The Land Of Look Behind Part 6

Two is a fonder number gracing the clock than one--a relief from monogamy, a rightful place to start. Three is too midway, cantankerous in its sound, still four is drab and stony and the sun lies too low in the sky for any truthful expression of real afternoon. Five is somewhat better, the sky is pressuring evening and, by six, is big with shadows that foresee the coming dark.

With seven, ambers and misty wraps are charged in pastel tones celebrating the arrival of eight. At nine, all pretense is dropped that its still daylight and colours lie bludgeoned--extinguished in the dark. Ten through near dawn is blissful and quiet, no confusing escapades of s.h.i.+fting light. Only the hour before dawn promises a summer respite any different than the cue sung at midnight.

The absence of colour and light diminish confusion over the sun's relative positioning. One need experience no mood fluctuations over birth or hasty departure of the day. In the broad smile of no light, the frock of virginal black remains securely intact.

AUTOMOBILE SOFT LEGS

"The world's smallest painting ... Our Beautiful Canada was painted with a single hair and the aid of a microscope. The artist considers his price of seven million dollars not too high."

The Globe and Mail, January 25, 1979.

Now, it came to pa.s.s that a seasoned young diner by the name of Simon decided to revolutionize the restaurant trade. It was his firm desire to bring some chutzpah into the all too predictable and dreary cuisine on this part of the continent. From the first, Simon maintained that food and pleasure were inseparable. Moreover, since food could be a vehicle for fantasy, even more tellingly it could provide an outlet for self-expression.

The lily pad pizza was typical of his new approach and was a twofold operation: a parent might buy an inflatable plastic "pizza," the size and shape of a small wading pool. It had an edible spout and dehydrated "sister," pizzas attached to the parent s.h.i.+p that allowed a child to fantasize while sailing and enjoying his favourite food. If that sounded too decadent or illusion inspiring, a sleeker model existed minus the extras--in other words the green wading pool size pizza unruffled by further wizardry.

Simon always maintained not everyone could handle too much soft-pedalled reality. Out of the dense formations of endless fast food chains, Simon's novelties were to t.i.tillate the jaded restaurant goer.

Interpretive signs and amenities guided the erstwhile onlooker to the "ultimate," in fantasy dining. Rhinocerous pizza was served flanked on an inflatable horn. For the less adventuresome, a lobster pizza with drawn b.u.t.ter could be had either with tangy dough balanced along its claws or imprints of lobster cut into the succulent crust. Children loved the lily pad pizzas and mothers discovered how delightful baby tears were when presented in tastefully done little cups. Terrariums soon arrived and were pedalled shamelessly. Some outlets claimed "billions and billions," were sold.

Simon also cornered the potent swamp water drink market and was having his empire go "wet." The familiar Chartreuse would now be available at request and a grown up might indulge primal fantasies along with a taste to be a gardener, rake and glutton all at once. Special suites were rumoured to exist patterned after the Poconos in Pennsylvania where a couple could bathe in a pizza-shaped tub embroidered with baby tears, fountains, tropical lianas and all the air plants one could stand pressed against your steamy shower. Pizza machines for a quarter lined the tubs and one operation had dispensed with coins altogether issuing instead rubber baby tears that subst.i.tuted for money. They could be strung around the neck like shark's teeth. Swamp water in little jars added a further touch to this risque scene.

But, of course, for the really discriminating the boar's head feast was the sign of a truly adventuresome palate. A Black Forest effect could be conjured up complete with moveable props. A pig's head stuffed with not the familiar apple but instead each tusk hollowed bulging with pizza. Another version saw rhinocerous shaped pizzas rolled in the style of Yap Island discs, that land being noted for its odd wheel like currency. A boar's head contoured in the recognizable shape but with tusks only made of pizza was a favourite alternative. After all, gourmands bought escargots in order to fill their sh.e.l.ls then, after was.h.i.+ng, repeated the process on future occasions. And, most certainly, no one could deny that Simon's ideas were anymore outlandish than the epicurean Romish feasts of peac.o.c.k tongues and a.s.sorted other naughty delicacies. His was but an updated version appealing to the mobile North American lifestyle. Frisbees even began to resemble pizza and trampolines approached that air. It was all the rage to be Italian and boast of one's prowess in demolis.h.i.+ng mounds of pizza.

Yet trouble was afoot for Simon and his proteges. The very real puritanical element in society saw Simon's chain of exotic pizza emporiums in the same league as exotic dancers and sought to banish them, seeing that gluttony was akin to l.u.s.t. Therefore, pizza pie body parlour rubs began to vanish.

Moreover, peevishly spiteful children insisted on spreading rumours that Simon's operations used day-glow worms as subst.i.tutes for pepperoni and unwashed algae as a base for pasta crusts. People began to question the wisdom of letting children act out their fantasies with food as that commodity was a very emotional subject and a testing ground for good parenting. Psychologists soon began to join the harangue and claim the pizza emperor was a poorly toilet trained debauchee acting out repressed impulses in the form of a greedy diner.

Some, in fact, claimed he was in the a.n.a.l stage of his development and that his taste was all in his mouth. Food faddists and health nuts wondered aloud about the wisdom of combining so much dough with gelatin plant fibre. It seemed most everyone was rus.h.i.+ng to deflate the pizza bubble and end our love affair with the anchovy.

Unemployed pizza cooks and pizza rub girls were soon at the end of the dough line. In fact, so great was the influx of misplaced persons that the term "on the dough," for a time replaced "dole," as an euphemism for hard times. Extortionists began to muscle in asking for their share of the pizza pie. Newspapers began gloating over the imminent bust of the "infantile," pizza pa.s.sion.

Still, Simon confided his trust in the same observation that must have motivated Lord Sandwich when he launched his invention. People will always search out the delicious and the readily available. What could be more elementary than meat between bread, frogs on lily pads, protein over raw vegetables, food amidst food?

Simon set his heart to selling automobile soft legs to hosts of touchy epicures who really wondered at this juncture if anything that unusual could really taste like chicken.

THE PELLY, THE POWDER AND THE SNAKE

The cowboy's overriding presence in North America's mythology is not difficult to understand.

Perhaps the great lone land ethos of endurance, stamina, self-resourcefulness and "a man's got to do what a man's got to do,"

John Wayne brand of thoroughness, still endures more so than once admitted. Talking in these terms usually elicits a responsive chord.

Everyone has felt that, at one time or the other, only his carabine (wits) stood between him and the fate accorded to the Sundance Kid. As life increases in complexity, in all probability there will be a tendency to create myths or revive tales from the past to help blaze trails. The westerner personifies close shaves with danger. So, too, surviving in the corporate jungle implies a similar fixation in manufacturing responsive heroes to see us through.

In one scenario, the setting of a gruelling contest at the managerial level becomes "highnoon," for the Earp brothers. The plug uglies in the vein of the Claytons are the bush-wackers waiting to play upon any opening. The board room a.s.sumes the air of OK Corral with old Doc Halliday leaning on the fence or a tombstone, if the exchange goes dismally.

Most of us would naturally see little identification with the Renaissance condottieri or mercenary or understand the Laager[1]

mentality of the white South African. Yet we do have some input into what the bounty hunter is capable of or the ramifications of being dry-gulched by an insensitive or unfeeling person. All have had to cross their Badlands, ride roughshod above the timberline or grab for cover to avoid a ricochet.

The two legged coyotes are still with us no matter how humanitarian we might fancy ourselves.

The Ox-Bow Incident[2] can overtake most anyone, although the saying "meeting one's Waterloo," seems at this writing more commonplace. In ramrodding an outfit to market, or seeing a plan to completion, all must stand clear of brackish water, wolfsbane and loco weed. Place these symbolist terms in their updated context and you will understand a hockey player's nickname "cowboy," and the slow irrelevance of that veneer time.

A primeval instinct beckons through time to the campfire. And I suppose a campfire logic might be said to exist in all of us. The thinking of things out carefully over a second and third cup of coffee, cautious self exploratory reasoning. Today, any job ad will still warn: "Only the aggressive with a proven trail record need apply." Myths and more myths, the saga makers are legends in their own time, recreating themselves shamelessly.

It may be time to pull on the reins, but allow one last indulgence. Who is the modern centurion? The town marshal finds his present niche in foreman, boss man, supervisor(?) The heart is a lonely hunter and amidst renegades, mavericks and poisoned water holes, the modern Cincinnatus[3] or wagon-master will be found contending with an array of tenderfoots, greenhorns and Jimson weeds up the Chisholm Trail through the Cimarron to market.

Chiggers, jerky, sweat beetles and hardtack are but mementoes of this earlier romantic interlude.

[1] The formation of a circle shaped wagon train to ward off danger at the time of the Utilanders trek across the Transvaal to the Orange Free State.

[2] Popular novel written in the early nineteen forties.

[3] Legendary Roman hero who safeguarded a vital bridge into the city from the Etruscans.

JABIRU

Clarence, the pipe stem would grow hot with rage, then become agitated over his apparent inability to stop smoking. You see, he was a misfit in more ways than one. He didn't snap firmly in place when ordered, and more importantly, he resented the appendicular attachment to a place and time not his own choosing.

Clarence would stew near the pipe bowl, rife with burnt ends and hacking smoke. The pipe had a bite and it was he who enlisted its bitter end.

Now Clarence had designs of escaping tobacco road. He envisaged a future free of pool hall smells and the glandular malfunctioning of his predator owner. They say the stem of a pipe pressed against one's tongue for extended periods of time will cause aggravation, perhaps "malignant growths," worse yet, cancer. To Clarence, however, it was he who was sickened by the onrush of brown saliva and halitosis as his compulsive partner pressed his bones to an opened jaw. He felt like Cain and wished he could kill this man with the jawbone of his own a.s.s.

At the very least Clarence wanted to be something more than an after dinner pipe. He wished a certain notoriety, a dance on pigeon feathers, to be a pipe of Nordic proportions--a yard's length of smoke. If he was to be engrossed in smoke, he at least wished it to arrive in exotic blends, from textures rich with the warmth of their climes. Turkish root, jabiru, all were curiously better than the stuffy domestics he had come to know.

But alas, Clarence for all his fuming saw nothing ahead but more of the depressing humidor. His lot was to be a rack in a provincial smokehouse kept aglow by a poor man's fervour for post-natal security. The additive was relaxation and his world was to be as commonplace as the hearth. Home was a blackened stem yellowing with age against a bewhiskered face. There was no knowing when a pang of nicotine might hit, so he spent his off hours in a coat pocket or a sleeve's rear end eyeing the world from a very shaky distance. Life was indeed strange when one was rudely hauled out of near hibernation into the brunt of day, stuffed into an asphyxiating batch of tacky powder, then pressed into open flame. Afterwards, further indignities were exacted as one's head was slammed against the pavement or struck on the heal of a manured boot. Existing was not sweet (barring Prince Albert) but likely to be h.e.l.lishly warm or worse, infuriatingly commonplace. Still, he comforted himself on the knowledge Alex the cigarette could sense his end more dreadfully as a b.u.t.t in some pool-side urinal. At least, his demise would be a trifling more dignified--or so he a.s.sumed.

Now it came to pa.s.s that Clarence's owner was pa.s.sing through a metamorphosis of sorts where he believed a meerschaum pipe would ease the tobacco habit. At once, Clarence faced the twin prospect of being not only redundant but phased out as an aging health risk. This was clearly the siren call to action.

Clarence thought of suicidal urges. He would lodge himself in his owner's windpipe. He would fall from grace with a thud, enmes.h.i.+ng himself in a thousand pieces at his distant relative's feet.

Least-wise, he would rot in a sewer near a busy bus stop replete with all the dronings of archaic feet. Or, or he reasoned, he would outwit his opponent and maintain his old hegemony. Oblivion seemed a more forbidding fate than drudgery.

For sometime, Clarence had watched the new meerschaum from a distance.

Its lily white figure elicited a plan. He would disgorge from the pit of his favourite ashtray all the toxins lodged in the burnt up tobacco.

He would prove white was an aberration. He and he alone would disfigure her perfection. A good pipe should camouflage its owner's hazards. He had only to tar and weather his rival or await the smoke to cloud the delicate perfection of that effeminate form.

Reveling in the sense of this new found power, Clarence became puffed up with more than his own smoke, and his thoughts fell into a dry rattle. The owner feeling this unaccustomed rush of heat and experiencing hard drawing from his companion, vigorously tapped the stem against an open door's edge. He muttered something to the effect about the clogged nature of his old instrument and how refres.h.i.+ng his next smoke promised to be.

And so it would, without the residue of filth lodged inside the once trusty pipe.

ADUA

Adua had never regarded his life as a pantomime. He wanted so much to please. As a dandelion, he thought of himself as little brother to the sun catching her yellow b.u.t.ter in his eyes.