I led him out the door
by the elbow of his expensive suit.
"How much?" I had paid a dollar.
"Ten bucks?"
I nearly said, "Sold!" but I caught myself. "Twenty."
"Twenty dollars?"
"That's what they'd charge at a boutique on Queen Street."
He took out a slim leather wallet and produced a twenty. I handed him the uke.
His face lit up like a lightbulb.
#
It's not that my adulthood is particularly unhappy. Likewise, it's not that my
childhood was particularly happy.
There are memories I have, though, that are like a cool drink of water. My
grandfather's place near Milton, an old Victorian farmhouse, where the cat drank
out of a milk-glass bowl; and where we sat around a rough pine table as big as
my whole apartment; and where my playroom was the draughty barn with hay-filled
lofts bulging with farm junk and Tarzan-ropes.
There was Grampa's friend Fyodor, and we spent every evening at his
wrecking-yard, he and Grampa talking and smoking while I scampered in the
twilight, scaling mountains of auto-junk. The glove-boxes yielded treasures:
crumpled photos of college boys mugging in front of signs, roadmaps of far-away
places.
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