Our Introduction to Canadian Hopitality

*** continued from previous post ***

I pull the Vision up to the front of the office, and we de-saddle. It takes us a couple of minutes to get the helmets off, and pry the sweat-laden jackets off our backs. I cast a cautious glance around the place. I don't know what I'm looking for, but the Border Guard's line of questioning keeps running through my head - possibly there are roving bands of agitated Canadians about - mayhap a family of vicious baboons skulking about the trees, or, more than likely considering how our day has gone so far, an ovulating T-Rex with a failed relationship and a knife.

Throwing caution to the wind I open the door and step inside the small office.

Oh goody. This should be fun.


Firstly, there is a man. The thing that catches my eye is his lack of upper garments. The gentleman is in his early 70's, balding, but with tufts of unruly hair on either side of his head that looked as if it were trying to escape. Or coalesce into wings for an escape. Very gray. Not the tufts, they are pure black, which is odd because it is his chest-hair that is gray. I don't let my eyes drift if-you-know-what-I-mean.

Please God, let him be wearing pants.

The front "desk" itself, and I use the term loosely, looks like it possibly doubled as a Formica lunch counter at some point in the not too distant past. The heat is heavy in this place. Somewhere buried deep in the rooms behind him I hear the dying gasps of an air-conditioner. Oddly, the whole office smells of bologna. Bologna, beer, and failed, failed dreams.

I try not to judge. It is very, very hot. I shudder to think of what your mother and I look like. I don't know about myself, but your mom is a sweaty, sweaty, sweaty little lady. She wears a bright yellow bandanna around her neck, and her shirt looks damp. (It is.) Her head looks like it may have been improperly cured during the formative process. That may be because of her hair, but I'm not ruling out that her skull may have become squishy in the furnace of her helmet. Her 'doo' is sort of clumped all over to one side, giving her the appearance that she had just stepped off the fore-deck of a ridiculously fast boat. Then applied a liberal coating of shellack.

I smile, and she smiles back but it looks odd, out of place, and forced.

"Hot enough for you?" He asks, and breaks into the kind of grin that causes people to get hit in the head with bricks.


*** the journey continues tomorrow ***