May Day

Suddenly this morning it's fine weather so I have an early breakfast and drive into town to get another X-ray on my busted toe. I was watching 'Usual Suspects' last night so I know how to walk all gimpy except my bust toe isnt the same as Kevin Spacey's crippled hand and twisted foot. My hobble is more on the heel and not putting the weight on the ball of the foot where the break is.

I'm celebrating the empty roads and telling myself I should get in early more often - like 8:45 is early but I'm a bit slow that way.

I get to town and there's parking everywhere and i remember my mother telling me that May 1 is a holiday. I park like where I can *never* park and go buy a Spectator from the brothers on Alessandros Ave which never closes.

I trick I have is to work out the precise cost and delve into my purse and leave the precise change. After 2 years they've got used to me being right so I just wave the money and put it down by the till. Once I got it wrong: I was buying a Herald Trib and a Corfiot and a pack of Karelia and I'd forgotten the cigs had gone up a cent. One of the brothers pointed it out and I really hated that and did 3 weeks penance letting them check my precise money until it felt right to go back to my old smooth ways.

It's best in the thick of tourism season when all the grockles are queueing and moaning and waving their foreign mags and getting back tempered and I just wave my money and put it down on the glass cigar counter and walk out. I like to think they look at me and try it the same and are hauled back. Those brothers are fast and they know every single price of every single paper of every language.

So I get my Speccie and I walk on and i happen to pass the x-ray man and his door is open and children are trooping.

I look inside and Theotoki is giving an art class. We shake hands and I tell him why I'm there and he pops me under the camera and moves away and I hear him telling some kid 'more green' then he's back and i go in and help the kids and draw Donald Duck which i do really well after a couple of hundred times for my own kids.

T comes out shaking his head and asking what I've been doing and i tell him just gardening and he shows me the x-ray and its all spaghetti junctions and I ask him what to do and he says he's not an orthopeado but he'd say just carry on another day what the hell i can't graunch my bones up much more and see Pandis first thing tomorrow and be ready for a cast of crutches or whatever it takes to keep me off gardening.

For some reason i feel better and liberated but the funny thing is i hate yardwork, really loathe it and would do anything never to deal with planty stuff again.

In Life you dont just have the things you hope you'll do and an achieve, you also have the depths to which you pray you never sink, the meaningless treadmill brain-dead nadir world that is everything you fear and despise and would hope to get hit by a truck before you've reached that level.

That is 'gardening' for me and I use that foul word guardedly.