I'll Seize the Day Tomorrow

by Jonathan Goldstein

  The scientist on the radio is now describing what the Earth being consumed by fire would look like; although, he concedes, no one would actually get to see it happen, as human life would be long gone before then.

  I get up and turn off the radio. Life’s too short to attempt too much at once. I sink back into the couch and watch the rest of the film in silence.

  FRIDAY.

  Tony is driving me home from work. At the stoplight, he calls his fiancée, Natalie, on his cell phone.

  “I’m on my way home,” he says. “Need me to pick up hot dogs?”

  Tony really likes hot dogs. Natalie doesn’t. He listens for a while, says goodbye, and then turns to me.

  “Her answer is always no,” he says, “but I just can’t stop trying.”

  Sometimes a cell phone can change life’s course of events, but most of the time it’s just as powerless as anything else.

  Popeye Loves His Olives

  (51 weeks)

  TUESDAY.

  I’m out for dinner with Marie-Claude, and after the waiter takes our order she stares at me appraisingly.

  “A spinach salad?” she asks. “With cranberries and goat cheese?”

  “I like spinach,” I say, suddenly ashamed.

  “I don’t get you. Whatever happened to the Jonathan Goldstein who never felt a meal was complete without French fries?”

  “He died of a heart attack at thirty-two.”

  The thing about having childhood friends is that they see any changes in your behaviour since the age of eleven as a betrayal of your basic personality. If you’re not collecting hockey cards with a face covered in chocolate, you’re a pretentious ass.

  As a compromise, I consider eating the salad with my hands when it arrives.

  WEDNESDAY.

  I’m on my way to Waterloo, Ontario, to deliver a keynote address, and while waiting for the plane to board, I have a sandwich and beer at the airport bar. The tab comes to nearly seventeen dollars. After paying it, I look at the bill.

  While I’m irked that the bartender has bundled a service fee into the total, I’m galled that the additional tip I just paid him was calculated based on that total—a total that included a gratuity I’d been unwittingly bilked out of.

  Just as I’m about to say something—or, rather, just as I’m about to consider saying something—the bartender approaches me with a large jar of olives.

  “I’ve been trying to open it all evening,” he says, his face red with exertion. “Would you mind trying?”

  His request catches me off guard. In an instant I go from feeling angry to feeling needed. I attack the jar with the kind of ferocious determination that involves grunting, grimacing, and almost herniating my disc. For some inexplicable reason, I want nothing more than to prove myself to a complete stranger who, only moments earlier, ripped me off.

  After about a minute, the lid pops open. I’m covered in sweat and olive juice. The bartender thanks me and then, for a job well done, hands me a plastic shot glass full of olives.

  As I walk away eating olives and feeling grateful, it strikes me that the bartender’s gesture could very easily be employed in other ticklish social situations. Newspaper vendor treating you brusquely? Office manager doesn’t say hello in the elevator? Friend thinks your choice of healthy appetizer makes you seem too high and mighty? Just pull a jar of olives out and ask for help. Call it “extending the olive jar.”

  FRIDAY.

  Flying back to Montreal after my talk, I grab some air sickness bags to use for packing work lunches. Not only will looking at them work as a natural appetite suppressant, but they might also discourage anyone from stealing my lunch from the refrigerator.

  Why a Duck?

  (50 weeks)

  MONDAY.

  The janitor has emptied the garbage can in my office a day early. It’s a small thing, but it’s still a break from the routine. I’m reminded of the day in grade three when Eddy Kaplan showed up in the lunchroom with a sandwich made with green bread. Eddy’s mother was different from the other mothers—into meditating and yoga—and she’d dyed his bread with green food colouring. It wasn’t St. Patrick’s Day or anything. She just wanted to remind him, and everyone else at the cafeteria table, that when you unexpectedly break from the routine, you are reawakened to the possibilities around you.

  I look at my trash can, its emptiness one day early and so full of possibility that I hardly know where to start.

  TUESDAY.

  Josh has just returned from a trip to upstate New York. He says the best part was buying roadside pot pies. In the area of pot pies, he says he now has two pieces of wisdom: “One, when given the opportunity, always take the duck pot pie; and two, the more decrepit the sign at the side of the road, the better the pie.”

  He then tells me about a place where the sign on the lawn looked hand-drawn by a hillbilly with a broken arm. When he rang the doorbell, he was greeted by an old woman wearing what appeared to be a hospital gown. She looked as though he had woken her out of a deep sleep. She invited him in and prepared him pies while he sat waiting at her kitchen table.

  “I ordered the duck,” he says, “and I never looked back.”

  I nod my head and Josh repeats “duck pie” over and over, as if the words are filled with magic.

  WEDNESDAY.

  I’ve been experimenting with colognes lately, trying to find one that could become my signature odour. I don’t know how people make such a choice. It’s like choosing your eye colour. It feels too big, something that should be left to the deity. Nonetheless, I’ve become rather fond of Gucci. To my mind, it makes me smell like the inside of a rich old man’s toiletry bag.

  As I walk to the store with Marie-Claude’s kids—my goddaughters, nine-year-old Helen and seven-year-old Katie—they complain about my smell.

  “I like the way you stink normal,” Katie says.

  “Yes,” I say, “but my normal stink is too subtle.” Plus, I explain to her, by leaving a heavily odorous trail, we’ll be sure to find our way back home more easily.

  “Like Hansel and Gretel with the bread crumbs,” I assure her.

  This gets Helen thinking.

  “I never could understand why that witch was so excited about eating kids,” she says. “She could have just eaten a chicken.”

  Helen will come to learn that everyone, even witches, likes a little break from routine. That’s why there are not only chicken pot pies but duck pot pies, as well.

  THURSDAY.

  Outside my window, I hear the sound of the garbage truck advancing and, as always, I am filled with a low hum of anxiety. Even if my garbage is already out on the curb, there’s always a part of me that views the approaching truck as a chance to throw one last dunk shot into oblivion. Though not hungry, I’m tempted to force-feed myself a banana just for the opportunity to barrel out the door and rid the household of the peel. For me, a garbage truck is a hybrid between an empty work trash can and the ice cream man.

  As I scan the apartment for potential garbage—waterlogged stacks of business cards, empty CD cases, notebooks full of ideas I’ll never realize—everything becomes bathed in the aura of trash.

  I’ve always wanted to feel like my life was rife with potential, but now, as the garbage truck outside grows louder, it only feels rife with potential garbage.

  Survival of the Fittest

  (49 weeks)

  SUNDAY.

  I’m taking my father shopping for a TV. As we leave his house, he says goodbye to his new dog, Boosh, short for Babushka. Although he calls her his “rescue poodle,” it seems too Super Heroic a name for a dog that spends twenty-three hours of the day sleeping, and the remaining hour eating venison dog food and being cuddled.

  My father hands her over to me.

  “Say goodbye to your sister,” he says. Calling Boosh my sister is my father’s new favourite joke. I don’t know how my human sister feels about having a new dog sibling, or my mother feels about having a new dog daughter, bu
t personally, I’m not loving it. My new sister growls in my face and I hand her back.

  “Doesn’t she do any tricks?” I ask in the car. “Anything to earn her keep?”

  “The SPCA didn’t know much about her previous owners,” he says, “but I’m learning of her talents all the time. Like the other day, I was arguing with your mother …”

  “About what?” I ask.

  “She has a habit of handing me peeled bananas, and it drives me nuts. You can’t refuse a banana that’s already been peeled.”

  “Why not?”

  “It just isn’t done,” he says. “So I might be in the middle of shellacking a bookcase or shovelling snow when all of a sudden, there’s the banana. I have to drop everything and start eating before it goes black. It’s very manipulative. Anyway, in the middle of the yelling, Boosh started yipping!”

  “Talented,” I say.

  “All rescue dogs have a talent,” he says. “For staying alive.”

  “At any rate they’re lucky,” I say.

  Maybe we all are. Each of us evolved from the sperm that made it—that beat out the millions of others—and for that, we’re all at least sort of lucky. And we’re all, if maybe only occasionally, seized with a bit of that “I’m lucky to be alive” feeling. Maybe even dogs are.

  TUESDAY.

  At work, my producer, Mira, informs me that fat raccoons are taking over Mount Royal.

  “They really know how to play an audience for handouts, too,” she says. “When they see you walking by, they start scooping water with their paws and look up at you all cute. But I can see through them.”

  I believe this statement says more about Mira than it does about the raccoons on Mount Royal.

  WEDNESDAY.

  I get a new picture taken for my security card at work. When I sit down to pose for it, I decide that, in spite of the bad day I’m having, I’m going to make an effort to smile. The picture is snapped and I’m handed my pass.

  There isn’t a trace of a smile. I look like mug-shot Nick Nolte, but without the hair or charisma. There’s a definite gulf between what I think I’m putting out into the world and what I actually am. If I was a raccoon, or even a dog looking for a home, I’d have died of starvation by now.

  But lucky for me, I’ve got money. I decide to take a walk to the coffee shop near my office for a cookie and coffee, and I pay for it with two toonies. The clerk takes them and holds one in each hand.

  “This one feels heavier,” she says, holding up her left hand.

  I ask for the coins back, to see for myself. The smallest unit of weight I’m able to think in terms of is the Quarter Pounder™. When considering how much my father’s toy poodle weighs, I think “twenty Quarter Pounders” and from there convert into imperial units.

  “I can’t tell the difference,” I say. “Perhaps you have a hidden talent.”

  She smiles. Everyone has a hidden talent for something. The lucky ones discover theirs before it’s too late.Would it be more sad or less sad to go through life never discovering you can fly, or discovering it only a minute before dying? I guess it would really allow for a beautiful death—an old man flying out the window after a long life.

  I take my coffee, sip it, and wonder how many coffees I’ve left to go.

  THURSDAY.

  I’m with Helen and Katie, auditioning a story I’ve written for my radio show. In the middle of my reading, Marie-Claude enters the room and sends them outside to play.

  “What wrong with you?” she asks. “Why are you reading my children a story about death?”

  “It’s existential,” I say. “Plus, they asked me to read it.”

  “My nine- and seven-year-old said, ‘Please, Uncle Jonny, favour us with a story about death’? Are you insane?”

  “As their godfather, I have a responsibility to offer lessons in spiritual hygiene.”

  “You? Hygiene? Helen says you told her that when you were her age you only bathed once a week.”

  “I wanted her to know that everyone is different,” I say. “That’s why there are career aptitude tests. The kids who bathe every day will be more inclined towards work in the public sector—making pastries and giving tours of model homes; while the once-a-week kids might be more comfortable hoboing, bohoing, or radio show–hosting. And in this way, we maintain a balance.”

  Marie-Claude does not buy my version of a just society, and throws me out of her house.

  SEIZING THE DAY

  There once was a man named Chalchas the Greek. When he was only a young lad, Chalchas learned that he would one day die.

  “It happens to all of us,” his father said. “It’s just the way things go.”

  The boy was surprised by the news. Sure, his father would die. Yes, his mother and even his brothers and sister would die. His grandfather had already died, as had the heroes he learned about at school. This all made sense to him. But that he, Chalchas the Greek, would die? No, there had to be a glitch in there somewhere.

  Though it didn’t make sense to his heart, he knew it to be true intellectually, and so each morning Chalchas awoke and thought, “Today could be the day I die.”

  On some days, he was struck with the thought several hundred times. It became impossible to focus on anything else. Back then, there were no psychiatrists or therapists, so Chalchas went to see an oracle.

  The old oracle lived in the forest, on the outskirts of town. It was a full day’s journey there, and when Chalchas found him, he was sitting in the shade of a large tree, staring up at the sky with wide-open eyes. Chalchas wasted no time in getting to the point.

  “I want to know when I’ll die,” he said.

  Chalchas figured that if he could just know how much time he had left, he could relax. A man only died once, but the way he was worrying, it felt like he was going through the motions of dying every day.

  After a few attempts at dissuading him, the oracle acquiesced, revealing to Chalchas the precise day upon which his death would arrive. It was a pretty far-off day, though perhaps not as far off as Chalchas would have liked. If he was honest with himself, he was in fact hoping the oracle would consult his great book of death and, flipping back and forth between pages, finally utter, “That’s odd. I have no listing here for Chalchas the Greek. It would seem you do not die. How weird is that?”

  And so the days passed and the day of Chalchas’s death grew nearer just as the day of all of our deaths

  draws nearer. Except Chalchas was able to count down to his. Each morning he would awake and think, “2764 to go. 1873. 922.”

  As the days dwindled, what once felt like a vast number of days—an ocean—slowly became a paltry year. And then that paltry year became a few skeletal months, and then, what felt like very suddenly, those months turned into weeks and when they did, Chalchas took to himself. He wanted to be alone in his final days to really cherish each second without distraction.

  “I’ve only a few days to go,” he’d say in a sweat.

  And then the day arrived. By now Chalchas was an old man, but mostly he felt okay, no major pains or issues. So when he awoke he looked around, took a few breaths, waited, and then, realizing he was still alive, Chalchas the Greek began to laugh.

  “Ha ha,” he chortled. “Hee hee.”

  So great was his merriment over having fooled the fates that Chalchas threw his arms up in the air and executed a jig.

  “Hardee har. Hoo hoo ha hee hee hee. How absurd to have worried!” he exclaimed through his laughter. “What do oracles know?” Oracle! The very word was ridiculous and enough to make him twice as giggly.

  No longer able to contain himself, Chalchas fell

  to the ground and pounded the earth with all his might. He laughed and laughed and punched and punched until his fists failed to clench, his lungs ceased to inflate, his throat could produce no sound, and his mind became free of all things, even thoughts of his own death.

  Atonement

  (48 weeks)

  WEDNESDAY.


  The evening finds me squatting in front of a gumball machine, cursing. In want of one more treat before beginning the Yom Kippur fast, I’ve inserted a quarter and nothing’s happened. As much as I assure myself that my outrage is not about the money but about the broken social compact, I still cannot help feeling that bear-hugging a gumball machine on my knees might actually be the first thing I’ve discovered in quite some time to truly be beneath my dignity.

  Who would be the perfect person to walk by at this moment? An old schoolteacher who never thought I’d amount to much? An ex-girlfriend’s father who could never stand my guts?

  When I was a kid, my parents had a needlepoint of Moses. In it, he’s giving the commandments to the children of Israel. Despite many important moments in Moses’s life, that one is probably the signature one. I can’t help thinking that wrestling this gumball machine might be mine.

  And as I continue to work, my finger up the gum hole, I cannot help imagining what this would look like as a needlepoint.

  THURSDAY, 2:00 A.M.

  I lie awake, hungry and thinking about God. I wonder: Am I a good enough person to get into Heaven? How does it all get tallied up anyway? Is my love of processed meat counterbalanced by the fastidious recycling of my scotch bottles? In gas stations and convenience stores, I take a penny more often than I leave a penny, but I am a more than generous tipper—even in buffet-type situations.

  3:45 A.M.

  For all we know about the workings of the universe, entry into Heaven might depend solely on shoe size. Nines go to hell and elevens go to Heaven, where their snowshoe-like feet are able to tromp atop clouds without falling through.