Failure, failure, failure, then success, even if the kite only flew for a few seconds and the dog only walked for a few feet.
Perfect.
“How about adding something more positive,” I said.
I took the microphone and after the first picture of the dog not walking I said, “But you have to believe.”
And after the first picture of the kite not flying I said the same thing.
In the end the kite flew and the dog walked. So much better than slipping on a banana peel or watching the person fall.
We had success, something we all hope for. We took a sad song and made it better. Which was the true story? What really happened? How much did we change reality, or not? How much did Sabrina not wanting it to be down have to do with lifting it up? Everything.
Like all stories, like all life and all dinners and report cards and trips on buses, it is how you look at it that counts. The kite flew. The dog walked. And that is the truth.
Randy Tait
Now here is a guy who took a sad song and made it into an opera, and not one of those traditional ones where everyone dies at the end. It is an opera in which the whole town is cheering the hero who has just slain the dragon.
Except Randy Tait has never been to an opera.
However, he is really good as Frosty the Snowman. If you go to Burnaby Village Museum at Christmas you can see him, a giant snowman waving at kids and having his picture taken with them and waddling around with pretend pieces of coal on his smiling snow-white face.
Under the costume he is not white, but he does have a smile.
When I first met him he wasn’t smiling. He had a stern face, with some bruises and unwashed hair.
He had just gotten out of prison. He had spent years there. Between trips back and forth living in a cage he lived in the back alleys of the Downtown Eastside.
“I remember waking up without a shirt surrounded by broken glass,” he said. “If I had rolled over I would have bled to death.”
Sad songs happen but somewhere, somehow, in some mysterious way he said to himself he had to do something. He had to make it better or he would die—and his death would not even be noticed.
On the day I met him I was standing on the steps of the Carnegie Centre just looking for something, as always.
He climbed the steps. We nodded, said a hello that was less than one syllable, followed by “How ’r’ you?”, which led to him saying he was going to an aa meeting but that he didn’t know if he could last through the whole thing.
I wished him luck, of course, the same as you would do for anyone facing anything hard.
I saw him a few more times over the next year or two and each time he was better, cleaner, straighter, stronger and talking more.
“I am doing this for me,” he said, which is the most important thing anyone changing their life has to learn.
Jump ahead a little over a decade from that first meeting. Randy had called me to say he was going back up those steps at the centre for a celebration.
I waited across the street with a cameraman. Randy, looking like a giant in neat fitting clothing and polished shoes, was going to share his eleven-year sobriety cake.
“This is the best day since the last best day,” he said.
He is Native. “Most people did not expect I could do this. They think we can’t control ourselves. I’d like to meet them,” he said.
As we crossed the street several of the citizens of Main and Hastings came to say hello to him. “He is a legend,” said one of them.
Looking at Randy, I thought the tiny telephone receiver stuck in his ear looked out of place for a tough guy on the skids.
“I get calls from people who need to talk,” he said.
Then he touched his ear. The phone had been ringing. Randy talked, then said to the person who called that he would talk again very soon. Then he touched his ear again. Another call.
He would turn it off just for the cake and then turn it back on.
The last time I saw him was at the Native New Year’s celebration at the pne and he was fully dressed in his aboriginal finest. He said he had to leave early the next morning to fly to Powell River to give a talk on preventing teenage suicide.
All he did was something so simple. He took a sad song and did you know what to it. He made it better. It works all the time.
A Famous Dog Story
I do not like the rain. Only crazy people are out and it is hard to talk to them because they all want to tell me how much they like the rain.
Other people are out, too, such as joggers, who are crazy because they run in the rain. They may be getting healthy but they are also getting wet and then they could get sick.
“How come you got sick?”
“I was trying to get healthy.”
What’s more, joggers are running too fast for me to say, “Excuse me, it is none of my business, but why are you running—or wearing that silly hat, or have no shoes, which is getting popular and is crazy, or have you done something amazing like run a million kilometres or something that we could put on television?”
I cannot ask that because they are gone before I can finish saying “Excuse me . . .” The very few that do stop still keep running in place while I’m talking and it’s hard to talk to someone who is bouncing up and down, and when they realize that they would have to stop running to answer my request they mostly shake their heads and go back to running, which is always away from me.
And I don’t like dog walkers, because they are always walking in the rain and when I ask why are they doing that they usually hold up a plastic bag containing something dogs must think people cherish because people are always collecting it and keeping it after the dog is finished with it. That must go beyond the understanding of even very smart dogs.
Anyway, dog walkers in the rain were not what I was looking for.
But then, way down near the water at Sunset Beach I saw some people. They were just standing, in the rain. This is good, I think. Except they are way, way down there, and that is bad.
I walk and walk. The rain is coming sideways and my umbrella is growing weak but the people are not moving so we have a chance. There are two of them I can now see.
When I get almost within shouting distance they start to walk away.
“Wait,” I beg.
One of them starts walking faster. Who wouldn’t when it’s raining and someone on the beach whom you don’t know wants you not to go?
They have on long dresses, which are soaked. I cannot tell what race or nationality these people are, but they are wet.
“Excuse me, it’s none of my business, but can you tell me what you are doing here?”
I tried not to sound like the secret police, but who else would be stopping them on the beach in the rain?
One kept walking.
“We were praying,” said the other one.
This was wonderful. I love people who pray. It is so heavenly and earthly and everything in between.
I once saw a man playing the bagpipes near the edge of the ocean. There were others with him. They were spreading the ashes of a friend and listening to the pipes, which were the favourite of the man who had become the ashes, and they were praying for him. In the world of beauty, this was beautiful.
Yes, we could take pictures of them. They thought it was good for honouring their friend. They, like cavemen and Egyptians and Romans and modern Christians, Jews, Muslims and others, were trying to connect with something no one has ever connected with.
Another time I saw a lone Chinese restaurant worker in a back alley off Pender Street. He was wearing his apron as he squatted over a pot with a fire. Into the pot he was putting paper, which I knew was make believe money that you can buy in any Chinese shop. He was sending it to someone in another world.
There were no words exchanged, there coul
d not be, but the picture was better than words. I explained what he was doing for those who did not know and then we just watched. To me there was nothing more wonderful or beautiful or meaningful. We try to do what we can do in the only way we can do it.
I have told these stories many times. You don’t need a tv to see them.
And now there was a woman at the edge of the sea in the rain praying. It could not be better.
“Could we take a picture of you?”
She nodded.
Heaven had opened its gates.
I looked at Todd, the cameraman. Yes, I nodded, praying that his camera had its personal rain jacket, which all of them have but none of them fit and they are a pain to put on and take off and all the camera people hate them, but if you don’t have it and the camera gets wet it stops.
He nodded. There was a lot of nodding going on, which was good.
Then the other woman, who was walking away, said something to the woman who had said Yes and I knew that the other woman had said No.
“Sorry, we have to go,” said the woman who had said Yes that was now No.
And they walked away, in the rain.
Darn.
Todd and I started walking back to the parking lot where he hoped he had not gotten a ticket. He had been in such a rush to get to the women who he did not know were praying that he hadn’t paid for parking.
According to the rules of the television station, they will pay for all parking but not for parking tickets.
They, the people who make those rules, know nothing, nothing at all, about how the product that they are selling gets collected. In short, people in management live in a comfortable world.
We will leave that aside.
Back to the rain and the beach. We were still walking. The prospects looked dim. No, actually they looked wet and barren and empty and impossible and it was late and there is just so much time allotted to finding something before it gets economically unworkable.
There is camera time, editing time and just plain time when some producer inside says, “If those hard-working people (meaning those useless idiots who can’t do their job) outside don’t come up with something we will have to find something else to put in that slot.”
There must be something, I said to me.
And there was a man with a dog. No. I am not going to talk to him. No. Not. No, I refuse. He is walking a dog in the rain. So what? I don’t care.
“Hello,” he says.
How can you resist an invitation like that?
“Hello,” I say. “Nice dog.”
I didn’t mean it.
“He’s an international celebrity,” said the man.
“What do you mean?” I asked, desperately.
I could hear it in my own voice. That was not a question, it was a plea. Please say something good.
“Well,” he said, and then he went into a long, long story about their last dog dying and he and his wife wanting a new dog but then discovering how free life was without a dog.
“We could go to movies and plays and out for dinner without worrying about our dog.”
Wonderful, I thought. Boring, I thought. The rain is hitting me, I didn’t even have to think.
We looked at his dog wandering across the sand where you are not supposed to let dogs go free.
“We found him on the internet.”
Good, I thought. Like internet dating. Don’t care.
“He was in Mason City, Iowa.”
Amazing, I thought. I really did think that. It is a good beginning—not much to go on after that, but a good beginning.
“But we couldn’t fly back with him.”
This is where I go “Huh?”
“They didn’t want him to fly. It might be bad because he was so small.”
That is good; better than good, I thought.
He kept talking.
“So my wife and father-in-law drove down to pick him up.”
That is pretty good. I know Iowa is in the middle of the us. Long drive.
Then came a monologue about how he, the fellow with the dog, had had a passport but it had been due to expire in a few months so he couldn’t go but he wished he’d been able to because, “Don’t tell anyone, but I am a much better driver than my wife or father-in-law.”
Sigh.
Then he said, “Apparently nothing happens in Mason City, Iowa, because a reporter showed up when my wife and her father went to the shelter.”
Wow!
“They did a story about the ‘international adoption’ and we were on the nightly news.”
Super wow!
Pictures of the dog, named Chester. Pictures of the owner, named Derek.
No pictures of Chester emptying his bowels on the beach or of Derek making a trek to find the leavings or of me directing him to the sizable leavings because Chester now weighed 125 pounds.
But there was something—an international dog.
I went back to the people who work indoors in the television station and told them what the story was about: an international dog.
Somehow we would make it exciting, I said, with a prayer they did not hear. See, prayers are everywhere.
This goes on every day, so when I tell you to find something interesting to tell to someone else I am giving you a hard job, sometimes an impossible task. Nonetheless the search is sometimes, just sometimes, worth the effort.
I got to my computer but I had no idea how to look up Chester the dog on the internet. I am more than a generation or two removed from the people of today. I am an alien with a ballpoint pen and a library card.
I figure we can still do the story with just the fellow’s description of how much publicity the dog got and how they had to drive to get him.
It would work, I prayed.
I stepped into the dark edit room. There was Carl, who did not strike me as a happy person until he went on vacation and met a girl. She was from Ohio.
“Here is her picture,” he said.
He was happy. It is like I said in the beginning of this book, love has everything to do with everything. Don’t question it. Just suffer through it. It will give you everything you want, and take away everything you have.
It is powerful.
Carl was happy.
I mentioned the television story on the fellow with the dog. Then I took a sip of my tea.
This has been a disaster with me. I used to drink coffee. Then I got older—too old to write a book and too old to make it to the bathroom when I drink coffee.
So I drink tea. It has the same effect but milder. I can make it to the bathroom. Don’t expect getting older will be easy.
When I got back Carl had up on the screen a five-year-old television news story from Mason City, Iowa. How did he do that? I had tried and failed when I got back to the television station. I had no idea how to do it.
Carl, like the other editors, did something impossible, at least to me. It is mind boggling. And then I looked at the monitor.
There was the Mason City anchor who looked like he was in high school (okay, I am prejudiced) introducing the story about the “international adoption” and then cut to a reporter who looked like a Grade 12 classmate.
And nothing could be better. This was small town television news. This was the real thing.
Put that in the story, the young anchor reading a teleprompter that said, “Pet adoptions are not unusual in Mason City, but an international one is.”
And then the reporter on the scene, saying, “Today, someone from far-off Canada is picking up cute little Chester,” over pictures of cute little Chester.
A tag line written across the screen, over cute Chester romping around, says, “Canada bound.”
It was big news in Mason City, but the best news was for me.
The old video of t
he young anchor and reporter made the story wonderful. At the end I said he was an international star, or something like that.
It really doesn’t matter what I said. The story was made by using pictures that Carl found and I could say, My gosh, they thought it was a big deal that the dog was coming to far-away Canada.
In truth, the anchor and reporter were more memorable than the dog.
And in truth, the big, big boss wrote to me on Facebook that the footage from Iowa was fantastic. I wrote back saying it was Carl the editor who found it.
That is probably why I love people who walk their dogs in the rain—and editors who are in love, even just briefly.
The Poor Dog
One more dog in the rain story. We did not have to hunt for this one.
We had stopped on a downtown street between one large condo and another large condo. We stopped just to look. The windshield wipers were still going and we could see the people moving like fish in a bowl.
Then along came the well-dressed woman walking her dog. I say walking, but actually the dog never touched the ground. She had it under her arm, which was small, but not as small as the dog.
It was a perfect downtown dog—tiny, with a tiny woof. She came out of a condo and walked halfway up the street to where there was a patch of artificial grass in front of a coffee shop.
Once upon a time there was a great forest in this same spot. Now there is concrete and plastic grass. If anyone wonders why the earth is falling apart and the oceans are rising and the glaciers are melting and the weather is changing, just look at the plastic grass and the concrete.
But that was not the concern of the woman. She only wanted her little house pet to do something so she could get back to work.
She put the small thing down on the grass that was not grass and held onto the leash, which had shiny emeralds embedded in it.
The small thing sniffed, took two or three steps, then squatted and did something. But that was not enough doing for the woman at the end of the shiny emeralds. She tugged on the leash and pulled the small thing to another part of the make-believe ground.
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