LIGHT TRAFFIC

Nothing like a good party dress.

I used to hate profiles. My own and everybody else’s. I think it was nose-related. Honestly, who wants to look at or think about noses. I’m not clear on what happened, but it appears I’m getting over that. Could have something to do with the Gainsbourg tv-special I watched Sunday. I mean, what a man, what a nose. I’m thinking if he could rock his, we can all definitely roll with ours.

The other day Debbie called to ask if she could come and spend the night. Debbie’s a woman I met a little over a year ago when I was writing about Victoria Avenue barbershops. I did a photo-essay about her for school (“Debbie’s First of the Month” – I’ll put that up one day), and we always kept in touch after that. When I see her in Mandela Park sometimes, biking from work, she introduces me to her domino partners as her “journalist friend, you know the one I told you wrote an article about me.” They all nod their dread-packed beanie hats and smile. They know exactly the one.

On the phone Debbie sounded tired and nervous. I was happy to hear from her and told her the couch was all hers, if she didn’t mind the risk of being slow-cooked to death in my A/C-less apartment. I hadn’t seen her around at all lately and for a semi-homeless woman, that gets disquieting fast.

“You know me,” Debbie said, “I’m easy.” She said she had a funeral to go to in the morning and that she “just knew” she wouldn’t be getting any rest where she’d currently been crashing. The guy she’d been staying with had brought in a new girlfriend (“a freak,” Debbie said, “and a loud one”), and started “smoking shit again”.

Debbie hates crack even more than a loud freak and she just wouldn’t have that. “It’s that smell, Carolyne,” she says, “it chokes me. It stabs me in my lungs.” (more…)

It’s summer time and it’s hot. Like, hot hot. Hot is all people can talk about. That and “Do you have A/C.” People joke about hell a lot and have visions of themselves dancing in slow-motion under popped fire hydrants. Nobody kisses hello or goodbye.

We’re at my grandmother’s house, in the kitchen. Someone’s decided it would be a good idea to make pizza for my brother’s birthday. Pizza. You know, the kind you bake in a hot oven. (Cousins banter: “Hot toddies with that anyone?”)

My grandma’s real name is Antoinette but we call her Mimi. It’s a cute name for someone well in her 90s, and she wears it well. She’s sitting in the kitchen on a high chair near the telephone cupboard, sipping on a tiny glass of rosé. I have bottomless love for this little Acadian woman, my mother’s mother, who raised six kids, never learned how to drive, easily zips through three books a week, is magic with plants and still won’t let you do the dishes when you drop by for a visit. And she bakes the best date-squares known to Man.

In the kitchen, it’s too hot to breathe. The lone fan is moving hot hair from the oven straight into our faces. Between the smoked salmon/shrimp pizza and the ham/mushroom/asparagus pizza (they are baking 5 kinds, the lunatics), my cousin turns to Mimi and asks: “Why don’t you go and sit downstairs, in the basement. It’s much cooler down there.” She’s seen the warnings on TV, about old people and heat waves. She doesn’t want our Mimi to become a sad summer statistic.

Mimi looks at her for a minute, nonplussed and dignified, like only a 93 year-old in her own kitchen can. “Go, if you want. I’m used to this,” she says.

“I spent my entire life in front of a stove”

*

PS. The above image has nothing to do with my grandma. It’s a picture of my friend Johnny I took last fall, around Arcata, California. Beyond the fact I like it a lot, it was selected because it was one of the only hot-weather shot I could easily pull out of the archives. (Note to self: I spend way too much time in/lusting after the Arctic.) Also, it seemed to me that Johnny’s plaid flannel vest, given that morning’s zombie heat, outside the Palm Café, was as absurd and iconoclastic as baking pizza in a small house without A/C on the hottest evening of the year.