Issue 11
February 1,
2002
Photography
Winter Photos
Victoria Harbour Dock
St. Patrick's Church,
Perkinsfield, Ontario
Photography
Weblinks
Poem
"Lartigue Photo:
45. Solange, Neuilly, 1929"
Writing
A Short Character Sketch
Reading
Reading - Patrick
O'Brian and W.E.B. Griffin
Reading - Nicola Griffith's The Blue Place
Golden
Retriever Saga
2X Golden: "Winter
and Such"
The one thing you would remember about him was the unending viciousness of his opinions. But it wasn't only that. When you made the mistake of challenging him on any of them and lots of them were crazy, he would show the face of a hurt child who once again had done nothing wrong but had been misunderstood or somehow he had not said it correctly or simply that you had let him down without even knowing it and he would have to forgive you and it would be hard for him to do that but he would try and even then you would probably not even notice or forget almost immediately.
When he was younger he had indulged in the more abrasive forms of humour, but he had lost that. I guess the sandpaper grit of that had gone and he didn't have a second sheet.
He was a master of compartmentalization. Certain sets of friends were organized like the cells of a resistance movement. But I always wondered what secrets each had, what defined the "need to know". And who might be hunting us all down.
He once told me that he had never been in love. He said he could never understand the troubles I and other male friends would go through, the horrendous gymnastics of the breaking heart and its repair with beer and long boring monologues of regret.
He told me once that he had started buying cheap bikes and fixing them up since he had developed a bad habit. A bad habit of cycling home after an evening at the pub and stopping to take a leak and then forgetting since he was so drunk that he had been on a bike and simply continuing to walk home.
The first time I saw his father was at his wake, although I had heard many stories about him. It was early evening on Hallowe'en which made the wake somehow easier to get through.
Text copyright © William Joseph Gibson
2002
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