It's long been one of my secondary survival skills... my ability to get home and find my bed no matter where I am when the shut-down impulse kicks in. But there have lately been obstacles in my path... nearly (but not quite) thwarting me.
The first obstacle has been getting a cab. Specifically getting a cab to get home from my friend Howard's. Specifically getting a cab anytime between midnight and two a.m. to get home from my friend Howard's instead of walking the hour to hour and a quarter back across the river to my place (especially given the fact that the price of the cab ride is an absolutely ludicrous $6.50). The time before last I called after Howard had passed out in a chair watching the DVD part of the last Akron/Family album. I went downstairs, called the cab... and waited, and waited, and sipped my last beer, and waited. My sozzle-senses started tingling with this idea, if I start walking out to the end of the driveway... reaaaaalllllyyyyy sloooooowlyyyyy... the cab will just arrive as I reach the street. And you know what? That's exactly what happened.
So last time, two weekends ago, as Howard and I sat in the kitchen downstairs, waiting, and waiting and waiting, and sipping our last beers... I thought... It's gotta work again, right? It was one of those night where a storm had gone from rain to freezing rain (little stinging balls of fury) and then just quit... leaving behind a strong but mildly mild wind. So I walked reaaaalllllyyyy sloooooowlyyyyy to the end of the driveway... and stood there... and stood there... and listened to the wind... and looked up at the tree next to the end to the driveway and really noticed how fucking tall it was... and how it was really swaying in the wind... and how I couldn't hear if any cars were anywhere near Howard's street... and then Howard called out from the kitchen window, "Why don't you come back inside, idiot?"
This past weekend I had two oddball end of night occurrences:
First was on Friday night when I went for dinner at my friend Andrew's place. He lives up in an area of Fredericton called Skyline acres... near the highway that travels east towards Saint John and west becomes Prospect St. The streets are little fishscale crescents that double back upon themselves... and given all the snow we've had, they look all the more same-ish. But no matter... I'm familiar with the area... it was fairly warm around midnight when I was leaving... I had my CD player... and my planned route was as illustrated below:
(1) is Andrew's place the starting point... and on a downward and vaguely westward trajectory you eventually come across (2) which is the shortcut across the highway on/off ramp and into campus and then hoppy skippy jumpy home... about 40 minutes or so all told.
Unfortunately this, I think, is the route I actually took:
(1) same starting point, but I must've whipped around Bristol in the wrong direction and slowly corrected course... although I was keeping an eye out for Canterbury I never saw it... though I had to have crossed it at some point... (2) is the large snow covered field I crossed... thinking I was at some weird new corner near campus only to emerge at (3) Forest Hill road... well above where the overpass leads to the Princess Margaret Bridge but a straight shot down towards the foot of campus... albeit about as far from my apartment as I had been when I left Andrew's in the first place.
The last homeward bound adventure was on Saturday night. John, Marc B. and I had been out with a brigade of fake mustache rocking Haligonian Voiceprint folk. Our night wrapped up at the former taproom and I split from the group and headed home up around the graveyard between Brunswick and George. As I neared the corner of Carleton Extension where I usually turn up I heard a voice from nearby behind me squeak out, "Hey hang on for a second... wait, wait." I turned to see the backlit figure of a smallish woman I assumed was someone I knew... but as she passed under the next streetlight I realized this was not the fact... I also realized she was wearing just a T-shirt and a skirt on this sub-zero night. As she pulled up to me she unwound her woeful tale... coat check took her ticket at Nicky Zee's, but offered her the wrong coat, which she didn't take... and now was shivering her way home. For some reason she targeted me as a suitable source of body heat... requesting that I escort her home so she didn't freeze to death. Home was only up around the corner onto Regent... more or less on the way... so I agreed, tucked her under one side of my coat and headed home.
If I were Matthew McConaughey this would have culminated in some exotic evening of Greek wine, conversations about Hopper paintings or more likely Charley Pride records and a lifelong friendship that deepened... for a time... into a brief, bittersweet romance. But since I'm, in fact, me I was offered a Corona, which I turned down, and then quizzed on whether I knew some of the same people... most examples of which were brought up turned out to have recently died.
Instead I just released her from beneath my jacket and (easily) found my way home... for once.
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