Canadian Calcium

Bone, shells and leaves form the moderately hard metallic element known as calcium, which covers three percent of the earth's crust and 47 percent of the earth's bread. In Canada, calcium also occurs naturally in limestone, flourite and gypsum, although others get a fair deal.

Anyone who spends seven minutes or longer with retired college professor, O.L. Pulseloose, is sure to walk away with a head full of similar knowledge, mostly scientific in nature, with only small portions being out of nature, in manure, instead. Contacted at his experimental condominium in York, Ontario, Pulseloose edified our editors with one of the strangest soliloquies any of us have ever experienced, by phone or bicarbonate.

The following excerpts were singled out as salient examples of what happens to the mind when the equation of teaching is taken out of the daily regimin of an active-thinking druid. While the remarks selected do not constitute the complete transcripts of this interview with the Troutstream Bored of Predators, they are inclusive to the extent they contain segments of each exchange, or, as they say, blotter drops.

The conversation begins with a discussion of the official residence of the archbishop and ends with a reference to an attractive icon.

STREAM: Your home has been described as Canadian pagoda, ornate, pyramidal yet Hindu in nature, Buddhist in aspiration. That must be one heck of a trailer park.

O.L.: It is. The place is not subject to the restraint of shame. It's ineradicable, inert, inexorably complex. We have more immigrants than all of Mammalia. The place is obligingly oblique. Mucho obligato, so to squeak.

STREAM: Does your diet consist of squid, exclusively, or merely as an afterthought?

O.L.: You put me in a stupor. I'm amazed, astonished, stupefied. What do you mean, squid? It's mollusk! And, I don't eat it. I infer its essence. Can you tell the difference?

STREAM: With your guidance.

O.L.: I have a rule of thumb. Don't wipe U.S. with it.

STREAM: Your contempt for America seems superficial, given the dependence your country has on our tourism dollars. Which reminds us, how come a U.S. dollar goes farther in a Canadian supermarket than it does in military canteens on our side of the river?

O.L.: Keynesian economics suggest disjunctive alternatives account for much of the dichotomy, not to mention a perverse convergence of fiscal years. Harpo. Chico. Groucho. Who cares? I'm going roller skating.

STREAM: Carry Nation carried a hatchet. Admiral Farragut, and a fair gut had he. Aleksandr Pushkin and all the other Russian poets. History's replete with iconoclasts. What are you going to do about that? How do you expect to stand out in a world where people like Desmund Halley, Confucius and Nathaniel Hawthorne already lived and died?

O.L.: Enlightenment can be attained through meditation, self-contemplation and intuition. You don't need the scriptures, although, they don't hurt. That's how it is. That's how it's always Zen.

STREAM: Fine. Just sit there then. Don't do anything. How is that going to save the world?

O.L.: I'll be too busy to destroy it.

STREAM: You have a good point there.

O.L.: Not really. It's an isthmus.

STREAM: What's the difference?

O.L.: One is a narrow strip of tissue joining two larger organs, the other, a crucial situation in a course of events.

STREAM: That's a Grosse Pointe.

O.L.: Grosse Pointe Farms.

STREAM: You've got more corn pone than a compounded cornucopia with a hefty horn of plenty.

O.L.: You've got more questions than a dozen snoopy reporters. Any chance of you just leaving me alone, perhaps hounding someone else?

STREAM: Who'd you have in mind?

O.L.: Tori Amos.