The middle of my weekend

The middle of my weekend began when I arrived at Pat's place. She's my brother's ex-wife, and has just moved into a new house. They (she and my nephews) actually moved two weeks ago, but it looks like they've just arrived. Boxes and disassembled furniture strewn everywhere. Floors torn up. A pile of cupboards in one corner. No running water in the kitchen. She's hired Tom to do a long list of renovations. He's inexpensive and very good at what he does, which Pat says is almost anything except renovation work. He brings her coffee in the morning. He chats. He takes Millie the poodle out for bathroom breaks. He tries to convince them they should get Millie a companion (Tom also breeds dogs). Pat's ex-partner came over with her daughter the other day and the daughter, who is 6, told Pat that she shouldn't make Millie live in a house like that, it wasn't a fit place for a dog. I guess as humans we're more adaptable - which is why we rule the world and dogs spend their time eating, sleeping and frolicking. My bed was a mattress on the basement floor, the canopy a foozeball table.

I am a harridan until I get my morning coffee, so as soon as I got up I went down to Queen Street. The window at Sweet Bliss was full of vanilla and chocolate buttercream cupcakes topped with pink icing and sprinkles. For a moment I became stuck in nostalgia for some past that may or may not have existed. When I managed to extricate myself I headed to the Red Rocket, where I drank coffee and for the first time in months read a newspaper. I was hoping to find a Globe and Mail so that I could read the Social Studies section, which has items that sound like they could have appeared in The National Enquirer – "Polish police baffled after cyclist badly burned when trousers burst into flames"; "Did NASA kill a bunny? Outraged writer accuses NASA of intentionally running over martian bunny with rover" – but you don't have to be embarrassed about reading them in public. No luck alas: I was stuck with more conventional news stories in The Toronto Star. After imbibing lots of coffee and current events I headed back to the house. I had allocated the day to helping Pat and the boys unpack. We started in the living room, where I became curious as to the unconventional placement and sparing nature of the electrical supply. We couldn’t find an outlet anywhere along the wall that spanned the length of the living room and dining room. We could only find two outlets in the entire living/dining room area: one was about a third of the way up another wall, and a second one was placed too high up for most people to reach, unless you happened to be a professional basketball player or busker on stilts. There was a shelf there, but for nonbasketball players and nonbuskers it was only accessible from the stairs leading to the second floor. I wondered what you could put up there that wouldn’t require a constant ascent and descent to operate… maybe a lava lamp? It didn’t look like the kind of place where lava lamp lovers had lived though. The curtains they had left on the living room windows were nondescript to the point that I am unable to provide a credible eyewitness account of them, except that they were topped by a valence so monstrous it had to be hung from a plywood box attached to the wall.

After a couple of hours I was getting hungry so I took my nephews to Edward Levesque’s Kitchen, where we dined on petit omelettes and delicate potato cakes that disappointed Liam and Kiernan because they weren’t deep-fried. While we were gone Pat decided that Kiernan’s bed needed to be turned so that it would be positioned horizontally across the width of his room. It's an Ikea bed that's designed to have most of the room placed underneath it, so you have to climb a ladder to get to the mattress. Try as we might, the room was too narrow to allow us to turn the bed. Pat said she didn’t care what happened to the walls but I didn't think this extended to knocking out one of them, so we decided to disassemble one end of the bed instead. We didn’t need a scheduler, watch or lawyer to help out with this, but a high IQ and an engineer or tarot card reader might have come in handy. I was beginning to suspect that when Ikea designers retire (and are presented with a gold Allen key) they're snatched up by the city of Toronto to make its parking signs. Once we unscrewed the complex of components that make up the end of the bed the rest of the wood frame began to crumple, and whenever we managed to get it straightened out nothing would fit together. We bolted and unbolted and hit and kicked and swore — at the bed, not each other. I’m sure that was coming though, so I was glad when it was 5 pm and I could turn in my Allen key, climb over the boxes and furniture pushing and shoving at the door to Kiernan’s room, and make my way to Scarborough.