got a cheap dance trophy or two from the Arthur Murray people.  I also got a Creech action figure from the Spawn comic books. (I wonder where it's gone?)

I won Creech some years back in a trivia contest at  a Rue Morgue magazine horror movie screening at the Bloor Cinema:  I think it was for an Edgar Allen Poe movie with Vincent Price, maybe The Masque of Red Death.  The question was what was the top-grossing B-movie of 1976, and I guessed that it was Grizzly because they mentioned that it was a blatant Jaws ripoff!

My mother liked to collect antiques.  Once we were driving through the United States and stopped at an antique shop so she could look around. (She didn't buy anything.) There was a sign telling people not to bring their garbage inside, and I quipped, "They have enough junk already!" Sometimes the joke writes itself...

One of our antiques is a mantelpiece clock whose wooden case includes some classical pillars.  It was probably made by German-Canadians, because it came from Kitchener back when it was called Berlin, before World War I came along and the residents proved their patriotism by renaming the town after Britain's big general.

We also have some Hummel figurines of little kids, from a line that's mentioned in The Encyclopedia of Bad Taste.