Sandy who owned the Peter Pan died, which is a rotten trick even for Peter Pan, a place whose very name suggested nobody was supposed to get any older in the first place. I didn’t know her well, maybe I met her once, though I knew musicians older than me for whom she was one of the brightest bulbs blinking along Queen Street in the punkish seventies and eighties, when Toronto was still cheap enough for artists to be poor.

I heard about her death when Cleave took me out the other day, and Cleave and I have reached the age where each carries several unauthorized volumes of Canadian musical history inside our noggins, books with no index and several pages missing, but fortunately, one can query the other like unreliable search engines.

Remember the film in Vancouver?

Oh.

The Sharpie in Moncton?

Right.

The driver for The Act?

Which one?

The driver.

Ah, yeah, Tone.

The hirsute Hamiltonian?

Still?

Probably.

We proceed, two walking libraries checking each other’s shelves for books that may no longer exist, occasionally discovering one of us remembers a chapter the other misplaced.

Cleave will soon be a grandfather, which is obviously nonsense. Grandfathers are old men who know how furnaces work and carry peppermints in their pockets. They aren’t people you remember loading amplifiers with or standing around clubs at two in the morning discussing the way the kit was intentionally trashed.

But apparently the Department of Time approved his application.

Sandy is gone. Cleave becomes Grandpa Cleave. Queen Street becomes like Neil Young said about Isabella, “you’re only real with your make-up on”.

And the rest of us continue walking around with ridiculous libraries inside, asking one another questions before another volume permanently goes out of print.