The Vinyl Café Notebooks

by Stuart McLean

  “When I was five years old,” said George, “I went with my parents on a family vacation to Portugal. We went to the small village of Serra d’El Rei, north of Lisbon. One afternoon my father took me to the beach. I remember him grabbing me by the arms and carrying me out into the ocean. The water was as deep as his chest. I was terrified. I was screaming and kicking, but he held me there, and the waves hit my face, and I have been afraid of water ever since.”

  George has been so afraid of water that he can’t remember the last time he took a bath. George takes showers. He is terrified of getting water on his face.

  “If there is water on my face,” he says, “I can’t breathe. I am afraid I am going to inhale the water and drown. Just to have water on my face makes me feel like I am suffocating. If I get water on my face, I have to hang on to something and I have to wipe the water off. Immediately.”

  When George was a teenager everyone would go to the beach. He would go too, but he wouldn’t go in the water.

  “I would watch,” he says.

  It used to scare him the most when he had to watch his brother.

  “It was awful. I would say to him, ‘Do you have to go so far out? Do you have to go so deep?’ I hated watching him. I always thought he was going to drown.

  “I couldn’t wait for him to come out of the water.”

  Sometimes George would take his shoes off and go in as far as his ankles. But if he saw a wave coming, he would panic and get out.

  “You try to hide it,” he says, “but you can’t hide it. You try not to talk about it. It is embarrassing.”

  Then ten years ago George’s worst nightmare actually happened.

  George has a friend who has a swimming pool in his backyard. George was at his friend’s home for a barbecue. He was sitting on the patio, as he always did, as far as possible from the pool. He was watching the water when he saw a little girl who was in the water start to drown.

  “I could see the panic in her eyes,” said George. “I jumped up, and ran to the edge, and I pulled her out. I actually saved someone.

  “That just made it worse. I would think of that little girl over and over. I would have dreams of her drowning. In the dreams she would change into my brother.”

  George is married, but he doesn’t have any children of his own yet.

  “My wife is thinking of getting pregnant,” he says. “And I know that if we have kids, she is going to want to go on holidays.”

  It was while he was thinking of this that George resolved to overcome his fear. He signed up for lessons at his neighbourhood pool—every Wednesday night for nine weeks. He thought that he would be swimming after two or three weeks.

  Learning to swim was harder than he thought. The first fear that he had to overcome was the fear of getting his face wet.

  During the first class his instructor made him put his face in water.

  “It was awful,” says George. “I would duck down and then I would come out panicking, wiping the water out of my eyes.”

  By the end of the hour George wasn’t sure he would come back. He began to have second thoughts.

  “I began to think, Do I really need to know how to swim? Why change now?”

  He went back.

  During the second class he met a woman who was as frightened as he was.

  “When I realized I was not the only person out there with a problem, that there were a lot of people like me, I thought, If she can do this, I can do this too. It made me resolute.”

  Then his instructor tried to get him to kick.

  “She gave me a board and tried to get me to go from one end of the pool to the other. There is a line where the water gets deep. I couldn’t make myself go past the line. I was afraid the board might slip out of my hands.”

  In the third class George’s instructor taught him how to tread water.

  “It was terrifying,” says George. “I cannot describe the panic. I had four or five feet of water below me, and I tried, but every four or five seconds I had to reach out and touch the edge of the pool.”

  George went home and told Paula he was going to quit. Paula said, “You are doing fine. You should keep going.”

  George barely slept. He thought about it all night. He thought, If she believes in me, I can do it. So he went back.

  George felt embarrassed in class because people who had started at the same time as him were already beginning to swim. He still was not swimming.

  At the beginning of every session he goes to the shallow end and practises what he calls his ritual.

  “I stand there by myself and put my face in the water and blow bubbles. I do it for about ten minutes. I have to teach myself each week that I can put my face in the water and not drown.”

  On the seventh week George skipped his ritual, and he panicked as soon as class began. So he went back to his ritual before every class. Last week he felt secure enough to venture into the deep end with his flutter board.

  “For the first time,” he said, “I knew that if it were to slip out of my hands, I wouldn’t drown.”

  And when he finished, when he kicked from one end of the pool to the other, he smiled at his wife, who watches every week from the stands.

  And that’s when he knew, for the first time, that one day he would learn how to swim.

  “I am very proud of myself,” he said quietly on Thursday morning. “It is my dream to go south and go snorkelling with my wife in the Caribbean one winter.”

  Sometimes love calls us to do the most amazing things. Sometimes love calls us to be strong, and sometimes it calls us to put our strength away. And always where there is love, it will eventually call us to courage. It is a call that never comes without pain. A call that never comes easily. It comes in hospital rooms, and in living rooms, and it comes in classrooms, and sometimes even in swimming pools.

  24 March 2002

  THE KEY

  On 16 December 2008, a Sunday, I woke up to find the city where I live blanketed with snow. The snow had begun the previous evening. By that Sunday morning it had snowed so much and was snowing so heavily that we were, quite literally, up to our knees in snow, and apparently sinking deeper. At some point before noon, the police advised people to stay indoors unless they had urgent and necessary business. The city effectively shut down.

  When that much snow is falling, especially when it is falling that fast, you don’t want to let it build up too long. If you do, shovelling your walk and the sidewalk in front of your house, which is your civic responsibility where I live, can become a Herculean task. And so that morning, trying to stay on top of the situation, I ventured out a number of times with a shovel. On one of those trips, I began to think of a neighbour of mine. She was a close friend who had done a lot for me over the years, and she was not at home. She was, in fact, one of the few people who were actually working on that snowy Sunday.

  This, I thought, was the perfect opportunity to repay her for the many thoughtful things she had done for me. I would shovel my walk and then walk over to her house and shovel hers.

  My friend lives alone, but she has a tenant who lives in a basement apartment and comes and goes from the back of the house. The walk from the sidewalk to the back door is long, and snow usually drifts back there, so this would not be an insignificant favour. I was feeling, I don’t mind saying, pretty good about myself for being so thoughtful and industrious. And then, as I began to do my walk, a man with a shovel, walking down the middle of my unplowed street, stopped and asked if I wanted his help.

  “I’ll do your walk for five dollars,” he said.

  Thinking more of my neighbour’s long walk than my short one, I hired him.

  While we shovelled, he told me a story. “I am down on my luck,” he said. He told me he had just broken up with his wife and that he had put a down payment on an apartment, first and last month’s rent, and when he showed up to move in, the man he had paid the deposit to had disappeared with his money.

  “I was conned,” he said
. And that, he told me, was why he was staying at the hotel at the end of my street. The hotel at the end of my street is not the kind of place where you would choose to stay if you could help it. It is the kind of place you associate with people who are down on their luck. The man who was shovelling my walk then told me that he was a carpenter. “My wife is a doctor,” he said.

  You never know, when people tell you these kinds of stories, how much is true and how much is made up. I tended to believe him, though the doctor part made me wonder. In any case, it didn’t matter. I wasn’t inviting him into my house. I was paying him to shovel my walk. And now that I saw how hard he could work, to help me with my friend’s.

  When we got to her house, I saw that, just as I expected, the snow had drifted badly into the back walk. It was waist high at the back door. My friend’s tenant was completely snowed in. A good thing, I thought to myself, that I showed up.

  It took the two of us the better part of an hour to do the job, and I was feeling both tired and pleased when my friend showed up just as we finished. When she saw the clean walk, she said, “That’s the nicest thing you have ever done for me.”

  I paid the man—more than I said I would pay him, probably more than I should have paid him, but it was almost Christmas, and he had worked hard, and maybe his story was true.

  “That is too much money,” said the man. And then, as if to give me my money’s worth, he picked up a broom and set to work on my friend’s front porch. Finishing touches. As we watched, he picked up the recycling bin, and the cedar chairs, and went at it. He was, it seemed, determined to remove every last fleck of snow.

  Eventually he thanked me, and disappeared, and my friend and I chatted. Then I headed home too. It was, maybe, an hour later when my phone rang. It was my friend.

  “We have a situation,” she said.

  She told me she had left a key to her front door under her recycling bin that morning. She said she had never done that before. She said she had left it there for her tenant, so she could come in and out through her front door because the back door was snowed in.

  “It was there,” she said, “when the man was sweeping.” She had seen it when he lifted the bin. Now it was gone.

  “I should have picked it up,” she said, “but I didn’t want to be suspicious of him just because he was hard up.”

  Then she said, “I have been looking for it for the past half-hour. I dug through all the snow. I didn’t see it anywhere. Do you think he took it?”

  My good deed wasn’t looking so good anymore. And this is the part where I don’t look so good.

  I could have said, “I don’t think that guy took the key. I will be right over. I will help you look for it.” Or, “We could change the lock.” I could have said all sorts of things. What I said was, “I will get your key back.”

  And I headed for the hotel where the man said he was staying.

  I was feeling bad. I was feeling responsible. My friend is a young woman. And she lives alone. I was feeling that she was going to be scared in her house, and that was my fault.

  She didn’t have the key. I didn’t have it. And she had looked through the snow. Where else could it be?

  The hotel was a rougher place inside than it appeared from the street, the sort of place you might see in a movie about a drug bust. A Quentin Tarantino sort of place.

  The sign said if you had any inquiries to go to room seven. The man in room seven said he had lent the guy in room twenty-four a shovel so he could earn some money. I went to room twenty-four. The man I had hired to help me answered the door.

  It wasn’t a big room. A single bed, a stained carpet, a desk, an old TV. There was no chair. He sat on the bed.

  “I think you might have made a mistake,” I said. “I think you might have picked up a key by mistake. I have come to get the key back.”

  I was trying to give him a way out. I didn’t care about blame or retribution. I was convinced he had the key, or at least if he did, I wanted to make it easy for him to give it back.

  He told me he didn’t have a key. I told him it had been under the recycling bin. And now it wasn’t.

  “I wouldn’t take a key,” he said. “I wouldn’t do that.”

  So then I told him I didn’t know him, and that the room and the hotel didn’t give him a lot of credibility or me a lot of comfort. I told him I needed comfort. He said he understood that.

  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 N
orth 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.