They Say It's My Birthday

It's my birthday today, but I'm not telling you which one, Gentle Reader. I barely remember myself, because I started lying about my age when I was 26. I figured I'd get a head start on the math, so the story would be more believable when the time came.

This can be something of a problem, however, when some of your closest friends are people who've known you since you were 16.

The first person I thought about when I woke up this morning was Jack. He always always called me on my birthday when we were together, and even when we weren't; even if we hadn't spoken for months. For thirteen years it was like that.

It's not the first birthday I've had since he's been gone. I think about him every day, but it's especially hard today, and on his birthday, which was in May. I washed and waxed Beauty and drove her to the cemetery, and we sat there and had a Scotch, and by we I mean me.

It's hard because, though we gave each other birthday presents we always said, at least to each other, that all we really wanted was another one. Until the year that he didn't get what he wanted.

This year was the first birthday I didn't get a card from my cousin Cinderella. Last year a card from her arrived right on the day, as it had every birthday for more than 30 years. It was a beautiful, arty little card, very Cinderella-style, and inside was a brief, cheerful message, also very Cinderella-style. And then, the next day, another envelope arrived with her handwriting. I opened it and found it was another card. She had written, "I know I sent you a card yesterday, but I saw this after I mailed it and I knew you would like it, so I bought it. Happy birthday again!"

She was like that, Cinderella. She always did exactly the right thing, always remembered your birthday, but always did something a little extra, a little special.

And then last fall she and her husband were killed in a plane crash.

I am of the belief that one's birthday is the most important day of the year, and that you should never have to work on your birthday. Unless you're, like, a brain surgeon or something and lives depend on you. So this morning I slept until I didn't feel like sleeping anymore, and the phone rang and it was my step-brother David, calling not to wish me a happy birthday but to tell me that the map that was automatically inserted by Evite into the invitation I had sent him indicated that the Academy of Spherical Arts, where I'm having my party tomorrow night, was located near Nathan Philips Square — which it's not. Not even close.

Sometimes, Google Maps is just a suggestion.

"I've been asking everyone I know, and no one knows where this pool hall is," he said. He sounded annoyed, and my pre-coffee brain could not recall why I had invited him.

"It's in Liberty Village," I told him. "On one of the little side streets, which I think was recently renamed, which is probably why the map didn't work." I wanted to add, "And referring to the Academy as a pool hall is akin to calling Casa Loma a house," but I didn't. Instead, I went downstairs and made a pot of coffee.

That's when I saw my birthday present from Rex on the coffee table. It was a big pink bag, not that I could miss it, and inside was the latest Stephen King novel — he knows I like Stephen King, because there are four boxes labelled "SK BOOKS" in his basement — and the best birthday card ever. It starts out looking like a regular card with the bottom of a guitar, but when you pull on the tab it expands to four times its length, creating a nearly life-size guitar. AND THEN IT PLAYS HAPPY BIRTHDAY.

Rex is turning out to be quite the creative gifter, which is not something I knew about him in high school. We were together for at least one birthday and one Christmas back in those days, and I can't remember anything he gave me. Yet in the last ten months he's given me a Boss distortion pedal, a fantastic multi-head PINK screwdriver, and a pair of gold Fender guitar earrings with rhinestones.

I guess maybe he likes me after all. You're never really sure where you stand with Rex; he doesn't say much. Most of the time he gives me the impression he only tolerates me, because I can be amusing company at times. Sort of like my cat.

See, it's one thing if you live with a guy live with a guy, it's quite another when you live in a guy's house. We're not exactly roommates; that would imply that we had rented a place together, on equal terms. That's what we were, you could say, when we lived in Gilbert's house together, when I first came home from California, but when Gilbert kicked us out so he could renovate and sell his house, we moved into Rex's house.

And that's the thing, see, it's Rex's house. It's not my house, it's not our house, it's his house.

When you live in someone else's house you hope you agree on some things, and you negotiate the rest, but when you don't agree — say, when one of you likes the heat and the summer, and the other likes to live in a meat locker — the one who owns the house wins. Like when you lived with your parents.

And on that note, before I start telling you about my kitchen sink, I'm going to go back to sleep, because even though the time of this post says 11:00 a.m, that's when I started writing it, but as I finish it's tomorrow and no longer my birthday.

Hanging By A Thread

For the last few weeks I've been doing research for the next edition of my marketing textbook, and among the many interesting things I've learned is that South Asians are now the largest visible minority group in Canada. They're also the fastest growing group, in that that's where most of our new immigrants are coming from.

This is interesting to me for three reasons. First, it means there are lots of great Indian restaurants, even out here in suburbia. Second, Sobeys opened a new chain of stores called FreshCo specifically to cater to this market, and there's one around the corner from Rex's house. I can't shop there, because it's owned by Sobeys and they are the evil empire, but it has provided amusement in the form of grammatical errors in their signage.

(It's been suggested to me that this was done deliberately, to appeal to the market, but if Sobeys would really print signs with bad grammar because they think Indians can't speak English properly, well, that's even more reason not to shop there.)

It always amuses me when I see signs or posters with errors that were clearly produced by professionals. I suppose that's the marketer's version of Schadenfreude.

The third reason is, well, I have to just go ahead and say it: threading.

(Men, you can stop reading at this point.)

I've wondered about threading for years. Oh, sure, I've had it described to me, but when someone tells you they pluck the hairs out of your eyebrows with a twisted thread, it comes across about as believable as magic potions that make men's hair grow like a chia pet.

In the mall around the corner there's a bank, a drug store, a convenience store, and a tiny salon with the windows covered in white paper and a sign on the door that says LADIES ONLY. The windows say they do waxing and threading, and today I dropped in for the former, still wondering about the latter.

I have weird eyebrows. There's a scar in one of them, the result of an ill-conceived game of tag played around a row of pine trees when I was nine; they're also unusually short. So the salon ladies have to be creative on my face.

I went in. There were two Indian ladies working on two reclining ladies in two chairs, one lady waiting, and me, and that was a crowd, the place was that small. There was also a TV blaring much too loud what seemed to be an Indian, or possibly Arabic (sorry; I couldn't see it well and probably wouldn't have been able to tell the difference anyway) music. You know the kind that sounds like cats being tortured?

It was unpleasant, but I couldn't leave because I was fascinated by the flying thread. The two Indian ladies were waving their arms above the reclining ladies, and you had to look close to see that strung between their two hands and their mouth was a long white thread.

Have you ever watched the chefs at Beni Hana's? It was kind of like that.

When it was my turn, I requested an old fashioned waxing, which the thread lady did, and quite well. As I said, my eyebrows are not easy, and she took her time, going around the tops and the bottoms little by little, spreading wax and ripping it off. (And no, it doesn't hurt, unless you're a big baby.)

Then she asked, can I use the thread?

Sure, I said. I was curious.

What she did was to line the thread across the top of my brow, then twist her hand in something akin to a towel-snapping movement. I felt the gentle vibration and heard a snipping sound, like when they use scissors. It seems the thread trimmed my eyebrow.

This is kind of cool, I thought.

She threaded some more, then stood back and examined her work. Then she applied a little more wax. A couple of plucks with a tweezer, and then, for good measure, a snip or two with tiny scissors. Then she announced she was finished.

I looked in the mirror and was very pleased with the results. "How much?" I asked her.

"Nine dollars."

"You should charge more," I told her.

Our House

The MLS listing for Triller was posted today, and it makes me sad. Triller is Gilbert's house, and though I'm happy for him, especially if he gets anywhere near his asking price, I'm sad for me because that house has been part of my life for over twenty years. I lived in it twice.

The first time was back in the early 90s, a few months after Gilbert bought the house and a few weeks before its value plunged to half what he had paid for it. Remember that recession? It was the Big One, when interest rates were in the double digits and so many people were buying overpriced condos to flip that half of them ended up walking away and losing their downpayments. To say the market plunged is to understate it. I think people have forgotten that recession, because they complain more about this one, which isn't nearly as severe. Interest rates are still ridiculously low. I just got a notice from the bank that the interest on my line of credit was reduced by 0.5%, and a couple of months ago I renewed the mortgage on my condo at 2.9%. The mortgage and financing rules all changed after the Big One, so nowadays people pretty much can't, and just don't, buy expensive properties hoping to sell them a few months later and make a killing. I just doesn't happen anymore, and that's a good thing.

Not that that's what Gilbert was doing. He bought the house on Triller to live in, and because he loved it. It wasn't his first house; he'd been buying, renovating, and selling houses for a few years and had made enough so that now he could buy the house of his dreams, and Triller was it. So even though the market crashed right after he bought it, he hardly minded because he wasn't selling. And now that he finally is, the house is worth four times what he paid for it, and that, Gentle Reader, is what we call karma.

The house was so big that not only did Gilbert live in it, but so did just about everyone else he knew. During the recent renovations Gilbert's brother, Steve, suggested we have a party and invite everyone who ever lived there, but we're not sure the house is big enough for that. Steve lived at Triller for several years, and at least five of his friends and their furniture came and went during that time. Gilbert's cousin Frank, who just finished the roof renovations, lived there for a year, and my cousin Theo lived there during his wandering years, and in between prison terms. When Lucien arrived from Poland and started working for Gilbert's company, he moved into the basement and started to fix it up as an apartment. And when X and I moved to Toronto from Montreal, we moved into the third floor.

Our plans coincided with Gilbert's idea to turn the third floor into a separate unit, so we hauled our fridge and stove from Montreal and Gilbert promised to build a kitchen around them. He got as far as hooking up the 220 line for the stove, and installing some cupboards and a countertop, but there were no doors on the cupboard and, more to the point, no sink. After four months of promises and washing dishes in the bathtub, we moved out.

As the years passed and one by one the bathrooms in Triller ceased to function, our group of friends spent many happy times at that house. There were birthday parties and New Year's Eve parties, and once, about ten years ago, Kaya came from Calgary for a visit, and we had a big BBQ party in the back yard with the whole gang, Gilbert and his five girls, the reunion tour.

Mrs. Gilbert was in the picture by this time, and she'd heard of us but hadn't met most of us. When she first started dating Gilbert she'd seen the picture, the one from our high school reunion with Gilbert surrounded by his girl posse: me, Genie, Red, Kay, and Kaya, all in formal wear, and she was none too pleased, but that was years ago and she's used to us now.

And, hey, she's still in the picture.

When Gilbert and Mrs. Gilbert started getting serious, they spent less and less time at Triller, and more and more time at her house, in a suburb so far outside the city we simply refer to it as "up north." Triller was converted to offices for Gilbert's company and was inhabited during business hours by a dozen or so people, but empty at night, except when there were parties. The juxtaposition of the stately 100 year old house with its high ceilings, wood trim, and three fireplaces against the high speed Internet network junction in the library, running via the dumb waiter throughout the house, just made us love her more. There's no place like Triller.

Two years ago Gilbert bought a small ISP complete with server colocation and office space in Markham, a pre-fab monster-house infested town northwest of Toronto. It was supposed to be an additional office, not replace Triller, but after a few months it became obvious that the new location suited everyone better than the big old house downtown, and so Triller was virtually abandoned.

This all happened while I was living in California, but I was apprised of the highlights, and then when I came home for Christmas a year ago and Rex and Gilbert and I went out, they filled in the details.

It was only a few weeks later when I learned that Rex and his wife were splitting up, and Rex needed a place to go.

"Why don't you ask Gilbert if you can stay at Triller?" I suggested. "You'd be doing him a favour. If the house is occupied, it'll keep the druggies and hookers from breaking in." Triller is a beautiful house, but it's in a bad neighbourhood.

So that's just exactly what happened. Rex moved into Triller, and six months later when I returned from California, so did I, and that's how I ended up living with my high school boyfriend in my other friend's house.

And that's how I lived at Triller twice.

Coming In On A Wing And A Prayer

(And when you're done, it also makes pasta.)

I've been living in the suburbs for two months now and I've discovered there are some things about it that are better than living downtown.

OK, there's one.

Scarborough, the 'burb in which Rex chose to buy his townhouse, is half way to the university.

I've started teaching at MKU again, and of the five universities with business schools that I deem close enough to Toronto for comfort, and at which I have at least some chance of being hired, MKU is my favourite. It's named after William Lyon Mackenzie King, who was our Prime Minister during World War II. He was a member of the Liberal party, but was considered a conservative liberal.

I'd sooner try to explain curling to my American friends, than attempt to explain what that means.

Anyway.

I'm back at MKU, and in KSB. That's short for King School of Business, and they do love that acronym. The department and the building are called KSB by all of us. They've done some renovations to the old girl since I taught her last, a few years before I moved to California, and I wonder if they grad photos still line the hallways on the third floor. I haven't been up there yet, because my classroom is on the second floor, and the third floor is all offices, and I don't have an office yet, since I'm only a part-timer, what they call a CAS, contract academic staff.

I hate acronyms, but I love being back. I love being a part of things again, especially at this place. I love that I have my official @mku.edu email address again. Best of all, I love this, the first official email I received:

KSB Shredding Days for Paper Materials ONLY
The next KSB Shredding Day is Friday, May 14, 2010. Please ensure that your materials are ready no later than Thursday, May 13, as the shredding will be done very early on the 14th.

**Please do not put CDs, DVDs or computer disks into shredding. Send them to me in KSB3236, and I will dispose of separately.

**ONLY CONFIDENTIAL MATERIALS NEED TO BE SHREDDED - non-confidential materials can be recycled in the small blue bins in your office/large green bins in the hallways.

Please leave your shredding in the 3rd Floor Faculty Lounge (KSB3069). There are both bags and boxes in the cupboard under the microwave - note the sign on the door of the cupboard. PLEASE LEAVE ONLY MATERIALS THAT CAN BE SHREDDED RIGHT NOW - exams must be held for one year after the course is completed, i.e., the most recent exams that can be shredded now are those from Winter 2009.

If you have a large quantity of materials and therefore require a pick-up from your office, ONLY REQUESTS SENT VIA E-MAIL WILL BE ACCEPTED; please, no phone requests (this way we have a paper copy to document your request). If you are using boxes, please request a shredding label so that we don't inadvertently take something we shouldn't.

**Staples do not have to be removed from documents to be shredded, however, please save the paper clips.

Future Shredding Day - August 27, 2010.

In case you're wondering, oh yeah WE TAKE RECYCLING SERIOUSLY in this country. Really seriously. Seriously, we do. I've seen people ostracized from their building because they put an empty pickle jar in the garbage bin. You do not want to mess around with Canadians and their recycling.

Just shut up about hockey. I don't want to talk about it right now.

Paint It Black

It's Saturday afternoon, which here at the suburban homestead we refer to as, "the time on Sprockets when we do manly things."

Last Saturday Rex installed a curtain rod in my bedroom so I could hang my orange velvet curtains, and, god bless him, he didn't even cringe, at least not while I was looking. I suspect they offended his sensibilities, since just last year he redecorated his entire townhouse in a perfect palette of bland-on-bland. He didn't even make me promise to fill in the holes and repaint the room when I leave — not that I'm planning to, but I will, eventually — though I probably will, anyway. It's the sporting thing to do.

I love my orange curtains. They go beautifully with my orange velour chair, the one that used to belong to my mother. I like colour in my life, Rex doesn't. He says I'm the colour in his life. Non-permanent, but no more so than paint.

Right now, Rex is in the basement, painting his bass case black. It was black, originally, but for the last 20 years it has borne very large, silver, carefully stencilled letters reading WHO IS JOHN GALT? It makes me sad that he's painting over it, and I'm not sure why. Maybe it's because I've been reading Ayn Rand: Goddess of the Market this week, and have a heightened awareness of the teenagers we used to be.

Me and Rex, that is. Not me and Ayn Rand.

Maybe it's because he's erasing a part of his life, metaphorically. But it's a part that I was a part of, and somehow, it just hurts a little.

Then again maybe it's because he's planning to get out to one of the many local jam nights and rock that Rickenbacker again, and he would be embarassed to have to explain what the phrase meant. Or, worse, meet people who knew what it meant.