The Icelandic Canadian - 01.09.2004, Qupperneq 34

32
THE ICELANDIC CANADIAN
Vol. 59 #1
The next night, only an hour after she
had washed, changed, and flown out the
door, Lisa returned from her driving prac-
tice with Wes. He came in for a moment,
scratching his fingers, but he didn't stay
long, as Lisa flew straight up to the wash-
room and wouldn't come out. My mother
went up after her, and after waiting for a
few minutes, Wes asked us to tell Lisa he'd
call her the following day and left.
It was nearing bed-time for me, so I
went upstairs to wait for the washroom in
order to brush my teeth. I could not hear
everything my mother and Lisa were say-
ing, and of course I wasn't eavesdropping,
but on a particularly loud wail I did hear
Lisa say that someone had rubbed fibre-
glass insulation all over her underwear. I
might have found out more, but I heard the
door unlock and I suddenly developed an
interest in a picture at the far end of the
hall. My mother left the bathroom, looking
not-at-all pleased, and closed the door
behind her.
It seemed as if our family were cursed
to live in interesting times.
The next noteworthy event occurred
shortly after Tammi had somehow forgot-
ten that snow melts inside the house, unless
of couse one keeps it inside a freezer; how-
ever, she had not put her snow-covered
boots in the freezer, she had left them on
my shoulder bag full of newspapers by the
back door. When the time came to deliver
them, I found her boots still sitting there—
shiny, wet, and entirely free of snow. I
must adnmit that I was none too pleased at
this; wet papers are less fun than a barrel of
Atkins&Pearce
Canada
HUGH HOLM
Plant Manager
P.O. Box 101 Bldg. 66, Portage road
Southport, Manitoba Canada ROH 1N0
(204) 428-5452 FAX: (204) 428-5451
monkeys to deliver, but frozen ones are
somewhat worse, particularly when they
begin to freeze to each other.
When I had finished distributing
Winnipeg's most-read block of ice and had
returned home for supper, I told Tammi
what she had done and asked her please not
to do that again for the rest of her life.
However, I had yanked her attention away
from The Hobbit (which she was not sup-
posed to be reading at the table), so when
she muttered a quick, "sorry," I was not
sure whom she had been addressing; me, or
Gandalf.
Later that evening, after I had gone
to visit my friend Scott who lived down the
road, Tammi received a phone call, the con-
sequences of which I heard about when I
returned later that night. Apparently Matt,
one of the other boys in our neighbour-
hood, had invited her over to work on a
book report which they both had to do for
school. Being as it was Tammi's first phone
call from a male, she had been so excited
that she had nearly hung up on him. Once
she had gone through the formality of
receiving permission from our parents, she
had thrown the necessary books and scrib-
blers into her Adidas bag and rushed out
the door.
However, after barely half an hour she
had returned, cheeks red and hair wet, hav-
ing recieved a ride from Matt's parents. As
I found out when I came home myself and
heard the story from my mother in clipped
sentences, when Tammi had been
approaching Matt's house, she had been
pelted by snowballs made with ice. When
she had fled to the house for help, Matt's
parents had let her in, but informed her
that Matt was at Cub Scouts that evening.
Nobody knew what to make of this.
I pondered our current situation,
which was beginning to make the national
tension between Ottawa and Quebec seem
like a picnic, as I walked down the road to
pick up my newspapers (I no longer
brought them home before delivering
them). It was getting dark later and later
every day now, but the sunlight was never-
theless still fading as I began to deliver my
papers. I skimmed over the front page
headlines as my feet carefully found their