Sound More Canadian and Sparky: Chapter Eighteen

I found this poster stapled to a public notice board on Yonge Street just north of the derelict Church of Scientology building. 

Here's what appeals to me: the well-groomed white guy who looks like he could also pull off an Italian or British or Middle-Eastern accent; that there's such a thing as a standard North American accent; that there are people out there who will pay money to sound more Canadian. 

I also like the fact that "sound more Canadian" has now joined the ranks of "lose fifteen pounds", "have washboard abs" and "make money in your spare time."


Sparky's Funtime Summertime Murder Mystery
Chapter Eighteen 

Sparky here. This is Chapter Eighteen of my story about how Gerry Ringbold met his untimely end. The story starts here.


Although I wouldn't call my last conversation with Carol a fight exactly, her bulletin about where Gerry Ringbold was buried was the last thing she ever said to me. After that chat, she stopped coming by the ladies washroom at the end of her work day.

That meant I had to put the rest of the pieces about Gerry's death together on my own.

Carol's reaction to my questions about giant hogweed got me thinking. She'd denied that any hogweed had ever grown in the Gardens, but a few questions started to creep into my mind.

I took another look at one of Marriba's screeds that she had launched into the day she found a recyclable container for natural source sunscreen that someone had left behind in the washroom and that, she claimed, someone then stole. 

Every worthless product that is delivered in packaging that costs more to make and dispose of than the product itself embodies the insanity of capitalism. And we treat it all as if it does not matter. Anything we lose is easily replaced and nothing has any intrinsic value. We assuage our reflex guilt with recycling and reuse as if that somehow corrects the fundamental error. Reusing something ridiculous does not make it less ridiculous. That it came into the world at all is what is wrong. We put two cents worth of sunscreen into a twenty cent container that costs fifty cents to dispose of because we have destroyed the ozone layer and because we have such idle lives and such vanity that white coloured people want to lay in the sun for hours and brown their skins without getting cancer. This is all supposed to somehow be less ludicrous because the sunscreen is natural and the container it comes in can be reused. 

What really pissed Marriba off, though, was that she had rinsed the "foul smelling and oxidized" contents of the reusable container out and put some of her own hand cream into the container. 

"The natural product had clearly expired," she said, "But the container was a better size for my hand cream. And then someone stole it!"

Marriba's account made me wonder if someone hadn't already replaced the contents of the jar with something else. And that the person who stole Marriba's hand cream just thought they were retrieving something they'd misplaced.
      
And I started putting some ideas together about what, exactly, had been in that jar.

Acting on that hunch, I went back into the newspaper archives of pictures of the Thompson Garden opening and other news releases. I took another look at that shot I found when I was researching Gerry, the one of the Thompson Gardens opening ceremonies. 

I hadn't noticed it before but there, plain as day, looming behind the crowd gathered for a photo op in front of the picturesque palm house was the unmistakable umbrella-shaped head of a giant hogweed plant in full bloom.

You can read Chapter Nineteen here.