The end of my weekend

The end of my weekend began when I arrived at Janet's place. She's a big blonde funny woman who can seemingly make a gun appear in almost any man's pocket. When she was in her mid 30s she was sitting in a bar and suddenly slumped over, thinking she had been shot. Maybe some man had been fiddling with his gun? What actually happened was Marfan syndrome went on a rampage, ripping a hole in her left atrium. She required open-heart surgery to repair the damage. Then in her mid 40s she was on a boat cruise in Toronto harbour and had a heart attack. Fortunately the cruise was a fundraiser for one of Toronto's hospitals and there were plenty of doctors on board. Even so, her brain was deprived of oxygen for too long. She used to drive her beloved MG from party to party; she no longer has a license, nor can she tolerate noisy places. She walks with a cane and searches for words, especially when she tires. But she's still funny and she’s still gorgeous.

She declines my offer to help with dinner. Having someone in the kitchen talking to her while she's cooking is too confusing. I can understand that. Even I find it overwhelming to cook and talk at the same time and sometimes feel like screeching “Why don't you get the fuck back to the living room” except I realize this isn't acceptable behaviour, especially since I can't plead any sort of brain injury. So while Janet's preparing dinner I look around her place, which is like a museum of kitsch. Every shelf, window ledge and cabinet surface is crowded with gnome candlesticks, lamps sprouting mushrooms, or cackling dolls that could have been stand-ins for Chucky. It’s a judgment call as to whether the ceiling fixtures are fantastically hideous or hideously fantastic. She could make a fortune selling the stuff on ebay.

“Where is Clyde?” I ask Janet over dinner. He’s away at a Morris dancer’s retreat. I had never heard of Morris dancing before I met Clyde, but apparently there’s a thriving community of dancers in Toronto. They’re mainly men. They wear white outfits with bells on their shins and travel to small communities in Canada and the US where they perform a perfunctory dance routine, then spend the rest of their time carousing. Clyde is also an actor. Janet spent much of her unmarried life searching for someone wealthy to marry, but instead she found the looniless Clyde. But she’s happy. I asked her if his was her first marriage proposal. It wasn’t. She got pregnant at 16, and the other party, a 22-year-old Macedonian, asked her to marry him. She ended up having an abortion instead. I asked her if it was easy to get one back then. “No, I got turned down at the first hospital I went to. They interviewed me, and said I was too flippant.” Her older sister accompanied her to the next interview at a different hospital, and the deed was done. Which was fortunate in retrospect, because Marfan’s and pregnancy aren’t really compatible. Then she asked me if had ever had an offer of marriage. I had, by an Australian I met while travelling in India. He had watched too many Mad Max movies and wanted to move with a chosen few to the desert where he had visions of re-populating a post-apocalyptic world. Or maybe he was just trying to resurrect the lost tradition of haremhood in Australia. (I’m not sure how he was going to convince someone to take on the eunuch role, if so.)

After dinner Janet was tired, so we watched Becoming Jane and then went to bed. When I was leaving the next morning Janet asked me to drop her off at the drugstore. As I drove away I looked in my rear-view mirror and saw a woman wearing a fur jacket, sweatpants and a crocheted hat (which may even have had a flower in it) making her way slowly across the street with her cane.

When I got back to Kingston I immediately headed out to a writer’s workshop, which was really two local authors – Diane Schoemperlen and Helen Humphreys – speaking about writing for an hour. Diane (we're on a first-name basis even though she doesn't have a clue who I am) went first and talked a lot about words. She seemed quite obsessed with them, but not as obsessed as the person behind the website that ranks words by the frequency with which they appear in the British National Corpus. “The” is first on the list and “conquistador” comes in last at number 86800. I just know this will stick in my head forever. It’s the kind of fact I remember, whereas items that would make me sound like an interesting and knowledgeable person or help me win the grand prize on a quiz show somehow escape from my neurons and drown in the cerebrospinal fluid. Helen Humphreys I had already heard a few weeks ago, when she talked about her new book The Frozen Thames. She’s low-key and funny. The Frozen Thames is a collection of very short stories about 40 occasions on which the Thames has frozen over. Helen (also on a first-name basis with her, although again she doesn't know me) said her next book will be pure fiction, so she doesn’t have to spend all her time researching it. I heard her speak another time about Leaving Earth, which is about two women who tried to break the flight endurance record by circling over Toronto for 25 days during the Depression. She said it required six months of research to write one passage that took maybe three or four minutes to read.

My weekend didn't end there, but I'll end my weekend here. I do remember dozing off in the Lay-Z-Boy late afternoon under a comforter of cats, but other than that the rest of the day is hazy and therefore not worth recounting. The delight is in the details.