insert clever quip about ubiquity here
my brother paul and i shared an apartment for a while in the arlington apartments on 100ave and 106 street in edmonton, alberta. it was a great place with enormous character, cheap rent and very little pestilence.
along with the character of the murphy-bed-closet, enormous windows and black and white tile on the kitchen floor there were some interesting people who lived in the building. one of these people was thor. he was scandinavian and looked exactly like a storybook norseman. he was tall, blond, and was the only person i’ve ever known who could make one of those metal helmets with the two horns sticking out the top really work.
he lived in a cheap apartment because he had an interesting bachelor suite in the basement where he had fashioned a fascinating loft. i went down to see his place once and he had reclaimed scrap metal and either welded or weaved it into a sort of second floor, sort of bunk bed type landing in his apartment. there were terribly precarious edges where sharp metal poked out here and there, but every night he would climb up onto this tenuous structure and sleep. it was large enough to hold several people, and i tried it out to see how sturdy it was. the space was remarkably comfortable and peaceful. i can’t imagine what the landlord said to him the first time he saw it.
i found out through some of our conversations that he had lived in many places in the world: some exotic and some ordinary and he was currently working as an architect in a well known and established architectural firm in town. he said he knew how to do that sort of stuff.
one day paul and i woke up, bumbled around our arlington apartment a while, and one of us eventually opened the front door. outside was a pair of pants – neatly folded. it took us a while to sort out what to do. eventually (i was a student at the time) i tried them on to see if they would fit. the smart thing to do would be to wash them first, but it wasn’t that sort of an apartment, or time in my life.
they didn’t fit.
we gave it a couple of days to see if in our daily social rounds we could sort out who had dropped off pants on our doorstep.
by logical deduction of who would could gain access to our building, but wouldn’t knock when dropping off pants, we decided it must be thor who left us these trousers.
i went down to talk to him, and he said that they were a nice pair of pants, and they didn’t fit him. he thought we might get some use out of them, so he dropped them off, but it was late, and he didn’t want to wake us over pants.
thor also mentioned he hung out at the petroleum club on occasion. i have no doubt that he was quite wealthy, or could have been so if he had any interest.
he was a kind, genuine person, and one of the people i am sad i didn’t keep in touch with.
Categories: personal / frivolity |
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