EDMONTON EXISTENTIAL

Uncle. UNCLE!

Tuesday morning, please be gone, I’m tired of you, hey, hey…

My sense this morning was that everyone living on our street has given up, become apathetic. The cause of so many drooped shoulders was not the news, economic, political, social or otherwise. No, it was the weather, the last damn thing anyone in any community has in common with their neighbours. The oppressive bone-toned sky rained down pins and needles, freezing rain and diamond-hard pellets of ice.

During the winter months most Edmontonians are diligent about keeping their walks, driveways, back lanes and public sidewalks clear, shoveling snow and spreading sand, grit or salt. I saw my first spring robin yesterday, Monday. A glimpsed red breast through a soapy car wash windshield blinding snowstorm, a bemused bird perched in a birch tree in the front yard. The flakes had snowballed on their journey down from the clouds, splatting to the ground in wet clumps. A bough of the overgrown lilac that usually overhangs and frames the garage door was bowed enough to block entry and exit.

I gave the bush a few whacks with my red plastic snow plow whose scraping edge has been chewed into some fatal-looking line you’d see on a medical chart. I reluctantly cleared a narrow path through the cardiac arrest snow for our newspaper carrier. The snow rolled up like a lead blanket. Shovel drop; nobody else on the street had even bothered to pick theirs up: sick and tired and fed up with this, this endless assault of winter.

Things had seemed so fine on Sunday. There was a flash of garter belt blue in the sky, the teasing band of a come hither spring. It seemed warmer outside the Crooked 9 than inside. I sat on the porch enjoying the mild temperature although I had to wear a fleece pullover and a scarf. The windows were open to create draughts of fresh air, change the stale atmosphere after months of low light and freezing cold. I’d left the front door ajar for the cat and because Van Morrison live at the Rainbow in 1973 was on the stereo in the living room: Turn it up! A little bit higher, so you know, it’s got soul. Turn it up!

Two men, both of them a little older than me, walked up the driveway. I didn’t recognize them. They mentioned the music spilling out into the street. Uh-oh, I put my cigarette and beer down. But on that same note, they’d arrived on a nobler mission than one of sniffy complaint: to gauge interest in a proposed block party in June or maybe July, blocking off the street and getting neighbours together for a shaker. I said, “Yeah, sounds great. Summer will be here before we know it.”

And, well, gee, on a lazy April Sunday summer seemed like a genuine possibility. A sure bet in fact because there was some semblance of spring in the city, something I could actually smell. But that was then.