l’auberge espagnole

I went to see l’auberge espagnole tonight. It’s a Spanish-French co-production, set in Paris and Barcelona, that concerns the travails of a young man off from France to Spain to study economics for a year. He ends of living in a shared apartment with a multinational bunch of roommates, and, as you might expect, chaos ensues.

One of the things I miss most about my early- to mid-twenties — besides the carefree headiness, casual drug use, chaotic romance, and desperate confusion of it all — is having roommates.

The roommate-roommate relationship is a unique one. You are not quite friends, not quite family, but much more than strangers. Because you are sharing a confined space, with lots of household politics, there’s a necessary structure and formality. But despite this, even though (and perhaps because) you aren’t friends, per se, a quirky intimacy can develop, enhanced by sharing every grunt, sob, laugh and gasp coming through the inevitably paper-thin walls.

My first shared house was 640 Reid Street in Peterborough. I was fresh from an aborted year at university, and ready to take on the world (well, not really). The house was owned by John, a polymath who’d somehow concocted a scheme to purchase a house at an early age. In this sense, the house wasn’t actually shared — we were boarders in John’s rooms — but because we were all mostly the same age, or at least of the same generation, the effect was less draconian than this might otherwise mean. High in the attic of 640 Reid Street were Colin and Mary, two students who, from my 19 year old southern Ontario boy perspective, seemed incredibly worldly, well-spoken and brilliant. I was very intimidated by them at first, but this wore off after a while. On the second floor was my room, along with Simon, an anarchist paralegal group home worker, and Mark, a geography student and surveyor. John had a room downstairs. As I wrote about last year in a piece about Yann Martel, we each took turns cooking dinner during the week. Every night we sat around the big table in the dining room, a table which, though not quite the Algonquin Round Table, was certainly more intriguing than the dining hall at Champlain College where I’d spent a year. We all got along fairly well at 640 Reid Street, but after a year various romantic and domestic caterwaulings meant that it was time for most of us to go our separate ways.

My next stop was 107 Hazlitt Street. Otherwise known as “that destroyed house” (see Stephen Good), Simon, my hall-mate from 640 Reid Street, and I moved there in May of 1987, along with two cats acquired during the move, Antigone and Wolfgang. Other than being destroyed, 107 Hazlitt was a great house, on the edge of a vast tract of park land. Being in “East City,” across the Otonabee River from the rest of Peterborough, gave the neighbourhood a sort of dashing Left Bank spirit (even though our neighbours were mostly 50 year olds who worked for General Electric). Simon, being an anarchist, a minimalist, and having been born in Smooth Rock Falls, was easy to get along with, and the summer was very pleasant. The end of our tenure came suddenly when the partially insane owner of the house returned from Springfield, MA, and insisted that we leave immediately. So we did.

After 107 Hazlitt, I spent a brief time living at 540 Aylmer Street with Sarah, the sister of a friend of mine who I’d only just met. She was much more of an adult than I was used to having as a roommate, and had things like soup pots and oven mits and frilly curtains to her name. We got along, but then again we never really saw each other as I was a sort of absentee roommate. Antigone and Wolfgang ran away, and when the mirrored ceiling above her bed collapsed one day and she needed to take over my room during the renovations, I moved on.

The next stop was 241 Dublin Street, in the fall of 1987. This apartment is the one that came closest to the aforementioned l’auberge espagnole in spirit. My roommates were Simon (for the third time), and two women, Brenda and Linda. I actually had to “interview” for the roommate position; I remember this event well for Brenda’s question: “I’m a lesbian, I sleep with women… is that going to be a problem?” In my 21 year old naivete, the best I could come up with for a response was “Well, I sleep with women too, so that’s great.”

241 Dublin Street was an apartment on the second floor of a commercial building. At the back on the first floor was the venerable Ed’s Music Workshop, a guitar shop founded by luthier Ed Dick, but by the time we got there run by Don Skuce, Ed’s apprentice. At the front of the first floor was Ground Zero, a silk screen printer run by a ragtag partnership the members of which were always arguing with each other (and because my bed was right above their office, I knew every detail of every argument). There was a staircase in the middle of the living room that led to the large, flat roof, and during the summer that was the perfect place to go up to get away from it all.

Because 241 Dublin had served an interconnected series of roommates going back many years, there were always “alumni” dropping by for dinner, or for the weekend, so things were never boring. Among these former residents of Dublin St. are several friends I know to this day: Barbara Jean (a former resident of my room, who I didn’t meet until years later; her high school boyfriend used to visit us, for reasons I can no longer recall), Constance (who I can call friend only through familiarity and connections; we’ve only actually met two or three times; she lives in Wolfville now), Richard (read and listen here), Tim (former resident of my room as well, and boyfriend of my good friend Yvonne, currently resident in Dartmouth, then living in Saskatoon, who visited enough to become friends with many in Peterborough; Tim met Yvonne because Yvonne’s sister Lori used to live at Dublin St.).

We had a good year together at Dublin St., but in May of 1988 all but Brenda moved on (she stayed for at least another year, with another cast of characters).

Despite the unusual circumstances of our flight from Hazlitt St. the previous year, I ended up back in that house in the summer of 1988, this time sharing the house with my friend Stephen. Unlike Simon, Stephen was neither an anarchist nor a minimalist, but he was (and is) creative, intelligent, and more socially adept than almost anyone I know. We had great parties that summer, and managed to undestroy the house back towards partial livability. I had a dog — a young lab/spaniel cross named Penny — who was prone to eating Stephen’s Birkenstocks and running away, sometimes for several days at a time. We ate a lot of chick peas, and listened to a lot of Sade. That fall, with winter coming on, we realized we needed another roommate, so Stephen, socially skilled as he was, simply went out and got one: one day he showed up with a woman named Mary Clare, and she moved in that afternoon.

Over the next several months, Mary Clare and I grew closer, and eventually started “going out.” Despite our attempts to not have this sea change throw the house politics out of whack — we were so naive — Stephen didn’t react well, and we reacted poorly back, and by Christmas, with the insane owner back barking at our heels, things disintegrated, and we were forced to go our separate ways, Mary Clare and I to a little house up the river and Stephen, well, I can’t remember where Stephen went (we patched things up that next summer, and have been friends ever since).

After three years of living with roommates, it was something of a shock, in January of 1989, to be living with just one other person, who was also the woman I was dating. We made a good stab at it, but in the end a combination of a long cold winter, a house with a septic tank that backed up every other day, and a relationship that wasn’t as strong as we thought, that experiment ended as quickly as it started, so quickly I can’t even remember the name of the street we lived on.

Next stop, in March of 1989, was a room in Jill’s apartment. Jill was going out with Colin (formerly of “Colin and Mary;” see above), and it was through Colin that I met her (ironic side note: Jill herself, many years before, had been a resident of the attic of 640 Reid Street). This was the first bona fide apartment I ever lived in — it had closets, a balcony, a buzzer, and everything! Jill was older and wiser than me, and I was a little taken aback. But she made terrific allowances for my mildly (some might say mostly) crazy dog, my weird hours, and my hither and thither girlfriend Mary Clare (our break up hadn’t quite taken the first try out), and though I was a political neophyte, she included me in her conversations about the West Bank and the Gaza Strip and the like.

Although I enjoyed my time in Jill’s place, after a couple of months it became apparent that dog plus small city apartment was not going to work, so I found a small apartment on my own, out in the country, and Penny and I moved out on our own for the first time. I was lonely.

I spent a year in my country apartment, and then in May of 1990, moved back into the city to assume tenancy of what was and is perhaps the greatest cheap apartment I’ve ever lived in, at 451 Water Street (my friend Stephen — see above — lives there to this day). The apartment was the former home of my good friends George and Leslie and their son Stefan, and so I had already spent many fine times there by the time I took it over from them. 451 Water is a second floor, two-bedroom apartment in a 1950s solid brick building on the cusp of downtown Peterborough. It’s got a huge living room and dining room, a wonderful sun room facing the street, a bathroom in two parts (bath in one, toilet in the other). And the rent, in 1990, was $340 a month. Because I was back in the city, I was slightly less lonely, as there was always someone or another dropping by. But I still missed having roommates.

In the late summer of 1990, I moved out of 451 Water St., and moved to El Paso, Texas for two months (long story), then from El Paso to Montreal (where I lived in two small, delightful apartments). By the spring of 1991, however, I was really lonely, living in Montreal with neither work nor prospects, so I bolted back to Peterborough for my last time living with roommates.

I moved back to Peterborough into a house on George Street North that I shared with Richard (see above, 241 Dublin St.) and Tim (see above, ibid.), Diane and their young daughter Casia. My “room,” such as it was, was entered by going through the closet door at the end of the second floor hallway and climbing a ladder to a small cubbyhole gnawed out of the attic. The summer of 1991 was a really great one on many fronts: Tim and Diane and Richard and I got along really well, and took on projects like repainting the living room with great gusto. Tim and I launched a brief career as singer/songwriters (Tim’s still at it). I had a great job — my “dream job” — working in the composing room of the Peterborough Examiner. And the “girl next door” was a 29 year woman named Catherine Miller.

By the spring of 1992, much had changed. Tim and Diane were on the way to splitting up. Catherine and I, conversely, were hooked up. And Richard was getting ready to move to Halifax to follow his own lady love. Catherine and I moved to a nice little apartment on Hunter Street. And so my life as a roommate came to an end.

If you took the highlight reel of my six years of on and off living in shared houses and apartments, you would end up with something pretty close to what played out in l’auberge espagnole. The movie captures the intensity, the tension, the intimacy. And the uniqueness. Perhaps better than anyone ever has on film.

By the time I got to 241 Dublin Street in the fall of 1987, I was head over heels into an incredibly complicated relationship. That summer my roommates spent many nights distracting me from this swirling chaos, playing canasta and gin rummy, listening to a 33-1/3 rpm recording of The Girl from Ipanema, and talking endlessly about everything. It was a priceless summer. I miss those days.

Winnie the Pooh

Ask anyone to name the icon of the Disney company, and they will invariably say Mickey Mouse. Indeed, go to the company’s About Disney website, and Mickey is sitting up top.

But I have discovered, with Oliver’s help, that Disney’s true weapon is Winnie the Pooh, bear of stealth.

Try this simple test: keep an eye open for representations of Pooh as you walk through your day. If your day is anything like mine, you might lose count after 25 or 30 sightings.

Here’s an example of where you can find Pooh in my life:

  • In Oliver’s bedroom there is one Pooh doll, one Pooh water bottle, a Pooh ball (with bell inside), a Pooh blanket, a pair of Pooh socks, and half a dozen Pooh books.
  • Painted on the window of the Basilica Rec Centre children’s daycare on Richmond St., half a block from our house.
  • On a flag flying over the daycare at the corner of Sydney and Hillsborough Streets, two blocks from our house.
  • In Wal-Mart you cannot walk 25 feet without seeing Pooh — videos, books, umbrellas, rubber boots, diapers, sip-cups. Same with Zellers.
  • In the video store — ad infinitum.
  • At the public library — many, many Pooh books.

And that’s just scratching the surface.

The secret of Pooh’s success is that parents like us, who would never in a million years welcome Mickey or Dumbo or Barney into our home, see Pooh as a loveable, friendly character, somehow existing above the commercial fold.

Mickey is out there in front, taking the heat, getting all the public attention, and the anti-capitalist scorn; Pooh is bringing up the rear, raking in the cash, and loving every minute.

Usual Airport Reminder to Aliant

Hello Aliant. I am using the computer in your Business Centre in the Charlottetown Airport. It is an old IBM Aptiva. It is slow. The purpose, I presume, of your sponsorship of this high speed Internet connection — which I laud — is to show we business travelers what a wonderful service you offer. Showcasing this service with an obselete computer is like letting people take a drive on the autobahn on an old Wheelhorse lawn tractor.

Here’s my suggestion, offered before but so far ignored: go out and by the fanciest, fastest, most hot and sexy computer money can buy. You’d be hard pressed to spend more than $5000 to reach this goal. Install it here, and retire the old Aptiva. We business travelers will now marvel at your excellentness.

You will get bonus points if you install a more ergonomic desk and chair. Super bonus points if the computer you install runs Linux or is a Mac.

Thanks for listening. Peter Rukavina, longtime customer.

In Praise of Coop Taxi

Catherine and I have been semi-regular customers of Coop Taxi here in Charlottetown for 8 years now. When we lived in Kingston, Catherine’s lifeline to the Big City was Coop; she still uses them to run out to Sobeys from time to time, now that downtown Charlottetown is devoid of grocery stores, and I take them out to Charlottetown Airport every couple of months.

In all this time — say, 250 trips — they have never failed us. They have never been too long coming, never missed a scheduled early morning pickup, never failed to answer their phone, never failed to offer helpful, courteous service.

If you need a cab in Charlottetown, you cannot go wrong with them. 628-8200. Employee owned cooperative.

Tangent: if you are ever in need of a conversation starter in a taxi cab in Charlottetown, just ask the driver about the situation in the taxi industry. No matter who they’re driving for, they will have a strong opinion. I’ve have innumerable conversations about Ed’s vs. Star vs. Yellow vs. Coop. Good Island fun.

The Moved and The Dead

My electronic address book, which I have been keeping, in one form or another, for almost a decade needed some serious cleaning out, and tonight was the night. When I started, there were 729 people on file.

Cleaning out an address book is always filled with pathos, for the people that get removed are people who have moved or people who have died. Unless they were enemies (which is unlikely, as who puts enemies in their address book?), this means that the deletion is sort of a “final farewell.”

It’s also an interesting bird’s eye view of my work life over the last decade.

The oldest addresses I deleted were for staff at PEINet, the Island’s erstwhile Internet Service Provider. So Berni Gardiner and John Cunningham, along with their @peinet.pe.ca email addresses, are gone.

I had lots of technical contact people from the first summer we ran the Vacancy Information Service — lots of entries like “the guy who runs the exchange in Wellington” and “friendly ISDN installer from St. Peters.” And the number for Sandra Perry, who used to be the woman who you had to call for anything related to data at Island Tel. They’re all gone now.

There were a collection of names associated with my work in the mid-1990s on the project that become Avonlea Village: addresses for historic villages all over North America, the name of the guy who used to store his boat in the Belmont School House (since purchased, moved from Belmont to Cavendish and renovated magnificently), and all sort of contacts at Parks Canada. There was also the number for the “Broom Squire” at Black Creek Pioneer Village in Toronto, perhaps the most interesting job title of the deleted bunch.

I had the modem dial-up number for “BATE — Line 9” on file, which is something only diehard veterans of the data wars will know the meaning or importance of.

A couple of numbers for staff at Marine Atlantic and Strait Crossing from when we had the IslandCam based on the ferry, and at the staging yard.

Some names I didn’t recognize at all: a “Roger Kitson” at a company called Cintek, a “John Lauener” in Toronto, a “Neil Mackinnon” identified only as “Government of Scotland,” a couple only identified as “Marc and Melissa,” and an entry for “Opus” with just an email address. There was my contact at “Worldwide Food Distributor” — I think that was a possible source for xanthan gum (don’t ask). Gone.

Lots of people are still here, but in different jobs. I still had Kevin Lewis on file at Enterprise PEI; he’s since moved on to Island Tel, and then UPEI. Brenda Gallant used to work for Tourism PEI, then went to Island Tel, and is now at the Confederation Centre of the Arts. David Mackenzie was at CADC, then the Capital Commission, now the Confederation Centre. David Malahoff when he worked on a CBC Newsworld programme called The Richler Scale (did that ever air?).

Elmer Stavert and Elmer Stafford were in there twice — I was never sure how to spell his name. I solved the problem by removing both entries.

Some old projects: our contact at the now-defunct Island Way Vacations, the number of a guy in the U.S. who wanted us to help him distribute music to adult contemporary radio stations on the Internet, Joe Sherman’s phone number at Arts Atlantic when we were going to put the magazine on the web. The phone and email for the guy who founded Delrina (the makers of WinFax) from an aborted attempt to prospect his new company. The President of the New England Innkeeper’s Association from when my friend Steve and I responded to their website RFP almost a decade ago.

Inexplicably, I had the phone number of the woman responsble for landscaping at the Confederation Centre of the Arts, the email address for Brock Meeks, former Chief Washington Correspondent for WIRED magazine, Robertson Davies’ daughter’s mailing address, the number of the man who runs the transmitter for Global Television in Halifax, and the address for the President of the Island Grain and Protein Council on file. They’re gone now.

Sandy Griswold died last year, and I had a tear in my eye when I removed his entry. I couldn’t bring myself to take my father’s mother, or Catherine’s mother’s mother out of the book yet — always hope for miracles, I guess.

The end result? I’ve pared myself down to 398 entries. The first entry is now my old friend from Peterborough, Jill Abson, and the last entry is the man known universally as “Dave Z” (pronounced ‘zee’) at Yankee.

Next update scheduled for 2013. Oliver will be just about to get his drivers license.

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