Some bikes were made for giving doubles. Others are easily converted. Still others are straight up built for two.

Sometimes children cover their eyes and imagine you can't see them, looking stunned between their fingers when they see you are still looking at them.  Peekaboo!  Or they wave a wand, and like a good wizard believe they have gotten rid of you, only to find that their protective device hasn't done the trick.  In psychiatry, they call that "the zaps"!  (Actually, these are electrical, and can accompany withdrawal from meds.)  Or they hold back their tears until it is raining, so people won't think they are crying.  Sakamoto singing Sukiyaki, because the Japanese is apparently unpronounceable! These are perfectly understandable ruses, whether because the kid is shy or private or otherwise unwilling to invite you into their secret world.  The fact that their magic is ineffective is hardly the point--that much is always predictable.  What is most touching is the childish conceit that they have the power to change the channel or refresh the screen ...

When you think of Orwell's Animal Farm , you get stuck on the idea of some being more equal than others.  But world peace, galactic harmony, the celebration of diversity and the active practice of inclusion are all achieved in science fiction by casting minorities in the role of animals and aliens.  Star Trek comes to mind in this regard, where even hippies were disposed of, Federation style, as sensitive dissenting aliens, not forgetting Spock with his pointy ears!  And then there were Wookiees, still man's best friend. Viewing animals as humans--anthropomorphizing--or treating different races as aliens, all of this is shape shifting.  This shape is my shade, there where I used to stand--that's Steely Dan.

Brother can you spare a dime?  Harry, what's a mild cigar?  Harry worked in the Scotmid Co-op in Toll Cross, Edinburgh.  He was a modest Scot in his white butcher's coat, and he was always willing to oblige with an answer to the sort of colonial from Morningside--escapees from the Raj--or Canada who had to be told what the little liverwurst sleeve of dough in a packet of minced beef was for.  "A-em, just a dumpling, I think." Things were no less tricky at the cash, where Harry was often called in for his opinion on wines and spirits--never beer, mind--and tobacco.  Was a panatella a mild cigar?  How much do you cut off the end of a stogie, and what do you expect on the first puff? Ever informative on the magic of a box of caustic soda crystals to clear a blocked drain--or baking soda and vinegar in a pinch. Less helpful was Harry--so he was--with matters of mice--"A-em, you'll have to call paest control for that."  So I did.

Starting out in Ottawa--not my first time away from home, but the first time truly living far away from where I was born with no chance of going home without considerable expense in terms of my career and anyway I couldn't support such a plan with my pocket book--I wrote home to my undergraduate honours thesis supervisor that I was homesick in the worst way.  He replied by telling me to read Thomas Wolfe, not the author of Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers , but a book with the inconsolate title You Can't Go Home Again .  This was the beginning of book ending things I couldn't understand with cranial looking stops made of petrified wood. I think I got the basic concept--and tried to think how I brought home with me in my heart when I moved and could return to its real comforts anytime, but somehow the dressed stone of Canada's neo-gothic capital were nothing like the Rockies, and culture invaded, the way nature had for Auden in Oxford. When Barry Coo...

Coming back from Summer holidays in 1974 a new term was loose on the street.  No more were girls frigid or as nervous as cats or dark horses or up tight.  No, over night they were now stuck up and losing some perennial battle of the bulge and doing special exercises, the bigger the better to fill the sweater, as the schoolyard taunt went.  And the girls said of each other they walked around like a s-h-one-t don't stink.  It is difficult to understand why they were hating on each other so much.  But like good little trolls and girls, we followed along, hair ratted up, belly buttons showing--whether innie our outie be.  Monkey see monkey do. Sweaters were in, too, even thought it was just past Labour Day.  Sweaters were cool unless they were made from a pattern and therefore looked too ethnic.  Style from the Fifties was unforgivable in the age of white platform boots. Somehow life settled down that Fall, and we all got through.  Perhaps...