How Not To Run A B&B: A Woman's True Memoir

by Bobby Hutchinson

  HOW TO FEEL WEALTHY WHEN YOU’RE EMPHATICALLY NOT

  What your current financial circumstances are is not nearly as important as how you feel about them. Like attracts like, so by feeling desperate and lacking and impoverished, that’s what the universe, being totally impartial, sends back. So we need to change the way we feel, we need to feel abundant, as if we’re receiving abundance and money instead of lacking it. Play a little game with me.

  Go beg, borrow or steal (joking) a hundred dollar bill and put it in your wallet. Keep it with you, feel wealthy with it there. Now, as you go through your days, notice and take note of the myriad ways you could spend it. (If you actually bought the first thing you thought of, you’d get the vibrational feeling of wealth and abundance only once.) But if you pretend to spend it forty or fifty times a day, you increase that vibration to having spent four or five thousand dollars. You think, yup, I could have that—yes, I can have that. Zowee, that’s possible. And because you do have the ability to buy any of those things—the $100 is right there—you’re not pretending something that doesn’t exist. There’s no doubt getting in the way of the financial flow. There’ll be a vibrational shift from impoverished to abundant, and—trust me on this, I’ve used it often—your income will overwhelm your outgo. (If you need to think bigger, use a $500 dollar bill.) I haven’t actually really even seen one of those, but hey! Go for it. What’ve you got to lose?

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Words are a virus from outer space.

  (song by Lorey Anderson)

  Methodically, charge card in hand at Ikea and Home Depot, I waded through Elizabeth’s list. I was packing up the things she’d suggested I store and then shipping them to Sparwood. My Sparwood son, Rob, would supervise putting them into a storage facility.

  So I bought packing boxes and filled them, fifty three with books alone. I rented a five ton U-haul. Eric and I loaded it to the gunnels, and then Dan drove it to Sparwood, where he and Rob, unloaded it into storage.

  My sons phoned me that night to tell me I had way too much stuff, which I knew all too well. The problem was, I’d be moving into an even larger house, I reminded them, and I’d need every mattress, bed, and armoire.

  “The books, Ma. Do you really need all those books?”

  I did. My collection of books was for research, I assured them. It was, but my book fetish went way beyond research.

  I’d learned to read at five, and it remains the mega passion of my life. My father was a coal miner, and we were poor. We didn’t own any books. But we had rich neighbors, Mr. and Mrs. Lazaruk. They were rich because they could afford bananas, and they had a full set of outdated Brittanica encyclopedia they’d bought from a traveling salesman.

  I loved the bananas Mama Lazaruk fed me, but I coveted those books. My mom and dad spent every Saturday evening playing whist with the Lazaruk’s, and sitting in the corner of a horsehair sofa beneath a dim light, I read my way through from A to Z. I determined that when I grew up, I’d buy books, and I had. Every room in every house I lived in had overflowing bookshelves. I gave books away, but never in the quantity I accumulated them.

  I had to admit the house felt lighter without so many, however. The floors were spectacular. I didn’t have a lot to time to enjoy them, because there were two million and seven details to see to. I worked frantically, from dawn to dusk, making every room a showpiece, changing lighting fixtures, exposing brick, sanding, cleaning windows.

  And every time I turned around, in the middle of every job, Louie was at the door with another gift. Flowers from some absent neighbor’s garden. Used postcards. Outdated telephones—he had a fixation with telephones and cameras. Dozens of photographs of Sam. Photographs of me I hadn’t known he’d taken, reading in the tree house, lounging in the hammock, bending over wearing shorts to see if there were any fish left in the pond. God, was that actually my behind?

  “I could take some of you in your underwear,” he generously offered. “I used to be an underwear photographer, you know.”

  “Louie, thank you, but no. And no more gifts,” I repeated like an old, shredding mantra, trying to curb my growing irritation.

  Anger is never justified, I reminded myself.

  “I have to pack everything, there’s no room.”

  I should have saved my breath to cool my porridge, as my father used to advise. Louie paid no attention, and Sam took to sneaking in and skating around on my newly finished floors, hissing at me when I chased him with a broom. Gordon had warned that it would take three weeks for the finish to harden, and Sam’s claws were leaving faint scratch marks. I fantasized over a thousand and two ways to put that cat down.

  The day of my open house arrived. I was up at five, arranging flowers in every room, cleaning the bathroom after I showered, not daring to even have a cup of tea in the pristine kitchen. Not that I wanted one; my stomach was sick with nerves.

  All my hopes and plans hinged on a quick and successful sale. If only it would happen today, without weeks of open houses, sleepless nights and days spent trying to make the place look like a comfortable family home where nobody actually lived.

  I was spending the day with my grandsons, and as I headed out to my car past the sign that bleated, “Open House Today, Ten to Four,” Louie popped out his front door, the cursed cat cradled in his arms.

  “I’ll make sure all the people that come know Sammy thinks he owns your house,” he promised. “He’ll make sure the right people buy it from you.”

  That old romance cliché actually happened--my heart sank. “I think you should keep him inside today, Louie. Someone could steal him, you know.”

  Louie laughed. “Nobody could steal Sammy. They’d be sorry. He’d scratch them and fight, wouldn’t you, little boy?”

  Louie and the demon cat were surely going to screw up my sale. Wanting to bawl from sheer frustration, I climbed in the car and drove away.

  But all my fears were groundless, as fears usually are.

  There were three solid offers that day, and they developed into a bidding war. My house sold to a young lawyer, a single father, for substantially more than its list price, nearly double what I’d paid for it five years before. And the closing date was mid October. My money worries were all but over.

  I bought still more boxes, and now the packing took on a frenzied quality, but inside I was filled with amazement and gratitude, if not peace. Not quite yet. Just like the man who’s been imprisoned in a dark cave for years and suddenly is free, I couldn’t immediately take in my windfall or really feel elated over it.

  So much to do, so little time, less than a month before I’d be leaving, then three weeks, then two, then twelve days, and that was the day Louie rang the doorbell for the fifth time in one hot afternoon.

  I was feeling particularly harassed. I’d run out of boxes again, there was a problem with the truck I’d pre-ordered from U-Haul, my credit cards were all maxed out, and the guy who’d bought the house kept phoning with impossible questions like what were the exact dimensions of the dining room, and would I measure it please to see if his dining table would fit. He’d dropped by numerous times with his kids, who rampaged thru the house arguing over which rooms would be theirs. I was happy they loved the place, but I hadn’t really said goodbye yet. I sort of wished they’d wait.

  And now here was Louie, holding a mason jar filled with faded artificial flowers which he’d undoubtedly lifted from the nearby graveyard.

  “Sammy got these for you,” he began. “You’ll still take him with you if something happens to me, right?”

  For the first time in five years, I totally lost it with him. My voice rose, and I spoke to him in a way I’d never done before.

  “Take the flowers and go home, Louie. I mean it, you have to stop coming over all the time. I can’t accept anything you bring, I’ve told you time and again I’m packing, and there’s no room for anything else. I really don’t have time for this. No more gifts, absolutely no more. Go home.”

  I
closed the sliding door in his face and locked it. He stood there for several minutes, and I hardened my heart against the shock and transparent hurt on his sagging face.

  A sad little voice in my heart reminded me that Louie was the most innocent of victims, that he was a part of me I didn’t want to acknowledge. But I turned away, and finally I heard his shambling, shuffling progress down the deck stairs, mumbling to Sammy.

  I felt guilty and mean and small souled and terribly wrong, but there was too much to do to dwell on my shortcomings. I’d talk to him later, I decided. Right now I had to drive thru the afternoon rush hour traffic to buy more packing boxes.

  About seven that evening, I saw Louie slowly walking down the sidewalk. He went into his house, and for a moment, I thought of going after him, apologizing for my bad temper that morning. But I was exhausted and sweaty. I didn’t have an hour to spend listening to him replay his familiar tapes about Sammy and marriage and women’s underwear.

  I filled the tub and reveled in a cool bath instead.

  I read for several delicious hours, and when I finally went to bed, I noticed that Louie’s kitchen light was on, which was unusual. He was meticulous about any routine once he’d mastered it, and he was always in bed with Sammy, lights out, by ten.

  I got up to pee in the night, and the light was still on.

  I was awakened from a deep sleep at six thirty the next morning by voices and unusual activity next door. I lurched to the open window.

  An ambulance and a coroner’s removal van were in front of Louie’s house. While I was trying to assimilate that, the front door opened, and two attendants carried out a stretcher with a gray blanket covering a body.

  Louie was dead.

  My heart hammered, my ears rang, and I could hardly breathe. “I’m sorry, Louie, I’m so sorry,” I babbled as remorse and regret overwhelmed me and the tears came.

  Caroline knocked on my door moments later. She, too, was crying. “I noticed the light on when I got up this morning,” she said. “I came over and he was sitting in the kitchen with his head down on the table. The medical examiner thinks he died sometime last evening. He’d been to the doctor in the afternoon, I didn’t even get any phone call from the doc that might have warned me. Louie always had some minor thing wrong with his heart, but nobody expected him to die anytime soon.”

  I could only think of the smartass quote I repeated when anyone talked about death. I couldn’t remember where I’d read it, but it stuck in my head.

  We ought to have the date of our death stamped on our forehead. We’d live very differently.

  So would those around us.

  I asked Caroline, “What’s going to happen to Sam?”

  “He’ll have to go to the SPCA. I have the dogs, I can’t keep him.’

  “I’ll take him.” I had to. I’d promised Louie.

  She didn’t argue. She didn’t like the cat anymore than I did.

  There was no service for Louie, only a private cremation. Caroline said he’d never belonged to a church, and of course he had no other close friends. I missed the closure of a funeral. Knowing he could hear me, I told him repeatedly how sorry I was for that last day. I’d finish off with, “I’ll take good care of Sammy, Louie. I promise.”

  Sammy was my penance, and he went out of his way to remind me of that fact.

  Being fed tins of common cat food on my back steps wasn’t that cat’s idea of a good time, and for several days, he refused to eat, caterwauling his displeasure so the whole neighborhood would know I was mistreating him. Caroline told me he was used to fresh lobster and shrimp from the fish market at Oakridge, and that he’d grown up eating off a plate, standing on the table right beside Louie. There was no way I was going to continue that madness. He’d just have to get used to the back porch and Nine Lives Tuna.

  Fortunately, he still believed he lived at Louie’s, so he used the cat door and presumably slept on Louie’s bed, although he spent more and more time sunning himself on my deck. I imagined he was lonely, and for Louie’s sake, I tried to make friends, but Sam would have none of it. We’d been adversaries for too long. I put a cat box by the back door for him, but he went on defiantly using my back garden as his toilet and hissing at me when I made halfhearted overtures.

  The drive from Vancouver to Sparwood was at least twelve hours, and to say I wasn’t looking forward to spending that time trapped in the car with Sam was an understatement of monumental proportions.

  For the few remaining days before I left Vancouver, I’d startle awake every night at oh dark hundred, certain I’d just heard Louie’s nasal voice in my garden, calling, “Sammy, Sammy. Come here, Sammy. Where are you, little boy?”

  I’d stagger out of bed and look out the window, expecting to see the old man out there in his pajamas, fly gaping, looking for that miserable cat.

  I never did see him, but I told myself that didn’t mean he wasn’t there.

  WHAT TO DO ABOUT REGRETS

  So you can forgive everyone else in the dream—but not yourself. How arrogant is that? What makes you any different than any of the other dream figures? You are no worse, no more or less important, and certainly no better. Get over yourself.

  If the person you feel you’ve wronged is gone from your immediate (so called) reality, like Louie was, then sit right down and write them a letter. Say your truth, admit your mistake, apologize. Express your love, they’ll get the message. And for heaven’s sake, move on, knowing that this, too, was just a lesson, and the other person has done you an immense service by reminding you that you aren’t yet enlightened. (Damn it all anyway.)

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Miraculous beings come running to help.

  (Zero Circle, by Rumi.)

  It was my final day. It was time to say goodbye to the Blue Collar. Everything was packed. Early the following morning, David and I would pick up the rented five ton truck. He and I, along with Dan and the Lost Boys, plus several of their dubious friends, would spend the day loading it.

  Dave would drive it over to Dan’s where we’d spend the night, and then we’d leave before dawn. All I had to do today was find a suitable traveling cage for the bloody cat.

  The doorbell rang just as I plugged the kettle in for tea that morning. It was the new owner of the house, shuffling from one foot to the other, looking hesitant and sounding embarrassed.

  “Hi, Kevin. Come on in.”

  “I can’t, thanks, I’m on my way to work.” He took a deep breath and let it out in a whoosh of words.

  “Bobby, I know this probably isn’t possible, and it’s asking a lot, but I promised my kids I’d ask anyway. See, they’ve fallen in love with your cat, Sammy. I spoke to the woman who’s cleaning out the old guy’s house next door, the old guy that had him before you? Louie, I think his name was? We met him the day of the open house. Anyway, she said he died and the cat belongs to you now. I don’t suppose there’s any possibility that you’d consider letting us have him? I mean, I know how attached a person gets to a pet, and the old guy was your friend and all, so there’s sentimental value. But, I just wondered—I mean, Sammy seems to like this house, he’d feel at home with us. And I’ve heard that cats don’t always take well to moving. I promise you, we’d take really good care of him.” His voice trailed off.

  I had to use real discipline to keep myself from screaming Halleluiah and beating a tambourine while I ran naked through the streets, overcome with rapture.

  I cleared my throat and tried not to smile too wide. “Kevin, I think that’s a great idea. Sammy would be much more settled if he stayed here. I’m so glad your kids like him.”

  “Really?” His grin split his face, and he punched a fist into the air. “Yes! God, the kids will be so happy, I can’t tell you. Thank you soooo much.”

  “It’s my pleasure.” He had no idea how immense that pleasure really was.

  I went out that day and bought two bottles of very nice wine and one of sparkling apple juice, along with a card welcoming Kevi
n and his kids to their new home.

  And then I spent a quiet few moments with the Gods of Irony in my garden. I couldn’t hear their wings or their laughter, but I didn’t have to. Let me tell you, they were there.

  WORDS OF WISDOM FROM MY FRIEND PAT

  Just do nothing.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players.

  (Shakespeare, As You Like It.)

  Like fitting together a mathematical equation, Dan packed the last tiny space in the truck with the last of my belongings and shut the sliding rear door.

  The Lost Boys and their friends hugged me tight, promising to come and visit. I knew they never would; they never left the Lower Mainland.

  Eric wrote down his pager number, home phone, cell, in a new leather covered address book and gave it to me. He knew how I lost phone numbers. We both were close to tears. We embraced once more, long and tight, and then he mounted his bike and rode away, red helmet glinting in the sunlight.

  Everyone left. Dave drove the loaded truck across the city to Dan’s, while I stayed behind for my private farewell to the Blue Collar.

  I walked slowly through the empty bedrooms where guests had made love, slept, made plans, dreamed dreams. I paused in the kitchen where I’d cooked so many breakfasts, the dining room where new friends from all over the world had sat around my table and sampled my quirky offerings.

  They’d laughed and cried and told me the secrets of their heart. They’d trusted me, thanked me, left me gifts—some more welcome than others—but each had taught me so many lessons.

  This had been my stage. The players were my teachers and my students, as we all are to one another, and I was grateful to them.

  I sat one last time on the back steps and looked out on the garden, the pond, the studio. Sam was nowhere around, and for the first time ever, I missed him. The house next door, like the Blue Collar, was stripped and empty, waiting for whatever the next act would bring.