tradition kerry in the fridge were apples, a grapefruit, and a bag of cherries. oh, you got cherries, he said. did i ever tell you… he was rinsing them off in the colander. he had a dreamy kind of look in his eye. when i’d go visit my dad we had this tradition of eating cherries and watching wrestling. wrestlemania. my mom wouldn’t let me watch wrestling so all year he’d tape wrestlemania, every episode, and we’d watch them together over the summer. he plucked a cherry from the bunch, deep red, like a tiny heart. i remember i was maybe nine and i asked him the question every kid eventually asks about wrestling... (he laughed) is it real? what did he say? he described wrestling as being a sport but also entertainment… it’s real, but it’s more like theater. we got a big bowl and a white espresso cup for the stones and took them downstairs to watch a horror movie. sweet and a little sour, not too hard but not mushy. the cherries were perfect tonight. 220129 ... epitome of incomprehensibility In my middle school, of the Cedar Christian variety, there was a family with six kids, all with light hair of varying degrees of redness. The girl in my grade from that family, hers was ginger orange - strawberry blond - some sort of blondish-red, anyway. They liked watching WWF and the mother worried that one of the middle boys was getting too aggressive because he liked copying the moves. So she'd tell him it was just a show. But he'd still do headstands on the couch, try jump-twisting from this position to a fighting stance, try tackling his older brother. Who thought it was fun most of the time. Some other kids in the school were snobby, called them things like "trailer trash". I was at their place for the girl's birthday party. It wasn't a trailer, but a crowded and somewhat messy duplex, and I liked their energy, how they interacted. But then I was equally snobby in my own weird way, thinking they were weak copies of other people in my life, thinking things like: My friend Amanda from Valois_Park is nicer than this Amanda, more creative. My brother's hair is a darker, deeper red. She calls herself a "girly tomboy" and there's something I like about that, but she likes pink too much, she's too rough, and I can climb better than her. ...I don't know whether I let those feelings show, but I should have recognized that I was missing my old school. Sadness need not transmute into snootiness. 220129 ... e_o_i This had little to do with tradition, did it. I just read kerry's blathe and it got me thinking about wrestling and nostalgia. But for snack-related traditions, there used to be a video rental store in Pointe-Claire Plaza. It closed, like the earlier Valois one that had "adult films" in a closed-off section - though there was a pornish-looking film that seemed to have escaped, a story of a teenage boy who's seduced by a teacher; I'd read the back of it over and over, look at the photo of him with his hands tied and the woman approaching him (I don't think she kidnapped him, it didn't seem THAT objectionable, but I still should've had the thought, "Uh, this wouldn't be OK in real life.") But then I was the kid who, at four years old, thought that the target shooters in the Olympics were shooting real people. (That bothered my conscience a little, but I figured it was okay if it was the Olympics.) Anyway, the Pointe Claire Plaza store. They'd sell little plastic cases of candy, like the tiny sour-sweet pacifiers I'd get for nostalgia purposes - I was a teenager then but I'd be nostalgic for earlier childhood, okay - and eat them as I watched the rented movies. And still, in the store, I'd like to pick up the film cases and read what was on the back, which is why I've heard about a lot more films than I've actually seen. 220129 what's it to you? who go blather from