The Little Things

It’s funny how sometimes even the grandest narratives end not so much with a whimper but the quietest of whispers. A slight puff of breath blows over once towering edifices. You expect fireworks. Everything leading up to the inexorable end screams fireworks. Instead, there’s just a shocked, stunned silence.

Huh. I did not see that coming.

The movies give us a gangster’s demise like White Heat’s Cody Jarrett blowing himself up atop a petroleum container. Tony Montana dies in a hail of bullets in the remake of Scarface. Tony Soprano… what the hell happened to Tony Soprano? Can anyone tell me?

In real life, Al Capone gets nailed evading income taxes and dies in jail of a venereal disease.

Sampson was done in by a haircut. Peter Rose kills a certain Hall of Fame career gambling. Eliot Spitzer goes from being the New York Governor and possible presidential candidate to a cable network quasi-nobody because of socks and prostitutes. Anthony Weiner tweets out pictures of his junk and greases the skids of his ride to obscurity.

It’s the little things that get you.

Now, far be it from me to pronounce the Mayor Rob Ford era over. His ability to withstand missteps and scandals are legendary, super-human even. It’s perfectly reasonable to now accept the counter-intuitive conventional wisdom that says he gets more popular the more dirt that’s uncovered on him.

But Jesus Christ. Carol Peck.

She seems to be the type of neighbour you keep your curtains drawn for if you’re prone to wandering around the house wearing only your unmentionables. She’s also that neighbour you love to have around since you’ll never have your house broken into. She sees everything that goes on around the block.

That senior citizen who essentially goes about her business, walking her dog, largely unobserved if you’re not the neighbourly type. Maybe a passing nod of acquaintance. A quick stop to pat the dog while making some quick small talk.

Now she sits in the middle of yet another drug related shit storm involving the mayor, almost crossly describing what can only be described as dubious interactions between our chief magistrate and his ‘good friend’, occasional driver and now arrested for drug related offences, Alexander Lisi, just a couple houses down from the Peck household.

“I have talked to people walking their dogs,” Mrs. Peck told the Toronto Star, “and I would say, ‘You know what, there’s something going on.’ “

“But if you and I were good friends and you were coming to call on me, visit me, would you not pull into my driveway, knock on my door?”

“So I said to a neighbour: ‘Is there a problem in this neighbourhood? Because I see Rob here all the time.’ ”

And then there’s the tooth brushing incident she tells about the mayor, sitting in his SUV in front of Lisi’s house, spitting his oral effluent out the window, down the side of his car.

Words can’t really describe the sloppy, trashy picture that paints or the glaring lack of character it suggests.

Forget it being bad behaviour for an elected official to engage in. It’s deplorable on the part of any reasonable, considerate adult. I’m just gonna sit here in my vehicle and brush my teeth (for whatever reason it seemed important to do at that time) and spit out the window onto this street. Who could possibly have a problem with that?

Carol Peck, it seems. The proverbial ‘little guy’ Mayor Ford always claims to be looking out for. Except this particular time when she apparently went unnoticed by him, out walking her dog on her quiet suburban street.

Yep.

It’s always the little things that get you.

— head-shakingly submitted by Cityslikr