| Canada Dreams |
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Paul's great-grandfather was killed when his Percheron Betty died
of heart failure in her stall while he was grooming her after a day's plowing. She
collapsed on top of him and they only discovered his body when the bone
man winched her out of her stall. In an old photo great-grampa is thin and short with a wisp of grey hair over a square Dutch face. We assume the eyes are the characteristic family hazel from their translucent clarity in the fading black and white photo. His widowed great-grandmother sold the farm and married a travelling bible salesman who knocked at her door one day. They moved to Florida where she lived for many years-surviving the salesman who was eaten by a shark off Miami beach one night while skinny dipping with a young waitress from the Flamingo Bar and Grill. His Grandfather Selbie Junior avoided the second great war by declaring himself a conscientious objector. He spent three year in prison for refusing to sign up for the draft. While in jail he earned his Bachelor of Science by correspondence and when he came out went to work for a Pharmaceutical company creating new and wonderful life enhancing drugs. He quit the company in the sixties when it was discovered they were marketing a pill to relieve morningsickness for pregnant women that caused babies to be born with out arms or legs. Paul was five when he went to live with his grandfather and his 25 year old wife Jasmine. By then Grampa was manufacturing home made Psychedelic drugs and distributing them through his Holly Mushroom Church. A tax deductible non-profit organization. Paul's parents died under mysterious circumstances. He still has an old National Geographic with a picture of them on an assignment. His father wrote the articles and his mother took the pictures. In this photo taken by a Bedouin assistant his mother sits comfortably on the back of a sagging burrow her blond hair loose and flowing on her shoulders. His father has his arm around her, smiling proudly. They both disappeared later that year up the Orinoco doing a piece on the last Cannibal Clans to inhabit the remote regions of Venezuela. No sign was ever found of them except a few bones which a naked old man with a soup bowl hair cut sold the rescue party for the equivalent of 87 cents. The old Indian gave the searchers a graphic description of the different methods for preparing human flesh and compared the gourmet properties of the different racial groups. According to him fair haired Caucasians are by far the most delicious. It was after the death of his parents that the orphan Paul went to live with Grampa and his young wife in the brightly colored bungalow in the East end of the city. Grampa died many years later just after Paul graduated from college on a scholarship set up by the magazine to honor his parents. After the funeral the widow Jasmine, still young and attractive, invited him back to her place and seduced him over spaghetti and a bottle of Chianti wine. The next day she took the life insurance money and flew to Costa Rica where she still lives. She writes every Christmas inviting him down but so far he hasn't accepted her offer. |
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