Tunesday : Fortuneteller

Fortuneteller

(Blackmore/Turner/Glover/Lord) Performed by Bobby Curtola

Fortune teller, can you see
What my future's going to be
Can you see it all
In your crystal ball
Have you got a dream for me

Fortune teller, is she free
Has she waited just for me
You can see it all
In your crystal ball
Tell me that it's meant to be

Tell me, tell me, tell me
Will we meet on a busy corner
Will she know that I'm the one
Will I be like little Jack Horner
Get myself a sugar plum

Fortune teller, will she stay
Close beside me all the way
You have seen it
All in your crystal ball
She's the only love for me

Fortune teller, is she free
Has she waited just for me
You can see it all
In your crystal ball
Tell me that it's meant to be

Tell me, tell me, tell me
Will we meet on a busy corner
Will she know that I'm the one
Will I be like little Jack Horner
Get myself a sugar plum

Fortune teller, will she stay
Close beside me all the way
You have seen it all
In your crystal ball
Gotta find a dream, you see

Whoa, oh, oh
She's the only love for me
She's the only love for me

Last week I skipped quickly through my two years of college in Edmonton, but as I only wrote about what was happening at school, I realised I should also write about everything else that was going on back then. I know I wrote before about the friends that Dave and I would hang out with - Curtis lived in our basement and was always around to play cards or video games, Steve and Libby lived nearby and would drop by for a pot of tea and a few hands of euchre, I didn't see as much of Delight anymore, but we still got together sometimes - but I don't think I ever wrote about Marg and Mike, even though we hung out with them the most. At the time, Dave and I were in our mid-twenties, and during this period, Mike turned forty (we had a great evening celebrating at the race track); and even though I didn't know exactly how old Marg was, she was even older than Mike. Other friends would ask us why we hung out with "these old people", and I really can't answer that except to say that it became a comfortable routine that we slipped into. As for this week's song choice: Marg said more than once that she was a huge Bobby Curtola fan - had seen him perform in many venues throughout the country - and she couldn't believe that I had never heard of "the original Canadian heart throb". Fortuneteller was apparently Curtola's biggest hit, and as I could use it to tie in cards (even if those aren't playing cards), that was a good enough connection for me this week. Onward.

Dave met Marg when he hired her as the office manager for Theatre Network. As Marg and her husband Mike were also from Ontario, they found plenty to talk about, and when Marg revealed that she was a huge Elvis fan - she worked for a senior's tour company back in Hamilton, and when Elvis died, she was able to organise a fast bus trip down to Memphis to join in the mourning at the gates of Graceland - Dave decided she was the bee's knees. Mike, as it turned out, was this big happy man and a Three Stooges fanatic: while he and Dave could bond over the idea of nostalgia, if not the specifics - the Three Stooges are not exactly Planet of the Apes - when Mike learned that our big dog's name was Moe (short for Satchmo, but that was beside the point), he figured we were okay, too.

We'd go over to their house two or three times a week, and Marg would always have baked up some goodies, and we'd sit and snack and play cards. Marg spent all of her free time knitting because she had some kind of arrangement with her mother back in Hamilton: Marg would knit up matching children's sweater or onesie/toque sets, her mother would sell them at a local flea market, and with the profits, she would buy cheap cigarettes from the Reserve, which she would then send back to Edmonton, along with all the yarn that Marg needed to make her creations. Marg and Mike smoked so much that playing cards at their house always occurred in a blue fog and I can only imagine that all the knit goods were coated with nicotine as well, not that we could smell it. (Related: For Christmas one year, Mike got Marg one of those automatic knitting machines, and while it could easily have cranked out ten times the simple sweater/hat sets as Marg could do by hand, she was underwhelmed by the gift, and as far as I know, never used it - it was never about the product to Marg, but the process.)

We always went to their house because Marg and Mike had an old Shih tzu, named Pumpkin, and she was so spoiled that they didn't like to leave her alone more than they had to. That dog was so old and slow and would only eat if her food was dumped on the living room carpet, so we understood why they didn't like to go out at night.

Eventually, Marg's son Stephen also moved to Edmonton, and we had a front row seat to the tumultuous relationship that he enjoyed with his girlfriend, Shauna. I don't remember all the drama - only that it was always dramatic - but the highlights include: When they decided to get married, Shauna insisted on a Mickey Mouse theme (they invited Mickey Mouse himself and framed the letter of regrets that he sent back), and while the black and white colour theme actually did look classy, something was off everywhere you looked: there were Mickey Mouse ears where you thought it was a silvery paisley on the groomsmen's vests; there were little Mickey silhouettes on the cake instead of rosebuds; Marg hated all of this childishness and her instincts were probably right - Shauna was likely playing a game all along. Shauna quickly became pregnant, and when their son was born and they named him Jordan Michael, Shauna was quick to point out that the baby was named after Stephen's favourite athlete, Michael Jordan, and in no way was Mike to think he was named after him. And within a few months, Shauna took off with the baby and moved in with some older man no one had heard of before; insisting that Marg and Mike and Stephen would never see the boy again.

Eventually, Marg left Theatre Network to become an office manager for a development company. And when the politics at the theatre became too much for Dave, he followed Marg to this new company, becoming a Property Manager. This was Dave's first real taste of the business world, and although he still had my full support if he wanted to build a life in the arts, this was definitely a turning point: Dave could see management as his future. Unfortunately, when I was in my last semester of school and something like five months pregnant, the owner of this company brought Dave into his office, and with tears in his eyes, explained that business was lagging and he was going to have to lay Dave off. Dave had a mortgage, bills, and a pregnant wife - and would soon have no job.

Happily, I guess, my uncle Mike in Calgary - who had built a successful carpet cleaning company - hooked Dave up with a former colleague of his; another Mike who had a carpet cleaning company in an Edmonton suburb; someone who was apparently looking for a partner with a view for expansion. This was the summer of 1995 and the rains were torrential and Dave worked constantly to pump out flooded basements and attempt to restore ruined homes. I was left alone a lot, and as it turned out, this Mike was a bit of a deadbeat - a cokehead with a cokehead girlfriend and an angry, pregnant wife - and Dave didn't always get paid; but he kept going back to work, twelve or fourteen hours a day, assuming that he would get a nice chunk of money when the insurance claims started paying out. 

We still saw Marg and Mike whenever we could - even if I didn't much like being there in the fog of cigarette smoke while pregnant - and with Stephen and Shauna around, we'd play evening-long games of canasta. At some point that summer, Marg and Mike moved into a new house - a big, bright new construction - and Dave helped them move. And in August, Kennedy was born. I'll save that story for later, but here's the last on Marg and Mike:

Dave never was getting fully paid, and with Kennedy's welfare now front of mind, we felt the pull to move back to be around our families in Ontario. My father said that he could set Dave up with some job interviews, and with what felt like few opportunities or reasons to live out West anymore, we put our house up for sale and looked to a future in the East. The house sold quickly enough and we rented a container to make our move - a truck dropped off a huge shipping container, and we had a few days to fill it before the truck would come back to pick it up and bring it in no particular hurry out to Dave's parents' house, where they said we could use their basement to store everything indefinitely. 

We had a newborn to take care of, but I helped Dave to carry out the things that he couldn't move alone, and when Mike showed up on the last day, we thought we were saved. Wrong. Turns out that Pumpkin so hated being left alone in the new house that Mike was hoping I'd watch her for the afternoon while he was at work - me, with no furniture anymore, Kennedy crying in her carseat on the floor beside me, Dave dripping with sweat as he moved hundreds of boxes down the stairs and across the yard, and Mike wasn't there to help. He needed a favour, and I waved my hand with exhaustion and told him to bring in the dog. I knew that Marg and Mike were a bit annoyed, a bit hurt, that we were leaving, but this made it feel like we had never been friends. What did I ever have in common with a Bobby Curtola fan who was at least as old as my mother anyway?

That last day with Mike showing up with Pumpkin was awful - as if we weren't emotional enough to be leaving the house and the city and the life that we loved - but I don't remember Marg and Mike now with bitterness. We had lots of laughs and countless cosy evenings of cards and companionship. We exchanged Christmas cards for a few years - we even went to see them once when they came back to Hamilton for something - but like many such old friendships, it outlived its natural life and fizzled out. The passing years softening the edges, I have nothing but fond memories now.