Jancsi and the Legend of the Air Beast

I meet Jancsi every Thursdays at ten in the admin office on the ground floor to borrow the cart to deliver food to Parkdale Foodbank clients in the building. He is a big guy (at least 300 lbs.) of an age difficult to guess (I'd say thirty something to fifty something) with masses of dark hair covering his face and head. He also has remarkably small feet. His English is grammatically excellent and he has a perplexingly rich vocabulary all spoiled by his atrocious Hungarian accent. We say ”Hi!” and load the boxes from the trunk of my car onto the cart and go to the elevator. I used to start at the top floor working my way down but when I was paired with Jancsi he insisted we deliver in ascending order, I am easy, so this is how we do it: unit 103 first and 909, on the ninth floor,  last. Then we take the empty cart to the elevator, punch the down button and wait. Inevitably we end up looking at the dirty sign: ”EXIT AIR BEAST”. Jancsi jokes (I cannot tell if is German, Hungarian, English or his combination of the three) so I nod and smile to get the few seconds I need to untangle the words from his messy pronunciation. He usually quotes Schiller's Fiesco's Conspiracy at Genoa: ”The Moor has done his work—the Moor may go" He says: disappear, exit like us, the Air Beasts. We take the cart back to the office and say ”So long, until next week, yeah?”. Yesterday Jancsi stared at the so familiar sign for a long time and then started scratching the lower left-hand corner of the cardboard with his fingernail. In time, the grimy paper peeled off to reveal the surprising full original text: ”EXIT STAIR B EAST --->” Janci grabbed his heart and cried out: ”Jaj, Istenem!” and we laughed all the way to the office

Murad et Grand-père

This young man approached me to ask where to dispose of his banana peel, I showed him the nearby rubbish bin and asked his name, he was Murad Piez, severely myopic refusing to wear glasses as he thought to see the world as God intended him to see it. His voice was unusually high and melodious reminding of the Barry Gibb falsetto. When I asked if he is the singer of "The Ziegenzwischenwirtshaft" he was astonished to be recognized and by my so correct pronunciation.

We had coffee and he told me his story going back to his grandfather Zbigniew Piez: in the south-central Polish village Kraśnica of his birth, rumors started that Zbigniew was a wizard who poisons the water in wells (and should be burnt at stake - is how Catholics were known to fix this). His friend, the dentist, told him that they actually just want to take his goats. The following week when Zbigniew took his fourteen goats to the fair, he couldn't find buyers even at very lowest of prices. That night he killed the goats, threw their carcasses into as many wells he could and walked to near city of Konin where he jumped a freight train to Gdansk. He signed up on a ship to work for his fare anywhere. He landed in Halifax, Canada where he found work loading beer barrels at a brewery. In time, married the brewer's daughter, bought a house and a few goats (never more than fourteen); he had a son he called Murad who also had a son who was also called Murad. Murad (père) studied economics and ran the brewery he inherited very successfully. Zbigniew, on his deathbed, gave Murad (fils), a piece of paper saying "this is the secret of my life". It contained only one word: Ziegenzwischenwirtschaft. So Murad just had fun, wrote songs and used that word to name the alt-rock band he founded. They played along the Eastern Seaboard and had a small but dedicated fan-base. When I told Murad what the word actually meant, he stopped smiling, turned and walked away without a word.

About six months later I saw Murad on Letterman talking about signing with a major label, his band's number on hit and about his book (#1 NYT list) based on the life of his grandfather.

Charlie Melfort

This is Klaus-Heinz Frischzeit (*2 April 1922, Trier, Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany – †1 July 2010, Melfort, Saskatchewan, Canada), I never met him, but I know his story from Burt Melfort, who also supplied the picture, but let me start at the beginning:

Klaus-Heinz turned eighteen in 1940 and fell desperately in love with Gertrud, wife of his much older brother Klaus-Werner, who had a son of fourteen named Hans. In an act of incalculable cruelty Klaus-Heinz killed his brother, who was sleeping in the backyard, by trusting in his ear a very sharp thin dark hardwood stick he found in the attic. There was no blood, no sign of external injury and the doctors concluded "natural causes". When Gertrud rejected Karl-Heinz' awkward advances and "Uncle Hans" became suspicious almost violent, even pretending to see his father's ghost, Karl-Heinz, in another bout of irrational anguish, went to the recruiting office and enrolled in the Wehrmacht. He went first to France and then to Northern Africa where he was captured by the Allies and sent to the POW Camp in Lethbridge, Alberta, Canada. Pretending to have farming skills and waiving his rights under the Geneva Convention, Karl-Heinz became a labourer in the rural community of Melfort, Saskatchewan. In 1946 when German POWs returned to (the now divided) Germany, the British government allowed him to stay as he married Ophelia, youngest daughter of Paul Danmark, his employer.  His name was unpronounceable to all around him, so he changed it officially and picked Melfort as a nod to the host community, first-name Charlie, what people called him anyway. The Melforts had five children who had children of their own: Burt was the eldest and Charlie's unabashedly favourite grand-son. One dark summer night, sitting on the porch looking out to nowhere, Charlie, by now in his eighties, told his story and showed Burt the sharp polished dark hardwood stick that he kept all these years. "Burt, meboy, this is where's y'all comes from!".

Edward Thomas

This is Phillip Edward Thomas (*3 March 1878 – †9 April 1917), I never met him as died in France during World War I, but let me start at the beginning:

The quiet Saturday early mornings are pleasant and the streets belong only to the dog walkers and the homeless. Casey was sniffing out the best grassy front-yard on Shanly when I, for no apparent reason, remembered Adelstrop. Edward Thomas was always among my favorite poets notwithstanding his relatively small volume of work, all written in a short three or so years. As father of daughter, the  opening lines of  "What Shall I Give You?" always choked me up

What shall I give my daughter the younger,

More then will keep her from cold and hunger?

. . . 

Picture credit Wikipedia under GNU and such, public domain Image copyright: Copyright expired 

So, once Casey makes her choice and makes, I go home and read meself some poetry, and, in the most respectful manner, I suggest so should you (too)!

Leonora Fitzroy

This is Leonora Fitzroy as I met her the other day at Pape and Harcourt. When she said her last name, I remarked that it was famously used by illegitimate children of the British royalty and Leonora said she knew, as she has an MA in History with a minor in Philosophy. She said people call her Leo as she is born in August and went on to say that, unfortunately, she didn't find a job in her chosen field and is currently a part-time lingerie model and volunteer for the Community Share Food Bank at The Church of the Ascension. We had that in common, I said (not de modelling, the volunteering). I asked if she'd like to have coffee and tell me her story and she said "Thank you, but that's my bus coming up".  I wished her good luck with all that stuff, said bye and walked South. When I turned around I saw her unlock her bike, put on her helmet and pedal away ... now I'm not even sure if her name is really Leo.

  

Elke

This is Elke Fuchs-Werner as I met her recently at the Dineen Café at Yonge and Temperance. There are, she told me, three things she is fanatical about: Yoga, Bridge and the Opera. There are forty-eight things that she is passionate about: the Environment, Jazz, Cooking, Watercolor, Biking, Cats, Montserrat Caballé, Venice, Arsenal Football Club, Penne Arrabiata, Rembrandt, Schubert's Impromptus, Culatello de Zibello, Merlot, James Joyce, Denmark, Vanilla ice-cream, Raisins, Richard III, Paul van Himst, the Fortified Church of Bierthelm, Comfit de Canard, James Ensor, Jasper FForde, Boca Juniors, Grey Goose, Tabasco, Toronto Maple Leafs, Dogs, Blues, Carnaroli rice, John Irving, Eric Satie, Brunello di Montalcino, Jamon Pata Negra, d'Alambert, Cashews, Guiness Stout, Bucatini All'Amatriciana, Hamlet, Giraffes, the Color Blue, Chrysanthemums, Fernet-Branca, Peñarol Montevideo, Kandinsky, Zaha Hadid and Berlin. Elke confessed that there are two hundred and thirty three things she hates but did not supply a list. As a child she had a pet zebra called Fibonacci, her cousins from Arnstadt had a pony called Klement.

Fran, the Maker of Splendid Soup

This is Frances DuLac and her dog Phi, as I met them a few Sundays ago for coffee at a small place on Pape Ave (See a French and a Vietnamese version of the picture). She runs an extremely successful catering business built on the Vietnamese Pho soup. It was, as she told me, an accident until it wasn’t. She made Pho from a recipe on a calendar and her friends went nuts. When the pandemic hit, with not much else to do, she perfected the recipe and started selling first to friends or phone orders and then on her website. She can hardly keep up with demand, had to hire three cooks and a delivery service. This natural talent for Pho, where did come from she asked herself and then dug into family history (a box with letters, photos and documents her mother had). Turns out, her great grandmother Linh Pham, born in Qui Nhon, Vietnam in 1934, was a famous beauty. Jacques Dorléac, a French colonel fell deeply and totally in love and, in 1954 when the French left Vietnam, took her to Paris. They got married (his family did not attend: Jacques et sa meuf d'Indochine, alors!). On April 12th 1961 a daughter was born: Françoise Paulette Louise. When the colonel died in 1972, the family helped them go to Canada on condition to change their name (they picked DuLac) and never contact them. Linh and Françoise bought a small house in Toronto, on Broadview Avenue and lived there quietly until January 1990 when Linh died of pneumonia and Paul Chayse, boyfriend to Françoise, moved in. On November 16th, on the holly feast of St. Matthew the Evangelist and Apostle, their daughter was born. They briefly considered naming her Matilda (closest to Matthew) but they chose to honor the Vietnamese grandmother where it all flows from: the beauty and the art of Pho.