I took this photo of an H & M logo suspended forty-five stories above the streets of Manhattan from the 47th floor of the Bank of America Tower in New York City on September 24.
Of all the questions that sentence might raise (why was I in New York; what was I doing in the Bank of America Tower; why did I shoot an H&M logo), I'll answer the one about the dots.
The dots are ceramic inclusions, floor to ceiling, on the jillions of panes of glass comprising the building's outside skin. They reflect sunlight; otherwise, said the architect, we'd all be roasted like potatoes in the mid-day sun.
Sparky's Funtime Summertime Murder Mystery
Chapter Twenty
Sparky here. This is Chapter Twenty of my story about how Gerry Ringbold met his untimely end. The story starts here.
When the ravine wasn't an open market for illegal activity, it was a dorm for addicts, the homeless and the people who prey on them.
I figured I couldn't wander in without a game plan. I knew from the noises coming from the ravine during my four to midnight shift that things didn't get going until ten or eleven o'clock at night. That made me think broad daylight would make the ravine safer. I learned pretty quickly that was a mistake, maybe the same mistake that Dubs and Carol made when they went in the year before.
I hadn't been under the canopy of maple, ash and birch trees for more than five minutes when two very scary looking guys came toward me. They wanted to know if I was buying and if I wasn't buying then what the fuck was I doing there. I took a can of pepper spray out of my pocket and pointed it at them. I told them to leave me alone. They laughed at my puny weapon and took a step toward me. I extended my arm and discharged the spray into the face of the guy closest to me. He went down and the other guy backed off. I turned and ran as fast as I could down a narrow path, the howls of the guy I assaulted echoing through the ravine, but I didn't hear anyone following.
I ran until my legs felt weak and my lungs burned. When I stopped to catch my breath, according to my phone, I was more than two kilometres from where I'd entered the ravine. I was also pretty far down the slope. I could hear the river and the incline was very steep. Too steep to drive a little balloon-tired gardening truck, so I headed back up the slope.
I was looking for a service road that the city utility and parks departments used to navigate the ravine. But the undergrowth was thick and densely overlain with fallen branches and saplings destroyed in an ice storm the previous winter. There were many spots where there was no way to advance, so I had to backtrack and try another way. This made for slow going, the day was getting late, and I was going to have to get out of the ravine no matter what before nightfall. After three hours in the underbrush, I was bug bitten, bleeding from where I'd been scratched by branches, thirsty, hungry and, even with the GPS on my phone, disoriented and clueless about whether I'd ever find what I was looking for.
Some game plan.
Around seven in the evening I had given up and was just trying to find any way at all out of the ravine when I found one of the things I was looking for, a narrow, level, two-rutted lane, just wide enough for small service vehicles to pass along. But with that discovery came a worse realization. I was about six kilometres from where I started, the service road could be anywhere from at least that long to many times that length and what I was looking for could still be anywhere.
My original idea had been to enter the ravine, find the service road right away and enjoy a relaxing stroll along it until I came upon the garden truck with the balloon tires, because, I guess, I thought I was that lucky and the cops were that lazy and stupid.
Without doubt, I was the stupid one.
Mortified and downhearted, I started down the service lane in the direction the GPS told me would bring me closest to a paved road, streetlights and a place where I could get something to eat and drink before going home. I was really tired and stumbled on a grass tuft growing in a rut. I reached out to break my fall and my hand landed on something... rubbery.
I'd found the truck. It was off the service lane, on its side and covered in fallen leaves and branches. The topmost layer of branches had been deposited by the ice storm, but the layer closest to the truck was arranged in an orderly criss-cross fashion, as if someone had deliberately put them there.
I pulled as many of the branches off as I could. Using my phone as a flashlight I peered into the vehicle interior. I just about hollered when I saw a small jar poking out of the cup holder.
It was getting late. I grabbed the jar, covered the truck back up and got out of the ravine as fast as I could. I emerged a few blocks away.
Sure enough, there was a Starbucks. As I approached it, my thirst and hunger fully ablaze, I remembered that this was the spot where Carol and Dubs had said they'd been the night Gerry died.
You can read the final chapter here.
This young man, half-obscured by splashwater, has just completed his turn on the water slide at the Pemberton Music Festival in July this year.
This was just one of the many fine examples of advertainment at the festival and strikes me as worthy of mention only because I am so old.
Sparky's Funtime Summertime Murder Mystery
Chapter Nineteen
Sparky here. This is Chapter Nineteen of my story about how Gerry Ringbold met his untimely end. The story starts here.
By now you might be thinking that, but for their rock solid alibis, Carol and Dubs did have something to do with Gerry's death. I have given you the reasons. They both had cause to hate Gerry. Dubs because of all the grief Gerry brought to both the Gardens and Dubs himself. Carol because of Gerry's dogged pursuit against both her boyfriend and her benefactress, Pea. And, because they were hooked up, Dubs' and Carol's separate reasons could have combined into something bigger and more motivating than the hatred they would otherwise have carried in their hearts alone.
Also, there's the whole business of the hog weed. It is possible that, while cutting down the Garden's specimens - maybe in response to a Ministry of the Environment order under the Noxious Weeds Act - Carol and/or Dubs collected some of the caustic sap, put it in a jar they had handy and thought, maybe, that there was a way to fool Gerry into applying it to his already photosensitive skin.
But that plan - if there ever was a plan - would have failed when Marriba found the jar Carol absent-mindedly left behind in the washroom, washed the contents down the drain and replaced the hog weed sap with her grapefruit-scented hand cream. That stuff would have been no more harmful to Gerry than tap water, unless he actually thought it was sunscreen. If he applied it and, thinking he was protected, then exposed himself to sunlight, the hyperphotosensitivity Marriba diagnosed could have caused the blistering they found on his corpse.
None of this explains what Gerry was doing in the area of the Gardens -- with or without grapefruit-scented hand cream on his skin -- or what happened to the truck with the balloon tires.
I think there is a simple explanation for the truck. The Gardens are bounded by city streets on three sides. The fourth boundary of the park is a steep-sided, densely overgrown and heavily-treed ravine sloping down to one of the several rivers that flows through the city. Into this haven of natural hidey-holes was where the drug dealers and prostitutes went once the Gardens began to be restored. It's a nasty place, strewn with trash and human feces, treated as off limits by everyone except the people who go there to buy and sell drugs and sex.
I think this is where Dubs and Carol, easily avoiding the cameras and the foot patrols, drove the truck late in the afternoon of June 21, 2013. As often do all grown ups in love, they were looking for a fun, safe place to make out.
So they made a big mistake in going into the ravine. I think something bad happened to them that day. I had a hunch that at least two other people would have known about that bad thing: Gerry Ringbold and Marriba.
But to see if my hunch was right, I had to go into the ravine myself.
You can read Chapter Twenty here.
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.
Sunlight captured on a poppy, Qualicum Beach, July 2014. In real-world and Waterlogue.
Notes toward a Netflicks series:
[scene opens]
Three people - one man and two women - all within single-digit years of retirement, are seated around a table in a small meeting room. The attitude of the man and one of the women is relaxed and playful. The other woman is relaxed and not playful.
The unplayful woman is attempting, after more than forty minutes of free-association-style conversation, to rein her colleagues into something like an agreement that, in light of the challenges surrounding them, they will commit to not making one another's lives any more difficult as they work together on a gigantic and amorphous policy project.
The playful people, as they have done for the entire meeting, move freely from tangent to tangent and neither agree nor disagree with the unplayful woman.
The unplayful woman wonders that she might not be at the same meeting as the other two, but also feels that she has heard some agreement on the topic of working together. To test this, she asks a pointed question: "So what will we do?"
The playful woman answers: "After we've had our dinner, we'll be able to eat our plate for dessert."
[scene closes]
Sparky's Funtime Summertime Murder Mystery
Chapter Seventeen
Sparky here. This is Chapter Seventeen of my story about how Gerry Ringbold met his untimely end. The story starts here.
I asked Carol where her mom was now.
"My mom died when I was four years old. Breast cancer."
I felt sorry that I'd asked that question, but Carol continued. "That's when Pea really stepped up for my dad, me and my sister.
"Pea never mistook her staff for family. She did not think of us as her social equals, but, still, she was very good to us. When my mom died, Pea let my dad move himself and his daughters into her house - most of it was empty anyway - and that's really the only childhood home I remember. Later on, Pea set up trust funds for my sister's and my university education. She paid for trips. She even bought us cars. She left us money when she died."
"It's just one of life's little ironies that Pea was so cruel to my mother when she was carrying Stuart's baby, yet later so kind to the rest of us."
Carol's story went a long way to explaining Gerry Ringbold's otherwise baffling fury toward Pea and, by extension, the Gardens. The second cousins' vendetta carried through two generations.
Another question occurred to me.
"Did Gerry know you were related to him? He must have known about his grandmother...?"
"Actually, no," said Carol. "Remember, Pea thought Stuart's child never made it out of the womb alive. The deal when my mom and half-brother came back here was that all ties between them would be broken so that Pea would never find out. It really was as if Gerry's dad came out of nowhere. Gerry had no idea who his paternal grandmother was or what my connection would have been to him."
"How come you know?" I asked. "Why wasn't the secret kept from you?"
"For a long time I didn't know. But, just before my father died in 2005 - around the time the two cousins' challenge to Pea's will was thrown out of court - he told me the whole story. Dad wanted me to understand who Gerry was, what my connection to him was and why Gerry was fighting so hard to get some restitution from Pea's estate."
"Do you know why Gerry disappeared without a trace after his death? There was no funeral service."
Carol gave me a strange look. "How do you know he didn't have a funeral service?"
I explained how I had done my research. The strange look changed to a wry smile.
"Just because something doesn't make it onto the Internet doesn't mean it didn't happen. Gerry's buried, right next to my namesake, and she's buried right next to Gerry's dad, in a family plot in upstate New York.
"Not everyone in Pea's clan drew bright lines between who was and was not family."
You can read Chapter Eighteen here.
This is a poult, a young turkey, photographed in Beacon Hill Park in Victoria earlier this summer.
Suddenly, a little acne doesn't seem so bad.
Sparky's Funtime Summertime Murder Mystery
Chapter Sixteen
Sparky here. This is Chapter Sixteen of my story about how Gerry Ringbold met his untimely end. The story starts here.
Carol's story about how Pea set about to discard Stuart's bastard child seemed incredible to me.
"How does anyone order the fate of another person like that?" I asked.
"Things were different back then," Carol said. "Even these days, rich people get to do pretty much what they want."
But, Pea did not entirely get her way. The two cousins did not exactly follow instructions. Instead they grew fond of the groundskeeper's daughter and conspired with her to frustrate Pea's intentions.
When the baby - a boy - was born, they sent a message to Pea that the child had been stillborn. They then demanded their consideration anyway, as a guarantee that the story of the child would stay with them. Pea sent a small amount of money - too small thought the cousins and that planted the seeds of a simmering resentment they nurtured and elaborated over the years.
The groundskeeper's daughter and her son stayed with Pea's cousins until the son was eighteen years old and the groundskeeper's daughter thirty-four. Then, after a tearful and heart wrenching farewell, the groundskeeper's daughter took her son back with her to her childhood home.
In his new town, the son quickly met and married a young woman. Just as quickly they had their only child, a son, the little boy who would grow up to be Gerry Ringbold.
Bob Harrison's account of Gerry's life goes only as far back as his birth. Had Harrison tried a little harder at his job, he might have found out about Gerry's lineage, his connection to Pea's second cousins in upstate New York and about the anger that had built over the years around how Pea had thrown away Stuart's child. Harrison might also have found out that the upstate New York cousins bankrolled Gerry's legal education, their intention from the beginning being to use Gerry as their avenging angel.
As for the groundskeeper's daughter, with her son grown and her best years still ahead of her, Gerry's grandmother set about to rebuild her life.
By now it is the mid-seventies. Without even a high school education and no social network but her family, the groundskeeper's daughter found herself back where she began, in Pea's house, asking for a job.
Stuart had been dead for almost five years. Pea was prepared to show some magnanimity, especially because she was not aware that Stuart's child was alive, living in the same city, and raising Stuart's grandson. So she brought the groundskeeper's daughter back on staff to cook, clean and do laundry.
Settled as well as she ever might be, the groundskeeper's daughter married one of the other members of the staff. They had two children, both girls, one born in 1978 and one in 1980. The groundskeeper's daughter named her second girl Carol, after one of Pea's cousins. If Pea noticed the coincidence, she never said anything about it.
"And that," said Carol, "is how someone born five years before me can be my grand-nephew. My mother and Gerry's grandmother were the same person."
You can read Chapter Seventeen here.
A while ago I wrote about the Brickworks turtles and lucky cats. Consider this the sequel. The old houses on Glen Road, long boarded up and home only to feral cats and raccoons are now under some kind of painstaking evisceration, a process leaving just the brick superstructure. As this photo shows, the houses are all brick, right down to the foundation floor.
Cool.
Sparky's Funtime Summertime Murder Mystery
Chapter Fifteen
Sparky here. This is Chapter Fifteen of my story about how Gerry Ringbold met his untimely end. The story starts here.
I had first met Carol the same way I meet a lot of people these days. She walked into the women's washroom. It was my first day on the job. She struck up a conversation with me then and it became a regular part of my work day: tirades from Marriba, bullshit from Jennifer and normal talk with Carol.
Her out-of-the-blue revelations of living with Pea and being related to Gerry Ringbold knocked me off my centre for a second.
"How on earth is someone a half-nephew?"
Carol laughed. "I can explain everything, but you're going to have to wait. I gotta run."
And she was gone.
Carol did explain everything over the next couple of days. Some of what she told me I have already told you, such as the details of who got what in Pea's will. But, because life is a mystery that unfolds on its own schedule, I've been holding out on you.
Here's Gerry Ringbold's real back story, far more complete than what Bob Harrison - the Gerry-obsessed reporter - wrote in his piece of alleged journalism I described at the beginning of this story. I'll start with Pea and Stuart.
Peony MacDonald and Stuart Chester's marriage was arranged by their families. Basically a business deal, their union was a merger of old and new money, a trade of a car load of social respectability for a car load of cash. As a bride, Pea was self-involved and spoiled. She considered her new husband to be a social inferior and she never really loved Stuart. Turns out Pea's assessment was fairly astute. Stuart was a gambling, opium-smoking, alcoholic lout who, despite his failings, probably loved Pea, but that didn't stop him from stepping out on her. Or from squandering her money.
Pea suffered enormous humiliation from Stuart as he philandered about town. She also suffered financial setbacks because just about all the money Chester brought to the union was gone in less than three years from gambling losses and reckless investments. Pea exacted punishment in a manner in keeping with their social status and bearing by forcing Stuart to watch her siphon gigantic quantities of money away from him to all the charities she supported over the years.
In their heyday as the city's most beautiful, wealthy, admired and influential couple -- with lots of sad secrets that lots of people knew about but now all those people are dead -- Pea and Stuart maintained along with their charade of a marriage, a staff of about 15 people, including secretaries for each of them, a butler for Stuart, kitchen staff, cleaning staff, groundskeepers and handymen.
One of the groundskeepers had a family of his own and was hoping the Chesters could provide one or two of his children an opportunity. When preparations began in 1955 for the annual New Years Eve party, the groundskeeper approached the butler to ask if his fifteen year old daughter might be hired to help serve guests.
The butler happily said yes.
The groundskeeper's daughter made such a positive impression at the New Year's party that she was brought onto the regular staff where she cleaned and did laundry.
By June 1956, it was obvious the groundskeeper's daughter was pregnant. Everyone knew that Stuart was the father. No one dared breathe a word.
Pea's response was measured and iron-fisted.
The groundskeeper's daughter was given three hundred dollars in cash, a one-way train ticket to Rochester, New York and taken to the train station. Once she alighted in Rochester, the groundskeeper's daughter was brought to the comfortable upstate New York home of two of Pea's cousins who had agreed, in return for consideration, to take the baby once it was born and arrange to have it put up for adoption.
As for what they were to do with the groundskeeper's daughter, otherwise known as Gerry Ringbold's grandmother, Pea forwarded no direction.
You can read Chapter Sixteen here.
As did armies of old, some of the celebrants at the Pemberton Music Festival bore standards.
Among the ensigns held high and brandished with pride were Poppa Smurf, Steve Buscemi's head, a Jagermeister flag and... the one in the middle of the shot above.
There's a cut-out of Rob Ford on the side away from the camera. The side you can see reads: I DON'T POP MOLLY I ROCK ROB FORD. Molly, for all the non-hipsters among my readers, is slang for the party drug ecstasy. I didn't know this when I saw the sign; I know it now because I looked it up in the Urban Dictionary.
Sparky's Funtime Summertime Murder Mystery
Erratum
The publishers of Sparky's Funtime Summertime Murder Mystery regret to inform all our loyal readers (all four of you: you know who you are) that there was an error in the closing lines of last week's episode.
Subscribers were sent a version that included the following statements:
"What do you want to know about them?"
"Everything! What do you know?"
"A thing or two," she said. "Gerry Ringbold was my half-brother."
What the author meant to say was:
"What do you want to know about them?"
"Everything! What do you know?"
"A thing or two," she said. "I grew up in Pea's house. And Gerry Ringbold was my half-nephew."
The publishers regret the error.
Also, the author's sister is getting married again. Sparky will resume next week.
