The Vinyl Café Notebooks (14 page)

He offered to show me some ID and pulled out his health card. I wrote down his ID numbers.

“If anything ever happened,” I said.

“I understand,” he replied.

And I went back to my friend’s house.

“I don’t think he has the key,” I said. “And anyway, if he does, I think you’re okay.”

“I don’t feel comfortable,” said my friend. “I think I should change my lock. Just in case.”

And so that is what we did.

It was Sunday, and it was late. We decided to wait until the next day. First thing Monday morning, my friend removed the lock and took it around the corner to a locksmith who rekeyed it. I was leaving town on business. As I was packing, my friend called. She couldn’t get the lock reassembled. I had about forty-five minutes before I had to leave. I ran over. I couldn’t reassemble it either. We called the locksmith. It took
him about five minutes to get there and less than five to fix it. It wasn’t a cheap morning. I paid for everything. It had turned into an expensive favour. But I figured we did the right thing. After all, the fellow at the hotel might have had the key.

Or maybe not.

“Maybe he didn’t see it,” I said. “Maybe he swept it away.”

“Maybe,” said my friend.

And that was more or less that. I felt foolish. I felt foolish that I had tried to do something good and that it turned into such a mess.

To be honest, I
wanted
to blame it on my friend. I wanted to say,
You should have picked that key up when he lifted the recycling bin and you saw it there
. I knew I shouldn’t say that. And I didn’t for a couple of weeks. But eventually, I did of course, and when I did, she said, “Yes, I know I should have picked it up, but I wanted to trust him.”

And then she said the thing that
she
had been holding back. She said, “I wish you didn’t bring him to my house.” She said, “From now on, I don’t want you bringing people like that to my house.”

We both began to blame each other. But that’s not what we wanted to do. The truth is we both just wished it hadn’t happened.

Whenever we talked about it, we would end the conversation by agreeing that we did the right thing. We
had
to change the lock.

“We’ll know for sure in the spring,” said my friend.

It turns out we didn’t have to wait until spring. We got our answer a week ago. There was a thaw. My friend found the key. The guy hadn’t taken it. He had swept it off her porch.

I have been thinking about him ever since. I have a lot of questions.

Should I have brought him to her house in the first place? I still think yes.

Should my friend have picked up the key when she saw it? I think yes to this one too.

This is the hard one for me. Did I have any right to go to that hotel? By knocking on his door, I was accusing him of theft. Would I have done that if he had lived in a nice house? If he had a good job?

It bothers me to think that when I left him that afternoon, I might have left him feeling unfairly accused, or defeated. I think I would have felt that way if I was him, and I am sorry for that. Whatever it was that led him to that unfortunate hotel room, his life was hard enough.

I believe I owe him an apology. I went back to the hotel with the intention of delivering it. It was my intention to tell him that we had found the key and that he was off the hook. But he wasn’t there anymore. On the off chance he reads this, I would like to say it anyway.

I am sorry that I doubted you.

27 January 2008

SAFE PLACES

Over the last fifty-odd years, the North American media—and I’m speaking of both the entertainment industry and the news bureaus that present the world to us—has framed our view of the world in a most unhelpful way. We’ve been told, over and over again, both directly and indirectly, that the world is not a safe place. A proposition I disagree with. This is not, I hasten to say, to imply that there aren’t dangerous people in the world, or even dangerous states. It is a complex and complicated world, sometimes sad, and often frustrating, full of intrigue and intricacy; but the simple fact is we aren’t surrounded by enemies, and the vast majority of people you might meet here, there or anywhere would lend a hand in help rather than in harm.

Yet the stories we’re given in our movie theatres, on our televisions, and in our newspapers wouldn’t lead us to this conclusion. Quite the opposite. Consider all the police shows, and reality shows, and talk shows. Look at the movie chosen by the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences in 2008 as the best of the year, the best America could do—
No Country for Old Men
. It was a movie of unspeakable violence. It left me, anyway, with one lesson, which was to question my
instinct to stop at the edge of a highway if I ever saw anyone in distress. That was one way the villain (or was it the hero?) would pose when he wanted to lay a trap for one of his many luckless victims.

We’ve bought this danger story hook, line and sinker, and in so doing, we’ve robbed our children of childhood. I fell for it too, which is probably why I feel so strongly about this.

The fact is that the strangers our schools teach children to avoid are more apt to help than to harm them. Yet we hover around our children like Secret Service agents shielding them from dangers that don’t exist, and instead of sending them next door to call on a friend, we arrange play dates as if we were social secretaries rather than moms and dads.

It is worth pointing out that it’s not just the media that should be held to account. Political leaders have been equally adept at this game. It has served more than one leader to paint the world as a dangerous place, to point to the enemies lurking around us. Here in Canada various politicians and police forces, serving their own self-interests, have warned us about rising crimes rates when quite the reverse is true.

Any person who has travelled widely would tell you this world is full of men and women just like you, men and women who are anxious to look after themselves, provide for their families and muddle through to the end as best they can. There are not armies huddled on our borders in the darkness, and if there are, they are the armies of the hungry and the dispossessed. And yes, again, there are bad guys, and yes, it is a tricky business navigating the ship of state, but any political leader who tries to tell you it’s time to circle the wagons is trying to sell you a bill of goods.

And that’s the truth.

It is not said enough, so I’ll say it again: the world is a good place, full of good people, and when we act out of that, when we act out of hope, and optimism, and faith in our fellow human, we act out of our best selves, and we are capable of doing great things, and of contributing to the greater good.

Hope and optimism are not synonymous with naivety. We should be looking to the future with flinty and steely eyes, for sure, but they should be wide open with hope, not squinting in fear.

Ask, and it shall be given you;

Seek, and ye shall find;

Knock, and it shall be opened unto you.

If it is evildoers you seek, you will find them aplenty; if it is enemies you want, they are there too. But if you want the truth, the truth is this: blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called the children of God.

9 September 2008

THE GIRL WITH

THE GLOBE

I was on my way home from one of the many farmers’ markets that dot the city in the summertime. My backseat was full of spinach and chard, pears and plums, old cheddar and fresh bread. I was driving slowly, wondering what I was going to eat first, and if the world ever got any better than this, when up ahead of me, it suddenly did. I spotted a young woman with the world literally on the back of her bike. She was pedalling in a random, summery way, without, it seemed to me, a care in the world. There was something fetching about her. Not
her
exactly. I couldn’t
see
her, except for the back of her plaid shirt. It was the
picture
of this young woman, with a globe, one of the old spinning kind that they used to have in the corners of classrooms, stuffed precariously into the basket on her back fender.

I don’t know why this image pleased me so. But it did. Enough that I rolled down my window when I caught up to her, smiled, and said, “Where did you get that?”

“Hey,” she said. And she flashed me a smile. “I know who you are.” So we stopped. Both of us. And I got out of my car. And she got off her bike. And we chatted for a while.

Her name was Madeleine. And she told me she was on her way back from the park, where she had been hanging out with her friend and his dog. And that on her way home she had spotted the globe in a pile of garbage on the side of the street.

“I always look in the garbage,” she said. “My mom taught me that.” She said that she saw the globe lying beside a broken computer chair, and a box of plates and old magazines, and some ripped plastic bags. And she told me when she saw it, she stopped, looked around and, when she was sure that no one wanted it, picked it up and put it on the back of her bike.

And ever since she had it back there, all the way home, she had been singing that old song, “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands.”

“I was still singing when you pulled up beside me,” she said.

So we went for a coffee and she told me about herself.

She told me life has not always been easy for her.

“I left home when I was fifteen,” she said. “And I have never lived in one place for longer than six months. I am always moving. Until I got to the place where I live now. I have lived there for two years, and I love it. Now I have to leave
it
because my landlord is renovating, and he is kicking me out. And I have to decide where I am going to go next. I am thinking maybe Brooklyn, or Montreal, or Edmonton, or Kingston. I lived in Mexico for a while and nearly got married there. But that didn’t work out.”

And then she shrugged.

“Life is not always clear,” she said.

And then she pointed at the globe.

“It is a great sign, though. Having a globe on your bike. Especially if you don’t think life has been fair.

“You are thinking
that
, and then you find a globe, and for some reason it makes you feel like life is giving you a sign in a delightful kind of way.

“So no matter how confusing things are, or how set back you feel, you know, if you have a globe on the back of your bike, it is all good.

“I think it is the universe talking to me,” she said. “It is telling me to go ahead and expose myself to change, and if I do that, something good will happen.”

We sat in silence after that. A surprisingly comfortable silence for two people who had just met, and then she smiled and shrugged again and said, “That’s all I can say. I don’t know if this story has an ending.”

And she got on her bike and pedalled away.

I watched her leave, and as I did, I felt like there were things I should have said. For instance, I should have said,
Everything is going to be all right. Nothing happens without a reason. You will be fine
. But I didn’t know that. Sometimes things aren’t fine. And, besides, she didn’t need to hear that from me. Yes, she had some heavy lifting to do, but she had a globe on the back of her bike. And she was singing when we met. And singing too, I bet, as she pedalled away.

12 July 2009

NEW YEAR’S EGGS

We all have our traditions to ring in the New Year. I have mine. One of them is to eat eggs for breakfast on New Year’s morning. It is, I have been told, good luck to eat something round to welcome in the year, which is
my
good luck, because my little egg ritual began for a different reason all together. It started, abruptly, on a New Year’s morning some thirty years ago and has been my tradition ever since. I remember that morning as clearly as if it happened yesterday.

I had spent many years
not
eating eggs. For a while it was a (misguided, I now learn) health thing. It didn’t begin as a health thing, however. It began in the foggy mist of my youth, the way these things often begin with children, for determined yet unexplainable reasons.

To be truthful, I don’t remember the specifics. I just know that I was a boy who ate eggs, and then, all of a sudden, I was a boy who didn’t. When I
was
eating eggs, I mostly ate them soft boiled, with little toast soldiers lined up for dipping. In fact, I think we called them “dippy eggs” in my family. And I can remember I liked eggs enough for a while that I would request “dippy eggs” from time to time.

And then I went off them, for whatever reason that was. And
when I went off them, I went off them with a
vengeance
. I went off avocado too. Or I never started avocado. I think avocado was just becoming common in Canadian stores at the time. And when it arrived at my house, I somehow got avocado mixed up with eggplant. Understandably, because an avocado is the same shape as an egg and the flesh of an avocado looks suspiciously egglike. And that was all it took to put
me
off avocado. I was having nothing to do with eggs, and that meant I was having nothing to do with something as suspicious as an
eggplant
, no matter how often I was told that avocados weren’t eggplants, and even if they were, eggplants had nothing to do with eggs. The avocado was doomed, collateral damage, sucked into the slipstream of my suspicion.