There the tiny thing with legs and a tail sniffed again, circled twice, squatted again and did the rest of the thing that the woman was waiting for.
She took out a plastic bag and picked up the stuff, both tiny deposits (no doubt still warm), gathered up the little creature in one arm and started to walk away.
“Excuse me, it’s none of my business, but does your dog ever see real grass?” I asked.
She looked at me with confusion. Should she answer? Should she call the police? Should she run?
“Why?” she said.
“I was just wondering if she ever gets to walk on real grass.”
“No. That would be dirty,” said the woman. “I have expensive carpeting and I want to keep it clean. Good day.”
She walked away, back through the front door of the condo and disappeared.
I was hoping that in a few minutes the little thing would stretch out on those expensive carpets—and fart.
ManWoman
Sometimes you just gotta do what you gotta do.
Even if it’s crazy and it will cost you dearly and you can’t undo it. Even if the reason for it is hard to explain and most would not believe it.
ManWoman. It has been years since I last wrote about him. If you know who I am talking about you will say, “Oh, yeah, there was a real nutcase.” And then you will tell someone the story.
If you don’t know him, a few moments from now you will say, “Wow, there was a real nutcase.” And then you will tell someone the story.
On the other hand it is one of those stories with no moral uplift. It is just weird and shocking and sometimes it is good to read about someone who has the courage to do what he wants to do even if the rest of the world, and that is no exaggeration, wants him to hide or go away or at least wear long sleeves and a face mask.
ManWoman was born Patrick Kemball in Cranbrook. It is a pretty town near the Alberta border. He described himself as a “normal, beer-guzzling, girl-chasing, car-crazy Canadian youth.”
He studied engineering, but he liked art and was good at it. Then he had a dream. He has never said what he was eating or reading or doing the night before but he swore there were no drugs involved. In his dream a glowing figure in a white robe came to him and told him it was his mission to revive the good name of the swastika.
Well, right there, that is where I quit. Right at that moment, when he told me that, I thought please give me an easier job, like bringing world peace or getting the sugar out of soda pop.
But no, the glowing figure wanted the reputation of the world’s most hated symbol cleaned and polished.
So Patrick did what he thought he had to do: he got a tattoo, just a tiny one, of a swastika on his pinky.
His mother, who was Jewish, thought this was odd. His aunt and her daughter, who had tattoos of numbers on their arms from a bad time in a concentration camp in Poland, thought this was not the best of ideas.
And then Patrick had another dream. Actually, it was the same dream but another night. He got another tattoo of the same symbol. Only this time it was larger and on his arm. He looked a little scary on the quiet streets of Cranbrook, which was trying to attract tourists.
Jump ahead a few years to the time when I met him. By then he had two hundred tattoos, each a little different in style and size, but all swastikas.
Several times people threatened to beat him into the ground. Once an older Jewish man hit him with a cane. Every time he went through an airport security check he was checked, and then checked again.
He was a big man, he had long hair and he wore coveralls—bright yellow coveralls. When he walked on a crowded street he usually had plenty of room.
“Why?” I obviously asked.
“Because it is my mission,” he said.
“But,” I tried to add without saying that this is crazy.
“There are no buts,” he said. “You gotta do what you gotta do so I am doing it.”
He then went into the history of the swastika, which for thousands of years was a good symbol.
He had a picture of a turn-of-the-century Canadian women’s ice-hockey team with a swastika on each of their sweaters. They lived in Swastika, Ontario, which is now part of a place called Kirkland Lake, which is easier to say.
He told me, and everyone else who would listen, that in many ancient civilizations the symbol meant good luck.
And then he had another dream.
Women were not being treated equally and he should do something about it.
He did. He legally changed his name to ManWoman.
This would cause problems with the tax people and the census.
“Mr. Woman, what is your first name?”
Much of his art contained swastikas, but instead of jackboots and tanks surrounding them, ManWoman painted doves and bunny rabbits.
In the end, I don’t think he won. The ugly symbol of the broken cross is too deeply scarred into our lives. The pain and death and destruction that went with it will take a long time to ease.
Maybe in a thousand years. Or maybe more.
But as for ManWoman, he did what he said he had to do, and he did it with a courage that was unbeatable. If only we had that courage, just with a different symbol, think of what we could do.
Sadly, after I did the story it sat on a shelf in the back of the edit rooms for months before someone finally ran it, at the end of the late show on a holiday Saturday night when there was a tiny audience.
ManWoman died a few years ago. Bone cancer, according to the doctors. Ink poisoning, according to his brother.
Baseball
It is time for something happy, and that is baseball.
I know some of you are groaning.
“Baseball is slow. Baseball is tedious. Nothing happens in baseball.”
That is three of you talking. But you are all wrong, along with the other three thousand who agree with you.
You like hockey or football or soccer or badminton—anything but baseball. Silly people.
True baseball is not what it once was, but if you grew up with it you could forgive it now for generally being a two-person game. There is the trillionaire pitcher who is only expected to last half the game before a reliever comes in to let the star’s arm rest. And of course the reliever is only expected to last a few more innings before the closer comes in all fresh to do what the other two so far have not done and win the game.
And there is the batter who swings, stops, loosens his gloves and then tightens his gloves, kicks the dirt, steps into the batter’s box and then watches a pitch go by that anyone could see was perfect. Then he steps out of the box, loosens his gloves, tightens his gloves, kicks the dirt and then steps back into the box.
For this, each year, he gets the average person’s lifetime salary.
Okay, you have a point. I agree with you, that’s boring.
But on the other hand, I was telling the editor, James Buck, about a magazine I once had from the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, dc. It had a cover story on old-time baseball as it was played in the 1870s and ’80s.
No gloves. There were many things different, but most of all no gloves. Because of that many balls were dropped or missed. Because of that there were many base runners and because of that the scores were high. How about 25–22, or higher? Now that would keep you awake.
Today’s gloves stick out a foot past the hand, which makes catching impossible balls commonplace, which keeps the runners from running, which adds to the lack of something happening.
So again, I agree with you.
And then James sent me the link to a YouTube video of the revival of old-time baseball, for which I gave him one of those giant thank yous, way bigger than a regular thank you.
You can find it and be fascinated. Thinner bats, funny uniforms and extreme fun in playing. Now that is baseball.
> And that is what I grew up with on the streets of New York. We played stickball just as often and in games that were just as wild as street hockey in Canada.
Girls, boys, everyone played. No gloves, no adult supervision, no uniforms, no scorekeeper. One ball, one broomstick and scores that were higher than your fingers could count. That is what made baseball wonderful—that and the fact that I once saw Jackie Robinson play.
I’ve written about this before, but if by some strange chance you missed it, here is the recap. We all skipped school. This was right before the Dodgers left Brooklyn for Los Angeles. We sat in the bleachers in Ebbets Field, a sacred place to those who loved the Dodgers but in truth it was a terribly hot place where you got bleached by the sun.
We could only see Number 42 from the back, and he was far away, but we said at that time that this would be one of the most wonderful things we ever did in our lives. We were right.
There were some men sitting in front of us drinking beer and smoking cigars and shouting a lot of insults at Jackie and Pee Wee Reese, who was his friend.
Once, during a terrible time of insults on the field when Robinson first joined the Dodgers, Pee Wee put his arm around Jackie’s shoulders. It was sad that he had to do it. It was incredibly brave that he did.
As far as the ugly men in front of us went, it took some work and some ingenuity but in short we kept saying we were going to throw soda over each other and that eventually got rid of them. The second best part of that was that the only seats left were next to a section of black fans. The men were quiet for the rest of the game.
But we did get to see Jackie Robinson play. It still gives me a thrill.
And in Vancouver I have been to many Vancouver Canadians games. They are Single A, which means you don’t get any lower.
From Single A you obviously go to Double A and then Triple A, and there you are starting to think that maybe there’s a remote possibility you will be called up to the majors to fill in for a game. And then, who knows.
So you can see that in the Single A league the dream is far off, which only makes them play harder. The games are wonderful and so is the stadium—small enough that you can actually see the players and hear them when they miss. That’s the time to cover your little kid’s ears.
That is exciting baseball.
And then there was the Japanese man in the parking lot at Sunset Beach. He had white hair under his baseball cap. He had a complete uniform, including the knickers that some major league teams still wear. He had a glove and a baseball made of hard, very hard, rubber.
He wound up and pitched at a concrete traffic barrier. Bang, strike. The ball hit right in the centre of the curve of the concrete. That is not easy to do.
It came back to him on one bounce. He scooped it up and put his arms up, then twisted his body and fired out his right arm with the ball leaving his hand again with beautiful accuracy.
I hated to stop him, but I had to talk to him.
He spoke very little English. After several tries, mostly between pitches, we learned he was visiting here. He played on a seniors’ team in Japan. He had brought his uniform and glove with him in case he found a game here he could play in.
And no, he was not a pitcher, although he sure was a good one. He played second base.
That’s all. I just watched him. It wasn’t like watching Jackie Robinson or playing stickball, but I will keep the memory just as long.
Not Even a Question
You might have seen this story, but it is worth repeating because good stories are like Christmas: they don’t get old.
Elena Schwartzman was with her four kids at the Richmond Public Market. She took them for lunch in the food court. Four kids pack a lot of stuff and then there is the stuff the mother has to carry—there are toys and coats and diapers and bags and more stuff.
Plus there are the kids. They sometimes wander off, and it’s terribly hard to explain leaving one of them behind!
When they had eaten, Elena got everything together and marched her kids and carried her stuff and pushed the stroller to the car.
When she got home that something happened that happens to almost everyone sometime. It was that moment when the world crashes and you look again and then it crashes much harder, because it is true.
“No, it can’t be.”
Back to the car to search. Maybe it’s there.
No.
Under the seat. Maybe it fell.
No.
She called the market, got their lost and found and—sorry, nothing. Thank you anyway.
And then the big crash as the realization sets in. Everything was in her bag. It’s crazy, but we all do it. Everything that is valuable we put in one place: credit cards, debit cards, cash, driver’s licence, medical cards, library cards, receipts, pictures, supermarket points cards, Air Miles, bcaa.
Some carry more—citizenship card, nexus, lottery tickets—and all of this in a folded up piece of leather in a pocket with no zipper or button.
Unless you are a woman. Then you have your bag, which has your wallet in it as well as your cellphone and a few hundred other things that are very important.
This is not meant sarcastically. We all do it, and sometimes it just happens.
Elena remembered hooking her bag over the back of the chair she was sitting at because there was no more room on the table or on the other chairs. And the back of the chair was safe because she, as many women know, could press her back against the straps. Bag locked in.
And then she got up and packed up.
“I was trying to make sure I had all the kids,” she said.
She did have them, and she had all their stuff, but she didn’t notice the bag as she walked away.
After the stomach-turning discovery she left her kids with her husband and went back to the market.
“It wasn’t there. I knew it wouldn’t be but I had to look.”
She talked to a few people selling food. She was desperate, but no, nothing.
The next day she called again.
Yes, the bag was there. Yes, she could pick it up. All the world was good again—unless, of course, there was nothing in the wallet in the bag.
She rushed to get there, as we all would, and yes, everything was there.
“Who? How?”
“I believe it was one of our custodians,” said the woman in the administration office who gave her the bag.
“Which one?”
“I’ll show you,” the administrator said.
A Filipino man pushing a cart with cleaning supplies was the hero.
Elena walked quickly to him and thanked him. He smiled. He nodded. He felt good. She felt wonderful and she was so grateful.
Elena is from Ukraine. In her country they make a most wonderful cake with cream puffs inside and a kind of marzipan top that overflows the cake like a snug roof. It takes a long time to make.
She brought the cake to the food court and I was lucky enough to be there talking to Elena when she saw her hero cleaning some nearby tables.
“That’s him! That’s him,” she almost shrieked.
She was bouncing. She stopped talking to me and literally ran to him.
“Remember me?” she said.
He looked, then smiled. “Oh, yes, thank you,” he said.
“No, I thank you,” she said. “You saved me.”
He smiled again. She gave him the cake. He looked surprised, not knowing what he should do with it. He still had his cleaning cart and was holding a mop in one hand, but he took it and thanked her again.
He said he had seen her with her children while he was cleaning tables. The next time he got close she was gone but the bag was there.
“I didn’t want to touch it,” he said. “Someone might see me and that would be bad.”
He stood guard over it while he us
ed his radio to call security, which took a while to come. Meanwhile he was getting behind in his cleaning.
Eventually someone came and took the bag. He said he was happy and that was the last he thought of it. He went back to cleaning.
I talked to him. His name is Dairo. I did not expect an answer, because most people will not tell you this, but I asked him how much he made. He didn’t understand the question.
“What is your salary?”
Again, he didn’t get it, probably because the food fair was noisy and he didn’t imagine that was what I was asking.
“How much do you get per hour?”
“Ten dollars and forty-five cents,” he said.
“You gave back a bag with money in it,” I said.
He looked at me again as though one of us did not understand the question, but this time it was me failing to understand that this was not a question to him. Not giving it back was an impossibility. I didn’t ask him, but I know the thought of taking the bag never occurred to him.
I asked if he had a family that he could share the cake with.
He said his wife was still in the Philippines, which meant that he was working to send money to her.
I asked how long he had been in the country.
“Four months,” he said.
Wow, I thought to myself. Thank goodness for the immigration officer who let him in.
Then Elena left with her bag over her shoulder. She couldn’t believe someone could be so good.
And Dairo walked back to his work station with the cake. He didn’t know what to do with it. He couldn’t put it there, not with the used plastic forks and empty cups, so he picked a clean table and gave it an extra wipe. Then he put the cake in the centre and went back to work clearing up other people’s dishes.
He would keep sending his wife money until she could join him. He would tell her the story as soon as he could call, and I imagine she would say he did what she would have wished him to do.
He was only wishing he could share the cake with her.
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