The guy at the store was just like all the others there: healthy, vigorous, outdoor-loving. He was enthused when he found out we were looking for a compass.
“What’s it for? Orienteering? Map work?”
I couldn’t resist.
“He needs it to find Saturn,” I said, indicating Ian beside me.
“Astronomy! Cool!” he said, turning to Ian, and I became the dork once again. The two of them pored over the compasses, selecting the right one for Ian. He fussed with it all the way home, advising me of my exact bearings.
At 10 p.m., when I was tucked into bed, there was a knock at my door.
“Come and see this,” he said. So, I went. He pointed to the telescope and I looked.
“It’s Saturn. Can you see it?”
You know what? I could see it. I could. It was Saturn, unmistakably so. From my living room window, there between the branches of the big basswood tree, south by southeast, was Saturn. And I felt profoundly good. I could have stepped away from the telescope and pointed into the sky directly at Saturn and known it was right there even though I couldn’t see it. And there is comfort in that.
The world is big … and bigger still if, like Ian, you want it to include the black holes, and the nebulae, and Saturn. But it’s also right there. Right there beside you, or right there worlds beyond where your finger can point. It doesn’t matter. If you use the maps and record the findings, it’s right there.
Winnipeg, Manitoba
MEETING THE QUEEN
Our first home, after our marriage in 1975, was a third-floor apartment on Sherbrooke Street in Montreal.
This was at a time when English organizations in Montreal were beginning to realize that it was an asset to have bilingual employees.
My husband and I, having grown up in English-speaking neighbourhoods, had never made much use of the French skills we had acquired in school. Now that I was actually beginning to use French in my daily life, I was keen to practise.
So I was excited to find that the name of the concierge in our apartment building was Alphonse Fournier. Alphonse took it upon himself to teach us newlyweds about much more than French language and culture. He acquainted us with various aspects of car maintenance, laundry, cleaning, snow removal, and pressure cookers. Pressure cookers, he told us, could destroy a marriage!
One day when I delivered our rent cheque to Alphonse’s apartment I noticed a collection of newspaper clippings taped to the wall behind him. All of them contained photographs of Her Majesty, the Queen. The pictures of British royalty in Alphonse’s home surprised me. I commented on them.
Alphonse’s response surprised me even more.
Pointing to his collection, he said, “I’ve met her. And I 1ike her.”
In answer to my “how, when, and where” questions, Alphonse told me the following story:
During World War II he left his Gaspé home to serve with the Canadian Army. Eventually he ended up as the head of a convoy in the south of England.
One day he was travelling down the road when he noticed another military vehicle at the side of the road. He signalled for his convoy to stop so that they could offer help.
Alphonse said, “As I got closer I realized that it was HER.”
He’d come upon Princess Elizabeth, then a member of the Women’s Auxiliary Corps.
She’d been driving with another woman in the corps. Their vehicle had broken down. Alphonse offered to attempt to fix the problem, and suggested to the two women that they might wish to sit down nearby. Two things impressed him and caused him to become emotional as he told me the story. First, he said, the Princess had immediately responded to him in French. Second, she’d said she would remain standing because Alphonse was a higher rank than she was.
And that is how one of the Princess’s (and later, the Queen’s) most ardent admirers was born.
Alphonse’s story comes to my mind whenever I think about the importance of respecting everyone we encounter along the path of life.
Morrisburg, Ontario
MARY’S PIANO
About eighteen years ago I bought a baby grand piano from a woman in Langley, British Columbia. A Heintzman. Ten years later I called the woman, Mary Dumbleton, to tell her how much my daughter and I were enjoying the piano. We both played it every day. We’d nicknamed it “Mary” in her honour.
Mary told me a little bit about the history of the piano and how it had come to be in her family. She thanked me for calling, and suggested that maybe we could get together someday.
In May of this year I read in the Vancouver Sun that Mary Dumbleton of Langley, B.C., had passed away, “loved and deeply mourned.”
I felt saddened by this, and recalled something she’d told me in our phone conversation, so I decided to send a condolence card to her family via her home address. The card explained who I was, and that I was sorry to read that their mom had passed away. It also said that Mary had told me her family had always been a little resentful that she’d sold the piano, and if they wanted to replace my piano I’d be happy to return the little Heintzman to the Dumbleton family.
I sent this card off and waited for the family’s reply.
About a week later I came home and found a note on the counter, written in my husband’s hand.
The note said:
Mary Dumbleton called.
I was stunned. The only thing I could think of when I read those words was “How is this possible? Where could she be calling from?”
I called my husband at work and asked him.
“Mary Dumbleton called? What did she say?”
“She said she liked the card,” he told me. He didn’t know what I’d done.
“She said she liked the card?” I asked.
“Yeah, we had a nice chat.”
I waited a week before I got up the nerve to call her and tell her how happy I was that she was still alive. We both had a good laugh about it. She said that it was a lovely sentiment but that she’d be happy if the piano stayed where it was. She thanked me for calling. She said maybe we could get together someday. She said maybe she could visit me in Horseshoe Bay and see her namesake.
I look forward to that day. And send condolences to the family of the other Mary Dumbleton of Langley, B.C.
Horseshoe Bay, British Columbia
TWICE IN A LIFETIME
On a cold January evening three years ago, on a snowy street corner in North Toronto, I suffered what the medical professionals call a “sudden witnessed collapse.” I remember virtually nothing of the day itself, and certainly nothing of the next few, some of which I spent in a drug-induced coma packed on ice, “like a flounder,” as my wife would say. But, a double bypass and three months’ recuperation later, I was pretty much back to normal, albeit twenty-five pounds lighter and on a much healthier diet and exercise regime.
The survival rate for such incidents is less than ten percent. I wanted to meet and thank the people who’d responded that day: the firefighters and paramedics who brought me back from a “vital signs absent” state. Over the next few months, I did just that. A family connection in the fire department put me in touch with the crew, and my wife and I visited them at their fire hall. Getting to the paramedics was more difficult, but eventually I met them too, and learned more about what had happened that day, and just how close I’d come to death. Their reaction was well summed up by one of the firefighters, who said, “So often I go home and tell my wife about something like this, but we never know how it turns out. It’s great to see that this had a happy ending.”
But there was one big hole in the story. Who was the witness to my “sudden witnessed collapse”? All we knew was that a woman saw me fall into a snowbank, called 911, and stayed with me until the emergency crews arrived. However, as far as we could tell, no one had taken her name, and we couldn’t think of any practical way of finding her.
Last winter we decided to take up ballroom dancing, which meant that once a week I’d meet my wife at the children’s booksto
re where she works, where in fact I was headed on the night of my episode. I don’t visit the store all that often, and usually stay for only a few minutes. I walked into the store wearing a coat very similar to the one from two years earlier, and the same hat. Just inside the door, a woman was looking at a book display. She glanced up at me as I stepped past her.
“Excuse me,” she said, “may I ask you a personal question?”
I stopped and looked at her, trying to figure out where we could have met.
Then she said, “Did you have a heart attack near here about two years ago?”
“Yes, I did,” I said.
“Well,” she said, “I’m the person who was there that night.”
My angel, as it turns out, is named Helen Healy. She’d changed her plans that evening and was heading home when I passed her, looking, she said, “like a man in a big hurry.” She told me that when I was about fifty paces ahead of her, I staggered, grabbed at a bus-stop pole, then collapsed. She quickly reached me, saw I was unconscious, and dialed 911. Incredibly, she said, although there was bumper-to-bumper rush-hour traffic just a few feet away, no one stopped. She pointed to my dark cap, the same one I was wearing that night, and said, “You have to get rid of that and get a red one. If I hadn’t been there, no one would have seen you.”
She’d started CPR, but, as she noted, I’m a big man and she’s a small woman, and after a while she saw I was slipping away. The dispatcher told her that the ambulance was only a minute away. At that point, she said, she stopped the CPR and gave me a big hug.
“Hang on,” she’d said, “don’t die on me.”
Moments later, the emergency crews arrived and took over.
Helen and I had the same sense that while our first meeting was fortunate, our second one was miraculous. Even now I can’t accurately describe my feelings as we stood there talking. I told her, hoping not to sound ungrateful, that I needed some time to sort out my reactions. Later, she told me that she’d found it “emotionally unsettling.”
We remain amazed at the coincidences that caused our paths to cross not once, but twice, on two snowy January evenings.
Toronto, Ontario
SPIT BUGS
I was looking at my to-do list today. You know the one: posted in command central, the place where you can find plenty of loathsome tasks waiting for your attention.
Our lists are posted on a big whiteboard in our kitchen. Most of them written in my wife’s careful script.
But the list I was looking at today was written in my own hand. Yes, I’d broken the sacred rule and added to my husbandly burden. Mind you, in my defence, it was obvious that I’d made this error sometime in the exuberant throes of spring, and, to the best of my knowledge, had yet to act on any of the items. Now I was standing in front of it, coffee in hand, ready to erase it.
But when I reread the list, rather than erasing it I drew a black border around it and framed it instead. It’s not that it’s a significant list. It seems that when I wrote it I had need of lumber for a long-forgotten project. And that I was thinking sticks might make good perches for the birds in our garden. And that evidently it was berry season: we were having, as I recall, a “spittle bug” problem in one of our shrubs.
It was the sum of these things that made me smile. As I stood gazing at it, I thought, “This is a good list. This list is too good to erase.”
So I left it where it was, in the corner of our whiteboard, the frame around it. And if I ever feel that there’s nothing to do, or that I have no purpose in life, it’s there for me to consult. Life could be worse.
Here then is my permanent to-do list:
Get Wood
Find Big Sticks
Pick Strawberries
Spit Bugs
Ottawa, Ontario
CULTURE OF KINDNESS
Our father has Alzheimer’s disease. It’s been creeping up on him for the last ten years like a slowly rising tide. Finally my mother realized that she had to put him in residential care.
The first place that took Dad was a hospital that accepted dementia patients. Despite that custom, it seemed they never knew what to do with him. Every week there was a complaint about his behaviour. He lost weight so rapidly that the social worker there suspected they were forgetting to take him to the dining room to eat. Within two months he had pneumonia and was obviously deeply disoriented and unhappy.
Fortunately, a bed became available at the Lodge at Broadmead, a veterans’ residence in Victoria. The contrast was immediately apparent. While both locations had small rooms, and hospital beds, and private gardens, and activities for residents, the atmosphere at Broadmead was cheerful and homey. The staff had obviously been hired for their skill, compassion, and patience, and were thoroughly trained in handling Alzheimer’s patients. From the beginning, I noticed that the culture was one of kindness, not bureaucracy or efficiency.
What I found particularly wonderful were the events that broke the monotony of the residents’ lives. While there are a number of activities throughout the day, once a week each unit in Broadmead gets a visit from Ania, the art therapist. Ania brings everyone who’s able, or willing, up to the large, bright art room and gets them going on their projects. The crafts they make are sold in the gift shop, which defrays the cost of supplies.
Dad had been a truly talented amateur artist, taking up pastels in his retirement with the same attention to order and detail he’d brought to his lifelong career in the military. Once Alzheimer’s stole his capabilities, I tried to get him interested in his pastels, but he didn’t remember them and resisted my invitations to try them out.
It was Ania who got him painting again. Not only on his designated day, but every morning.
And slowly Dad transformed. Now, at eighty-nine, he’s no longer restless and grumpy or visibly frightened. He seems quietly content. And while his mind doesn’t remember, I believe his body knows that he’s both well treated and well loved.
On one of my visits I saw Dad in the art room, concentrating on a length of silk. It was stretched over a board on which there were three evenly spaced knobs. The silk was tied tightly over the knobs.
“Ahhh,” I said to myself, “Dad’s going to do tie-dye. How very much like him to do something with military precision.”
I thought no more of it until, during one of my daily phone chats with my mother, she said, “Your father painted a scarf. They entered it in the Saanich Fair, and it won first prize.”
So I wept. I wept knowing that he wouldn’t remember painting it—even if he saw it. And that he wouldn’t remember winning—no matter how many times he was told. I wept with deep gratitude for this wonderful place and the people who understand about love, and fun, and capability, and dignity long past remembering.
My mother bought the scarf from the gift shop and gave it to me for my birthday. I wore it the last time I visited Dad.
He admired it.
Calgary, Alberta
FREUDIAN SLIP
One spring day a few years ago, my wife and I went for a drive.
The wind was blustery. But we didn’t care about the wind. We wanted to see the town. We wanted to say hello to it after a long winter. We wanted to smell the air and feel the wind. So we rode with all the windows open, with no radio on, and with little conversation. Our conversation was the pleasure of each other’s company.
The one drawback was the layer of winter sand on the roads. It was dry, and the wind was blowing the sand into the air and into many swirling dust devils.
As we turned the corner onto one of the side streets near the college, we noticed two college-age girls walking together along the road. They were also enjoying the day in their light spring dresses, talking and laughing together. And that was the fateful moment when two things happened at precisely the same time.
The first was that a particularly strong blast of wind blew past the girls and caught the hems of their dresses so that they both had to do a quick Marilyn Monroe stance.
I thought to myself, “If that wind had been moving just a little faster it would have blown those dresses clean up over their heads.” I promise, Stuart, there was no wishing involved.
At the same moment, a gust of wind—doubtless the same mischievous gust that had ruffled the girls’ dresses—blew dust into the car through my wife’s window and into my eyes. Another thought entered my brain: “Now would be a good time for my wife to roll up her window.” Those two thoughts met in my brain like young lovers at a garden party.
Rubbing my eyes, I asked my wife, “Honey, would you please roll up your dress?”
She wasn’t wearing a dress, Stuart. Those two girls—they were wearing dresses.
All I was able to do was drop my jaw and croak out some guttural grunting groans. By rights, my wife should have cuffed me. But instead she smiled, and broke out laughing. I pulled the car over and we laughed together. That there, Mr. McLean, is a fine example of a woman with a sense of humour.
Prince George, British Columbia
BIRD DOG
There is a common belief that if you touch a bird’s nest, or the eggs within it, or, heaven forbid, the tiny birds that emerge from those eggs, that little bit of life will not survive. The parent birds will never return, so the rule goes, after a human hand has touched the nest.
I’m not sure this is true.
Every spring a bird builds its nest in the clematis that drapes over our front stoop. From a bird’s point of view, this is probably like buying the cutest little bungalow in the dodgiest area of town. While the entryway to our home is framed by pale flowers falling like a pink waterfall, the nests built here have inevitably fallen prey to the neighbourhood gang of crows. So that year, when I once again discovered a tiny sparrow’s nest perched in the clematis, my heart sank a little. Dumb birds, I thought.
Time Now for the Vinyl Cafe Story Exchange Page 12
