The Vinyl Café Notebooks

by Stuart McLean

  “Get rid of that desk,” he said. “Move the couch. Buy a palm tree.”

  I got rid of the desk and moved the couch, but I decided that a palm tree, which I suspected would cost a couple of hundred dollars, was excessive. I decided not to get the palm.

  A week passed. A couple of weeks passed. And then a month. My house didn’t sell. Then one day, when I was at the local corner store, the kind of place where you go for a pack of cigarettes or a lottery ticket but certainly not a palm tree, I saw they had a palm for sale: $125.

  I explained my housing predicament to the man behind the counter. I asked if he would consider renting me the palm.

  “I just live around the corner,” I said. “I just need it for a week or two.”

  I promised to be careful with his palm. I offered him $25 rent, and the opportunity to sell it once I was finished with it. This didn’t seem as good an idea to him as it did to me. He showed me another palm, a less robust palm.

  “Fifty bucks,” he said.

  So I bought a palm tree. And wouldn’t you know it, my house sold.

  Not knowing what else to do with it, and feeling a certain obligation, I took the palm with me to my new house.

  I am not one of those people who are good with plants. In fact, until I bought the palm, I didn’t own any houseplants. Not one.

  Don’t get me wrong. I like green things. From time to time I buy cut flowers. But I am not good with them either. Even cut flowers seem to die faster in my care than they do in the care of others. But their death never feels like a tragedy. Or, more to the point, like it is my fault. Cut flowers are, after all, supposed to die. It is the natural order of things. The death of a vase of tulips is like the passing of an elderly aunt—something to mourn, perhaps, but not to fret over. The death of a house plant always feels more like a homicide. Or at least manslaughter. I have stayed away from them.

  But suddenly, as well as my new house, I owned a plant—the palm—and because we had been through something together, I felt this obligation.

  I can’t say for sure that my palm was the reason my house sold. But I can’t say it wasn’t either. It did look spectacular by the window where the desk used to be.

  And now, a year has passed, and I have cared for my palm, if not religiously, at least responsibly. Enough, anyway, that it is still alive. I feel good about that.

  I have learned a number of things about and from it. I have learned that when it wants to grow a new frond, it shoots out a spearlike appendage that stands around for weeks, somewhat stiffly, like an awkward guest at a cocktail party, until one day, abruptly and for no apparent reason, it unfolds. I have learned that when the current fronds turn brown, and my palm appears to be dying, and I feel like giving up on it, I shouldn’t. Because if I keep watering it and cut off the old growth, new growth appears. So far, anyway. The lessons I have learned from it are the important lessons of patience and faith.

  I don’t want to give you the idea that I am the perfect owner. I am not the perfect owner. My palm doesn’t look as good today as it did when I got it. But let’s be honest, neither do I.

  My palm tree is, after all, clearly out of place in the city where I live, a little tropical tree cast ashore in the cold north, first finding refuge at a corner store of all places and then in my home. I don’t know which would be worse. We have endured, my palm and I, and now we are heading toward our second winter together.

  The way of the heart is often a mystery. It is hard to know why we love the things we love. And maybe it is better that way. But I do know this. We grow to love the things we care for. We like the responsibility, I think. It feels good to be needed.

  I am now a guy with a new house and a palm tree. I don’t want my little tree to be homeless again. I want us to make it through this winter. Together.

  15 November 2009

  LOSING PAUL

  It was late afternoon. I was sitting at my desk. The phone rang. I looked up at the name and the number on the call display and my stomach lurched. I thought, Why is Alan phoning me from Moncton?

  Alan and I hadn’t spoken for years. Not that we had had a falling out. Just that we had been busy, living our lives. I didn’t want to pick the phone up. I did, of course.

  “Alan,” I said, picking up too quickly. “How are you?”

  “Not good,” he said.

  The next part came out rushed.

  Alan said, “We lost Paul.”

  Or maybe he said, Paul’s gone. Then his voice cracked, and he didn’t say anything else.

  It was my turn. And I can’t remember what I said. Probably I said, Oh no. Or maybe, What happened? Or maybe I swore. Probably all three.

  Paul and I met, long ago and far away, at a summer camp in the Laurentian Mountains. We were students; working at camp was our summer job. We worked together for three summers and went to the same university.

  At school, we shared a student apartment—a basement place so small and dingy that the rent was $25 each a month. Paul’s brother, Alan, who was phoning from Moncton to tell me Paul had died, lived in that apartment too.

  There were two bedrooms. We flipped a coin, and Alan won. So Paul and I shared the remaining bedroom. It was so small we had to build a set of bunk beds.

  “It was cancer,” Alan said. “It started in his lungs. By the time they found it, it had moved to his bones.”

  They thought he would live until the spring. But that morning, the morning of the telephone call, his wife, Kathy, couldn’t wake him. He just stopped breathing.

  I drove to Peterborough for the funeral. I went with a friend who didn’t know him but who came so I didn’t have to go alone. We arrived just as the service was starting. We had to sit in the balcony of the church. I didn’t think I was going to cry, but I did.

  The minister quoted Emily Dickinson in her homily. “Parting,” wrote Dickinson, “is all we know of heaven, and all we need of hell.”

  Death is always a surprise, even when it isn’t. And it always comes with grief. My grief for Paul is coloured by this: I let him slip away from me.

  My dear, good friend Paul, whom I used to play squash with, and drink beer with, and who loved canoeing, and recommended books that I should read, slipped away as we grew up and got busy with our lives. He slipped away, and now he is gone, and I am left with the worst of all the emotions. I am left with regret. Deep regret.

  I was in Peterborough, where Paul lived, not two months ago. And when I was there, I thought, I should call Paul. Sometimes I phoned him when I was there, but I didn’t phone him on that visit because I was busy and tired and whatever. And now I have been kicking myself all over the place.

  I went back to his house after the funeral. Kathy gave me a hug.

  “I can’t tell you how many times I thought of phoning you these last six months,” she said.

  The house was crowded. I found Paul’s daughter in the kitchen. The kitchen of a house I had never been in.

  “Have you seen your picture?” she asked me.

  It was stuck on a corkboard by the phone, an old passport picture, taken when I was in my twenties. My hair is long and curly. I have no idea how Paul got it.

  “How long has this been here?” I asked.

  “As long as I can remember,” said Paul’s daughter. “It’s been there all my life.”

  Clearly I was still in Paul’s heart too. But he hadn’t been phoning me either.

  Alan told me that when Paul found out he was sick he asked his brother to let me know. Alan couldn’t explain why he hadn’t called. But I understand. Who wants to make that kind of call? That’s the kind of call you put off. And I understand why Kathy didn’t phone either.

  I feel sad they didn’t, because I would have visited. But it wasn’t Kathy and Alan who messed up. It was Paul and me.

  If we had been doing our job, the sorrow I am feeling today would have been the deep sorrow that comes with parting, not the pain of regret.

  15 January 2006

  WATCH
FULNESS

  I have a garden this year.

  It is not, as gardens go, either a big or an ambitious garden. Just a swath of black earth that runs along the back fence, the width of my modest backyard, that, until this spring, I allowed the weeds to have their way with.

  I would have let them have their way with it again this summer except for some ambitious friends who took pity on me and my backyard and arrived one evening with shovels and other gardening stuff and got it going. They brought some irises from their garden and some shrubs from Canadian Tire and a trillium they had dug up from the woods, which they hinted might be illegal. (I am doing my best to look after it, and it seems to be doing fine, and certainly getting more water than it would in the woods.)

  And lo and behold, inspired by their industry, I added a plant myself. A plant I bought on a whim at IKEA, which I thought should get some wild time. It seems happy out there, nestled in the shade, not far from the trillium.

  And that should have been that, but there were still some empty spaces, so last weekend I went to a nursery and bought tomato plants, which I put in pots, and they are thriving, and herbs (the ones you would expect) and a Brussels sprout vine, because I like Brussels sprouts and it amuses me to think I might grow my very own, and then as I was leaving, I thought, I should get some flowers too.

  Well, I had never bought flowers in a nursery before, so I bought the only ones I knew. I bought a flat of morning glory—those soft and moon-shaped flowers that open and close so wondrously every morning, and go on and on all the way to October.

  I am pleased by all the activity, and how good it all looks, but what interests me about this is not how I have worked on my little garden, but how my little garden has worked on me.

  It has made me watchful.

  Every morning before breakfast, I stand on my deck with my mug of tea and watch it, checking out how things are doing in the kingdom of dirt.

  At noon I watch again, and in the evenings too. Mostly I am watching the tomatoes, and the morning glory in their glorious run up the back fence, wondering, as I watch, if it can be truly possible that I will get red fruit and blue flowers where once all I got were weeds.

  Other things I have been watching since my garden began instructing me are the other residents of my backyard, the birds—a red-winged blackbird, some warblers, a house finch and more sparrows than you can shake a stick at—and the hungry squirrels, who have become my mortal enemy.

  All of this watchfulness in the natural world has got me watching other things as well. I’ve been watching, for example, the stain on the bottom of my freezer more intently. It appeared there the day I left the freezer open, or as I would rather we referred to it, during the great spring thaw. It is a deep purple stain, richer and redder than the iris, but browner than the tomatoes. And I know I should get in there and clean it, but that would involve removing the freezer drawers, something I am unsure can be done, so in the meantime I am simply watching. And I can report that the stain, unlike the trillium, is not growing at all.

  I am also watching my weight, and trying to watch my health, and I have been meaning to dig out my kite and take it down to Cherry Beach and watch it for a while too.

  While I am at it, I can also tell you I have not been watching the Stanley Cup Playoffs, So You Think You Can Dance, the television news or, sadly, over you.

  Which I would be happy to do if you would call when you weren’t in such a hurry to get to wherever it is you are going today.

  So I am not watching over you, not today, but will be soon enough, I hope. In the meantime the morning glory will have to do.

  3 June 2007

  MY “TO DO” LIST

  I am at loose ends. To be honest, I am at a complete loss.

  Somehow, somewhere, sometime since I went to bed last night and woke this morning, my “to do” list went missing.

  I know you are thinking I misplaced it. But not so. I wouldn’t misplace something as important as my “to do” list. I suspect it was tidied up.

  It was written in dark blue ink on a piece of yellow lined paper. And when I say it, I don’t want you to think that there was only one item on my list and that I should be able to remember it. There was way more than one item.

  I can’t possibly remember everything on the list. That’s why I had a list.

  Yes, I know. I am always putting my glasses down somewhere that I can’t remember. This is different. This is my list of things to do. And no, I don’t remember where I was when I had it last. Please don’t ask me that again.

  I don’t know what I am meant to be doing, and it is making me agitated.

  Are you sure you haven’t seen it? Let me tell you what it looks like. There was actually more than one list. There were several lists, each in different quadrants of the page: things to do, people to write, people to call.

  And there was a little doodle in the top right corner: a picture of a hammer smashing a little animal that you might mistake for a squirrel but is actually the neighbour’s dog (who wouldn’t stop yapping when I was working on my list).

  I keep thinking of the people on my list. Were you on my list?

  Are you someone sitting in a coffee shop waiting for me? Are you a dentist standing beside an empty dentist chair, dentist tools laid out beside you? I am not coming.

  If there is a paucity of me where you are, and there shouldn’t be, if there should be more of me than there is, it is not personal.

  You might have heard already. I lost my list of things to do.

  I want to assure you that I am going to begin a new list. I have already, actually. But you aren’t on it yet. So far there is only one item on my new list. Number one—find missing “to do” list.

  Which is why I am talking to you now.

  If by any chance you have my “to do” list, could you please call me? If you don’t have my number, you could phone any of the numbers on the list and ask them for my number. Tell them I said it’s okay for them to give it to you. I’ll come and pick the list up.

  It suddenly occurs to me that someone other than you might have the list.

  Was I supposed to call you today? Has someone else already called? Have you received any confusing phone calls?

  It is possible my list has fallen into the hands of one of those people who like to get things done. One of those people who, unlike you and me, actually enjoys sitting down and crossing things off lists.

  Maybe someone like that found my list in their pocket. And no, I don’t have any idea how it got there. But if it did, and if she is one of those people who like getting things done, maybe she was delighted to reach into her pocket this morning and find my list, with all those things just begging to be crossed off.

  If you are the person who has my list and are getting my things done, I appreciate that, but I would appreciate it more if you would just return my list to me, because you aren’t doing these things for me. You are doing them for yourself. And you should get your own list, because I am beginning to feel unhinged without mine.

  And though I understand how you may be feeling smug about getting all those things done, have you stopped to think what it is like being me? Not having the vaguest idea of what you are supposed to be doing?

  Just give it back.

  I live in the house with all the windows beside the one with the little yappy dog that is starting to drive me crazy. Honest to God, when are they going to take that dog inside and feed it?

  Where is my list? I want my list back.

  You can have my glasses. And my keys. And my cellphone and all the other things I’ve lost. Just give me the list. And then you can do whatever you want to the dog.

  I will look after the dog right now if you will just give me the list.

  Listen to me. Do you know what would happen if I don’t do the things I am supposed to do? If I stop calling and writing and showing up? If I unplug?

  You don’t have to answer that.

  Okay, I warned you.

  I�
�m over it now.

  It’s gone. Do what you want with it. I don’t need it anymore. I am done with “to do” lists. I am beginning again. I am starting fresh. I am going upstairs to write out a list of things I don’t have to do.

  You can have my “to do” list. I am starting my “to don’t” list.

  And I don’t care what happens to it.

  18 January 2009

  ANTS

  I have had, for longer than I can say with certainty—more than a few days or weeks, but not years, so for a certain number of months that I have not kept track of—a solitary ant on patrol in my upstairs bathroom. Always one, never more, often in the sink, but not always in the sink. Sometimes on the counter.

  I say on patrol, but I don’t know that. I have no idea if my ant is there with any purpose in mind. I just know he is there every time I go into the bathroom, or almost every time, so he is clearly not just passing through. He could be on guard, but on guard for what, I can’t imagine. He could be a spy. He could be there for any number of things really, including because he is thirsty.

  I can’t say much about him with any certainty, except that he is almost always there. I don’t even know if, in fact, he is just one ant, or one in an ever-changing number of ants. A revolution of ants.

  I don’t even know if it is biologically possible that he is, or has been, the same ant all these months, because my lack of knowledge when it comes to ants is almost complete, and includes a lack of knowledge regarding the life expectancy of ants.

  If I had to guess, I would say they live for a season. Although exactly what a season is where ants are concerned is beyond me. And surely these chilly January days are not that. Ant season, I mean. Yet, if I were to get up right now, and we were to go to my bathroom, we would find it is ant season there. Or it is for my ant. Because if we were to do that now, check out my bathroom, we would almost certainly find him.