The invitee list reads like a who’s who of Michael’s life. We are a dozen friends and family. But it’s a hard task to discern who belongs in which category. We’ll start with big brother Albert – a source of inspiration to Mike who served as a friend, mentor and inspiration. Whether it was sailing, cooking, travel, or womanizing, Albert set a high bar that Michael has succeeded in underachieving for sixty years. Albert’s wife Linda, the pride of Tabor Manitoba, has suceeded in sleeping in late enough each morning, to conserve enough energy to allow her to scour the premises daily, removing all signs of dirt or detritus material. Her skills with a vacuum cleaner defy human comprehension. Were Ed Sullivan still providing entertainment to America, without a doubt, he would present a carpet replete with dirt and stains gathered from every corner of this planet to allow the audience to join in the pleasure of hygenics to a level hitherto unseen on the planet. Just don’t offer her anything sweet; she will turn into a she-wolf and lunge toward your jugular at the mere thought of her being exposed to sucrose. No worries, though, she will clean up any remains of the bloodied carcass with nary a drop of hemaglobin to be seen,

Paula, Michael’s older daughter, and her slave Andrew are also on the trip. Not since the days of Adam and Eve has any man paid so dearly for his relationship with a female and an Apple. A true and dedicated gamer, Andrew has not been fortunate enough to find the required cheats to allow him any control of the game that he has committed to: “Myself is the Best Thing of All”. The things we do to allow others to gain control of our joy sticks. As tech assistants, the rest of us old folk are fortunate to have our built in tech support thanks to the two of them. Our ornery wi-fi, suffering from more overuse than a John Smith signature on a motel register, responds at speeds comparable to sluggishness brought on by an Italian summer.

Julie, the younger Eskenazi spawn, has brought her roommate Cleo along for the ride. The greater mystery remains – was it more crazy for Julie to invite Cleo, or was it crazier that Cleo deigned to accept the invitation? Wouldn’t a two week hiatus from a roomie be more desirable? Or has Julie fallen complete victim to the Stockholm Syndrome? The two of them are attempting to infuse a new language into the rest of the group. It is called whiny uptalk and creates a cadence and an aural tone that prohibits any of their conversations or comments to be taken the least bit seriously. They had also adopted a pet shortly after their arrival. A gecko named Larrold. Larrold has not been seen since day two. My belief is that he committed salamander suicide after being exposed to the vocal tones that must have infected the living space of this poor amphibian. Either that or Larrold starved to death. Geckos eat flies. Cleo, fluorescent green swatter in hand, has succeeded in stealthily tracking and pursuing each and every fly in the house, sending them to an early demise thusly depriving their pet of sustinence. Despite my subtle and kind attempt to infuse the house with more flies by intentionally leaving the door open each time I left, the fly population was no match for the wide eyed huntress. Diana is the perfect middle name for this insect killer.

Julie, working with the elderly has displayed the musical retention taht would make the an idiot savant tojealous. She’s memorized the lyrics of every show tune since the Gershwin brothers inked Porgy and Bess. Always present with a cogent comment, Julie has managed to blast out of her sister’s shadow, an effort requiring a booster thrust greater than that of an Athena rocket, and has found her own path to inculcate herself in every situation, impacting events while mantaining an innocent ‘Who me’? wide eyed appearance.

Sonny and Suzy Modiano – he a Turkish transplant to Detroit via Montreal, she a local Detroit girl with a dulcet voice which allows forgiveness for many of her other traits are honoured guests. Sonny, a brother from a different mother to both Albert and Michael, but especially Michael, has been a kind and helpful positive character around the place, keeping an eye out for reprobate behaviour. He has provided the perfect balance to Suzy who, despite having being warned by her fellow travelers about yours truly, approached meeting me with an open mind and for the first while seemed to be as incredulous as I with regard to the reputation that I have garnered amongst the guests. But I now sense that she too has turned against me. I’m not sure what I said or did to cause the shift, but apparently something I said was hard for her to swallow.

Poor Lori; does she have a choice? Loved, admired and cared for by one and all, she has the unenviable task of having to be at my side more often than any human being should be subject to. She has developped a laudable defence mechanism. Lori, left to her own volition, is capable of sleeping past noon daily. Ergo, she is not exposed to me and my behaviour for at last half of our waking hours. The rest of the time is spent photographing mundane subjects ad nauseum, trying to get her electronica to function properly, or applying a mixture of oatmeal and baking soda to her body riven with bug bites. I am torn – do I want Mike to abscond with those two products, forcing her to use medicaion developed since the days of Hippocrates knowing that the two ingredients could end up finding their way into yet another mundane batch of cookies.

Ginelah, the antithesis of laissez-faire, has busied herself organizing, reorganizing, rereorganizing, suggesting, interjecting, planning, implicating, organizing, reorganizing, rereorganizing based on whatever her twisted perception of the common desire may be. Projecting or attempting to project her take of the lowest common denominator is a huge task. Particularly, when her perception is prismatically coloured by her desire to find a way to achieve the communality of all of us. The sooner that she realizes that nobody here gives a good god damn about what anybody else wants to do, the happier that she [and the rest of us] will all be. It remains difficult to take her to task since goodness, kindness and mercy ooze from her every pore [except when it comes to me]. Her organizational and people skills have kept Felix and Norton afloat over the years despite the tyrannical tirades and mental volatility displayed by her partner. To know Gina is to love her, I can’t think of any other in the world who has been afflicted with the burden of wifehood that this poor woman has.

Then there’s the birthday boy. So needy and desperate to be feted and celebrated by those around him who he actually percieves gives a rat’s ass about him, that he bribed us with an exqisite and exquisitely planned trip to one of the most spectacular and sensual corners of the planet. How beautiful is it? We’re all here, aren’t we? Michael has succeeded despite rather than because of himself. A person who knows everyting, stubbornly refusing to take advice from people more in the know on every subject [because he knows more about every subject] and steadfastly charging into an adventure thinking God, luck, the forces of nature, reason and intelligence are on his side. When, on the extremely rare occasion that things don’t work out exactly as planned, he is the first to admit that the fault lies somewhere else.
A relatively gifted chef, even that was a last rsort. Having proven himself highly incompetent in athletics, his parent enrolled him in ballet. No Nuryev he. Failing in every dexterous endeavour, he naturally gravitated to the one room in the home dedicated to the weaker sex, where he prepared mountains of cookies to drown his overwhelming mountains of sorrows.His carreer at Reitman’s looked promising for a while but when it became apparent that being a team player was a requisite, this too vannished in the dust. All that was left was making biscuits. Fortunately he whittled down the ingredients to butter and chocolate, realizing that even he couldn’t screw that up.
Somehow, its all worked out, moreso as a result of Divine Guidance [which he claims full credit for] than innate skill [which he also claims full credit for], and the result ended up serendipitously in being surrounded by a group of friends, fans, family and a clan of admirers who will continue to follow him to all ends of the earth to celebrate future events. As long as he’s paying.

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