The beginning of my weekend

My weekend began at 3 pm, slightly earlier than usual. I was heading to Toronto to see my older nephew in a play. My brother emailed at 3:10 to say that visibility was poor there and that maybe I should cancel my travel plans. Even if I had gotten the email I would probably have ignored it, since it was sunny in Kingston and if I had had a tam I would have thrown it joyfully into the air.

About 90 minutes later I ran into the storm (and fortunately nothing else). No snowplows anywhere. Snow removal budgets have probably been depleted, and drivers were left to fend for themselves. I never learned to navigate snowbanks, so every time I tried to change lanes the car would fishtail. Soon it became difficult to even see where the lanes were. But all’s well that end’s well, except that I made a wrong turn and ended up several blocks from where I hoped to end up. I parked the car and got out. I don't know if every city is like this or if it’s peculiar to Toronto, but there is always an array of signs on Toronto streets informing you of the various situations under which you cannot park where you want to park. You have to have a scheduler, watch, high IQ and possibly a lawyer or tarot card reader to figure out whether you can actually park there at the particular time, date and season in question. I was standing outside carefully reading all the signs, and then noticed that one of them had “no parking, snow route” on it. I'm not sure exactly what this means, but since it was snowing I thought maybe I should go back to the car and move it.

I must have locked the door when I got out. And while I was reading the signs the door must have blown shut. Everything was now locked inside the car, including my money and keys. I tried for a bit to yank the door open and asked two people walking by if they knew how to break into cars, but either they didn't or were unwilling to admit that they did. I decided to deal with it later and made my way to the play. Set in an insane asylum, it was mostly a conversation between Marat and de Sade, interspersed with some musical numbers and whip-cracking. The person playing Marat spent the entire play in a bathtub. I was confused throughout, and probably should have read The French Revolution for Dummies before I went. My nephew later informed me that Marat hid in the sewers of Paris for years and developed a skin condition. When he emerged from the sewers he spent much of his time in the bathtub fomenting rebellion and relieving his itchiness.

I met up with my brother after the play and managed to convince him to pretend he was on a pioneer reality show and had to exist (he seemed loathe to call it “live”) without his cell phone for 24 hours, and went back to the car. Fortunately it hadn't been towed. I guess they weren't using the street as a snow route that night. I called the CAA, and help arrived within the promised 72 minutes. I never gave them the license plate number and they didn’t want to see my card. Apparently giving a name and telephone number is enough. I should have asked them to let me into the Audi parked several blocks down instead. It probably had heated seats.