I've been hunting for a fountain for a couple of years now, not the Trevi, nothing like that. I would like a small fountain to mount on the wall of my balcony. The idea is to muffle the sound of the traffic below with the gentle trickle of circulating water. So far I haven't found anything small enough to work. I was surfing the net the other day, finding nothing but big two thousand dollar fountains for large gardens, when I bethought me of The Boy with the Boot., a little fountain in Assiniboine Park in Winnipeg that I researched way back in my other life. So I looked it up and there - lo and whatever - was an article by me about the Boy. Published by Manitoba Pageant, an historical magazine, in 1957, the piece still has my byline on it. I guess that's about the closest to immortality that I'm ever going to get. Quite thrilling, actually. Suddenly I had total recall of my hunt for information, one of my first big research assignments (self-assigned). I remember I was in New York with my husband and I went to an ironworks rumoured to have been the source of the boy - boyS, for there were similar fountains all over North America, each with its own story, I'm sure . I remember sitting in the library of the Winnipeg Free Press reading micro-fiche reels of past issues of the paper, searching for dates relevant to the Boy's history How different research is now when all you have to do is go online for it. (Caution: check your sources.) The lesson is still the same. Be patient. Seek and ye shall find. And one of these days I'm going to find a fountain for my balcony,
smiles
You know how you come across something, a word or an idea, or even a person, that you haven't seen for ages and suddenly it/he/she pops up one, two, three times in the next ensuing days? For me it happens most often with a word I've never encountered before and then do, three times. This is a little different. Last week I was describing garter belts and the gap at the top of the thigh, between the edge of the stocking and the beginning of the underpants, a cold place in a Winnipeg winter. I didn't have a formal name for it (No-Man's Land?). But today I found it. I'm just reading Jane Gardam's latest book, Last Friends, the third in her wonderful trilogy, and I have just read of a court case argued in the past between the two lawyers, each the protagonist of one of the novels. The case was being argued before a judge concerning a poor challenged kid who shovelled dung in a circus and who for kicks would take a long straw and go under the bleachers where he would stick it up through the slats and tickle the private parts of the ladies. As you know, says the narrator, ladies' tights hadn't been invented, "and there were all these pale pink arcs of skin between the stocking-tops and the knickers. Schoolgirls,I believe, used to call the gaps 'smiles' or 'sights'." And the boy was charged for tickling all the smiles. Well! You learn something every day.