I'll Seize the Day Tomorrow

by Jonathan Goldstein

  “I never knew Dad took dance lessons,” I say.

  “Your father was always afraid of being a wallflower,”she says.

  Before we get off the phone she asks me what number sunblock I’m using.

  “Seventy,” I say.

  “Don’t be a hero,” she says. “Get ninety.”

  As the music blares, I imagine taking off my jacket and whirling it above my head like a helicopter propeller. I imagine doing one of those life-affirming, leg-kicking things. But in the end, I find a nice wall against which I allow my inner wallflower to blossom.

  WEDNESDAY.

  I’ve booked a trip to the Río Grande to see the rainforest.

  Our tour guide is a man named Hector. Hector starts many of his proclamations with “In Puerto Rico, we have a saying,” as in, “In Puerto Rico, we have a saying: A grape is a raisin that forgot to die.”

  Almost none of these sayings make any sense. But still, Hector makes learning fun. As we ride through the countryside, he teaches our small group a little Puerto Rican history.

  “We imported snakes to Puerto Rico to eat our rats,” he says from the front of the truck, “but the snakes got out of control, so we imported mongooses to eat the snakes. But they all come out at different times in the day, so now we have rats, snakes, and mongooses.”

  Back at the hotel, I email a picture of myself beside a rainforest waterfall to Gregor.

  Five minutes later, the phone in my hotel room rings.

  “Why’re you wearing white leotards under your shorts?” Gregor asks when I pick up the phone.

  “How’d you get this number?”

  “And why are you wearing a man purse?”

  “It’s a travel bag,” I say. “I keep all my important documents in there.”

  As Gregor goes on, I open my laptop so that I can study the photo along with him. In it, I stand before one of the most beautiful natural waterfalls I’ve ever experienced, yet all I can see is my inability to properly accessorize.

  THURSDAY.

  With my vacation nearing an end, I sit at the hotel bar watching the Lakers play on TV.

  A couple in their early twenties is seated beside me. The woman chastises the man for eating bar peanuts.

  “They’re nasty,” she says.

  As we get to talking, they share with me the details of their relationship. They had a fling and she ended up pregnant, then they split up; but after their son’s first birthday, they started dating again. This is their very first trip together.

  I tell them about how my parents had their honeymoon here, and as I do, it occurs to me that they’re sort of on a honeymoon, too. I tell them this and they both smile.

  “I guess we are,” he says, reaching for a peanut.

  “How romantic,” she says, taking it out of his hand.

  I try to imagine my parents here, kids in 1966, still doing what they always do—bickering, watching TV in bed—except wearing tropical cabana wear and travel money belts cinched so tight they can hardly breathe.

  FRIDAY.

  Back home in Montreal, I call up my parents.

  “Do you still feel like the same people you originally fell in love with?” I ask.

  They both say no.

  “Your father was so good-looking then,” my mother says.

  “What becomes of a person,” my father says.

  “Don’t say that,” my mother says. “You’re still good-looking. Better looking. Back then I liked the cologne he wore and the way he looked. But now I really love him. Now I know what kind of a person he is.”

  “How long did it take to find out?” I ask.

  “A long time,” she says. “But it grows every day. He’s become like my mother and father.”

  She asks if I understand and I tell her I’m not sure. “I’ve known him longer than I knew them,” she says.

  “He looks out for me. Now I’m going to cry.”

  “What is the Suez Canal?” my father asks.

  “Still with that show! ‘What’s this and what’s that’!”

  “It’s almost over.”

  “It’s always almost over!”

  I put down the phone and start unpacking.

  The Power of the Written Word

  (25 weeks)

  SUNDAY.

  I’ve gained five pounds in Puerto Rico, and so I join the YMCA near my house.

  My favourite station in the workout is the water fountain. About to take a drink, I read the sign above it.

  “Don’t spit in the fountain.”

  One of the problems with seeing someone spit in a fountain is that it makes you think about spit when you just want to be drinking water. The same can be said of a sign that reads “Don’t spit in the fountain.”

  As I drink, I try to fill my mind with random things to blot out thoughts of spit. A suitcase full of bird whistles. A pony soaked in ketchup.

  Sometimes knowing how to read can be a burden.

  THURSDAY.

  A physical burden, too. In a last-minute bid for erudition before middle age, I’ve begun reading War and Peace, and schlepping it along to read on my metro ride to work feels like a part of my new workout regimen.

  As I’m only on page three, I fear my fellow commuters are silently judging me, thinking I look neither smart enough nor committed enough to make it all the way through. Being on page three feels like a public failure.

  There’s something inherently embarrassing about starting things—new jobs, gym memberships, new books. There should be a press that publishes books with a couple dozen blank pages at the beginning so it never has to look like you’ve just begun.

  FRIDAY.

  At the café table where I’m seated, someone has knifed the word “beer” into the tabletop.The letters are small and look like the product of a focused, if not slightly deranged, mind. It’s a hard wood and must have taken time, determination, and great daring. The engraver was not content to stop halfway at “be,” not one to convince himself, penknifehand sore, that the word had a certain existential elegance. No, he persevered, risking a possible police record. And for what? So that I may look upon his handiwork and think: beer.

  Sometimes being able to read is a good thing, and at home, I ensure that the engraver’s written campaign is heeded well into the evening.

  SATURDAY.

  I’m at my parents’ house with a hangover. I’m helping them clear space. As such, I spend the day holding up objects, asking if I can throw them out, and being told, no.

  A decades-old almanac? It’s bloated with water damage, as if it was last read in the shower.

  My father shakes his head.

  “It’s a keepsake from the year your sister was born,” he says. “I can’t throw that out.” He drops it into the “save” pile.

  We rummage through laundry baskets and shoeboxes loaded with VCR instruction manuals, expired toaster warranties, and pens empty of ink since the nineties.

  “Look what I found,” my father says, a jewellery box in his hand.

  He passes it over and I open it. There’s a key chain inside that says “Christian Dyor.”

  “It’s a Christian Dior,” he says.

  “It’s a key chain,” I say, “plus it’s a fake.”

  Still, it makes it into the save pile.

  By evening, we still haven’t begun cleaning up anything. Sure the day’s been a failure, but at least it’s been a private one.

  Irreversible

  (24 weeks)

  SUNDAY.

  Tucker lives around the corner from me, but he doesn’t like to leave the house very often, so I introduce him to video chatting. After getting him to install the appropriate software, within minutes I’m staring into my computer screen and Tucker is staring back. The experience is unexpectedly unsettling, but I still try to convince Tucker of its virtues.

  “See?” I ask. “If chatting on the phone is like a game of chess, then video chatting is like a game of threedimensional chess.”

  “I’
ve always thought chatting with you in any form as being more like a game of Sorry!,” he says. “Can we stop this?”

  “I guess so,” I say. “I’m not too crazy about your ‘listening face’ anyway.”

  “What you’re seeing is my ‘pretending-to-listen face,’” he says, “ and either you’ve got poppy seeds in your teeth or I really have to clean my computer screen.”

  Sometimes when you stare into the abyss, the abyss stares back; at other times, it is Tucker who stares back. I’m not sure which fills me with more angst.

  WEDNESDAY.

  I meet Gregor for soup. I show up in my new vest which, I’m informed, makes me look like a children’s entertainer.

  “Strike that,” he says. “A children’s entertainer’s monkey.”

  “It’s reversible,” I say meekly, not exactly sure why I’m defending myself. “And vests are practical, what with all the pockets.”

  “So when you strip down to eat a mango, the vest stays on or off? With it on, you have a place to keep your toothpicks and paring knife.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Didn’t you once tell me you hate making a mess with mangos, so you eat them naked in your bathtub?”

  “No. No I didn’t.”

  “And what is this? Your five hundredth vest? Keep going this way and you’ll end up on that TV show about hoarders.”

  “What are you talking about? This is the first vest I’ve ever owned in my life.”

  “If you can manage to get a little more famous, I can pitch the network on a Hoarders celebrity edition.The first episode could be Bret Michaels swimming waist-deep in bandanas, cross-cut with you trying to decide which of your twenty thousand vests to wear while eating a mango in your bathtub.”

  FRIDAY.

  Tony and I meet for coffee downtown. He’s carrying a bag from Victoria’s Secret, a present for his fiancée.

  “When you work in a lingerie store,” he says, “you’re inevitably seen as being beautiful enough to work in a lingerie store, or not beautiful enough.You’re always going to be judged against the dainties.”

  “There’s something about your saying ‘dainties’ that doesn’t sit right.”

  “I’d make a good lingerie store worker,” Tony says dreamily. “Sitting on a stool, telling it like it is between bites of my sandwich. ‘That thong really brings out the blue in your eyes.’”

  “The fashion world can really use a man like you,” I say.

  “Of which,” Tony says, looking me over with distaste, “what’s up with the vest? You look like Emo Philips.”

  As Tony rips into me, I settle back into my chair and brace myself. Unlike your finer quality vests, the subtle dynamics of old friendships are not reversible.

  It Can’t Be That Bad

  (23 weeks)

  MONDAY.

  Tucker calls me at the office.

  “What are you doing?” he asks.

  “Working,” I say.

  “No, really,” he says.

  In truth, Tucker’s call finds me washing an apple over my wastepaper basket with coffee from my mug.

  I hang up, telling him I have to get back to work, but instead I sit at my desk trying to decide what to order for lunch. I know I should have a salad but I want to have smoked meat. Either way, I should probably stop eating at my desk. My computer keyboard is starting to look like the floor of a bus station washroom. To get the dirt out from between the keys, I turn it upside down and tap it against my desk. In so doing, I inadvertently Google “IMYH.” One of the first results is a Sheryl Crow fan site—IMYH being the acronym for her song “If It Makes You Happy.”

  I take this as a sign to have smoked meat.

  THURSDAY.

  I take Howard out to his favourite steakhouse for a belated birthday dinner.While some men pride themselves on marksmanship, yachtsmanship, or even penmanship, Howard prides himself on steaksmanship—the ability to eat vast quantities of steak. He orders the largest one on the menu and I do the same.

  Everything is so rich and heavy. Even the salad seems soaked in a dressing made of mercury. While waiting for the steak, we chomp away at handfuls of bacon bits like they’re peanuts.

  During the meal I try to match Howard, eating whatever he does. Across the table, he stares at me over a steak bone practically gnawed down to the marrow. His eyes are narrowed, as though sizing up an opponent.

  “I see what you’re doing,” he says. “You’re trying to go toe to toe with the kid.”

  “I’m trying to enjoy a meal,” I lie, my stomach beginning to ache.

  After our dinner, we each eat a wafer-thin chocolate that comes with the cheque. I feel mine go down like an iron barbell plate.

  I leave the restaurant, woozy, my stomach doing flip flops.

  “I think I might have steak poisoning,” I finally admit, a sob in my voice.

  “If anything, you may have pork poisoning,” Howard says. “You ate about an industrial dumpster’s worth of bacon.”

  I beg him to stop saying “bacon” and “dumpster” because the words are making me feel like my stomach is a plummeting elevator full of oatmeal.

  In what I know is Howard’s version of a victory lap, he suggests we stop on the way home for ice cream.To refuse would be to admit defeat.

  “If it makes you happy,” I say, my face shiny with sweat. And moments later, at the ice cream parlour, as Howard eats a double scoop of pistachio and I force-feed myself a ball of orange sherbet, it would seem it truly does.

  FRIDAY.

  Gregor visits me at my office.

  “What’s this?” he asks, pointing to the large yoga ball under my desk.

  “Someone in the office was throwing it out and I thought I’d try sitting on it while working. It’s supposed to do wonders for the posture.Want to try sitting on it?”

  “I wouldn’t even touch it,” he says. “Balls are great for dribbling, kicking, and helping man determine winning lotto numbers, but not for sitting on. A yoga ball is the rare object that can boast having had buttocks pressed against every millimetre of its surface. The sphere, my friend. Nature’s perfect cootie catcher.”

  I guess that’s why it’s the perfect shape for a place that’s home to asses like us.

  The Weight of Worry

  (22 weeks)

  MONDAY.

  My office chair has been sinking of its own accord. Maintenance has been by to fix the problem twice and they still can’t seem to figure out what’s going on. In my heart I fear I know something that maintenance does not: the chair responds to emotional heaviness, and confronted with seven hundred pounds of worry, it doesn’t stand a chance.

  WEDNESDAY.

  I’m at the airport with Gregor. We’re flying to Toronto for a mutual friend’s wedding on Saturday. In line at the gate, we watch as people late for their flight are rushed to the front of the line.

  “I don’t get it,” Gregor says. “These guys roll out of bed fifteen minutes before their plane’s about to take off, and they’re treated like members of the landed gentry. It’s airport welfare!”

  Walking through security, my bag accidentally wheels over Gregor’s loafer, scuffing it.

  “Sorry,” I say.

  “There’s an old Russian expression,” he says, bending over to rub his shoe, “an apology isn’t a fur coat.”

  “Of course it isn’t,” I say. “One’s an abstract idea and the other’s a physical object.”

  “Boy, you’re a barrel of laughs,” he says. “By your logic, ‘who’s on first’ should have been called ‘the exchange in which a personal pronoun is confused with a proper name.’”

  Boarding for our plane is announced. We stand and wait as the people in first class have their tickets taken.

  “I don’t get it,” Gregor says. “These guys just roll in making more in a week than I do in a year and they get treated like members of the landed gentry!”

  “Call it airport corporate welfare,” I say.

  O
n the flight, Gregor forces me to take the middle seat.

  The stewardess comes by with the snack wagon.

  “Cookies or Bits & Bites?” she asks.

  “The latter,” I say.

  “Sorry?” she says.

  “The one that isn’t the cookies,” I say.

  The stewardess leaves and Gregor turns to me.

  “God forbid you should stoop to say Bits & Bites.”

  “My grip on my dignity is tenuous.” Which is why it’s important for me to at least maintain a grip on my armrest. At the moment, though, it feels as though the man to my right is trying his best to subtly elbow me off. He and I stare straight ahead, pretending to be entranced by our newspapers, but all the while, we both know that we are locked in battle.

  I turn to my left to explain the situation to Gregor so that he knows, too.

  “There’s an unwritten rule that the man in the middle has claim to the armrests,” I say.

  “Unwritten where?” he asks. “On an asylum wall? What hope is there of peace in the Middle East if two strangers eating airplane snacks can’t even share a two-inch slat of plastic?”

  Of course Gregor is right. I lift my elbow off the armrest and, almost immediately, I start to feel better about myself. The feeling, though, is short-lived, as to my left, Gregor shoves my elbow off our armrest, spilling Bits & Bites all over my lap.

  “Sorry,” he says.

  SUNDAY.

  Gregor stays an extra day, and I fly back alone. The plane is going through turbulence, and every time there’s a big bump I look over at the stewardess and study her face. I am looking for a wide-toothed grin. Nothing clenched or strained. Nothing that says, “What the heck was that?” For me, perhaps even more important than bringing me bourbon, these smiles are a stewardess’s most important responsibility. In such moments it feels as though it is these easy smiles that keep the plane, as well as life itself, afloat. At work on Monday, before sitting down on my office chair, I’ll empty my heart of all worry, if only for a moment, and see what happens.