Good Things I and II
- Happenings in the Hood
I live in a very good neighbourhood in London, called Old South. Not full of rich folks, thankfully, but very pleasant for the most part. The recent policies of all levels of government are making the northeast corner of the neighbourhood, in which I live, slowly but surely less pleasant. However, one need only walk a block to leave that behind. Bottom line, I like living here.
One very interesting thing that My Gal and I have noticed on our joint and separate walks about our neighbourhood is a house about two blocks from me with a large tree trunk on its front yard. A tree of considerable girth clearly stood there at one time, now all that is left is a large flat surface just above ground level. The folks who live at this house – or maybe someone else, we don’t really know, has gotten into the habit of staging miniature dinosaur tableaus on this large flat surface. What the wee dinosaurs are doing varies, but it always happens on the flat surface of that tree trunk. We look forward to checking out what the dinosaurs are up to whenever we head out for a walk.
Here is a photo I took of the tableau from this past Sunday.
I am not a professional photographer, obviously, but it looks to me like the dinos are hanging out at the pool. Who’s pool? Couldn’t say.
If one looks up at the porch of this house, there are also dinosaurs cavorting about there.
Being a grandpa, I have a nontrivial collection of toys and books and games that I acquired when my grandkids were kids. Unlike me, the grandkids have grown older, and so most of these things are no longer of any interest to them. That includes a set of plastic dinosaurs My Gal picked up back in the day, thinking my grandson would enjoy them.
He definitely did, but now he’s outgrown them, so I got the bright idea that we should donate them to the folks who stage those mini-dinosaur events.
So inspired, on Sunday we walked over to said house with our gift of dinosaurs in a bag that included a note saying ‘They would like to join the fun’, and left the bag there next to the tree trunk.
I should note that the dinosaurs we contributed were of a larger scale than the ones you see in the photo above.
Well, this morning, Monday, one day after we left our reptilian contribution at the tree trunk, My Gal went by the tableau house on her usual morning run, and stopped to take the photo below.
As you can see, our larger-scale dinosaurs have been nicely incorporated into the proceedings, pushing a pram full of wee-er dinosaurs.
We are very pleased to see our donation has been accepted, and look forward to what the tableau-makers, whoever they may be, get up to in the future. I do wonder what is the source of the props like the pram and the swimming pool, but it doesn’t really matter. Creativity, once unleashed, cannot be contained.
I should also mention that when we walked over to drop off our bag of dinos on Sunday, we were both wearing T-Rex costumes. My Gal bought herself one of these some years ago, and had so much fun with it she bought another, so what our neighbours saw was two six-foot-plus tall T-Rexes bopping through the neighbourhood, one carrying a camera, the other a bag of mini-dinosaurs.
We got a lot of honks and waves from passing cars on our journey – what does one do when passing a T-Rex other than wave – and we also set a lot of the dogs in the neighbourhood to howling and barking. I guess that is what dogs do when they spot a T-Rex….or two. One lady stopped her car and got out to take a selfie with the two T-Rexes. My first selfie, I’m pretty sure.
Anonymous notoriety is kinda fun, I have to say. We have plans to appear as The Two Ts again.
- Good Garrison
I just finished reading another recent acquisition from my last trip to The Book Addict: Leaving Home: A Collection of Stories from Lake Wobegon, by Garrison Keillor. These are in fact lightly edited transcripts taken from his radio broadcasts, and every one starts with the same sentence: ‘It was a quiet week in Lake Wobegon.’
I never listened to A Prairie Home Companion when it was on NPR, and that is my loss. There are very few writers whose work can get me to laugh out loud while I’m reading it, but Keillor is certainly one. The stories are perceptive, often heart-warming, sometimes tragic, and at times very very funny. Stories about people living their lives in a small place, for whom a road trip to St Cloud is a big deal.
The closest thing to Keillor’s work here in Canada I think is The Wingfield Series, which was a cycle of seven one-man plays written by Dan Needles. In them Rod Beatty played Walt Wingfield, a Toronto stockbroker who bought a 40-acre farm and went off to change his life and be a farmer.
I saw some of those Wingfield plays over the years, and they were very much in the spirit of Garrison Keillor’s stories of Lake Wobegon, as Dan Needles did actually do what his character Walt talked about, although he made up the location of Larkspur, Ontario, in Persephone Township. Each play consisted of Beatty reading letters Walt had written to his friend, the Larkspur newspaper’s editor. I laughed a lot at those, too.
I’m pretty sure I also saw some Wingfield on CBC, which showed what were essentially half-hour videos taken from the stage plays. Not hard to do for a one-actor play. That was when CBC was actually good for something….
Anyway, I will look for more of Keillor’s books once I finish this one, and I recommend his writing to you all. You don’t gotta be Uhmurikan to appreciate Mr. Keillor’s stories, and it turns out you don’t have to be (born) Canadian to enjoy Wingfield’s Follies,