The bookstalls in October, the zoo in February.

When I turned on the radio this morning "Tainted Love" was playing.

And later, at the supermarket, I heard it again, as I did after lunch at the post office.

A few minutes ago it was playing in the liquor store.

I don't wanna hear "Tainted Love" no more.

Tomorrow is Saturday. It doesn't matter to me if it's sunny or overcast. I coudn't care less what season it might be: it's Saturday, wee bells ringing in the psyche.

I plan to wake early and buy a newspaper. I'm going to settle down in a very worn easychair. I bought this easychair years ago at a yard-sale. I turned it upside down and carried it home on my head, my hands on the armrests.

Piglets in life-jackets almost made me vegetarian. It was on tv years ago. The guy was a farmer I guess -- most people don't have a party of piglets as household pets. He wanted to keep his piglets clean so he invented these little life-jackets. I remember watching those piglets bobbing up and down in a really big bucket. You could hold those pigs in the palm of your hand.

It was a touching sight. It really was, but then the overwhelming childhood memory of bacon frying, breakfast sausages, and the romance of the past beating out compassion as it often does.

***

You will note that despite all the p's in this post, I did not mention Proust.

In the early 60s my mother adopted a beehive hairdo and kept it that way. She went to her hairdresser once a week to have her dyejob touched up and the hundred bobbypins put in. She had the same hairdresser for almost thirty years, a young gay man named Robert.

When my mother got sick her hair fell out and a year went by. When her hair started to grow back it came in snow-white, and she got up the nerve to go back to Robert. He told her to throw the wig away, he would take care of her hair. And he did.

I'd met Robert a few times off and on when I was growing up. I'm pretty sure I was the only one at my mother's funeral who knew who he was. Tall and dignified, he walked up to the coffin and put his hands on the edge of it. He didn't cry, but he spent ten minutes standing there.

I wonder if kids learn how to touch-type these days -- I mean typing without looking at the keyboard. When I was in grade nine I signed up for a typing course, but when I walked into the room it was all girls. I immediately walked out. Mademoiselle Vague suggests I might have had fun being the rooster in the henhouse, but I'm pretty sure my reputation would have plummeted among my male friends. Those were the days!

I type fast with three fingers like a newspaper reporter in a movie made in the 1940s. I wear a wrinkled suit, suspenders and a crumpled fedora when I work on this enchanting blog of mine.

French onion soup (life goes on).

Saturdays are usually my happiest days...

My clock-radio kicked in early and I heard the news. A building not too far east of here collapsed, the walls and then the roof. It was just like this one: a street-level shop and some apartments above.

A young guy was startled awake when he heard some loud crackling sounds. He saw, sleepy as he was, big cracks appearing in his walls. He ran into the hallways and banged on everyone's door to say get out now, this building is FALLING DOWN. They all did, clothes and belongings left behind. A baby was rescued as were all the tenants. One woman got her cats into a box and set the box on the sidewalk, but huge pieces of the building fell and squashed the box. Worst of all was a younger gal whose sobbing comments have been on the radio all day. I'm paraphrasing a bit but not much:

"I heard yelling and things were falling in my room. I thought I was dreaming. I tried to open the door but it was stuck. It was so scary. I don't have a home now. My pets I think are dead."

If you'd heard the way she said "my room"...this girl's safe place, her comfort zone, as one's room always is when you're young. And the way she said "home" rather than "apartment"...it would break your heart as it did mine. And the tender, astonished and horrified way she spoke the words: "My pets I think are dead."

Standing there in a winter coat over her pyjamas, no religion or philosophy to stop her skinny knees from shaking.

Ever seen the Brit cop series called "Foyle's War"...? We get it up here in frozen Canada -- maybe in New Zealand and Australia, too. Not sure if it's on in the U.S.

Anyway, the cop-character Foyle has an official driver. I can't remember her name in the series but I just found out the real name of this cute-as-cute-gets actress. Her real name is...(wait for it)...Honeysuckle Weeks! No, I mean it, her name is Honeysuckle Weeks. Born in 1979, sigh.

I'm raising my glass to her parents for giving her such an appropriate name. Let all things smell of honeysuckle for weeks and weeks and weeks!

Ok, I'll stop now.

I like winter rain as long as it doesn't freeze overnight and make me slip and break my ankle as it did a few years ago. Most of the time I like the sound of it, tic-tac-toc on my windows as I'm chopping onions and garlic, weepy with the old joy of cooking.

The rain has washed away most of the ice from the sidewalks, and the snowbanks are shrinking. I'm not naive, winter is here for months. It was a beautiful thing to see the Muslim boys playing ball-hockey in the parking-lot beside the mosque. It was beautiful, too, to stand still for a moment outside Brass Taps and see Kevin and Marushka inside, laughing and drinking. I thought of dropping in but I was in the mood for home. I wanted to be by myself, open a bottle of wine and prepare a simple meal. The onions and garlic are chopped and set aside. The music I'm playing would make you cry.

I just finished Bill Bryson's new book, his biography of Shakespeare. It's not fall-out-of-the-barber-chair funny, but it wasn't meant to be. Still, there are many coy and brief and amusing asides.

Not a whole lot is known about Shakespeare so he remains the same old shadowy figure in the background. But that's the thing: Bryson paints the Elizabethan background masterfully with so many obscure and oddball details. Don't shy away because reading W.S. was such a drag in high school. It's a very short book. You could read it in the time it would take for a squirmy kid to get a haircut.

Alright, the romance of names, people I know blog-wise.

I've never met a Mali and I don't know if Mali is Mali's real name, but her heart is a travelling one, as is mine.

Maureen. Well, hmm. I've been half-in-love with Maureen since I met her online but she was seriously married with kids and a dog. Mademoiselle Vague's best friend years ago was a Maureen. Such a flirt. At a party years ago she was walking up the stairs and my friend Byron crawled up behind her and bit her bum.

Helen was Homer's joie de vivre. If there are petals in her lumpy hair, I'm the one who put them there.

Indigo. Oh indigo. I know your real name but truly you are a wintertime bird to cheer me, and the springtime bird to remind me of spring.

Susan. How many Susans have I known? Bunches I guess. The only Susan I ever dated was Susan Morrison in high school. She played piano as her mother did. I have a cd of another Susan reading some poems, and her voice drags down the angels from heaven and throws them back up again.

sewa. The only sewa I know is the only sewa I've ever known. That's alright. It's not like a require a tribe of sewas, though a barbershop quartet of sewas might be fun. One will do, especially this one whose heart is bubbling up with goodwill.

Bridgett. I don't know what it is about the name but I've always loved it. It has no religious associations for me at all. I don't know the difference between the Bridgett from Ireland and the Bridgett from Sweden. When I still had my secondhand bookstore there was a Bridgett living in the apartment upstairs. I let her use my shop as her library, and she always brought the books back.

Peter. Well then, Peter. Nine or ten years old our schoolyard was full of seagulls. Mini-Rimbauds, we stood there watching before the schoolbell rang. It was flight we had in mind, we two unhappy and angry boys with music in our ears.

***

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5UF3Y1k2Q6g

I'm at home in every sense of the word when I look out my living-room window and note the beautiful curved roofs of the redbrick bungalows. Snow-covered, all of them, and they fill the horizon so I can't see the lake. Well, you can't have everything.

Beautiful too are the icicles hanging from the "Wigs and Hair" sign across the street. And the old Greeks bundled up and smoking outside the Athens Restaurant and Tavern. And gone are the nights when the naked cello-player would sit by her window in the apartment above "Vertigo Beads." I know, but it's not the sort of thing I'd make up. And it's not like I bought a telescope or anything. As I strongly implied a few moments ago, you can't have everything.

I was looking for a photo to use as my computor wallpaper, something to happily remind me. I found it.

Of all things, I found a black-and-white photo of boys playing hockey on the south-west corner of the plaza I knew and where I bought my comics and candy. The field was frozen and made for a perfect rink. I'm not one of the boys there -- the photo was taken in 1972, my last year of high school and my first year of college.

Besides, that corner wasn't always happy. In 1966 there were still greasers who would push around boys with long hair. It was about 15 years ago that I sat in a bar near the guy who stole my transistor radio in that very plaza. We recognized each other, but there was nothing really much left to say. He was pathetic and I was splendid. Tough luck and fuck you.

I suppose I'll continue to search for a summer photo of the same hydro field and its tall waving grass, as it was on one of those sultry afternoons when I wanted nothing more than to go down on a girlfriend.