In the middle of a city summer, my little canoe is drifting merrily on a rare current of joy, and life is but a dream.
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All those portages through hostile territories have led me to this bobbing calm. I feel as buoyant as Paddle-to-the-Sea. To know what I mean, I urge everyone of every age to see the National Film Board classic, which, for my no money, is the best Canadian motion picture ever made.
I can’t even be bothered to get enraged over drunken yobs leaning out of taxis attempting to knock me off my bicycle. I pity them. Of course, if they succeeded, I’d kill them.
But right now, pity I can afford. Long, bitter experience has taught me that hatred is the reaction of those in the wrong. Hence the anti-pathy of the operators of fossil-fuel-burning machines toward singing cyclists. The only valid reaction is what Ziggy talks about weeknights at 11 on AM 740: love.
Elderly downtown gardeners’ carefully tended plots exhale so sweetly in the deep of night that I swoon. A red Do Not Enter sign calligraphed into a rising sun over a Chinese vegetable patch in a carless driveway is heaven to me.
Decades of sublimating the love urge that requires another human being have rendered me extremely sensitive to subtle sensory pleasures. “An everyday sensualist” is what the handwriting analyst called me. “Very repressed and knotted up” is the opinion of a second graphologist. They’re both right!
But I am not alone. There is my loyal doll companion, Reina Luminosa, whom I mostly leave at home to wait for me in bed.
How glad I was to bring her to the Inti Raymi Festival of the Sun at Christie Pits on the solstice last month. I danced barefoot with Reina to the salsa band on the tricky incline of the hill as proper dancers whirled on sheets of plywood laid over the grass in front of the stage.
Darkness came, and the scene was magical.
There was a trio of singers, and one vowed they were only getting started and would play until 5 am. A tune or two later, he addressed the crowd in the only English I’d heard spoken all night. Someone had complained. To someone. Somewhere. Just past 10 pm, the wee community fiesta to which Reina and I had fled was shut down.
The night was so lovely. Instead of leaving, we went down into the bowl of the park, where I spotted an unusual swing set. Big, round flying saucers on cables. I guessed they were installed to accommodate obese children. Then we tried one.
They’re for stargazers! You can lie back and make room for a beloved or two if you are so gifted. Reina and I were flying through the night sky when a man plonked down and began to chat.
Just as I was about to redirect my attention, I caught sight of a hurtling orange blaze. A comet! I found myself resenting the intruder who had almost cost me this blessed sight. I hope he found someone else to talk to.
At College, we gaped at the unpartable sea of people walking in the road, which was closed to cars for the weekend. People obviously like to be in the streets with no cars. Did they drive down? In Trinity Bellwoods there was night croquet and singing drunks and a friendly cat carted off by a group Reina and I wouldn’t have joined even if we were invited, so there.
My summer is music, musicians, hugs from bass players, staying up until day and jumping alone into the lake. It’s also cherry- and berry-picking, singing with little yellow birds, watching a pair of bats tool overhead as I wheel a pattern on my bike in a 3 am intersection. Three am: the hour the train yard mockingbird does a long show if it’s foggy.
All the riches of the world are being spent to finance violence, the loser response to love, life, night, innocence. To quote a song by a late lady singer, “They think they’re winning, but they’re winning whot? A losing battle with their own bad thoughts.” Merrily, merrily, merrily….
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