Saturday Sailor

I listened to CBC radio all afternoon. Saturday is the pop cultural line up, and I love it. The sun was out, so I lay down in the grass in the yard and watched the cat happily gnawing on some green blades. I was lying on my stomach, the fertile earth close to my beating heart while the sun warmed my back. After lunch I took the baby for a walk. He's so cute with his baby cheeks and the little dreadlocks his mom has braided into his hair, and people we pass on our treks are often making comments. They have no clue that he's developmentally challenged, that he isn't learning things like normal kids do. But I taught him how to press my nose in order to get me to sing the Mozart rif his favourite toy makes.

In the evening I went out skating. The park was crowded with little African boys on bikes, and a couple kids from high school. I stayed there for about an hour, even though I wasn't skating very well and there was nothing going on. On my way back I stopped at the basketball court. The sun was going down behind the abandoned factory; there is a fan set in one of the walls that spins continually and seems to have no other function but to act like a strobe when the light catches it. A storm front was moving in from the west like the fin of a massive grey shark. I had the court all to myself, and it was such a contrast from the crowded, hectic park. Even though I was tired I carved around the flat, doing wheelies and spins, whirling like a Dervish. Then my housemate appeared from behind the chain-link fence, carrying her boy in both arms. They had been out for a walk, which is all the kid wants to do these days. What he needs is therapy, but we haven't finished laying the floor in the room we are building for him.

Just now, eating some rice and lentils, my housemate said that when she saw me there, skating all by myself on the basketball court, I looked like "a lonely asphalt sailor...or a seagull doing swoops and flips in the sky". My housemate is a poet, even though she rarely takes the time to write her musings down.