Last Sunday night, just before Covid had its way with me, a weird and rather scary thing happened.

I kind of forgot about it this past week, as I was in the throes of feverish coughing fits, sneezing spells, brain fog, and all-over bone-weariness.

Let’s face it, I was feeling:

• sorry for myself;
• guilty for not having masked 100% of the time everywhere I went recently; and
• sad that I now had to miss my weekly fun activities, e.g. Monday night choir, and Thursday bridge group.

But I am very grateful to my dear husband John…

…who’s been taking wonderful care of me – and our furball, Annie! (Annie pics here!)

So: now that my mind is becoming clearer, I wanted to tell you about… um… what was it again? Oh right! Last Sunday night! John and I walked a couple of blocks to a bus stop to take us home, after seeing a super performance by Canadian singer-songwriter Connie Kaldor along with her incredibly talented family. Here they are:

So at the stop for the 51 bus, there was already one person waiting – a nondescript, casually dressed acceptably groomed middle-aged man.

Let me just interject so you get the full flavour of the setting: it was pouring rain (unexpectedly – we had forgotten to check the weather forecast, so no umbrellas, and no hats [aside from my pink woolen headband, as shown here]); it was dark and damp, gloomy and – except for that man – deserted.

We vaguely nodded at him, but kept our distance, we were about eight feet or so away; then we turned to each other and chatted a bit about the show we’d just seen.

A couple of minutes passed.

And then, the man walked over to us. “Excuse me,” he said, looking more at John than at me. “How would you feel if I told you that your government is trying to kill you?”

🤯😱😧

Hearing that word, “KILL” – come out of the mouth of a stranger – in the deserted night – I silently recoiled, immediately looking away from him, then at my feet, perhaps noting that my heart had dropped down there somewhere. I was trying to make myself as small as possible. Then I looked at John for his reaction.

My John is a calm kind of guy. True to his nature, he kept his cool and just stared back at the man.

The man seemed to take this as some sort of invitation to tell John more. He went on… and I must interject and confess that I was so fearful of this person with such a paranoid bent, who knows – people are shot, stabbed to death in the streets, it’s happened in every city, every province, every state, I – so, I simply could not focus on everything he was saying. One line I do remember was, “Viruses are invented!” Also, “Vaccines are poison,” etc. etc. etc. After a bit more of this complete crazy nonsense he was spouting, John decided to end the “conversation.” He began shaking his head in denial, and when the man said, “Oh you don’t believe me? It’s true! It’s all facts! You can look it up!”

At that point my darling John said, eyeing him levelly, “I already did.” And then he took my hand and we turned, facing away from the obviously mentally unbalanced man – who so far hadn’t killed us – nor had our government, I should add. 🙄😬

And then the bus came. The 51. The man got on. John and I got on… and sat as far away from the guy as possible. All was fine now. Just a scary bit of an interlude on a dark Montreal street.

All is becoming fine on the Covid front too! I’m still in isolation, but… Behold!