The algae bloom on Lake Ontario just reached critical mass overnight and this morning the water out of my tap smelled like a scum-covered quagmire in the muskeg of Northern Ontario. The four gallons of fresh water I’ve been keeping in my fridge against the arrival of this day will supply me with decent morning coffee for a couple weeks but after that I’m doomed until the colder weather of October finally cools the lake. Guess I’ll have to get out my essence of peppermint for tomorrow’s soak in the tub.
Arrived home from work today to get a taste of what the beginning of the new school term will presage for those of us mature enough to have troubles remembering what that was like. The antipathy those of us who have owned our condominium apartments for decades feel toward absentee owners who rent their investment properties to community college students goes way beyond prejudice. If you think about it, the expectations of a retired couple in their late seventies and that of a student still not out of his teens, who has left home for the first time in his life don’t really jibe. When I got home today my neighbour was seated in our second basement garage with steam blowing out of her ears because some incompetent agent had managed to put both our elevators on service making it impossible for her to make it to her apartment 4 stories and eight flights of stairs on the third floor. This weekend, it would seem, is moving day. One can only rail about the real estate agent who complains that his investment properties here are under-valued and fails to realize that one of the contributing factors is the wear and tear, vandalism, and noise caused by the students to whom he rents as an absentee owner. One can only fantasize about the judge who sentenced a slum landlord to house arrest in one of his creaky tenements.
Thus I begin a month’s holidays and to mark the occasion Mother Nature is sending me the remnants of Hurricane Ernesto to drive monsoons of water sluicing down my balcony windows. Doesn’t sound like weather for camping somehow. I suppose it’s a sign that I should curl up with my books and work at completing Homer’s Iliad. I’ve just reached the point at which Achilles’ lover, Patroclus is killed, or ¾ of the way through the book. One of the details of the epic that has taken me by surprise is the heaving of stones at the enemy, by hand not catapult on the field of battle. I can’t say why that would seem more incongruous than lobbing a grenade at one’s opponents, it just does. It would seem that Homer’s listeners hung on the gory details of heads and limbs lopped off, torsos skewered by spears and bodies disemboweled by swords—the poem is crammed with such details. I do find it remarkable, nevertheless, that for most casualties death comes quickly; very few are described as dying slowly in excruciating pain as their life-blood drains slowly from their bodies over agonizing hours of torment. I suppose the reality of such realism does not lend itself to this romanticized view of warfare. The other surprise awaiting anyone familiar with the story of the Trojan Horse and how it led to the fall of Troy, is the fact that the Iliad ends before we arrive at that point in the story. In the end the hero of the Iliad is Achilles and even then, the fatal injury involving his famous heel is not part of the epic either.
One of the projects ahead of me in the next week is the editing and printing of the photograph of my fellow workers I was commissioned to produce as a gift to a departing supervisor. As you can see, I have some work ahead of me:
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