What's it all About, Alfie?

Yes, Gentle Reader, I'll get back to this story soon, but it's still very hard for me to write about Jack now that he's gone, so allow me to distract both of us with a different tale.


If you know what "what does this mean" means, you must be a Lutheran, and just like only Newfies can make Newfie jokes and really really get them, only Lutherans can make catechism jokes and really get them. For example, that picture is Martin Luther doing the Chicken Dance. Come on, that kills!

On the other hand, if, unlike Newfie jokes no one else even thinks they're funny, the whole politically correct issue is deftly avoided.

Where was I? Oh yes, so, when Rochester Facebooked this video the other day, it not only had me in stitches but it impressed me that in addition to being a Sloan fan and knowing to say hockey, never ice hockey, he was one of mein people.

I know what you're wondering, Gentle Reader: We thought Postmodern Sass was an Existentialist? I am, now, but if you know anything at all about Germans you know that you can't ever un-become what you were born into. California is not exactly what you'd call a land of diversity in culture, so discovering that Rochester is Lutheran was rather like spying a Canadian flag on someone's knapsack in a rural Chinese village.

He's a friend of a friend of the Librarian's, and I first met him about a year ago when the Librarian's friend, JB, took me to his apartment. Rochester's apartment, I mean.

That sounded so much better in my head.

See, the Librarian and I had been out at one of our favourite pubs, O'Flaherty's, and JB's wife had let him out for the night so he called — my cell phone, because the Librarian doesn't have one — to find out where we were. The thing I like about JB is that when he goes out, he goes out hard, so even though the Librarian checked himself out around 10:00, JB was still rarin' to go.

I like going out with married men because you always know where you stand.

"I'm going to call my friend Rochester," said JB. "He lives downtown, and is usually amenable to the idea of beer." I liked him already. More so, when we arrived at his place a few minutes later and he handed me a Molson.

I've seen him two or three times since then, and last weekend we went to see Get Smart together, though it was definitely not a date, which suits me just fine because I don't want to date anyone right now, maybe not ever again, but it's nice to have a smart, interesting man to talk to.

Even if he's not married.

To be where little cable cars climb halfway to the stars

My cousin Cinderella is on her way here, and we're driving up to The City tonight. That's San Francisco, where my heart is, for those of you who may be local to some other city.

It's not the first time I've been there since Jack died. There was the wake at his local pub, for one. Jerry took me to that party, quite the celebration of his life, it was, and just like Jack would have done he looked after me, made sure I didn't get too drunk, and made sure I got home safely.

He's awful swell, Jerry is.

Then there was the Friday night I talked Jeremy into driving me up to The City. I promised to take him out for dinner to a place of his choosing so long as he'd take me to The Black Horse for a pint afterwards. It was Jack's birthday, and that's where I wanted to be.

But the first time I was in Jack's city without Jack was the week after he died, when Tim invited me up to hang with the Java nerds. To take my mind off the frustration I was feeling then, because no date had been set for the funeral yet, and I thought my head would explode from frustration. I love to hang out with nerds, especially with Tim, because he's, like, a pretty famous one, and it's never boring to meet the propellerheads that flock to him.

And hang we did, from one Java fest to another, then one bar to another. Now, I don't believe in karma, as a rule, but I had to wonder what cosmic forces had aligned when the Java troop trooped into Jack's after-work bar, the House of Shields.

To be continued.

No Woman No Cry

When I got up this morning and walked through my closet to the bathroom (yes, just like Carrie in Sex and the City) and saw that the bathroom floor was shining like a mirror I swear the first thought that went through my head was, I'm going to need to get stronger glasses and sleep with them by my bedside — because, naturally, it wasn't possible that my bathroom was afloat in three inches of water.

Except that, well, it was.

It's not that I trusted my eyes. What I trusted was my foot, when it stepped into the water. But still, there's a certain amount of cognitive dissonance that you have to wrangle when you find yourself wading to the toilet.

(It gets worse when you sit down on it, and put your feet on your rug, and they're covered in water up to your ankles. You try to lift your feet up while you're sitting on the toilet, go on, just try it.)

I suppose if I'd had a dog he would have barked to alert me of the situation soon after the water entered the foyer, but I don't, I have a cat, and cats are happy to sleep for as long as you're willing to stay on the bed, which, if you're a cat owner, you already know.

Pinky didn't seem especially bothered that his litter box had floated clear across the bathroom, or that he wouldn't be able to jump onto the kitchen counter to eat breakfast because he'd have to swim to the counter first. He just looked up to me as if to say, later, dude, and good luck with all that. Then he went back into the bedroom and jumped up on the bed.

By now my brain had accepted the truth of the flood, and where it went next was, oh shit, what have I done? Did I leave the tap running? Did the fridge blow a fuse and defrost? And what is this, the 1950s? Since when does the ice in your fridge melt into a puddle deep enough to cover your ankles?

So I grabbed a towel, went back through the closet, drying my feet as I went, and circled around to the other side of the apartment, turned on the light, and saw that the kitchen and the foyer were completely flooded, too. The rest of the floors are covered with carpeting, and the metal strip that bounds it in had, apparently, served as a damn to hold in the water. It reminded me of the parking lot on the grounds of Paramount Studios in Hollywood. It's slightly concave, and they fill it with water and hang backdrops from the adjoining building and float boats in it and film movies.

It's funny where your mind goes when you wake up in the morning, all unsuspecting and everything, to find a reflecting pool where your bathroom used to be.

There was no water running in my apartment, so I waded out into the hallway where I met my neighbours. They had sandbagged their doorways as a precaution, but the water hadn't quite reached them. No, it had only formed a lake outside my door, then rivered its way in. You see, my apartment is closest to the giant concrete planters with the built-in watering systems which, it seems, had overflowed during the night.

"We've been trying to reach the manager," the neighbour around the corner said, and the one next to him added, "I came home at 7:30 this morning and saw the water in the hallway. I've been calling the office every ten minutes since then, but no one has called me back."

"I'll call Monica," I said. "She's my friend, I have her personal number."

Monica's been great. I'm not sure I would have gotten through the last few weeks without her. We weren't that close, not until Nadine moved away a couple of months ago, but then she went through some stuff and I was there for her, and now she's there for me. I haven't spoken to Nadine since Jack died. She moved to Phoenix at the end of March, to live with her boyfriend in his big house with the swimming pool. He's buying her a diamond as big as a head of cheese and they're getting married in November, and all she does is bitch and complain about her problems. From where I sit, she doesn't have any problems, none that matter, anyway, and I can't bear to listen to her anymore. It's for her own good that I unfriended her, because if I had to hear once more about how she sprained her wrist unpacking, or how horribly hot it is in Phoenix, or how she couldn't bring herself to go to the Suns game because she was so tired from working all week, I'm going to grab her hair, pull her head off her neck, and hammer throw it into traffic on 101.

But Monica, she's terrific. She said, take Pinky and go make yourself some coffee down in the media room, and I'll go get you a breakfast sandwich from Starbucks. She knows I love them. So I did just that, I put Pinky's leash on and we went downstairs, and within half an hour we'd been fed, and Bert, the maintenance guy, had brought Pinky's litter box downstairs for him, and Monica said don't worry about anything, the cleaning crew's already here and they're cleaning up the water, and it didn't reach your shoes or the books, and everything's fine, and I'll even credit you a couple of days' rent this month because of the mess. We'll clean the carpets and it'll be even better than it was before, so don't worry, don't look so sad, everything's gonna be all right.

I knew she was right, I did. It wasn't so bad, and it could have been so much worse. The water stopped just inches short of a big pile of library books, and it didn't seep into the closet where all my shoes, the pink shoes, are. So there was no reason, really, no reason at all, that I should have broken down crying right then, sitting on the big, comfortable sofa in the media room, when I had a latte in front of me and Pinky was fine and my apartment was being cleaned and everything was fine, just fine, everything was going to be all right.


Except that, well, it wasn't.

I Left My Heart in San Francisco

I was doing okay through the first half hour of the service, I really was. I'd gone to Zellers that morning, and bought my own handkerchiefs, since I'd just recently returned all of Jack's (Oh, cruel irony!).

I was crying quietly, and barely shaking at all, but I kept expecting him to put his arm around me and comfort me, because that's what he did at times like this, so how could it be that he wasn't there for me now, when I needed him more than I'd ever needed him?

Peter, Jack's best friend since forever, delivered the eulogy, of course he did, and Peter is a writer, so it was a marvellous speech. Shot through with Star Trek and Monty Python references. We all laughed, then cried, and I continued to be impressed with my waterproof mascara.

Next, Jack's father gave a short speech, opening with a Jack Benny impression, and I cried all the harder because there was the man that Jack should have had another thirty years to become.

But I was doing okay, all things considered, I really was, until the music accompanying the slide show changed to I Left My Heart in San Francisco, and then it was too much to be borne, and the great heaving sobs won control.

A few years ago, when I was still living in Toronto, a courier package arrived before my birthday, and inside were a number of small bundles, each wrapped in a sheet of paper and labelled in Jack's exquisite handwriting, "Open me first," "Open me second," and so on. Inside the first was a plane ticket to San Francisco, first class on the upper deck of a 747. Inside the next was a postcard of the very grand Mark Hopkins hotel, on the top of Nob Hill. The next held a brochure from the Starlight Room, with a note from Jack saying, "Bring a dress. Everything else is taken care of."

The bundle that read "Open me last" was the smallest of the set. Inside was a tiny card reading San Francisco, with a little envelope that held a charm of the Golden Gate Bridge.

Inside, he had written, "Leave your heart."

Pretty in Pink

I went shopping today, to buy a pair of gloves to wear to Jack's funeral on Thursday, because I know he would have liked that. He was a great lover of ceremony, of dressing formally, and of conducting one's self, in situations like these, with the utmost dignity.

I know, because he escorted me to my Dean's funeral last year.

I wasn't sure whether black gloves or white would be most appropriate with a black dress on such an occasion. Jack would have known. He was always the most elegantly dressed man in the room. His sartorial sense was unparalleled. And so, it is important to me to honour him in this way.

He loved the black dress. I wore it last year when we went to the theatre in San Francisco. We dressed up, of course, and I wore a black satin hairband and he giggled like a schoolboy when he saw it. "You look really pretty," he said, and then I swear he blushed.

I went to Nordstrom's today, in the upscale mall called Valley Fair in San Jose, and I had to take a moment to cry again, because there are so many memories in that place. That's where Jack took me when I first moved to California, and bought me a fabulous pair of Chanel sunglasses. I wanted pink ones, but there weren't any, and when I put these on he said, "Those are you."

Nordstrom didn't have any formal gloves, not one pair, and so I was forced to try a bridal store. (The horror!) So it was with unexpected delight that I found the perfect pair of gloves.

They're pink.

They're perfect.

Best of all, they go with the shoes — and oh yes, Gentle Reader, I will be wearing them!

I know Jack would approve. I like to think he'll be smiling down on me, on Thursday. He might even blush.