Early morning paint job, and smoking Canadians
February 09, 2004 ~ 12:15 a.m.
I know this is the freeholder�s (property owner�s) duty, but I painted the outside foyer of our house early yesterday morning. We had some white paint left over from having painted the walls in our living room a year ago, so I decided to paint the woodwork on the outside foyer. It had gotten rather grungy-looking and I couldn�t stand it anymore, so I took the extra paint, borrowed our upstairs neighbor�s ladder and set to work. It was 2:45 in the morning, and it was cold and windy. No bother to me, I just wanted to get the work done.
The reason I was painting at 2:45 in the morning? Well, we live on a busy main street, so I decided to do it at a relatively quiet time of the day. Besides, it was the weekend, when I can pull all-nighters with impunity. However, as I was halfway through the job, someone who had obviously been wandering the streets in a drunk-as-a-skunk stupor since being chucked out of the pub at nearly midnight, either really loving the cold, gusty weather or trying to remember his way home, approached me. I froze.
Shit, I thought. Was this somebody from the council warning me that it�s illegal to paint in the early morning hours? I�m still relatively new to the country, so it was a question worth considering. Then I saw, in his eyes, that he was seriously inebriated. The door to the inside of the house was open, but I was armed with a paintbrush, a can of paint and a heavy metal ladder, so I relaxed a bit. He stopped at the step and asked, �Do you have a cigarette, mate? I�m dying for a fag.� (Note to my American readers: �fag� almost always means cigarette here in England, with no alternative sexual reference attached to the word at all. Curiously though, just as in America, �faggot� does. Strange �)
I looked at him sympathetically, shrugged, and said soft-spokenly, �Sorry, mate, I don�t smoke.� (Well, not cigarettes anyway �) I flashed him a good-natured smile.
�Ah, well � er, no problem, thanks �� he muttered. But as he walked away, he added, �I thought all you Canadians smoked�mumble, mumble, mumble ��
My first thought was: I am not Canadian, damn it all.
My second thought was: Wait a minute here. If I�ve been led to think correctly, Canadians are just as hostile to smoking as Americans are. What on God�s formerly green earth led this dude to believe most Canadians smoke? Here in Britain, most people smoke like goddamned chimneys�despite large SMOKING KILLS warnings on cigarette packages�but not in North America. It isn�t just my fellow Yanks who act punitively against smoking.
I finished my painting job, shut the door, went upstairs to the apartment, had a cup of tea and warmed up again. I did all this in the space of fifteen minutes before some other drunk wandered up to me and mistook me for something I�m not (a Canadian or a smoker, take your pick.
� M.E.M.
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Copyright � 2001-2007 by M.E. Manning. All material is written by me, unless explicitly stated otherwise by use of footnotes or bylines. Do not copy or redistribute without my permission.
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