Sandy Day's Blog, page 11

Where's My Car?

Years ago, before I had children, I woke up, or came to, whatever you want to call it—one dry eyelid scraped across an eyeball and I stared into the white freckled flesh of my husband’s shoulder. Okay, I was in the right bed. Tick that box. I turned my head and my brain skittered and slammed into the side of my skull. Ouch, that hurt. My other eye creaked open. So now, I was awake. It was light out. Really light, no mistaking it, it was daylight.

I needed more sleep but my bladder squawked, a taut elastic band, and my mouth tasted like a combination of dry corn flakes and moldy lemons. I sat up on the side of the bed. I was wearing one of my husband’s t-shirts. My clothes from last night lay in a tangled lump on the floor.

In the bathroom, I stared into the mirror. Under my puffy eyelids, two smears of mascara graced my upper cheeks like two polite black eyes. I guzzled a glass of water then held onto the sink for a moment, waiting for the water to go down into my stomach or come hurling back up.

I walked into the silent living room and looked out the window. Where’s my car? I craned my neck so I could see down into the parking lot to the spot next to the walkway, next to the playground, unit 501’s designated parking spot.

The bumper and side panel of my car were visible. I felt my breath expel, unaware that I’d been holding it. The car was there. Intact from what I could see. Someone (me?) had driven it home.

I went back to bed. My husband stirred in his sleep as I climbed in. He opened one eye to look at me. Didn’t smile. I lay my head on the pillow. My brain sloshed into a new position like fluid in a level.

I’m safe, I told myself. I’m okay. I didn’t do anything wrong. I closed my eyes. Then I started to remember.

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Rest assured, I will be spending New Year’s Eve safely ensconced under my duvet. What should I watch tonight? Hit reply with your suggestions, or in the comments wherever you read this post.

The little story “Where’s My Car?” is from my book, An Empty Nest: A Summer of Stories. Click here for the free Ebook. Or if you prefer a paperback it’s available on Amazon.ca and Amazon.com

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There is nothing more exciting than the first batch of books fresh from the publisher. They arrived yesterday, before the official publication date! (which is tomorrow, January 1, 2024)
I am already shipping out signed copies, complete with my fancy bookmark. Let me know if you would like one.

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Odd Mom Out Ebook

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Shoplifting a Baby Jesus

When I arrived at the store on a brisk December morning, in one quick glance I could see that the main display window was virtually empty. The only thing in it was a set of light-up houses on the floor.

I turned the key in the lock and stepped inside. The alarm pad flashed at me as I punched in the secret numbers to turn it off.

“What the hell, Natasha?” I asked, when the window dresser arrived for work later that day.

“You have to see it at night,” she gushed. “It’s so cool.”

“I’m sure it is, but…”

I explained to her that during the day, most of our customers would just walk on by, thinking the window was empty. It couldn’t stay like that for the month of December. Thirty percent of our year’s business was expected to transpire in the next 23 days. We needed to draw people in to buy stuff.

I could see from her face that she was crushed, but undeterred, she begged me to wait until evening before making a decision. 

All day, I sensed a grumbling amongst the employees, for they were on Natasha’s side. The window was a sacred work of art, and I was a crass mercenary Ebenezer Scrooge.

I waited around to see how the window looked after closing time, when all the interior store lights, all seventy-seven $10 quartz halogens, were turned off, and only the front window glowed like a jewel in the night.

Natasha had been assigned window display duty that month, and with the assistance of Liv, had pulled an all-nighter, draping the back of the large central display window with a hand-painted bedsheet, a gradient of midnight blue at the top to glowing golden sapphire near the bottom. Celestial bodies, including a bright and shining North Star roamed the night sky. Pale tulle clouds floated, suspended with fishing line pinned to the ceiling. 

On the floor of the display, they’d created a Middle Eastern tableau with burlap, beach sand, and cacti. In the center, on a lumpy hill, they’d set out the three porcelain light-up buildings of the Little Town of Bethlehem. 

For a few years we’d been dabbling in selling decorative light-up houses from an American company called Dept. 56, but that year, we’d gone all in, investing a good chunk of money in a full inventory of Dickens Village, North Pole, Christmas in the City, and, for the first time, Little Town of Bethlehem. 

The middle building of the miniature holy town was the stable, and of course, it was the main attraction. Mary, kneeling in her blue gown, and little baby Jesus in his manger.

(As an aside, I must take this moment to tell you that baby Jesus was the most frequently shoplifted item from our store at Christmastime. We took to holding him back; keeping him under the counter until someone laid down their hard cold cash for a crèche. Only then did we provide the baby Jesus.)

Along side Mary were porcelain figures; a donkey, a cow, and a few lambs; the wise men; a shepherd; Joseph, a minor character with a badass beard; and a camel. 

Taking in the entire window display from the south side of Queen Street that night, I could see that Natasha’s window was indeed glorious; I may have heard angels; but by day it was a retail flop. 

I wondered to myself, what would happen if word got out that I had nixed a nativity scene window? I worried about the store’s reputation. We were finally getting past our head-shop origins, now we might face some backlash from the Christians.

The following day, I was saved from making a Grinchy proclamation when a customer came into the store to buy the nativity set in the window. She wanted it now, and she didn’t flinch at the price. 

Staff shared worried looks, for the only set, the literal one-and-only floor model, was in the window, on a bed of burlap. To sell it to this customer meant crawling into the window and dismantling Natasha’s display. 

What would we replace the Little Town of Bethlehem with? Santa and the North Pole houses seemed wildly out of the question.

Natasha swapped out her window display later that day, filling it with a half-hearted attempt at a good old red & green holly jolly commercial Christmas. Up front, she displayed our best selling Christmas card, pictured below. 

Within days, a handwritten, anonymous, complaint arrived, slid through the mail slot in the door after closing time. Soon after, we sold out of the card.

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Your replies inspire me…

In an email exchange with a reader recently, she told me that when she unpacks her Christmas ornaments, she is reminded of my old store, Stoneworks, on Queen Street in the Beaches. I wondered then if I could summon up a humorous anecdote about the store at Christmastime, so this is for you, Karen. And although most of the story is true, the ending is most likely a figment of my addled imagination.

Do you have any cringey Christmas retail experiences? And have you ever shoplifted a baby Jesus? Hit reply and let me know, or leave a message in the comments.

HAPPY SOLSTICE & MERRY CHRISTMAS TO YOU!!!

Order Odd Mom Out from Me!

I will be receiving paperback copies of my new novel Odd Mom Out in January. You can order it after January 1st on Amazon, but if you order from me it will be signed by yours truly, and will include one of my fancy bookmarks.

Life just got life-y…

On the night that Trudy Asp discovers her ex is engaged to the same dental hygienist who’s been picking at her teeth for ten years, her daughter, Madison, suddenly announces that she too is getting married, in Europe.

Frumpy, floundering, and forced to live with her martini-swilling mother, Trudy is swamped by these revelations. And on top of it all, she’ll be wearing the second most scrutinized gown at the wedding.

Having packed on the pounds during the demise of her marriage, the idea of being eyeballed by her ex and his scrawny fiancé Zelda, is truly horrifying. To make matters worse, there’s the paralyzing fear of a transatlantic flight — something Trudy has avoided for decades.

When Zelda offers to stand in for her, Trudy is forced to confront the forces that stole her marriage and threaten to steal her daughter’s wedding too. With three months until the ceremony, Trudy must get to Europe, squeeze herself into a gown, and claim the role she wants more than anything: Mother-of-the-Bride.

Will this Odd Mom Out sink or swim? Or will she drown in a sea of humiliation?

Travel with Trudy, ORDER YOUR COPY TODAY!
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Why Christmas Turns My Crank

As an atheist, I would never have wished Christmas away.

Granted, I sometimes bristled at the Christian takeover of a pagan solstice celebration, but I had nothing against a saintly old man who, long ago, poured gold pieces into stockings that three desperate young sisters had hung by their fireside to dry. Poverty had been luring the girls into a life of prostitution, and Saint Nicholas intervened to avert that fate.

Nor did I object to the old man’s 20th-century counterpart, who brought gifts to all the children of the world on one winter’s night each year, me included. No, I quite approved of Saint Nicholas, and Santa Claus too.

When I was a child, and an atheist, I celebrated Christmas enthusiastically with my atheist family. We housed a decorated evergreen in the living room; we exchanged presents, and feasted on roast turkey; we raised our glasses, invoking peace on earth – goodwill toward men. We enjoyed the glorious voice of Mahalia Jackson on record; and the angelic contralto of my classmate, Tommy Faulkner, soloing “O Holy Night,” with our grade 5 choir, to a near empty church.

These days, even when I fall for the crass commercialization and consumerism of Christmas, my soul, I think, responds to a deeper yearning – to fall in love with the world; to wish everyone peace and harmony; to drink in the coniferous beauty of my urban forest home; to feel gratitude overflow in my childish ticker; and as Ebenezer said, “…honour Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year.”

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I wrote “Why Christmas Turns My Crank” in 2014

Since then, a lot has changed, both in the world and in my life, but my sentiments about this time of year remain the same. I’m a fan. I like the short days and the candlelight at the end of them. I like the fake fireplace on Netflix and the holiday playlists on Spotify. I no longer partake in gingerbread boys or raspberry beer, but I’m still cutting branches off evergreens to bring inside for the season.

If I don’t get a chance to see you in person or on Zoom, I hope you settle into the darkness for another week. Never fear, the Solstice arrives Thursday night, and after that, we celebrate the return of the Sun.

How about you? How are you feeling about Christmas? Reply to this email so we can chat, or post your comments wherever you’ve read this.

My New Book!

I’m excited. My new novel, Odd Mom Out is already selling well in pre-order on Amazon! If you like to read on an e-reader, grab it now while it’s priced at .99. You’ll receive it automatically on New Year’s Day 2024. Click to get a look at it: Amazon

Paperbacks will be available soon if you’re like me and prefer paper reading. Let me know if you would like a copy when they come in.

Are you on Goodreads? It’s a fabulous site for book lovers. Let’s meet up there!Thanks for reading me! See you next week.

Away in a Roasting Pan

Check the cavity,” Mom said after I removed the plastic wrapper from our Christmas Day turkey. Apparently, she’d been speaking to my Aunt Lulu earlier in the morning, and Lulu had poured hot water over her bird's cavity. 

“Lo and behold, there was a bag of guts inside,” Mom said. 

My eyebrows knitted as I contemplated this unwanted meddling.

“This is a frozen turkey, Mom, the whole point is to cook it from frozen.” 

“Lulu’s was too,” she nodded. “And yet, guts.” 

I tossed the plastic label into the sink and spun the frozen lump of poultry around on the counter. The drumsticks were frozen tightly together at their dainty ankles; no getting in there anytime soon. 

But, what was this? I prodded at what looked like a twist-tie wrapped around the legs, holding them in place. 

What was worse, I wondered as I pried at the bright yellow fiber embedded in the goose-pimpled turkey flesh: roasting a bird with the guts in, or roasting one with a plastic leg-band? 

My fingers were numb by the time I moved the bird into the sink and started pouring hot water over the business end of its anatomy.

Mom was phoning my sister, Suze. “She'll know what to do; she worked in a grocery store,” she relayed to me, as if I may have forgotten where my sister worked. 

The flesh was thawing surprisingly quickly. I tugged at the plastic tie, now determined to get a peek inside the bird. But the stubborn strand of plastic was entwined in a manner that said, "Go away, Mary, no room at the inn." 

I flicked over the wrapper again and scanned the directions. “Cook from frozen,” it stated in plain English. 

I hadn’t factored in thawing a turkey today. Everyone knows it takes days to safely unfreeze a bird in the fridge. If you do it wrong, you can poison your dinner guests. Now I was sloshing a slippery white bird around in quickly cooling water. My sister Marcy and her hubbub were arriving in a couple of hours. They’d been promised a fully cooked Christmas dinner with all the fixings. There wasn’t enough time to thaw out this turkey to check inside for a bag of gizzards and a neck.

The phone rang. Mom answered. It was Suze calling back. “She talked to Bob,” Mom yelled from the living room. Bob was the meat manager at the store where Suze had worked. “He says, go ahead and cook it from frozen. The plastic is food-safe.” 

Well, then, if Bob said so. 

But I had my doubts about cooked plastic, supposedly food-safe or not. I knew all about xenoestrogens and polychlorinated-whatchamacallits. They had no business showing up at a Christmas dinner uninvited. However, I had no choice. I had to get this turkey, frozen guts and all, into the oven now, or no one would be eating tonight. 

I lugged the 13-pounder into Mom’s large metal roasting pan; salted the skin; and into the cavern of the oven it went. I prayed silently to the ghost of Julia Child, “Please watch over this bird this afternoon.” 

Hours passed, Suze came home from visiting her daughter, and our guests arrived bearing mashed potatoes in a crock pot. The house filled with the delicious Christmas-y aroma of roasting turkey. Basting religiously, I noticed our beast emitting an extravagant amount of juices as it cooked. There would be gravy.

Finally, when the skin was golden and crackly, the drumsticks loose in their sockets, and the meat thermometer read 185 degrees, I took it out.

Around the dinner table that night was a small group, our early pandemic bubble. We ate turkey, cauliflower stuffing, peas, mashed potatoes, and O little town of Bethlehem…so much gravy. 

A frozen bird is a juicy bird, I’ll give you that. A gizzard and giblets would’ve been nice to make the gravy with, but you can’t have everything.

For dessert were the requisite pies: apple and pumpkin, with copious globs of whipped cream; a couple of mincemeat tarts; and a plate full of Christmas cookies. 

Later, after Marcy and her hubbub went home, Suze and I put away the leftovers. We scraped the dishes and filled the dishwasher, and I heard Mom back on the phone to Aunt Lulu. “It’s just not how I did things when I was in charge,” I heard her exclaim. 

I looked at Suze, and she rolled her eyes. “Merry Christmas,” she said.

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As always, I’d love to hear about your turkey travails. Hit reply on this email so we can chat, or post your comments wherever you’ve read this. I read them all.

Big News!

In case you missed it last week, my latest novel, Odd Mom Out is now available for pre-order on Amazon! The e-book is currently priced at .99 so reserve your copy now; the book will be published on January 1, 2024. Click to get a look at it: Amazon

Waiting for the paperback?

Stay tuned. I may have copies before publication date available exclusively for you.

Thanks for reading me!

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Four Men, Liquored Up

One night when I was about ten-years-old, Lake Simcoe blew up, as rough as the ocean. The wind was roaring, and our cottage windows were shut against it. Late, after dark, people in the houses across the road from our cottages, far back from the lakeshore, they heard cries for help floating on the wind.

In our cottages, right next to the lake, we heard nothing but the crashing of the waves.

A boat of four men, liquored up, had set off from Keswick; their destination Barrie. The lake was so rough they’d been blown far off course and in our bay their small craft capsized.

Only one man could swim.

And there were no life preservers.

I remember thinking it was so odd that grown men couldn’t swim.

I imagined their drunkenness, their incapacitation, falling down stumbling, passing out drunk, the way I’d seen my father, the way I’d seen my Uncle Norm.

In the deep water between the first and second sandbars, their motor boat had keeled over. Twenty swim strokes in either direction and the men would have been standing in waist-deep water, but they didn’t know that.

Where their boat flipped, the water was over their heads, and the high waves rolled in one after another.

The one man who could swim made his way toward the lighted cottages on the shore. He dragged himself from the lake and onto the beach. The first door he banged on was a few cottages away from ours. And the occupant of the cottage told everyone the next day that the survivor had scared the wits out of her.

At first, she hadn’t wanted to open the door to a sopping, out of breath stranger pounding on her sliding glass door.

Somehow, the whole shore woke up, except for us kids asleep in our beds. My uncle drove his car down over the lawn to the edge of the beach and shone the headlights out over the crashing lake.

I found out about it the next day. Three men drowned about a hundred yards from shore, about two hundred yards from where I’d been sleeping.

The following day the lake was like glass. Only the occasional ripple from passing boats lapped at the shore. In front of our cottages, a police boat trolled back and forth, back and forth, dragging the bottom of the lake for the drowned men. One body proved difficult to locate. Someone said it must have been the man who’d panicked the most — that’s why he was the hardest to find.

I was sitting on Aunt Donna’s beach, watching. No swimming that day. It was hot and humid but none of us kids wanted to swim in that monster of a lake.

The perfect summer day beat on. Innocently, gulls flew overhead, puffs of clouds floated by, and the tree toads trilled…

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In early 2020…

… in hopes that the pandemic would soon be over, and that life would be returning to normal, I published a novella called Head on Backwards, Chest Full of Sand. It’s a coming-of-age story inspired by a trip I took to Cape Breton Island when I was seventeen years old. Parts of it were written way back in my younger years, but most of it I concocted after writing Fred’s Funeral.

Last week, while reflecting on windy summer days on Lake Simcoe, I remembered this passage from Head on Backwards. I dusted it off, revised it a little, and posted it for you today. Inspired by a novel-writing coaching-program that I’ve been attending for the last couple of years, I plan one day to revise the whole book.

I hope you enjoyed this diversion from my usual pieces, set in the same locale with the same characters. Have you ever had an experience like this? Let me know in the comments, or hit reply to this email. I’d love to hear from you.

Big Announcement!

As promised last week, I have exciting news! My latest novel, Odd Mom Out is now available for pre-order on Amazon. The e-book is currently priced at .99 so reserve your copy now and save. The book will be published on January 1, 2024. Here is where you click to get a look at it: Amazon

Waiting for the paperback?

Stay tuned. I may have copies before publication date available exclusively for you.

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Dog Days of Summer

Summer days stretched out, languid in the monotony of cicadas buzzing in the trees. Long days of living in my bathing suit. The blue lake and endless sky ever present. One summer day like the next except for the direction and velocity of the wind.

When it blew long and hard from the north, it whipped the lake into a frenzy of rolling white caps, over which seagulls hovered, riding the wind. Big puffy cumulus clouds took turns playing hide and seek with the sun.

A day like this, challenged me to find ways to get warm enough to swim in the lake. I was a kid with the staggering privilege of having to get warm enough to go swimming in the lake, right next to my cottage. On a windy day, that was my biggest problem. As a kid, however, I was only peripherally aware that my normal world was not like many of my friends’ normal worlds.

Janie, Hellah, my other cousins and I had various strategies to stay warm outdoors in the wind, and hopefully get hot enough to jump in the waves.

One of the methods was to venture off the property for awhile. Our three cottage lots were connected, side by side with our grandparents’ property, so we had a lot of area to roam, four different dwellings to play in, but most of the time, we didn’t want to be inside, and so a windy day provoked us to leave.

If we walked over the two roads toward the Froggy Pond, we could visit our Cousin Fancy in the golf course club house. I wasn’t clear how this older lady with her impressive auburn beehive was my cousin, but the fact that we were somehow related by blood was enough to warrant a visit. 

She wasn’t always there. Sometimes it would be an old man minding the club house. And then we were wary. Old men were all business, and none of our business. We never tried wheedling anything out of the old man. Instead, we’d hang around outside the club house, drinking cold water from conical paper cups or washing stray golf balls in a sudsy contraption. The sun was dappled through the swaying maple trees, but if we went late enough in the day, the edge of the golf course would warm us sufficiently to go back to the cottage for a swim.

Sometimes Hellah’s dog would accompany us, a docile black lab named Jessie. 

One day when we went to the golf course, we were in luck; Cousin Fancy was minding the shop.

I wandered around the clubhouse, peeking into the deep dark cooler where pop bottles jostled. Hellah chatted to Cousin Fancy who was as nice as pie, while I wandered around, the sisal runner prickling my bare feet.

A couple of golfers came in in their spiky shoes, the same ones my dad wore, and Fancy attended to them. Some business transaction, which took place on the small cedar table, home to a glass case that housed a small selection of chocolate bars; life savers; and Wrigley’s gum.

The club house didn’t have the variety there had been in the hotel coffee shop, but by then, the hotel had burned down, and it was either spend my thin silver dime at the golf course, or go uptown to the drug store, where the choice was bigger but the staff less accommodating.

Cousin Fancy often took pity on her poor cousins, us, with our daily allowance of a dime; she was generous with her pricing, but we always had to pay, there was no free lunch.

I sat, waiting for the golfers to leave, on the hearth of the big stone fireplace, drinking in the log cabin-ness of the clubhouse. It was literally a log cabin, though the logs were glossy brown and the window sills spanking white, all painted, not rough like in the pioneer times I learned about in Social Studies.

Hellah bought something. She usually had more money than Janie or me. Cousin Fancy was no pushover, she didn’t treat the rest of us to free chips or pop or candy bars, but she always let me take a stubby wooden pencil, a prize no one else was interested in. But I had dreams for that pencil.

We walked back to the cottage. Now, warmed up enough to swim. We ran down the dock as usual, yelling “Geronimo, look out below!” and jumped. Then made our way through the rolling white caps to the sandbar to try body-surfing in the waves.

The afternoon was spent on the south side of the cottage, lying on towels, playing cards in the sun; the big building, which once lodged hotel guests, provided a wind shield for us. But when we got hot again, another run around the cottage to the lake was easily accomplished.

That evening at dinner time, Hellah’s mother started asking if anyone had seen Jessie.

Usually, the big black dog was just one of the gang, lying around, her fur getting hotter and hotter as the afternoon passed, taking a swim in the lake if she felt like it or lapping a drink of water from the edge of the shore. But no one could remember seeing her.

Hellah’s mother was getting worried.

Tasked with a mission, we kids wandered around the property, calling and calling, our voices flying away in the wind. Hellah and Janie whistled; they could both make piercing loud whistles with various fingers stuck in their mouths. We wandered along the shore, calling Jessie’s name, but she didn’t come bounding like she usually did. She was nowhere.

Night fell. No Jessie. We went to bed.

In the morning, the wind was gone and Jessie was lying in the sun on Aunt Donna’s porch.

“Where was she?” I asked, joining my aunt for our usual morning visit.

“No idea,” Donna answered. “She was waiting on the porch this morning.”

Jessie didn’t say a word about where she’d spent the night, and just thumped her tail on the wooden porch boards when I asked and patted her velvety ears.

Around noon, the mystery of Jessie’s disappearance was solved when my dad and uncle got back from golfing; it seems that Cousin Fancy had been surprised by a bolting Jessie when she’d pushed open the door the washrooms behind the clubhouse that morning. Jessie knew the way home and lost no time, crossing the busy roads by herself. 

Many a time Jessie had accompanied us into the washroom where she could get herself a drink of water out of the toilet. She must have been really thirsty yesterday, and while we were in the clubhouse shopping for candy, she pushed open the door and let herself inside. 

Sometimes doors are easy to push through, but much harder to pull open, especially when you’re a dog.

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Here’s a Little Ditty for YouDid you have a dog like Jessie in your life?

I’d love to know if you shared your childhood with a family dog. Please let me know in the comments on Substack, or hit reply to this email.

Big Announcement Next Sunday

Be sure to read my story next Sunday. Some big news is coming! If you received this in your email inbox, you are already a subscriber. No need to do anything else. I hope you have a great week.

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Job Skills

My friend Liza lived on the next street. We were never classmates until Grade 9, when we landed in the same French class. We were required to choose partners and “act out” a dialogue in front of the class. Liza was my partner. Hilariously, she wrote her lines on the palm of her hand, and spent the entire dialogue pretending to scratch her forehead while squinting at the smudgy words. “Jacques Beaudet à l'après…” she read haltingly. It would have been easier to just memorize the lines, like I did. But even the teacher couldn’t suppress her laughter. 

At 13, 14, 15 years old, Liza and I did a lot of stuff together. We bought nickel bags of pot, prowled around our neighbourhood, and spent endless hours laughing, drinking tea, and listening to Carole King and Cat Stevens.

I don’t know whose idea it was, but at some point we landed jobs at the Toronto Sun. Around five o’clock in the afternoon, for about a week or two, we traveled downtown together on the streetcar to the red brick Sun building on King Street.

Our jobs took place in a room full of crappy tables, telephones, and three-inch thick City of Toronto phone books. Our supervisor, a guy with a scrawny black moustache and a white short-sleeve shirt, explained the job. “Tear a page outta the phone book, and start at the top. Call each number. Use the person's name, and ask if they want delivery of the Sunday Sun.”

The price of the subscription was dirt cheap, but surprisingly to me, a lot of people took up the offer and the job was pretty easy.

Liza had a great voice, low and raspy, but she enunciated clearly and was articulate, overcoming objections with ease and roaring with laughter. Her friendly enthusiasm won her more subscriptions than anyone else in the room.

At break time, she and I met up by the vending machine in the hall. She wasn't hungry, but I was smitten with the selection of items behind the tiny glass doors. Two dimes got me a powdered jelly doughnut in a sealed cellophane pouch.

Down the hall was a smelly break room where Toronto Sun employees must have added cream and sugar to their wretched coffee. In the break room was the first microwave oven I’d ever encountered.

“Put it in!” Liza encouraged me, seeing me with my jelly doughnut. 

“In the plastic?”

“Yea.”

With reluctance I placed my treasure inside the oven and clicked shut the door like a prison. I pressed a few buttons, clueless as to what I was doing. Probably a minute oughta do it. What was I doing anyway, heating a doughnut? Why? Well, probably because coming from a vending machine at the end of the day it was not very fresh. Probably chilled. Who knows? I can’t remember. But the wilted puddle of doughnut, quivering in its cellophane wrapper at the end of an interminable sixty seconds was not happy. I carried the scorching thing over to the table where we were allowed to eat. No food was allowed in the phone book room. 

It was molten lava . Someone pointed out that only a few seconds was needed to heat a doughnut. What was I? Some kind of dinosaur?

Liza laughed her deep uproarious laughter. She was more interested in making friends with the other losers we worked along side of. But I learned my lesson. No more microwaving jelly doughnuts, unless, unless, I could time it just right.

How long did the job last? A week? Maybe two? Long enough to collect our first pathetic pay cheques.

I nuked a jelly doughnut in its wrapper. It seemed like a very important skill to master.

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I hope you enjoyed this passage from my in-progress book, Big Love

Let me know if it raised any thoughts or memories for you, I’d love to hear about them. Hit reply, or comment in Substack.

If you received this in your email inbox, you are already a subscriber. No need to do anything else. But if you’d like to support my writing with a paid subscription, I will send you an autographed copy of one of my books. I’ve got a new novel coming out in January called Odd Mom Out.

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Trouble at the Froggy Pond

On a windy spring day, when the lake was too rough and cold to swim in, we decided to go to the Froggy Pond.

I say we, because I was one of a we: my sister Janie, just older; and my cousins, both younger and older. We never did anything alone at the cottage — we ran in a pack. Grandpa called us ‘the sprats’ or ‘the doobies’, depending on our age. I’d only recently become a sprat.

In the spring, the muddy edge of the Froggy Pond would be black with tadpoles. Our plan was to scoop them up into our hands, and pour them into jars. Once we caught enough, we would bring them back to the cottage in hopes of nurturing the wriggling black polliwogs into tiny green frogs. That is, if we didn't forget about them and find them days later floating bellies up, grey corpses in pails of stinky water.

To get to the Froggy Pond we crossed the lakeshore road and traipsed down a scruffy street, mysteriously named, Melody Lane. Then looking both ways, we ran across the two-lane road that separated the golf course from the old hotel property. The pond was to the east, and out past the third hole of the golf course. To reach it we trudged our way down to the end of an unpaved street with newish bungalows, their yards devoid of trees.

Beyond the gravel road was a footpath leading into the bush. As we approached, a little gaggle of kids with old mayonnaise jars, we heard firecrackers up ahead, and halted in our tracks to listen. 

After a few moments, when there were no more blasts, Janie urged us, “Come on.” And she proceeded onto the path and toward the bush. 

I was scared, but crept along, across the field like a caterpillar, following Janie and the others toward the Froggy Pond. 

At the edge of the bush, all seemed well, and I fell into my usual custom of collecting a few strands of elephant-leg plants, while Janie and an older cousin practiced blowing reed whistles with fronds of meadow grass. 

The bush was shady and cooler than the road and the open field. All around the Froggy Pond, saplings and shrubs grew wild and thick and as we drew nearer, I caught sight of the green pool, mirroring glances of sunshine like sparklers on its surface. 

Suddenly, a volley of wild west pistol shots exploded, more firecrackers. The cherry-bomb kind we weren’t allowed to have. Then boys’ voices, hooting and cackling. 

We froze. And turned back toward home. Even Janie dared not advance any deeper.

Spring turned into summer. 

We swam night and day in the lake. 

The summer turned into the school year and time churned past.

By the following spring, we sprats had grown legs, and began venturing further and further away from our cottage property. Not to the golf course or to the Froggy Pond to the south, but east, toward town. 

A gang of boys, perched on their banana seats of their bicycles, hung around outside the Blue Dolphin fish & chips store smoking cigarettes. They eyed us, and we eyed them, but no one talked, until someone did. 

They asked if we smoked and then shrugged with indifference when we didn’t.

Amid awkward comments and embarrassed rejoinders a realization of who these boys were began to occur to me. They had firecrackers in their pockets, and matches. There was boasting about blowing up frogs. These were the boys from last summer. These were the ones we were afraid of. We never told them we called it the Froggy Pond.

On the way home, Janie and I wrote our initials with sticks in the wet cement outside Horvath's Television and Antenna. We didn’t dream we’d get in trouble, but we did. Somehow, someone knew it was us.

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Sweet Marie

Behind Lakeview House Hotel, way up high on a pole, was a big bell. Before each meal, the dishwasher ran outside and rang the bell, signaling to hotel guests — near and far, out on the lake, on the golf course, in their rooms — that breakfast, lunch, or dinner was ready to be served.

Down at our cottage, across the road from the hotel, we could hear the bell toll through the summer air. 

Lakeview House, or ‘the hotel’ as we called it, had been in our family for five generations. A summer resort, it was started in the late 1800s by my great-great-grandfather. In the 1960s, when I was around seven years old, the ownership of the hotel moved from my grandfather to my uncle.

My memory tells me that it was about that time that my sisters, cousins, and I started attending Sunday night buffet dinners set up in the hotel’s lounge. At the end of a line of tablecloth-draped tables, Harry the chef, with his tall hat and sweaty, florid face, carved the roast. But I wasn’t interested in the meat he was slicing in thin, succulent slabs. On my plate, I wanted only a glob from the long metal pan full of creamy orange macaroni and cheese.

I’m sure we kids were a menace, running around the hotel like we owned the place. But it was rare we got scolded. Our parents and grandparents must’ve looked the other way because we were relatively safe, and at least they knew where we were. Twelve cousins, ages spanning fourteen years, whose sibling parents spent each summer across from Lakeview House in cottages next to Lake Simcoe. 

My youngest cousin, Piers, in a droopy diaper, toddled around barefoot on the red carpeting of the lounge. Janie and I followed behind him because we were entranced by him. He was such a novelty for us, like a walking doll, big sage green eyes, curly golden locks of hair, he was so adorable.

“Look Sandy,” Janie said, pointing at the carpet. “A Sweet Marie bar.” 

There it lay, unwrapped, a lumpy dark chocolate log. It must’ve come from the Coffee Shop, fallen out of its packaging as someone carelessly unwrapped it. And here it was, finders keepers. 

I bent to pick it up, forefinger and thumb ready to tweeze it. And just before I plucked it from the carpet, Janie shrieked, “Don't touch it!” She screamed with laughter. “It fell out of Piers’s diaper!”

Piers toddled off, oblivious. I felt the shame of my gullibility. And disappointment. No Sweet Marie for me tonight. 

We probably left it lying there. 

I don’t remember. 

But I do remember the story later became, when Janie retold it, “The time Sandy almost ate a piece of poo.”

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Miss Pittance

My family moved away from the suburbs and into the city in the spring of the year I was to turn 9. My sisters were upset, being older, and forced to abandon their social lives, but me, I didn't care. All the things I needed and loved had moved with me. The cat, my mom, and most of my toys.

As in the suburbs, I walked to school — all the kids did. It was a long walk; up our street, and across four other roads, to an ancient brown-brick three story school surrounded by oak trees. If I had to do that walk now, there and back, twice a day, I'd drive. But I was nine, and I didn’t have a driver’s license. 

In my first week, on the way back to school after lunch, I noticed kids streaming into a little store, like ants to a sugar cube. The store crouched among the houses, out of place. I’d never seen anything like it, this being my first encounter with an urban corner store. It was built into an old dwelling, and still had the original side porch, upstairs dormers, and windows. The front was adorned with a big round Coke sign, that’s how I knew it was a store.

Maybe a classmate brought me in for the first time, some kid who wasn't allergic to the new kid, I don't really remember. I just remember the tinkling of a little bell when I pushed through the door. 

To the right, were loaves of bread, shelves of dry goods, and coolers of milk. To the left was a butcher counter, in front of which were the kids, lined up like worker ants, waiting their turn. In the butcher counter, safely behind glass, were boxes upon rows of penny-candy, every kind imaginable, an Aladdin’s treasure trove of sweet sweet love.

The smoke shop in the suburbs had nothing on this.

The proprietor of the store was an elderly woman named Miss Pittance. Her white hair was pinned in a French roll and her skull housed a mind like an abacus. One by one, she patiently served the line-up of children that snaked right out the door. Each kid pointed through the glass, naming and quantifying the candies they could afford this time. 

My turn. “Three jujubes, three black balls, two pixie sticks, a double-bubble, one licorice stick, a chocolate caramel, and a set of wax lips.” 

“10¢,” she said, passing me my precious paper bag of candy.

I handed over my thin silver dime, hot from clutching it in my palm.

I was getting my fix, once, twice, sometimes three times a day if I had the cash. I stopped by on the way home for lunch, again on the way back after The Flintstones, and finally on the way home when school let out.

I never ventured into Miss Pittance’s in the morning on the walk to school. I had my standards. I hadn’t sunk to the level of candy in the morning. My mom wouldn’t even buy Lucky Charms. It was Corn Flakes and Rice Krispies for me, to which I added brown sugar.

Despite what my mom said about rotten teeth, candy was, obviously, a harmless delight. And if candy was so bad, why was it aimed with such precision at my eight-year-old sensibilities? What child could be expected to resist the kiddy colours and miniature features of penny candy: sugar sprinkle-balls on discs of chocolate, Mojos and bubble gum in tiny pink wrappers, striped barber pole butterscotch sticks, finger-length boxes of Smarties, green and foil wrapped silver-dollar peppermint patties, or inch-long Jersey Milk bars?

No, something was wrong with my parents. They didn’t understand my palate. And they’d started to guard their spare change like squirrels hoarding acorns for winter. I saw no reason for their stinginess. Clearly, they were the ones with the problem.

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I hope you enjoyed this passage from my in-progress book, Big Love

Let me know if it raised any thoughts or memories for you, I’d love to hear about them. Hit reply, or comment in Substack.

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To all my writer friends:

I urge you to join Substack to share your magnificence with the world. Use the button below to create your own Substack and connect your publication with Sandy Day

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