Last Friday I went to the Drift Bar on Bloor West to meet a friend. I was a little bit early so I sat there at my table with a drink and my notebook, looking around the place in the most unobtrusive way I could fashion.
To my left a young and beautiful couple sat across from one another holding hands upon the table. Sometimes, one of them, as if making a suggestion, would place their free hand in there, too, slowly running a thumb or a forefinger over wrist or ring. They spoke in near whispers and rarely looked at one another, choosing instead to stare down at their union of hands, for therein was contained the idea that had brought them to this point.
Sitting at the table by the window were three people. There was a woman in a bowling shirt with the name Sam embroidered on it. She had long, straight blonde hair that looked like it was washed out of a sense of duty rather than love and had the appearance of somebody who really liked fantasy literature, the one who always related to the character who wielded the double axe.
She drank beer, like a warrior. Beside her was the femme girl who wore a pretty white dress. She drank a glass of rose and listening rather than speaking, ran her hand up and down her shin all night as if checking for stubble. The third member of the group was a hipster, a guy with a well attended mess of facial hair and some sort of John Deere-like baseball cap that was meant to suggest a practical indifference to fashion but conveyed the exact opposite. He seemed bored, like he was somebody’s brother just waiting to do something cooler a little later in the night.
I wondered about them, I guess, and must have been staring over while making notes. The Alpha of the little tribe, the woman in the bowling shirt, gave me a hard look, “What are you, some sort of detective, just sitting there staring at us? Get a life!”
“ I’m just waiting for a friend, a priest, in fact, and my eyes must have just fallen on you folks. Sorry about that.”
“Yeah, a priest,” she responded, “ a guy like you, I bet you’ve got a lot to confess, a lot to talk about, eh?”
I was not sure where to go with this, and so, for reasons that are not entirely clear to me I said, “ You are a beautiful bird, a rare and unexpected treat.”
She gave me the finger.
I nodded and tipped my hat— the couple on my other side still holding hands, still lost to the possibilities of their knotted flesh.