cool dry place

I got the co-op student to take my shift last Sunday. He quit or got fired or ran away or fell off a balcony or sold the wrong stuff to the wrong guy on Saturday and his tenure here is over. So my shift fell into someone else’s hands. She’s an interesting character too, but less quotable, so I feel regret and sadness. But that’s not what’s important. What’s important is that Sherry and I packed a bunch of stuff in her car on Saturday evening and hit the road.

NORTHBOUND!

To Lake Muskoka, where the boathouses are bigger than regular houses and the beautiful people cavort in the woods and ply the dark water with their tan, lithe bodies and the air smells like smoke and moss and pollen and mosquito bloodlust. We drank and celebrated our friends’ engagement. We’re at an odd stage of twentysomething where there are a lot of “couples” get-togethers. Everyone here was paired up, whether married or engaged or ungaged or other. Sofabeds and Scattergories were the order of the night. It’s no Scrabble, but Scattergories lies well within my comfort threshold, right next to Apples to Apples and drinking-Jenga.

My formula for interacting “normally” with Sherry’s high school friends is to drink four beers. It is a precise quantity that allows me to tread the middle line between silent self-consciousness and vocal obnoxiousness. Also at that level I can still remember their names.

They have bizarre naming convention where females are called by their first names and males are called by their last names except when being called by their own respective female mates, who use their first names. The result is that the number of names I have to keep track of is one and a half times the number of people there. I’ll admit it’s easier to understand than Sherry’s family, where females are named some variation of “Sherry-Lynn” and males have mustaches.

Sunday afternoon I fell off a tube being pulled behind a boat and when I got back to shore my stomach hurt and my evil twin had shown up. The working theory is that a dimensional portal was torn open by the boat’s wake and I passed through it, spinning off an alternate duplicate of me to an earlier point on my own worldline.

His name was Ryan and his last name was like mine too. But he had those tattoos that encircle the arm. And a goatee. And he wore his sunglasses at all times. He was the unRegan.

“Tell them about the seagull,” his girlfriend said.

“So we’re at Wasaga Beach for the day,” he began, an inscrutable expression behind his mirrored sunglasses, “and I see this seagull walking around by the side of the road, and it’s wing is off. Like, off. It was hanging off to the side and starting to rot and decay and it was obvious the bird was going to die soon. Now, I’m an animal lover and I wanted to help this poor seagull, so I caught it and held it with one hand under the body and one around its neck, gently, so it couldn’t bite me.”

He paused to take a drink and we sat back in anticipation of a heartwarming animal rescue tale.

“So we drive to the animal hospital, but it’s Saturday, so of course it’s closed. I decide I’m going to have to help this bird myself. I figure the wing needs to come off completely and then the bird can get better. At the very least it will be in less pain without the rotting wing. But I don’t have any scissors or anything.”

Our faces got grave and serious at this point.

“But I have my tool box in the trunk. So I pull out my putty knife and hold the bird down on the side of the road and start hacking away at its wing. It wouldn’t come off! And the bird is squawking and I keep hacking at it and people are driving by going ‘What the fuck?’ and I’m going, ‘It’s okay, I’m an animal lover!’ and the girlfriend’s standing there telling people ‘Move along, nothing to see here.’”

The chicken burgers weren’t sitting all that well in our stomachs at that point. Someone asked, “Did it work?”

“No,” unRegan said, “Eventually my arm got tired so I said ‘Fuck it’ and we drove away.”

The story closed in uncomfortable silence.

On the ride up, Sherry and I had seen a case of beer on the side of the road with a raven perched on it, trying to peck its way in to partake of the ice-cold, easy-drinking taste within. I realise now that we should have pulled over and given the raven a nose-job using a mechanical pencil and a box cutter.