Funny Talk 1

Saturday, September 8, 2018

I heard two funny stories this week, one at a liquor store, the other at the Share Shed, a building beside the dump where people put things too good for the dump.

The liquor store had an armed robbery this week, CBC Radio news said.  I was in there a couple days later and asked the clerk if he was on duty during the robbery.

"Yeah, I was here.  The guy didn't get anything.  He came in, showed me this little knife,and said, 'Give me all your shit!''

"I said, 'No.'"

"He said, 'What?'"

"'No,' I said again.  'Get out.'  And he left."

The Share shed was busy when I was there looking for small bowls for our building's Social Room, actually called that, its door sign says.  I therefore locked my bike to a bed frame leaning on an outside wall of the Share Shed, lest I unintentionally donate it to someone who mistook it for a giveaway item.

I found some bowls and started talking to a guy there.  He said he had looked at my bike but that people wouldn't take such a bike unlocked.

Yeah, right, I thought.

I then told him about the bike lying in a field that my Ottawa landlord, a transport truck driver, repeatedly drove past, just after I had rented a room in his house in 1987.  One day he put the bike on board his truck and gave it to me.  I had no bike, having moved 4 000 kilometres by shared car from Western Canada that summer for graduate school.

"That was my bike," the man at the Share Shed joked.

Rising to his humor, I offered to contact that landlord, who is probably dead, to ask about the bike, which I left with him when I moved out of that Ottawa house in the spring of 1988.

So ends Funny Talk 1.  The next time I hear something funny enough to recount, watch this blog for Funny Talk 2.