I wondered where my mother was and what was taking her so long. I waited in the van at the parking meter. It was four hours since her call and three hours since I called work telling them I wouldn’t be coming in for five days and I wondered where my mother was, and what was taking her so long. She went into the plaza to go to the bank, to let the manager know so he would freeze the account and she was there a long time before I started to worry. And I wondered how my mother was, why she was taking so long, this steady strength during my father’s long illness. Did she make it to the bank? Were they trying to pull the wool over her eyes, trying some flim-flam, emptying her purse of every last red cent? And I wondered where my mother was, and what was taking her so long. So I got out of the van and headed into the plaza not thinking of the gray meter, number 090570, as I would later find out, a meter my mother stopped at before continuing into the plaza, and I thought she had paid – a meter that had seen better days. And I stopped wondering where my mother was, for she was with a manager going over the account, and I shoved the ghost of my dead father out of the empty seat and I listened to numbers rattle like wind around a mountain and thought about what my mother told me, that the funeral home had arranged for his body to be taken from the hospital and stored in the funeral home, and they didn’t know if they’d cremate the body before the weekend, because it was Thursday, and a doctor had to check the body first, and she told me that in their haste to remove the body his personal effects were left behind. When we left the bank a Toronto cop, white, 6’2", heavy build, with a mustache, was writing a ticket, and I had the urge to tear it up and throw it in his face and tell him that my father’s dead, he’s been dead for six hours, and I didn’t give a damn about this ticket, and he would have shoved me down on the hood, in handcuffs, and told the gathering crowd, "Please move on, there’s nothing to see here," and he’d lock me up with the prostitutes, druggies, and murderers, for parking at an expired meter. But I didn’t. I took the ticket and got in the driver’s side, my mother got in the passenger’s side wondering why I hadn’t put money in the meter, and we were on our way to our next stop: the lawyer. by David Clink from: His name was Gord, and he used to run with the bulls, ©2001  Published by Junction Books