fuzzy-
i usually post heather mallick's articles
to elpie, but this one has fuzzy written
all over it. besides, i don't think he's
got time to read them anyway.
she has great wit, intelligence and sense
of humour.
theglobeandmail.com
Silly season? No, my summer is surreal
By HEATHER MALLICK
UPDATED AT 12:15 PM EDT Saturday, Jul 31, 2004
Bartender, I'll have a summer column, with ice, thank you, whenever you have a moment.
As at Christmas, with its annual "festive" column, so, on the next-to-last long weekend of the summer, you write about summer things, a canoe shooting silently into the lake, the bee hovering over the picnic table as friends laugh together at the cottage.
Or you do if you're someone else. I hate summer. I am no good at everyone's favourite season. I hate the muck of it, the "seeding, breeding, buzzing, barking, fluttering germinating, growing," as travel writer Alexander Frater described it. I don't kitesurf, as John Kerry does, much less swim or boat, don't like sweating, salad or alfresco dining, mosquitoes or the garden turning yellow. I sit indoors with my book and look at summer.
This summer, I say with great contrarian delight, is shaping up to be the worst ever. If it were a film, it would be titled not My Left Foot, but My Right Foot, or rather My White Foot, after the thing that ends my right leg being pale compared with the orange things with white lumps and red dots that are my actual legs. Yes, I once again tried a fake summer tan, testing it first on my thighs.
I stared intently at them for an hour; they seemed fine, I did the whole legs and they erupted. Except for the right foot, which I missed. I could spray it to create a matching rash, but it seems counterproductive.
Then I went to a party. The feds have said they'll decriminalize the use of recreational pot. I don't smoke pot because the paranoia overwhelms me, but to honour a good law, I did.
Big mistake.
When the raccoon came out, it was the size of a coyote and it had no fear. I was terrified that it would land on me, embrace me and eat my face. My husband came up behind me, touched me and I screamed and went back into the house and that was all the outside I had that evening.
They had done something magnificent to a lump of cow and I kept sneaking back to the carcass and sawing off great slabs of beautiful white peppercorned beef fat. I'd chew and chew and roll the fat around my mouth and extract everything that fat had to offer. Then I'd go back for another slice.
A woman guest who had the real thing, the red flush of summer on her cheeks, looked down at the floor and mumbled that she really liked my writing, had always wanted to say that. Horrified, I apologized, while a strip of beef fat was slowly sucked into my mouth with a little slapping sound of finality. "How terrible for you. It must be awful to think someone's clever and then finally meet them and they're inhaling fat like it's the last cow on earth. I'd hate it if I met me." This is how I think when I'm stoned. When people pay me a compliment, I fight them on it.
Fat ingested, I was headed for the punchbowl, now drained of Cointreau, mango juice and gin, to eat the 50 slices of nectarine marinating in the leftover alcohol.
Luckily, before I became a fat and fruit hog, I was quickly escorted home, where it was the local jazz festival and some woman was singing, scattily, "East o' the sun, west o' the moon, boppity boppity boo" as I peeled off my clothes and fell into bed.
I gradually realized as the weekend progressed that I was horribly ill with something. You know you're ill when you suddenly lie down on the hallway floor for no reason, moaning in anguish. Strangely, my housework compulsion was still functioning. I'm dying, I thought, and this carpet needs a good clean.
Hours passed. I began to feel like Hitler's deputy, Martin Bormann, who died on the streets of Berlin on his flight from the bunker and was hunted in South America for 40 years when the whole time he was lying under the rubble until someone found him while building condos.
Yes, I was delirious and at 2 a.m. was taken to a hospital emergency room where paramedics, nurses and doctors were astoundingly gentle and patient, even when they asked me "Do you have children?" and I, dizzy and uncomprehending, had to check with my husband. "Two steps." What heavenly people.
I lay there as the fever passed (it was a non-party-related virus or something), amazed at how firm but not nasty the nurse was with the overdosers and their mumbling companions, and how fast yet soothing with the man with angina. It was my first visit to an emergency room as a patient. I was overwhelmed by the kindness of the doctors, and the way triage hadn't asked for a credit card or proof of owning a Lexus. I love this hospital, this country, I thought. Scatter my ashes here, not on Juno Beach in Normandy, as previously indicated.
We got home at 5:30 a.m., with the sun just coming up. The moon sat in a pale night sky like an old Band-Aid, just hanging on. It was a surreal ghostly ride home, wrapped in my husband's arms like a kangaroo in a pocket. As I climbed back into my soft bed, I thought: "Did I dream that?"
That was the high point of my summer. Ahead: the August heat wave. You wish summer were over, with its heat and big food and animals on the prowl and people noodling on the piano, the notes going out in the middle of Lake Ontario as you think what a summer fool you are and how you're going to do better next year.
hmallick@globeandmail.ca |
