Simian Farmer: A little equivocation

I was born at an early age to two parents who loved me very much. Or at least that's what the note on the basket read when the nuns picked it up from their doorstep at three in the morning that fateful day in 1974. "We love this boy very much. Please raise him as if you do too, and let us know if he ever wins the lottery."

It was raining that night, which was a good thing since I got a little wet and started to shrink. The fact that I was two days old and already weighed 29 pounds, measuring 45 inches from the top of my head to the tip of my prehensile tail (subsequently removed through several rather painful surgeries) may have had something to do with my abandonment. But the nuns still hold to the story that my parents had loved me very much. I cling to that. I never did win the lottery.

Thanks to that rain, I'm now a much more reasonable five feet, eleven inches tall. Though I frequently tell people I'm six feet since it appeases certain of my insecurities. And I'm not going to tell you how much I now weigh since it's none of your goddam business!

Being raised for the first few years of my life in the small city of Waterloo had its ups and downs. Especially that battle with Napoleon in it. Wow! I always thought he'd be taller, but whatever. (His parents must have left him out in the rain too long when he was an infant. This could also have resulted in certain abandonment issues leading to his dictatorial military sweep across Eastern Canada.)

My dad used to like to spend his Saturdays sitting in a lawn chair across the street from the local Italian community centre. Every now and then he'd jump up, hide behind a tree and shout out, "Hey Tony!" He never stopped thinking that was funny. Until one day Fat Tony and Little Paulie came to our house one night and persuaded Dad that it would be a good idea to move out of the city. Out of the province even. They were very persuasive.

After the reconstructive surgery, moving west wasn't as much fun as the cowboy movies with the wagon trains and the oxen and the wholesome girls in the full-length skirts with pig-tails had led me to believe. My parents were too cheap to buy a car, so it took us months to cross that distance. And you should have seen some of the looks we got from passing motorists when we had to stop and slaughter a fresh cow for our meals every couple weeks. You'd think they'd never seen gushing entrails before!

I was home schooled for the first seven and three quarter years of my life in the west. My mom wanted to enrol me in a bilingual school so as to create more potential for employment upon my eventual graduation. Problem being, she couldn't find one that catered to Pig Latin. So she took it upon herself to teach me and my half brother, Clyde, on her own before we eventually got enrolled in Catholic school. She probably would have put us in public school, but she once mis-read a school sign and thought it said 'Pubic School'. It offended her sensibilities so that she thought it the lesser of two evils to foist upon us a doctrine-laden Christian education rather than having us run the risk of getting crabs from the lavatory. She's still funny that way. And I don't mean funny ha-ha.

Pity about the Pig Latin. I hardly recall any of what she taught. Ustja enougha ota etga yba ina onversationca. Eh?

My university education has led me to a career as an engineer. My mother asks why I don't wear overalls and a striped hat, and I don't have the heart to tell her I'm not that kind of engineer. So I just tell her the dress code at the CPR has changed due to an overhaul in management. She's written a number of stern letters over the years that have had the fortunate and unexpected result of a blossoming friendship with the form letter clerk in the Toronto office. They're getting together for brunch in Regina next month.

I got married and had a kid a little while ago. My wife wanted to have the kid, but I told her that women go through enough trial and tribulation what with breast-feeding and raising children, so I insisted. My wife stays at home and keeps him well-watered at my insistence. She sometimes expresses disbelief at my tales of how big I would have grown if not for the rain that fateful night on the doorstep of the nunnery, but at least she humours me. And our son is nicely sized, so that's proof enough for the both of us that watering him has worked. Thankfully, I didn't pass along my prehensile tail. Must have been a recessive gene.

I have to get out of the house every now and again, just to clear my head, so I go for a drive some nights and drive real slow through residential neighbourhoods with my windows rolled down, howling as loud as I can to see how many dogs I can incite to bark at the same time. My record is 19. I hope to break it someday.
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And that, officer, is why I swore off acid after my first hit. You'd think, with so many people dropping it, that there'd be more lying around to pick up, but that's just not the case.