When I was a senior at college, the guys I lived with thought I was the coolest in our dorm. I wasn’t, but I liked that they thought so. Thirty freshmen lived on my dormitory floor, and I was in charge of introducing them to college life. Which meant that I tried to save them from the worst cases of alcohol poisoning and venereal diseases. AIDS hadn’t been invented yet. They thought I was cool because I took some art courses where we drew pictures of live, nude models. Well, of course they were alive.

“No way, they’re naked, right there in the room?” asked the guy we named Bender. Four or five guys were in my dorm apartment, drinking beer. I was the only one who had an apartment; the freshmen had single rooms, and roommates.

“Yes,” I replied, trying to act like it didn’t matter to me, when I thought it was awesome too.

Bender was impressed. “How does it work? Where does she take her clothes off?”

“It’s not a big deal,” I said. “We’re all in a big circle with our drawing boards. There’s a little platform in the middle. The girl comes in wearing a robe, stands on the platform and takes off the robe. She does a bunch of poses and we draw her from different angles.”

“Bare nude?” asked Bender, finally getting the concept.

“Bare nude,” I said.

Not satisfied, Bender asked, “Does she bend over and stuff?”

“Yes, sometimes she bends over. I don’t know what ‘and stuff’ means.”

“Why am I taking all these fucking science courses?” asked Bender. He took a long pull on his beer. “When is your next class? I’m going to come with you and see this for myself. Can I just sit there or do I have to draw something?”

“I don’t think so, Bender. What are we going to tell my prof? That you’re not registered for the course, but you thought it would be okay if you hung out and stared at the naked chick?” Some of the guys were giggling.

“Well, I’m taking that course next term,” he said. I didn’t tell him that sometimes we had male models.

My ‘cool’ status among the freshman ratcheted up another notch the next term when I took a painting course. No nude models this time, and the only requirement was that each student complete two large paintings for presentation to the class. I attacked my first painting with vigour, spending countless hours in the studio. Terribly clichéd, it was of a young ballerina at the bar. It was so Degas of me, but it turned out well and my professor seemed to like it. It was the second required painting that caused me some anguish, and hero status with my dorm-mates. I’m not sure how I expected that painting to get finished when I continued to delay its commencement. After I completed the first painting, I didn’t visit the studio once, and the second painting’s white canvas and paint sat in my closet. I justified my delay by focussing on my serious academic courses, the ones I needed to ace to get accepted to law school (If I only knew then what I know now). Despite the reasons for my procrastination, I still had to pass my art course. Every foot-dragging day brought me closer to presenting a completely blank canvas to my expectant classmates. Non-painting weeks turned into non-painting months. The night before the grand unveiling of my painting in class, I had no plan, no ideas, and no paint on my canvas.

Sitting in my apartment with my then-girlfriend (who will remain nameless, since she spectacularly broke my heart years later), I said, “I must find a way to arrange in a pleasing manner the paint in the tubes over there, on this canvas over here.”

“It’s 10 o’clock at night. Don’t you have to do the whole thing tonight and present it tomorrow?” asked the girlfriend who shall remain nameless.

“Yes, that’s actually the problem,” I sighed. “Did I ever tell you that I wrote the Procrastination Handbook in high school?”

“Whatever,” said the girlfriend who shall remain nameless. “The important thing is that you start painting right now.”

And I did. With no scheme or purpose guiding me, I aimlessly splashed paint to and fro. I ended up with a pale pink canvas, a bit swirly in places, nothing more than a background colour. It was as blank and bereft of imagination as my brain.

“This is shit,” I said to the girlfriend who shall remain nameless. “I can’t take this to school tomorrow.” I started to think about the implications of being refused entrance to law school because I could only manage an “F” in art. The fine arts may not be too important for a legal career, but this was still a university course. Those law school admissions department sticklers didn’t like to see any failures on a transcript.

“It’s almost midnight. And it is shit,” the girlfriend who shall remain nameless delicately confirmed. “You’re going to have to do something.”

Desperation, or divine inspiration took over. “Take off your clothes,” I said.

“That’s not what I meant when I said you have to do something,” she said.

“I know, just take off your clothes.” And she did. It was never a problem getting the girlfriend who shall remain nameless to disrobe. As she stood there in her naked glory, a lithe and supple 22-year-old, I considered procrastinating a bit longer.

As I hesitated, the girlfriend who shall remain nameless said, “Well, what are we doing?”

Brought back to the reality of my upcoming “F,” I reached for the blue acrylic paint. As the girlfriend who shall remain nameless giggled and shrieked. I painted the entire front of her body, including one side of her face, in watery, blue paint. The paint was cold, and her skin became all goose-pimply. I was worried about the sharpness of her overly-erect nipples as I carefully lowered her to the pink canvas I had placed on the rug. She lay on her front, one cheek on the canvas. I instructed her not to move, lest she smear the impression. I let her lay there much longer than was necessary as the non-painted side was making its own impression on me. I then slowly pulled her off of the canvas and admired the imprint. I was ecstatic, as was the girlfriend who shall remain nameless. Her normally smallish and pert breasts, two-dimensionally pressed to the canvas, looked bulbous and Little Annie Fanny-esque. Her waist, always thin and perfect, was thinner and more perfect in its blue version. It was a triumph, a flawless print that improved upon the original. I was so excited that I hastily pulled the canvas off the floor to look at it vertically…and watched a long blue drip leave the confines of the vaginal area and bisect the space between the painting’s thighs.

“Fuck!” I shouted. “I’ve wrecked it.” Too much paint had collected in the pubic hair of the girlfriend who shall reman nameless, which was of the typical ‘70s level of bushiness. The excess had pooled in a big blue triangle on the canvas, and I had stupidly tilted my painting before its most personal area was dry.

“I kinda like it like that,” said the girlfriend who shall nameless. “It’s not just a print anymore. It says something else about the model. It’s a bit raunchy.”

“OK, I’ll go with that.”

The next day, my painting stood on an easel in the art studio, covered by a sheet. My classmates and my professor sat in a semicircle. My 23-year-old self thought it was all terribly risqué at the time. I was the new enfant terrible of the art department. I thought I was breaking new ground. Which I wasn’t.

I whipped off the sheet with a flourish, and my classmates said nothing. They sat there, gazing quizzically. I could almost hear the cogs turning in their heads, as they tried to figure out how I had made a picture that looked like I had painted a model’s skin and pressed her naked body to my canvas. But the artist couldn’t have done that!

After a long silence, one guy said, “Uhhhh, how exactly did you, uhhhh, paint that?” I caught my professor smiling at the back.

Wanting to add to the discomfort in the room, I said, “First I painted the canvas pink. Once that was dry, I had my model disrobe. Then I painted her skin blue all over, making sure that I applied excess paint to her vagina. I lay her down on the canvas to make the print, and then carefully pulled her up. This was the crucial part…..I immediately tilted the canvas so that the extra paint deposited by the model’s pubic hair would cause a lone drip between the painting’s legs. This added the level of eroticism and titillation I was shooting for.” There followed a lively discussion about the errant blue drip and the sexual liberation of women through artistic expression.

The guys in my dorm liked when I told them this story, the day after my art professor gave me an ‘A.’

Flying back to Canada after a lonesome house hunting trip in Provence, I scored the holy grail of airline travel on the Toronto-to-Vancouver portion: my own pod. On all previous flights, I jealously coveted an angled, self-contained and private mini-bunk, and sneered at the self-satisfied elite-status pod travellers arranging blankets and slippers as I trudged past them to cattle class at the plane’s tail. But there I was in business class with the flying rock stars, and I prepared myself for a movie, a cocktail, and the most comfortable nap offered by the airline industry.

The guy in the pod behind me had other ideas. It would be grossly understated to call what he had a ‘cough,’ since it was as close to a cough as the sound of a golf cart is to the roar at the Indy 500. He started hacking while looking for his seat, and continued for hours. I think flight attendants should have the authority to sedate anyone in this much agony (I mean me). I half-expected him to cough up an internal organ before we reached Vancouver. None of my fellow podders were doing any napping either, and we had to content ourselves with sharing the cougher’s swirling death-cocktail of airborne germs, recycled in our pressurized cabin.

Happy to be back in Vancouver, I forgot all about my coughing co-passenger. I was only three months away from moving to France, so I had a few details to clean up. I felt I was on top of my relocation to-do list until I experienced sharp pains in my chest while waiting at my daughter’s clarinet lesson. Chest pain for a guy in his fifties is never welcome, so Carol and I had a sombre ride to the hospital. After several hours of waiting and EKGs and more waiting, I was relieved to hear that I didn’t have a heart attack, but only a muscle inflammation in my chest. A common occurrence. Crisis averted, until the next day, when I was besieged by excruciating headaches looking for a new word to describe pain each time I coughed, which was often and violent. After a week of drugs and misdiagnosis by two doctors, I was back in the hospital, waiting for hours for the results of my CT scan. My phone had run out of juice, I had forgotten to bring a book, and the most recent waiting room magazine was a 1982 Good Housekeeping, “your essential source of foolproof recipes, fabulous fashion and beauty tips, and gorgeous looks for your home.” I was alone and bored out of my mind, but progressed to freaked-outedness when the Emergency Room doctor came to discuss the results at one in the morning.

“We see a large mass on your left lung, so we’ll have to wait until our pulmonologist has a chance to look at it,” the doctor said stonily.

“What is it,” I asked, sounding much more brave than I was.

“I don’t know,” the doctor replied.

“Is it cancer?”

“I don’t know,” he repeated.

This was not the most reassuring conversation I had ever had with a doctor. The next two hours, waiting alone for the lung specialist, was fraught with worry. But I wasn’t worried that I was going to die. That never crossed my mind; I know intellectually that one day I will certainly die, as I know that some day I will have to give up snowboarding or playing hockey. But not now, not for a long time, as I still imagine myself as youthful and indestructible. No, I was worried that whatever was on my lung, cancer or some other nasty thing, would prevent me from moving to France in three months. In my mind, whatever I had would be operated on and I would recover, but I’d heard that cancer and surgery have a way of delaying one’s plans. What if my operation was set for the same day we were to fly? What if I was too sick to leave the country? Would I be able to pass the medical exam required for my French visa? I fretted about the house lease I had signed in Aix-en-Provence and the deposit which likely wasn’t refundable. I had also rented out my Vancouver house, enrolled the kids in school in France, given my clients away, and paid for a family bike tour in France and Switzerland. I was emotionally, professionally, and financially committed to moving to Europe, and it would be the ultimate piss-off if cancer postponed my trip.

I was relieved when the lung doctor said I had double pneumonia (with a recovery time of only two months). Remembering my coughing co-passenger, I was disappointed that I could no longer mock the tourists wearing surgical masks in airports.

The train rolled into Bratislava at 6 a.m. with two clean and rested cyclists on board. With an hour to spare before our train to Austria, we took seats in the ornate station restaurant. It was a weekday, and it was common for the locals to eat breakfast in the station before boarding their trains to work. This meant that the restaurant was packed at this early hour, about 200 people. As we looked over menus which we were incapable of reading, Nickipedia said, “Hey, look around. Do you notice anything strange about this place?”

I glanced at the cavernous ceiling, the worn red chairs and battered tables. The customers seemed no different from most people I had seen in Czechoslovakia; frayed but clean clothes, tired looks on their faces, lots of sighing.

“Seems normal to me,” I said.

“Look around again,” said Nickipedia. “It’s 6 a.m., and these people are going to work, in factories. Every single adult in this room, except you and me, has a pint of beer in front of them. Some have a pint and a glass of slivovice.” Slivovice is a clear, plum-based liquor, 50 percent alcohol, tasting similar to battery acid. The Czech government had to regulate the private production of slivovice because errors in distillation were resulting in the production of poisonous methanol.

It was true that everyone in the restaurant was drinking. It was a pitiful looking group. I thought it was a revealing fact of communism that no adult could endure a day of operating heavy machinery without an alcoholic breakfast. Wanting to blend in, I said to Nickipedia, “Well……..what do you think?”

“Oh, definitely,” he said. “Dvē piva,” Nickipedia said to the waiter, ordering two beers, and showing off his expanding Czech vocabulary.

Wandering along the narrow, twisting lanes of centre-ville toward the Place des Prêcheurs market, I spied a small restaurant/bakery on rue Bueno Carriero with an impressive outdoor lineup of hungry college students. Following the curious French tradition of using English names for businesses, the sign read ‘Bagel Story,’ and then in French what I translated as ‘Authentic New York Bagels in Aix-en-Provence’ (and almost translated to English on Bagel Story’s website as ‘The originals New York’s Bagel in Aix-en-Provence’). I didn’t move to France to buy bagels, but I hadn’t had one in a long time. I thought, how bad could it be? The French were exquisite bread makers, the sign suggested that they had some connection to a New York bagel recipe, and the Norwegian smoked salmon ubiquitous to Aix would make a perfect bagel blanket.

Waiting outside in line, the Bagel Story smelled pretty good. Before I knew it, that distinctive aroma ripped the fabric of the space-time continuum and I was sucked into 1969. There I was, 11-year-old me, with my father and uncle, encircled by a raucous crowd of French-speaking sports fans. It wasn’t a match du foot, but my first professional baseball game, at Montréal’s Jarry Park. I will always associate the smell of a toasted bagel with the Expos, as incongruous as that sounds.

We were sitting down the third base line, about halfway between the bag and the outfield wall. We had a perfect view of Willie Mays, San Francisco’s Cooperstown-bound centre fielder. Willie Mays! It was a beautiful day for a baseball game, so the Expos and Giants decided to play two. My dad, who never allowed concession stand purchases at movies or sporting events, shocked me by buying a salt-encrusted pretzel bigger than my head; I devoured the pretzel and the doubleheader in utter bliss. Little did I know that this wasn’t even the best part of my day.

Returning to my aunt and uncle’s Montréal home, well past my bedtime (which was exciting in itself), we sat down to another first, my introduction to bagels and lox. I had never had bagels before, and certainly nothing from the wood-burning oven of local legend Saint-Viateur Bagel. The heady combination of a still-warm bagel, cream cheese, capers, onions and smoked salmon seemed so exotic, so ethnic, leaving an indelible mark on my tastebuds’ psyche. Willie Mays may have impressed me, but the bagel hit a home run.

My brain switched back to Aix mode as I elbowed my way inside the Bagel Story. In the close confines of the tiny restaurant, more like a large closet, I was reminded that deodorant was often optional in France. Unfortunately, that smell didn’t rocket me to somewhere else as I waited in line. Still, I was excited to buy my bagels, and happily anticipated my turn.

My first surprise was the cost. In Aix, where four perfect baguettes could be purchased for about three dollars, six bagels were twelve dollars. I was also taken aback by each bagel’s size, roughly the same as a small salad plate. Undeterred by the price or size (after all, I was living in a new country), I carted my six treasures home. Where five of them ended up in the trash. The sixth was a mealy, cardboard-like, fall-apart-in-your-hands affront to cream cheese. It did share one attribute with a real bagel in that it was round. How could this pseudo-bread have been produced in France? I thought the only bread disappointments in Aix related to purchases made in supermarkets (a vile and disgusting habit not worthy of a Frenchman). This wasn’t a bagel, it was a tasteless, calorie delivery system. I started to think the New York recipe lost something in the translation.

I could wait to have a proper bagel in Canada. The mystery was the lineup of collegians jostling to get inside Bagel Story. To be generous, I could say that they had never experienced a proper bagel, and as such, didn’t know any better. That argument was weak, however, because the overall lack of quality should have been apparent to denizens of a proud bread nation. All I could think of was the ‘McDonald’s Syndrome,’ whereas seemingly rational gourmands would tolerate mass-produced fake food because of a restaurant’s American cachet.

When Nickipedia and I finally boarded the train in Bratislava to take us back to Vienna, we went straight to the dining car and ordered every salad and fruit cocktail on the menu. It may have looked odd, but we were unable to buy any fruit and vegetables the entire time we were traveling through Czechoslovakia. There were fruits and vegetables on the restaurant menus, but we didn’t need to speak Czech to understand from the waiter that they were out. There were also fruit and vegetable stores with employees keeping regular hours. Those employees sat in their stores all day guarding the empty shelves that should have been holding fruits and vegetables, which were in deficit. By the time we returned to Andy’s apartment in Vienna, we had stuffed enough Vitamin C into ourselves that we had warded off the onset of scurvy.

“It was weird, Andy,” I said. “We had lots of money, since we traded our US dollars on the black market. So could eat in any restaurant we wanted. And not once did anyone have any fruits or vegetables to sell.”

“That’s the Soviet planning in action,” replied Andy. “The Soviets decide how the food is distributed throughout their empire. They decided that Czechoslovakia gets meat but no fruits and vegetables, and Poland gets the opposite.”

“That’s not exactly true,” said Nickipedia. “Bill, remember when we saw that long lineup on our last day in Prague?”

“Lineups are everywhere in Czechoslovakia,” interrupted Andy. “It’s a way of life to be waiting for everything all the time. So many things are in deficit.”

“No, Andy, it was different,” I said. “We saw the line, it stretched way down the block, and we walked up to the front to see what they were selling. After the week we had, I couldn’t believe that it was a fruit and vegetable shop. We kind of peered between the people and saw the display window. There were some wrinkled, gross-looking apples and what might have been pears. That’s what the locals were lining up for. It was disgusting. We knew we’d be back to civilization soon, so we didn’t line up, of course.”

Nickipedia looked at Andy, who was as white as a ghost. “What’s wrong Andy?” he asked. “Are you OK?”

Andy took a long time before answering. “I heard a rumour about that, but I was hoping it wasn’t true. That fruit is from the Ukraine, but the Ukrainians won’t eat it and the Soviets won’t feed it to their own. So the Soviets ship it to Czechoslovakia, where the people are desperate and don’t know the facts.”

“What does that mean? What’s wrong with the fruit?” I asked.

“Didn’t you hear about a little nuclear accident earlier this year? That fruit is from the orchards surrounding Chernobyl,” said Andy softly.

“Pozor,” said Nickipedia.