Hi. Can I get the number
for the poison control centre, please?
Silence. Then more silence. I wait, pen poised, wondering what the delay is. I’d already called the telephone company’s directory-assistance service for other numbers in Saskatoon, our new home in this January of 1980, and usually they’d rattled them off pretty quickly. Finally, a voice speaks, hesitantly, as if afraid of the answer.
Is this an emergency?
Given that Canada Day is just around the corner, this really ought to be a study in scarlet, but here we are. And there we were a few days ago, stumbling across yellow at two locations in the Ottawa Valley: Ashton and Pakenham.
In Ghostbusters, our hapless heros are instructed to choose the form of their intended Destructor, Gozer the Gozerian.
Choose and perish.
(timestamp – 2:56)
In mindfulness training, participants are instructed to notice a given colour for a whole day. On this day, of course, the yellow itself didn’t mean anything; noticing it meant everything. If the “nimble little minx” from Ghostbusters had been along for the drive, she might have growled this instead.
Choose to notice,
and live.
Yes, ma’am.
As I was saying a few weeks ago . . .
I could be ready to undertake CPR or, in a public building, ready to deploy an AED properly. That means learning how to do both . . .
. . . and, for buildings that I frequent, that also means learning where the AED is.
Smoke is in the air as Los Angeles streets offer up video that could be a Rorschach test for the different ways the same footage can be understood–Riots? Peaceful protests? Opportunistic looting? All of the above?
Smoke is in the air as Air India drops a Boeing 787 into a crowded residential neighbourhood and even before the horror can be fully described, much less grasped, the informed and uninformed speculation begins–Pilot error? Mechanical failure? Bird strike?
Smoke is in the air as the Middle East teeters on the edge of something–Peace for a generation? Regional war that draws in Russia, China, and the USA? Regime change in Iran?
Before slapping marmalade on my rye-bread toast, I caught it trying to alert me to some dismaying prospect.
Although, come to think of it, maybe that expression is for its own circumstances.
Lacking the physical and mental oomph these days to organize photo shoots of better subjects, I just go places and photograph whatever is in my path.
In theory this could have gone a few directions–from boardwalks to bridges–but where it went this week was to dandelions and friends.
I remember when I learned that red wine doesn’t go with Thai food. I remember when I learned that a homemade dressing that was spectacular on a spinach salad did not even rise to insipid on any other kind of greens. But that was then; this is now. I was this many years old when I learned that light rye bread (sans caraway seeds) makes the right toast for marmalade, by 1.6094 country kilometres. Nay, the perfect toast.
You doubt me? Try your own taste test. Take a piece of any soft white bread, or a challah knot, or an English muffin. Toasted, they’re all perfect foils for honey. Pair any of them instead with a big dollop of marmalade and what do you get? A sad little overly sweet piece of nothing, that’s what.
When in trouble,
when in doubt,
run in circles,
scream and shout.
We were discussing this little ditty just a few months ago in the context of the President’s on/off again tariffs on Canada.
Is it good advice? Not really, but then it’s not really advice, is it?
It’s a comment on what happens, not on what should happen.
Five weeks ago, I found my husband slumped over in his office chair gasping for breath. I thought that was bad until he stopped even gasping. On my part, what followed was not a textbook example of an effective emergency response, although I did manage to call 911 and today he is back in that office chair.
I reinforce my limited knowledge of French in unremarkable ways. These include repetitive exposure to bilingual talking-elevators in our Nation’s Capital. After several weeks, I feel that I could call off the floors quite creditably if called upon to do so:
Deuxième étage
Troisième étage
I add to my limited knowledge of French in unexpected ways. These include intermittent exposure to bilingual-cute signs and products created, presumably, by fluently bilingual marketeers. This is how I learn something about the language as she is spoke. Maybe even something that is true.
This past week’s offering? A box of protein bars at Costco.
My six years of junior- and high-school French and my lone year of university French never got to the stage of slightly-profane-but-not-outrageous idioms. It seems a shame. Surely we would have picked up new vocabulary and conversational usage faster and cuter. And that’s rien d’absurde.
Posted: 2025 Jun 28
