On the way to the Lumiere Festival

Yesterday I emailed my sister Kerry and suggested we take her kids to the Lantern Festival – they’d love it and Arrow could wear her princess dress. She said the kids were with their dad this weekend, but she and Mom would come with me. But then at the last minute Mom cancelled, Kerry had no way into town and I had to go alone.

I took the #14 to the Rideau Centre. Elvis, the Elvis Impersonator, got on with some friends on Gladstone Street. Elvis is a man who fills all the space available to him – physically, socially, verbally, anyway he can. He had barbecued burgers for dinner, he forgot the garlic, he doesn’t want anything to do with one girlfriend because she hasn’t finished getting rid of her husband yet, there’s a 21-year-old girl after him. Yack yack yack. He couldn’t even yawn quietly. He’s one of these people that vocalizes his yawns: “eye eye eye eye – arrrhhh.” His friends barely said a word. They didn’t smile or feign interest or anything.

An 11-year-old boy with a basketball got on the bus near Bank Street. He admired Elvis’s tattoos. This earned us ALL a shirt-raising so we could enjoy ALL the tattoos. (I wasn’t fast enough with the camera, otherwise you would have to see it too.) Elvis announced he was going to have weight-loss surgery to get down to 160 pounds, and the tattooed dancing girls on his chest would look better then. Apparently those girls used to dance whenever Elvis rippled his pecs. Not so much anymore.

I got off the #14 at the Rideau Centre, and waited for the #7. While I waited a drunk woman unleashed a nasty screaming fit on whoever was on the other end of her cell phone. A man sitting on a wall told her to shut up. She handed the phone to her girlfriend and went over to the man and told him to go fuck himself. He told her to go fuck herself. She told him to go fuck himself. I started counting. Between the two of them, they shouted “Go fuck yourself” 34 times. Then she walked away, took her phone back from her friend and screamed “Go fuck yourself!” to the person she’d put on hold.

Then the #7 arrived. I got on, and sat near the front, in the first forward-facing seat. Right in front of me, in the sideways facing seats, was a family. The pretty little girl was wearing black jeans, a black t-shirt, a black baseball cap, and black wings. Wings! She was going to the Lumiere Festival. I smiled at her. She smiled at me.

The I looked at the little boy in the stroller. He was adorable. I smiled at him. He smiled at me. He looked familiar. I wondered if maybe he was famous – a child star or something. And the more I looked at him, the more familiar he looked. And then I started thinking how much he looked like my nephew, Max, only Max has a scuff on his nose. And finally that brain cell fired and I realized this was my nephew Max and his nose had healed and the little girl was my niece Arrow and the grownups were my former brother-in-law and the Other Woman.

I couldn’t really see my former brother-in-law, since the others were between us. The Other Woman looked very different from what I remembered: she was older and her hair wasn’t long and blonde anymore and her face was kind of chipmunky and she was pregnant. But I think she had recognized me all along, which made things a bit awkward once I finally figured out who they were. I didn’t feel awkward about not recognizing the grownups, but really, it shouldn’t have taken me five minutes to recognize my niece and nephew. I don’t see them often, mostly because Kerry lives in Chelsea and neither of us drives. But I did see them just last weekend. I’m just not that visual a person, and I often don’t recognize people out of context. But still.

Anyway, since I’d been sitting there treating them like cute strangers for the previous five minutes, I figured I better just keep doing that. Because, you know, it would be kind of weird to suddenly recognize them and start treating them like family. So that’s what I did.