Category Archives: Stories

Rip Van Winkle

Posted: September 20, 2018 at 10:01 pm

As the story goes, Rip Van Winkle fell asleep for 20 years and awoke to discover he missed the American Revolution. I felt like Rip last weekend when I visited my alma mater, Western University, in London Ontario, with my buddy Mark. SO much has changed while I slept through the last 40 years. Here are a few of the differences on campus from 1978 to 2018: 

In 1978, I ogled the lithe and nubile cheerleaders at the football games. They wore short, SHORT skirts, and I was glued to their every move, waiting for their skirts to flare up so I could see their underwear. In 2018, it’s almost the same, except they’ve saved me time and effort by just wearing the underwear, without the skirts.

About to enter the washroom at the campus Spoke ’n’ Rim bar (an action I completed about 9,000 times in the ’70s), I read a notice on the door: “Western respects everyone’s right to choose a washroom appropriate for them. Trust the person using this space belongs here.” We didn’t have that in 1978, but I think it’s a good thing.

It’s not polite to look at another dude at an adjacent urinal, but I spied a young man in the Spoke’s washroom, two-thumb texting while he peed (look Ma, no hands). There are a bunch of reasons why that never happened in 1978.

When I was at Western, there was a bar in the basement of the student centre called the Elbow Room. It was a chill oasis of calm where I drank beer in-between classes. Alas, the Elbow Room is no more, but there’s still a bar at the same location. Only it doesn’t sell alcohol and it’s called Wax Bar. Their corporate slogan is, “There’s a Brazilian number of reasons to get waxed.”

My old dorm, Saugeen, was a co-ed, 1200 student, hormone-bursting apartment block of debauchery. From its inception, it was deservedly called the “Zoo,” owing to its collection of uninhibited animals. The residence symbol was a monkey, which I designed as a student and which graced the cover of the Saugeen yearbook. At Saugeen last week, the residence proctor (kind of like the president of the residence) gave me a tour of my old haunt. She brought out the 1978 yearbook to jog my memories, but then balked. “Oh no,” she said. “Does that say ‘Zoo’ on the cover? We can’t say ‘Zoo’ anymore. In fact, we’ve forbidden anyone in this residence to ever say ‘Zoo.’” I assume they were in the middle of a failed attempt of rebranding, trying to convince parents their children’s residence wasn’t wild. The Zoo: “The Nickname That Shall Not Be Named.”

My dorm room in 1978 accommodated two guys, on a floor of 30 young men, bent on mayhem. Saugeen has long since integrated every floor with boys and girls, a calming influence on the drunken idiots. The proctor used her skeleton key to let me into my old room, now decorated with ruffled pillows and darling stuffed animals. The current inhabitants of Room 754 are two gals named Balpreet and Jordynne.  There was no one named Balpreet or Jordynne at Western in 1978, but there probably should have been.

I visited Saugeen’s cafeteria. It’s now a beautiful, distressed-wood-and-planters ashram with organic quinoa salads and an Asian stir fry bar. When I lived in Saugeen, the cafeteria was a cement-block hangar that held pub nights with drugged-out rock bands, always ending with a wet t-shirt contest. The food was boiled until it was grey, or fried until the batter calcified. A mainstay was what we called Mystery Meat.  We dubbed the Swiss Steak “Swiss Mistake.” Once a week they served fried chicken and fries in a little red plastic basket, lined with a red and white checkered paper, called Chicken-in-a-Basket. It was greasy and disgusting, renamed by the students as Chicken-in-a-Casket. Those were the three best entrées.

Near Saugeen’s cafeteria, there was a photocopier where our drunken selves photocopied our bare butts so we could give pictures to girls. Hilarity ensued. For some reason, probably linked to hygiene and the #MeToo movement, the photocopier has been removed.

One thing hasn’t changed since 1978. The Western football team, once again National Champions, won Saturday’s game 77-3.

Bluebeard

Posted: August 2, 2018 at 11:09 pm

That evening, I sat in my favorite chair in la Pistache, the one beside the best reading light. I underlined incomprehensible phrases in La Provence in preparation for coffee with Cécile. The children watched The Adventures of Tintin on our tiny television.

“Daddy, can you help me with my homework?” asked Devon, five minutes before bedtime.

“Poor planning, Dev,” I said. “You’ve had all evening. Why are you doing it now?”

“I just remembered.” How could I be angry with him? I was a more skilled procrastinator in my youth. “I have some grammar and I have to review two pages of a story my teacher gave us.” I put down my newspaper.  

“Let’s sit at the dining room table,” I said. I interrupted my reading with pleasure; I liked doing homework with my children more than, well, anything. They both had a curiosity about learning I found satisfying. They were also petrified of being unprepared for class, and wanted the highest score in any academic pursuit. There was no disputing these traits were paternal in origin. 

“Dev, even though it’s late to start your homework, I love we have the time to do it together.”

“You always help me, daddy. Ever since I was a kid.”

“I appreciate that, Dev, but it’s not true. There were lots of times in Vancouver when I was working, or too cranky, and I couldn’t do this. In Aix I don’t have excuses. And you’re still a kid. You’re only in Grade Three.” 

We started with grammar, my weakest subject. Devon delighted in correcting me, with sly grins of superiority. He often forgot I was the reason he was bilingual. At lesson’s end, I used the incorrect French verb for “to know.” The word “savoir” means “to know,” in the context of knowing how to do something. “Connaître” also means “to know,” but it’s used when referencing a person or a place, as in, “I know Paris well.” It’s easy to mix them up.

Devon looked like he swallowed a canary. “Dad, you can’t use connaître like that. You have to use savoir.”

“You’re only eight,” I said. “How can you know that?”

With a straight face, he said, “I don’t know, dad. I just savoir it.”

“Okay, enough grammar. What’s the story about?”

“Get it, dad? I savoir it.”

“It doesn’t get funnier the more you say it,” I said. “Tell me about the story.”

“It’s called ‘Barbe-Bleu. That means Bluebeard in English.”

“Thanks for the translation.” I knew this story, a well-known French folktale. We read it together, and I wondered what sadists chose the curriculum for eight-year-olds. The story is summarized as follows:

A wealthy man lived in the country. As a consequence of his unattractive blue beard, none of the local ladies would date him. His neighbor had two daughters, and Bluebeard asked to marry one. The daughters refused, citing Bluebeard’s ugliness, and the small issue of the disappearance of several of Bluebeard’s former wives. Bluebeard had some swinging parties, allowing the ladies to see he was a fun guy, and one daughter finally married him.

After a month of marriage, Bluebeard told his young wife he was taking a business trip. He gave her keys to the house, the safe, and the cabinets holding jewels and gold. He also gave her one tiny key, and made her promise not to use it to open the small door at the end of the hall. Of course, as soon as Bluebeard left, the wife entered the restricted room. It was covered in blood, and Bluebeard’s former wives, throats slit, hung from hooks (did I mention Devon was only eight?).

In a panic, the wife left the macabre scene and locked the door. Unlucky, she smeared blood on the tiny key, and being magic, it was impossible to clean. When Bluebeard returned, he demanded to see the keys, and asked his wife why the tiny key was covered with blood. 

“I don’t know,” she said. 

“You may not know,” said Bluebeard, “but I know all too well. You have gone into the little room! And now you will re-enter the room, and take your place among the others.”  

The wife threw herself at Bluebeard’s feet, crying, and begged him…and begged him…and…

And that’s all we had of the story. Devon’s photocopy ended, mid-story, mid-sentence. He couldn’t read the ending, in which the wife was saved by her two brothers. They slew the serial-killer, rendering the widow both wealthy and Bluebeard-less. I worried about Devon going to bed with the image of Bluebeard’s many wives strung up on meathooks. As I tucked him into bed, he said, “Dad, you know what I was thinking about?”

Uh-oh, I thought. “Uhh, no. What?”

“You know what would be cool? In 1,000 years, people will look back and study us, like we’re prehistoric people. They’ll say, look, they actually reached down and used their hands to pick up a glass if they wanted a drink. Today, we have robot arms which bring the glass to our mouth.” 

How am I going to give up these precious moments? I couldn’t go back to Vancouver and resume my regular job. I couldn’t be like I was before, I couldn’t miss out on my children’s ephemeral years, those unrecoverable years, being an absent father. I pinkie-swore with myself I would structure my new Vancouver life to allow for maximum family interaction, maximum mental engagement, Provence-level. I immediately regretted binding myself to the unbreakability of a pinkie-swear, despairing I could not construct such a life and still make a living.

I returned to my favorite chair with my laptop and a glass of rosé. “Just savoir it?” I had to record that story before I forgot it. I laughed out loud while typing. Why can’t my real life be like this? Crafting stories from the quirks of everyday living for my own amusement. Unfortunately, blogging wasn’t a career; my vignette would be thrown into the blogosphere’s yawning maw, where it would be read by fifty friends and be lost in the beast’s intestinal tract along with millions of blogs written by unfulfilled millennials.

That thought threw me down another well of depression, too deep to escape. While I was down there, I came to a woeful conclusion.

He Who Hesitates Is Flattened

Posted: January 14, 2018 at 4:16 pm

I figured out the secret of success in life while learning how to cross the street in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. Let me explain.

I’ve circumnavigated a Renault Super-Cinq through the confluence of twelve roads at the Étoile traffic circle in Paris. I’ve fought the crowds on foot through the streets of Manila, Hong Kong, Beijing and Guangzhou. One time, I even stepped in front of a throng of Lululemon-bedecked, West Van yummy-mummies ordering their morning grande, extra-hot, non-fat, low-foam, extra shot vanilla lattés at Starbucks. So I understand the threat to one’s person when crossing  against the flow.

But nothing prepared me to wade into the vehicular insanity of Ho Chi Minh City. Home to 10 million people and an equal number of motorcycles. I estimate 10% of the vehicles are cars, taxis and Ubers, while the rest are motorcycles and (for the hardy) bicycles. No one walks. Motorcycles are used to transport what SUVs and trucks carry in North America…..bags of rice piled on the seat behind the motorcycle driver, taller than his head.  A bouquet of wire lanterns ten feet in diameter. An ancient, hand-operated cement mixer on a wooden trailer, only connected to the motorcycle by the driver’s left hand. And a family of five: father driving, a toddler standing on a metal platform placed between dad’s feet, a 5-year-old sitting behind dad, followed by the mother, with a breastfeeding infant in the crook of her left arm, a cellphone at the end of her right. Only dad wore a helmet.

If there are driving laws, they are spectacularly ignored. Lanes are imaginative, traffic lights mere suggestions, safety a quaint fiction. More than once, I saw a motorcycle driving at the side of the road, against the traffic, on the highway.

There are few crosswalks, and their faded white lines mock the tourists as traffic speeds by, unabated. Remember watching the Tour de France on TV, and the peloton races by, maybe 200 riders in a pack, wheel to wheel, shoulder to shoulder? It’s like that, but motorcycles. Standing on the crumbling curb, you see no breaks in the traffic, no windows of opportunity, no Frogger-like path to weave back and forth, side to side.

If you wait for a convenient or safe time to cross, you will never cross. Here’s the key: forget there’s any traffic and walk straight across the road as if you’re the only one there. As Hall of Fame pitcher Satchel Paige said, “Don’t look back. Something might be gaining on you.” Also, don’t stop, hesitate, stutter-step, or look at the approaching traffic on your left (and it may come from the right!). Trust the cars and motorcycles and bicycles and tour buses and cement mixers will flow around you like water. They almost always do.

After two weeks in Vietnam’s asphalt minefields, I realized my newfound street-crossing philosophy could also be applied to achieving success in life: walk confidently, keep moving forward, and don’t break stride.

Le Tour de Rants

Posted: July 22, 2017 at 2:01 pm

As I watched le Tour de France race through Marseille today, I felt a couple of rants coming on. But first a bit of background.

In person, I have seen stages of le Tour de France on four occasions, and it is my favourite sporting event. It’s also the hardest thing to win in sport. I have driven a car up Alpe d’Huez, one of le Tour’s ugly mountain stages. My little Renault Super Cinq could barely make it up the 21 steep hairpin turns in first gear. It’s harder on a bike. There is a scale for rating the difficulty of mountain climbs in le Tour, but Alpe d’Huez has the special designation of hors catégorie, which translates exactly to “it’s so frickin’ tough that it is beyond our classification scale.”

Every year, the cyclists strain to reach the summit of Alpe d’Huez, to complete a 172 kilometre challenge. The crowd’s always boisterous, if not slightly insane. Fans dress up as superheroes, vicars, kangaroos, vikings, and weird naked guys. Everyone cheers madly, waving the flags of their home countries. So far so good, but here starts the rant.

During le Tour de France, the most famous bike race in the world, boasting millionaire riders of immeasurable physical conditioning, there are no rules for the crowds. The fans surge onto the racecourse during the competition…and why wouldn’t they? After all, there are no barriers keeping them away, and, well, they are mostly French. Fans constantly touch the riders, run beside them, cross in front of them at the last second, narrowing avoiding collisions. In what other professional sports championship are the fans allowed onto the field of play during the game? A couple of years ago, I watched Frenchman Christophe Ribbon inch up d’Huez in the lead. The crowd blocked his route, leaning over in front of him, opening a sliver of road at the last second. Riblon looked like Moses parting a Red Sea of crazed cycling fans. The road was obscured by the people and the flags held in front of each rider…the cyclists just had to trust the depth perception of a mass of drunken idiots to pull back in time to avoid collisions. I don’t think it’s a lot to ask that le Tour riders can actually see the road they are racing on, a split second before they ride it. Running guys were slapping Riblon and the other riders on the butts and shoulders while they climbed the Alps. It was like trying to give an NFL wide receiver a high five, just as he’s trying to make a catch, in the end zone. Near the end of the race, a jogging, beefy guy tried to put his arm around Riblon’s shoulder, (remember, this is DURING the competition), and the cyclist started to veer off course. Riblon had to lash out and punch his fan in the chest just to get clear. Most telling was that the television announcer didn’t even comment on the incident, which is common. How can this be allowed during a professional sporting event?

There is a short section of the climb up Alpe d’Huez which actually has normal metal barriers, the type you would see at any North American race. An affront to the crowd, the barriers can not hold back everyone leaning over, shaking their fists, trying to touch the riders still. Huge flags hang over the racecourse so the riders have to duck to get through them. Fans with foam swimming noodles whack riders on the helmet. I remember one lonely guy, who probably lives in his mum’s basement, dangling over the fence a hugely fat, naked, blow-up sex doll, its cherry red lips held in a permanent “oh.” The riders casually ducked under her too.

The route up the mountain is narrow, made narrower by the long, long line of camper vans parked on the road. Not at the side of the road, or in a campground near the road, but ON the road while the race is in progress. Those without camper vans pitch their tents on the road, which may make for a hard sleeping surface, but keeps one close to the action. I think it would be cool if the next time I went to New York I just pitched my tent in centrefield of Yankee Stadium. During the World Series. Good seats.

It isn’t all uphill for the riders on d’Huez, and in one descent most hit 70 kilometres per hour. While they risk their lives racing downhill, team cars weave in and out between the riders, with inches to spare. Bystanders walk across the road, narrowly  avoiding collisions with racers and team cars. The cyclists breathe the fumes of the many motorcycles with cameramen on the backs, sometimes sitting backwards while they film the racers. So much for the health and safety of the riders.

I appreciate that le Tour de France is partially great because the fans can get close to their heroes. Anyone can go, and it’s free. The lack of rules adds to the race’s charm…it’s a month long party where anything goes. But as I watch horrific crashes of cyclists in le Tour each year, I remember the closing day of a recent Tour de France. The cyclists were on the final bolt up the Champs-Élysées, a cluster of sprinting madness. Each rider was inches away from his neighbour, pumping furiously to win the final stage. A woman leaned over the course, and her purse handle looped around the handlebars of one of the riders. He immediately went down in a high speed, end-over-end tumble of road rash and broken bones, taking a dozen others with him. There formed on the road a huge clump of tangled metal and bloodied millionaires. I asked myself what it was in the French psyche that justified the danger to its heroes when a reasonable barricade could eliminate most hazards, without loss of enjoyment for the fans. Maybe I’m just too English to ever understand it.

My Mid-Life Crisis

Posted: September 25, 2015 at 9:55 am

 

“Maybe you’re just going through a mid-life crisis.”

It was February 2012. Having just taken a bite of my smoked duck breast and gizzards, I started choking. I sat in my favourite booth at Café le Verdun with my medium-level-friend Dan, visiting from Canada. Dan had skipped a few levels on the relationship scale by inviting himself to stay with me in Aix-en-Provence. He heard for the first time I didn’t want to be a lawyer anymore, and his conclusion surprised me. How could I be going through a mid-life crisis? I’m only 53! Uh-oh, wait a minute.

Cough. Swallow. I took a sip of Sauvignon Blanc. “No I don’t think that’s it, Dan,” I said. “I’m just so tired of reading contracts and the rest of that shit that I have to do something different.”

That’s a mid-life crisis, Billy.” Dan was talking with his mouth full and I could see bits of seafood lasagna in there. “You’re asking yourself what it’s all for, aren’t you? Well, I can tell you what it’s all for. It’s all for money. Forget about all that higher meaning bullshit. We do our jobs for the money.  Everyone wants to retire with lots of money and live in a house on the ocean and have a cabin at Whistler. If your job was fun, they wouldn’t pay you so much to do it.”

“But I can’t take it anymore.” I felt whiny. “Besides, last year I had tendonitis in my elbow from clicking my mouse all day.” I drummed the fingers of my right hand on the table, as if proving to Dan their connection to my injured elbow.

“Are you really ready to give up your clients?” Dan asked. “A barista makes ten bucks an hour. How many times does ten divide into your hourly rate?”

I told him the number.

“And you’re complaining? His job is way harder than yours, and he has to clean the toilets too. Are you fucking crazy?” Dan said. The waiter looked up from across the restaurant and scowled.

“I know, I know. My job was easy for me. Easy isn’t the right word, but you know what I mean. I have nothing to complain about, but I was miserable, all the time. I just need to escape. Somehow I thought that during this year in France, something better would miraculously happen to me. I figured I’d find something better to do or I’d meet someone who’d offer me some cool job.” I felt embarrassed saying that out loud, and looked down at my plate so I could avoid Dan’s eyes.

Dan pointed his fork at my chest. “You must have known that wasn’t going to work. What happens when you go back? It took years for you to get that great setup. You won’t just find two perfect clients like that, two huge clients, and start back where you left off. Some lawyers can’t find jobs, you know.”

“But I don’t want to start back where I left off,” I said. “I’m done with it.”

“You can’t do that, can you? How will you live? Don’t you want to retire some day?”

“Well, I can’t retire yet, that’s for sure. I don’t have enough money. But I don’t have to continue making what I was making. I don’t think. I’m not sure. Maybe when I go back, being a lawyer won’t look so bad anymore.” I paused. “What am I saying? It’ll still be bad. I’m an idiot.”

The waiter had appeared at our booth, hearing my last sentence, perhaps understanding. Dan waved him away with a flick of his hand. I could see the waiter roll his eyes and heard a suppressed sigh as he turned.

“Is it SO bad that you can’t do it for another five or 10 years, make a shitload of money and then retire to do whatever you want? Then you can go to France for as long as you want.” It sounded so simple when Dan said it like that, but I instantly recoiled.

“If I thought I had to be a lawyer for 10 more years, and that would be my last job until retirement, I would probably have to kill myself.”

“Really? You’d kill yourself?” said Dan. I saw the woman in the next booth, obviously a tourist, sit up straighter so she could hear the rest of our conversation.

“Of course not. I’m too much of a chicken. And if I killed myself, Carol would really kill me. But I just can’t keep doing what I was doing. I always thought I was smart enough to end up doing something cool or something insanely fun, and I ended up reading contracts. It’s just so boring.”

“What would be your perfect job?” Dan held up his arm to get the waiter’s attention. The waiter looked in our direction, expressionless, then walked toward the kitchen.

“I was asked that once at a party. Without thinking, I joked I’d like a job where I could paint nude portraits of my friends’ wives.”

“That doesn’t sound like it would pay much. Can’t you just do that in your spare time? A real job would be the lawyer for Playboy Enterprises.” Dan giggled. “That would be fun.”

“I doubt they let the lawyers take the pictures. Or hang out in the grotto.”

“You’re probably right. That sucks. I just think that throwing away all those years of school, when you’re at the top of the heap, is crazy. Maybe there’s a different way you can be a lawyer that you’ll like better.” Dan waved at the waiter again, who had returned from the kitchen and was three booths away, intently studying his empty tray.

“Yeah, I thought about that,” I said. “Maybe there is. But I don’t think so. I hate all the lawyer bullshit. And I am tired of having to be perfect. Everyone expects me to be right all the time, everything is so exact. I like broad strokes and ballpark answers, I like artsy stuff, and I’m stuck with the opposite. I’m a total faker.”

“That’s not true. You can’t be a faker for 20 years and still have a bunch of happy clients. You’re good at your job, obviously.” Dan was always a bit in awe of the career I created, and believed me to be much smarter than I actually was.

“Well, it’s not me. I’m not that guy. I don’t wanna be that guy,” I said, without eloquence.

“How can you waste all that education?” Dan asked.

“Who says it’s wasted? Can’t I do something else with my brain?”

“Sure you can,” Dan said. He paused. “Maybe you can do business development for some big company and negotiate their deals.”

“That’s kinda what I was doing already. No, I have to make a clean break. I don’t want any job like the one I had. If I do this half-assed, I’ll end up where I was before. I’ve got to let go completely, turn everything upside down.”

“Wow. I don’t know if I could do that,” said Dan. I was perversely happy that he was afraid to do what I was planning, but I didn’t tell him that.

“I like the idea I’m finally thinking big, but thinking big is scary. I never thought I would have the guts to do this. To leave law. That’s all I know how to do.”

“It’s not the smartest financial decision you’re making.”

“Tell me about it,” I said. “Every bit of logic tells me the smart thing to do is go back to law, work hard for 10 years and then retire. But my heart and soul are screaming at me to never do law again. It’s not me. So I have no choice but to do something different.”

“Well then, I guess you do.”

“It could be my mid-life crisis. Maybe. But I think I’m now confident enough to not worry about what other people think I should do………..and not for one minute more do something that I don’t want to do,” I said, raising my voice much more than I intended. I certainly sounded more sure than I was. I could see the waiter coming our way.

“Sounds like you’ve made up your mind,” said Dan.

“I have, I guess. I don’t know. I’m freaking out a bit. Oh, here’s the waiter. Should we order dessert?”