When I Was Young and In My Prime (24 page)

and how, when I brought him the little mason jar full of cherries that I had dried in his machine, he said,
Are they the sour or the sweet? Sour,
I said, and he smiled—
Just the thought and I can feel it in here,
he said, rubbing his jawbone

and the note he wrote in block letters on cardboard and put with the dryer when he sent it with Mom:
 

THIS DEHYDRATOR IS TO GO TO MY GRANDDAUGHTER
 

UNLESS SHE ISN'T INTERESTED ENOUGH IN IT
AND THEN I'LL SELL IT
 

and in smaller letters:

(
AND
I
'
M
GOING
TO
ASK
FOR
$100
 

BECAUSE
IT
COST
A
LOT
MORE
THAN
THAT
 

WITH
THE
ATTACHMENTS
)

and how, when we were visiting one weekend Grandpa peeled a banana and fed it to Grandma and Mom said to him,
Do you remember how you used to always both bring home bananas on the same day?

and later, when Mom went out to get groceries for him, he brought out his electric razor, held Grandma's face steady and her shaved chin, rubbing her jawbone and saying,
There, now she looks respectable
 

and when we were cleaning out the basement for the auction I found a shoebox labelled,
strings too short to be of use

and how Grandma's house was always full of candy dishes, how her bevelled-glass candy dishes always had candy
 

and Grandma pulling out her empty pockets at Thanksgiving dinner, saying,
I want to show you something

and how, when she no longer lived in her house, my

grandmother's candy dishes had wood screws and pill
 

bottles and fertilizer sticks for violets, and when they had
 

candy it was sticky and stale and didn't come properly out
 

of the wrapper

and how, when watering the violets on the window sill, Grandpa said the grosbeaks get drunk on crabapples in late autumn,
after they've got a couple frosts on 'em

and how Uncle Nick brought beer, and Grandpa said he might just get drunk for his eighty-seventh birthday
 

but he never did

and how he never smoked that cigar either

and how Grandpa said Aunt Dorothy giggled over Grandma's new Denby Twilight dish set, how he knew what she was going to say before she said it:
The teacups are shaped like chamber pots!

and all I know about Aunt Anne is that she was Grandpa's favourite sister and hated blue jays because they were greedy at her feeder
 

and though everything I thought I knew about what makes a life

is getting smaller and
 

smaller, lighter and
 

lighter, I seem to be less
 

and less able to
 

hold it all.

details from the urban soundscape

1

One morning last winter, I was woken by the squealing sound of a car spinning its wheels in a snowbank outside. The car digging itself deeper and deeper into hysteria.
 

I'd been having trouble getting out of bed in the mornings. The whining engine—the sound of no-traction panic—must have been burrowing into my half-consciousness for some time before it finally broke through and made me throw off the covers. And, no kidding, the very moment my feet hit the floor the squealing stopped, tires caught, engine engaged, the car drove off and I stood there, suddenly hungry
 

for the day.
 

2

Many of the major intersections downtown now have chirping bird noises so the blind know when to cross the street—a perky go-ahead chirp for the north-south axis and a lower, slower chirp for east-west.
 

Would the two sounds be identifiable to someone more literate in the language of birdcall? Or are they shorthand cartoons of birdsong, the way the lit-up walking stick-man of the visual pedestrian signal is shorthand for human?

Does the call and response of the intersections confuse the real birds?

3

In the middle of the night, sirens swoop in my neighbourhood like mosquitoes around the head of a sleeper in a tent, closer then farther. Fluctuations of an everlasting emergency. Just when you think they've died down, they return, sirens right inside your ear, impossible to swat.
 

4

In line at the bank downtown, transferring my weight from one foot to the other on the cool, hard marble floors, high-ceilinged hush of held breath, everybody behaving themselves in the belly of the beast. Somebody's cellphone rings behind me, and it sounds like the bank has been infiltrated by crickets.
 

5

Woken from a deep sleep by a storm last summer, James and I turned our heads on our pillows, met eyes during a lightning flash. His hand found mine under the covers. James is afraid of thunder. It's a fear I don't share, so I have to prompt myself to empathize. We didn't speak. My thumb stroked his. Lying there, we listened to the storm approaching from across the city until the thunder and lightning were almost simultaneous and they gave my heart a new pace and suddenly my forced empathy broke through, ran fresh.
 

And then, somewhere in the neighbourhood, a car alarm began to sound, set off by the flash and crack.
 

Which made me, for that moment, inexplicably happy.

6

Though I've never heard it myself, I'm told that residents of the neighbourhood bordering High Park sometimes hear coyotes howling in the distance.

7

Window open, early morning. Again, I'm woken from a deep sleep. This time by the sound of keening, many female voices wailing in unison from the apartment building across the street. I lie there blinking, disoriented. My body scoured by the women's voices. Somebody has just received a call from overseas maybe. Whatever it is, it's bad news. The women wail with both abandon and skill, communicating the fact of a loss, getting into all its corners, tunnelling through it so thoroughly it's linked to all loss, which makes it at once infinitely sadder and somehow easier to bear.
 

Then a single voice from the same building—somebody leans out from his balcony and yells:

WILL YOU SHUT THE FUCK UP IT'S FIVE O'CLOCK IN THE FUCKING MORNING TAKE YOUR MISERY SOMEPLACE ELSE

And the keening stops.

8

Most of the time you don't hear it, or not exactly. It blends into the background. It is the background, and you don't hear it, not as itself.
 

But sometimes you do hear it—especially late late at night or early early in the morning. Or, more specifically, in that still-dark hour that's both late and early, that hour just before dawn when you're, say, making your way home slightly drunk from a night out—seeing a friend's band then dancing at an after-hours booze-can—and you pass a group of new immigrants (these ones look mostly Tibetan) on the corner of King and Wilson Park, climbing one by one into the Rent-a-Worker van that will take them to a factory on the industrial outskirts of the suburbs where they'll trim the loose threads from floor mats destined for Hondas all day long, and the sight of them sobers you just enough to take in the strangeness of the hour. It's then
 

you hear the sound itself: the drone of the city, its main ingredient the traffic of the expressway, that prolonged
 

whoosh. But also, somewhere behind that, a blurred and hard-to-get-at current. It's a sound as constant and pulsing with force as surf, or a high strong wind in a mountain pass. As I said, it's mostly traffic. Transport trucks careening obediently between A and B along major arteries. A ghostly sound, almost
 

otherworldly. Listening to it, you feel that if you could somehow tap or reroute it, you could power a new kind of city.
 

a small rain

of copper

Yesterday I woke up and, I don't know, could be it was the sound of the birds, but I was buzzing there, you know. Bones felt restless. Like maybe they should be doing something. I started up pacing around. Trying to figure out what the hell was wrong with me. Well, after a while I think I put my finger on it. It's spring. Work. Work to be done. And at the same time I remembered the house is sold, garden with it—I don't have to do anything.
 

Well, I sat down on the bed and looked around the room. Wagon by the door, the one I built for the grandkids. Old bird feeder on the dresser beside Mary's reading glasses. She doesn't use them anymore. I keep them anyway. And all the family pictures. As well as the picture of the farm taken from an airplane. Aerial, they call it.

I sat there for a long time. I know I should have felt relieved. And I guess I did, a little.
 

Mom calls. Grandpa's fallen again. Cracked his hip. Landed himself in hospital.
 

His life is peeling off him. In one swipe, two layers, at least: his apartment, his mobility. Astonishing how quickly he's lost the use of his legs. So the outer layers go. Closer and closer to the bone. We clear out his apartment. He'll never live alone again.
 

An incomplete list of items in my grandfather's apartment: A litre jar of local honey, half-full. The seagull ball-cap from PEI with fake bird-shit on it. An enamel jug and basin, mismatched. The old wooden coffee grinder. Two of every kind of screwdriver. The bird clock. Uncle Alf's bell collection. Two round tin canisters, one for sugar (labelled in two languages) and one for tea (labelled in three, his shaky hand all the way around). A bushel of apples, dried to fit in a shopping bag. The Lawren Harris print of the glacier. His harmonicas. Seven shaving soaps. Sandy, the canary. A chest freezer full of garden produce, some of it dating back twelve years. A spool of string, tall as a forearm and thick as a tree trunk when it ceases to be a sapling and becomes a tree.

 
For each item: Will he need this want this like this miss this in his room at the nursing home when he gets out of the hospital? (No one asks, will he ever see that room?) If no (he will not need this want this miss this), does somebody want to take this home? If yes (somebody wants it), and more than one person wants it, who should take it? Who has already taken what? Who isn't here who might want or deserve it? (There are criteria both spoken and unspoken.) If yes, and only one person wants it, fine. If no (nobody wants it), what do we do with it? Auctioneer? Salvation Army? Garbage? What is it worth?

No one asks will he ever see that room. He will not need this want this miss this. Somebody wants it. Nobody wants it. There are criteria both spoken and unspoken.
 

(What is it worth?)