Rory and his suddenly acquired muse, Bongo Bearance, were strolling east on Queen Street—past the street’s viral breakout of semi-chic restaurants, and its scattering of fast food outlets and clothing stores.
“There used to be used bookstores all along here,” Rory observed.
“Tons of them!” said Bongo. “I especially miss Abelard Books. I miss it very much.”
“Me too.”
“I once bought a really gorgeous three-volume set of Boswell’s Life of Johnson there.”
“Nice,” said Rory, thinking it was a pleasantly odd sensation to be walking through the city with a woman who had read Sam Johnson.
Bongo suddenly smiled rather puckishly at him.
“Do you know Johnson’s definition, in his Dictionary, of ‘sonneteer’?”
“Johnson wrote a dictionary?”
“He did. In 1755. All by himself!”
“And so what is a sonneteer?” Rory asked, feeling he really didn’t want to know very badly.
“Sonneteer,” writes Johnson. “A small poet.”
She laughed merrily, as if this revelation was the most amusing thing she’d heard for a long time.
“Why is that funny?” Rory asked her.
“Because,” said Bongo, poking him sharply in the chest with her right index finger, “that’s you, my poetaster friend!”
“A small poet?”
“Not in stature of course,” Bongo giggled, looking at him admiringly from head to toe, “but in poetic ambition, aspiration, vista, and all that, you are, so to speak, housebound.”
Rory sighed.
“Housebroken,” he added.
Bongo smiled. “So what are we going to do about it?”
“We?”
“Well, I’m supposed to be your muse, aren’t I?”
“I was half kidding.”
“Well I wasn’t,” said Bongo gaily. “I’m on the job. I’m taking this muse business very seriously!”
Rory didn’t know whether to be pleased or apprehensive. He decided to allow himself to be both.
They had reached University Avenue and turned north.
“I hate this street,” said Rory. “It’s wide and civic and hard and impersonal.”
“I bet you’d like it better if it had a big whacking Arc de Triomph straddling it somewhere. Then you’d think you were in Paris and you’d feel all noble and exhilarated!”
Twenty minutes later they were turning into the University campus.
“Let’s go to Hart House and have tea!” said Bongo.
“Hart House? I haven’t been there for years.”
“I go there all the time,” said Bongo happily. For me, it’s still fragrant with the effluvia of Lawren Harris and A.Y. Jackson and Emily Carr and Carl Schaefer and Northrop Frye all those brilliant, larger-than-life people!”
“The last time I was there,” said Rory glumly, somebody had backed a chair into a painting by E,J Hughes and put a dent in it.”
“That’s awful,” said Bongo.
“What’s more awful is that nobody seemed to notice—or care.”
“Well,’ replied Bongo, “that’s where you have to locate your poetry.”
“What do you mean?”
“In the realm of damage and remembrance—among other carefully chosen locales.”
They had their tea. Rory ordered a cinnamon roll, but it was stale, and he threw it in the garbage.
“More poetry,” said Bongo.
