I remember the first time I saw a James Bond movie. Or was it the Pink Panther? Something absurd anyway. It was years ago. In a theatre in a mall somewhere. When I was about 15 or maybe 16 years old. I was visiting in Toronto with my roommate from boarding school. Keith Forsyth. He was on the First Hockey team in spite of being much younger than the others who were in Upper Sixth Form. We were only in Fourth Form. I never saw much of Keith after that. At least not until four years later when I went to Glendon Hall for undergraduate studies. Somehow, I don’t have the foggiest, he and I reconnected. That was long before email and cell phones. Keith had left the school after his parents divorced when we were both still in Fourth Form, when his mother drove her Cadillac Eldorado to the car wash with me. They cleaned the car inside and out. Keith never liked fancy cars. I did. Keith became a “citizen”, a word he used. Not certain what he meant by it. He had a motor cycle. And smoked cigarettes. He collected me on the Wood Estate then took me for a ride on Park Lane Circle behind the college. Nobody wore helmets in those days. He stopped on Bayview Avenue next to a black Cadillac de Ville, driven by a woman with a beehive hairdo and heavy make-up. He stopped at the light immediately next to the Cadillac and stared at her behind the window. Then when the light changed he sped off. I clung to him for my life. I don’t think things went well for Keith. The last time I spoke with him was one evening on the telephone at college when I was drunk. It was the usual serenade wrought by that superfluous condition. We never spoke again.
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