OVERHEARD IN THE PARK

A: Hey, that's a nice CD player.
B: You want to buy it? I got a tape player too.
A: Oh, I got more tape players than you could possibly imagine.¹ Seriously man, I got six tape players at home.

Perhaps there's a great failure of imagination among the people who hang out all day in Victoria Park, but I have no trouble imagining six tape players. I can picture different brands, different eras, styles, whatever. Three Sony TC-110As (one without the microphone, one with a broken Pause button, one in mint condition), a schoolbus yellow Sport Walkman knock-off called a "Walk and Play Sport" which takes a discontinued battery size, a black Grundig ghetto blaster with the name "Andie" written on the back in white-out, and a slam-bang 1983 Panasonic RX-5050, featuring awesome sound but a tendency to stretch out tape and pull it into its gears as if the mechanism possessed its own hungry soul. All six tape players sit in a heap under an old kitchen table in a shed in his backyard, right next to a Sears-Roebuck electric guitar with three strings left.

See, I can imagine six tape players. What's wrong with the audio equipment salesguy in the park?

DRYCLEANERS

Previously on Palinode we learned a little bit about the Fleischmann family, German Jewish immigrants who came to Regina and ran a drycleaning empire. We met Martha Braun, n�e Fleischmann, in the process of preparing a shirt for a customer. I've since done some research and found out the following information about her husband Arthur, the current and last owner of Fleischmann's Drycleaning:

When Arthur Braun was fourteen a wasp stung him on the cheek as he was carving his name onto a picnic table in the park. He wandered home in the summer heat and stumbled through the screen door. His mother screamed when she saw his swollen face and laboured breathing. She pushed him into the back seat of the family station wagon and roaring off to the hospital, rushing stopsigns and laying on the horn all the way. The doctors treated him for anaphylactic shock, but the wasp's poison had made him nauseated and feverish. He lay in his bed for the next few days, unable to eat, drifting in and out of delerium.

On the second night of his fever he dreamt that he was walking down a forest path that ended in a clearing in a copse of linden trees. He lay down and gazed up at the sky, which was bright with afternoon sun but yet was pricked by the light of stars. A man with the head and paws of a bear but dressed in a surgeon's apron and shiny black shoes walked into the clearing and stood over him. The man pulled a scalpel from a leather bag and cut into Arthur's chest. The pain was immense but far-off, like heat distortion seen on the horizon. With a few quick strokes of his scalpel the man opened Arthur's chest, pulled out his heart and bit into it.

Arthur woke from the dream a little after dawn. The fever and nausea had disappeared. He understood that the surgeon with the bear's head had saved his life, that the dream had been a pact between himself and the man. His sense of right and wrong had been swallowed whole, but in exchange he could not be hurt, could never be sick, never had to feel any fear for the rest of his life. With this knowledge he dressed quietly and headed out to the park over dew-studded lawns, his breath visible in the early morning air. He found the wasp's nest hanging underneath the picnic table and sank his fingers into its dry mass. Wasps poured out, swarming and crawling over Arthur's body as he pulled apart their nest. Not one stung him.

That's what I found out from looking through some old newspapers and talking to his mother-in-law Brigitte.

parode - exode