Jess:
Mr. Fisher.
Stuart:
Mr. Fisher. Yeah. Mr. Fisher, the teacher. Well, I like “Fat Cat.”
Jess:
“Fatso …”
Stuart:
“Fatso, the Cat.”
Jess:
One of the best.
Stuart:
It was a great, funny one. And it has that great line in it.
Jess:
If you wrote that line yourself you’d be thrilled.
Stuart:
I’d be proud of it, yeah. I like the one about peeing off the side of the truck.
Jess:
Oh, that was one of the early ones—the hitchhiking story.
Stuart:
Is that A.J.?
Jess:
No, that was Matthew Jackson. Matthew Jackson of …
Stuart:
Somewhere out West.
Jess:
He ended up writing a book, that guy.
Stuart:
We’ve made some friends … A.J. Mittendorf.
Jess:
A.J. Mittendorf has had two stories on the Story Exchange. There’s only been a few people who’ve had more than one story. A.J. had the one about the birthday suit and the girl and the cookies—
Stuart:
He’s the master of the one-liner.
Jess:
“Here. Catch.”
Stuart:
Yeah.
Jess:
And he also had one we call “Freudian Slip.”
Stuart:
Oh, yeah, with the wind.
Jess:
He used to live in Prince George, B.C. And, yeah, he’s become a friend. He plays the bass. So he comes to the shows and he and Dennis Pendrith, our bass player, have jammed together a couple of times.
Stuart:
You’re kidding.
Jess:
No, they—
Stuart:
They jam together?
Jess:
Yeah. A.J. has come up onstage and Dennis has shown him a few things and …
Stuart:
What, after the show?
Jess:
Yeah, yeah, after the show.
Stuart:
Some of the stories have really moved me. Some of them have brought me to tears.
Jess:
Some of them are very powerful. Some of them are funny. Some of them are just exactly what you asked for: a moment. And together I think they add up nicely to … I don’t know … something bigger. What I learned, from reading not only these stories but the thousands that have come in over the past decade, is that the small stuff matters. The everyday experiences that we have with other people leave a lasting impact. And I like that because it means that we, and our actions, matter to others. We make a difference, even when we don’t realize we’re doing it.
Stuart:
What do you want the collection to add up to?
Jess:
I think of each story as a Polaroid picture, a little snapshot. And I want it to add up to some sort of family album. It doesn’t need to tell some sort of story. It just has to leave the reader with a sense of what life was life was like for people, for our audience, during this decade. I want them to feel like they’ve been talking to a friend, that they’ve just had coffee with one of their friends … You know that feeling you have after that, where you feel …
Stuart:
Connected.
Jess:
Yeah. That you have a story to tell and someone to hear it.
Stuart:
And life is good.
THE MONGOOSE
Last year I bought a caged mongoose at a yard sale.
To be honest, it wasn’t a real mongoose and the cage was actually a wooden box. It had a spring-loaded mechanism that propelled a fur stole out of the top. The whole thing was like a child’s jack-in-the box, except for a small wire-mesh covering on the top. It gave you a fleeting glimpse at what appeared to be a vicious cobra killer.
It was the ultimate practical joke machine.
I did my best to sucker in anyone I could find. And all my victims responded in pretty much the same way:
“Oh my god, I think I’m going to have a heart attack.”
Immediately followed by, “That’s sick.”
And within thirty seconds: “Hey, has my wife/friend/ mother-in-law seen this yet?”
Friends and neighbours called to borrow my mongoose machine or asked me to bring it to their homes.
One Sunday afternoon, when my neighbour was hosting a brunch for some of the members of his church, I got a phone call to bring over the mongoose and show some of his friends my exotic “pet.”
One by one, every curious guest trundled down to the basement to have their wits scared out of them and then eagerly ascended the stairs to set up the next mark. At some point the congregation’s minister arrived and was directed downstairs by one of his parishioners. As he approached the mongoose he told me matter-of-factly that he had ministered in Southeast Asia in his youth and was well aware of the mongoose’s vicious reputation.
I had a live one here.
The minister had taken the bait and it was time to set the hook. I explained that, as he probably already knew from his travels, a mongoose is nocturnal so there was little to fear opening the cage during the day. Then I added, “But you wouldn’t catch me opening this at night.”
I sprang the latch on the cage and the bedraggled swatch of fur catapulted out the top.
The minister was no young man, but in two or three steps he put at least ten metres between us. When he looked back at his attacker he quickly realized it was a practical joke. His stare burned into my soul and he began his rebuke: “Young man, I find it virtually incomprehensible that you would take delight in preying upon the primordial fears of your fellow man, only to satisfy your own shallow desires.”
I felt a stab of guilt.
As I struggled to mount my defence, two of his parishioners appeared at the top of the stairwell. The good reverend turned to them and in a kindly voice said, “Hello Mary, hello Dave. Have you two ever seen a real mongoose? Here, let me show you something interesting.”
Waterloo, Ontario
SUNLIGHT ON LEAVES
Nancy and I became best friends two weeks after I moved into the big house on Duncan Street. She appeared at our door one morning wearing one of her smocked dresses and with her braids tied with crisp ribbons. She introduced herself to my mother.
“I’m Nancy Jane MacBeth,” she said. “I heard you have a little girl my age and I would like to be her friend.”
It was 1941. We were both five years old.
Nancy and I became fast friends. We both had vivid imaginations, so every day was an adventure. We played house, school, and office. We loved to colour and bake mud pies in the sunshine.
One day we came up with a wonderful idea—every Monday for the rest of our lives we would give each other a gift.
My first gift to her was a ring with a blue stone. It cost five cents—half of my weekly allowance. Oh, the excitement that first Monday when we exchanged small boxes! What gift would I get from Nancy? A ring? A brooch? A hair ribbon? But all I found in the box was a flower—a dark purple pansy resting on a bed of cotton batting.
“It’s just a pansy,” I said, disappointment in my voice.
“But it’s special,” Nancy answered. “Feel it … it’s as soft as velvet.”
I can remember only two other gifts I bought for Nancy with my pennies—a hair clip with bluebirds on it and a “genuine” cricket clicker. I can’t recall any of the others. But I can remember what she gave me: half a newly hatched robin’s egg, a special hiding place in Mrs. MacKenzie’s hedges for those summer games of hide-and-seek, a nest of naked, pink baby mice in an old crate in the storage shed (we sat as quiet as mice ourselves and watched them), and a spider’s web, under construction.
One very special gift was permission to sit o
n her own private branch of the huge birch tree in her backyard. I looked up to see the sunshine falling in bits and pieces through the leaves and looked down to see the patterns of sun and shade on the grass. I heard the ocean for the first time in a cowry shell in her father’s study and saw the sunset through the rose-coloured glass of the round window on the front stair landing.
Eventually I tired of the gift giving. I complained to my mother, “Every week I buy Nancy a nice present from the store and she just gives me things I can’t keep.”
“Are you sure?” my mother asked. “It sounds to me as if she’s given you some very special gifts.”
“But they’re not real presents,” I insisted.
Nancy and I had a falling out over the whole thing. It was a nasty, name-calling fight that five-year-olds excel at. We cancelled the “best friends for life” clause and I went home and ground the robin’s eggshell into a fine blue powder.
A year later Nancy was killed in a traffic accident. She was seven years old.
But Nancy’s gifts remain. Every spring as I stoop to feel the velvet faces of the pansies in my garden I think of her. I carefully pick up the pieces of a robin’s egg should I find them. And while I no longer climb trees, I never pass under a birch tree without looking up to see the sunlight playing on the leaves.
At five, Nancy knew the secret of giving gifts that truly last a lifetime. How blessed I am to have had her for a friend.
Naramata, British Columbia
HEIGHT OF HUMANITY
I don’t know what my father did in the war. Except that he entered as a private, and left as a master sergeant.
He was a pattern-cutter in the garment industry in New York when he volunteered for service. By volunteering, he was able to choose the Signal Corps. It was thought that this would offer an extra measure of safety, but it did not. Someone in command had a brainwave. When the first marine hit the beach on each of the island-hopping Pacific invasions, a working telephone should be waiting. Installing that telephone line was my father’s job.
By the time I was old enough to understand my father’s war stories, he’d stopped talking about the war. My brother, who’s five years older than I am, heard all his terrifying tales of blood-curdling banzai charges in the jungle night, and of men leaping into foxholes to escape the machine-gun bullets of strafing Mitsubishi Zeros.
But there was one war story my father did continue to tell. About how, one night, he did not shoot a looter. He was guarding a supply dump on one of the Philippine islands. A young Filipino boy was running away with a case of something held over his head. My father said he shouted the warning, “Stop, or I’ll shoot!” The Filipino boy, never breaking stride, replied, “I am not the one.” My father laughed. He laughed whenever he retold that tale, and it was the only war story he ever told in his later years.
That story never seemed especially heroic to me when I was a boy. But now that I’m no longer young, it seems to me to be the very height of humanity and good sense.
My father died in 1995. There are, almost certainly, no military medals awarded for not shooting a looter, for not killing a starving, terrified boy in his own war-ravaged country, but maybe there should be.
Richmond, British Columbia
A LONG WAY TO LONGLAC
When Jimmy Robbins was twenty he attended Lakehead University in Thunder Bay. Jimmy was from Newfoundland. He used to thumb his way back home at Christmastime.
Northern Ontario was the most difficult leg of Jimmy’s trip. There are only two roads that cross that part of the province, the Trans-Canada and Highway 11. Both of them are surly. Experience quickly taught Jimmy that Highway 11 was his best bet: truckers preferred it for its lack of icy hills. And so Jimmy developed a plan to cope with the often sub-zero temperatures. Rather than stand at the side of the road turning blue and hypothermic, Jimmy would sit inside a truck stop at the Nipigon highway junction, drinking coffee and waiting for somebody to offer him a ride.
That was how one bitterly cold December afternoon, Jimmy met a trucker named Percy. When Percy saw the lonely hitchhiker sitting at a table drinking coffee, he mumbled gruffly at him and motioned for Jimmy to grab his backpack and hop on board. Jimmy couldn’t have been more relieved. It was –35 degrees Celsius outside, and he’d already been waiting for several hours. His cheer soon faded, however, when just minutes down the road the effects of excessive coffee-drinking started building an undeniable and increasingly urgent pressure in his bladder.
“I’m sorry to tell you this,” Jimmy admitted sheepishly, “but I’ve really gotta go to the bathroom. Can you pull the truck over?”
Percy gave him a perturbed look, mumbled something about ice on the road, and told Jimmy that he’d have to wait until Longlac.
How far they were from Longlac Jimmy couldn’t remember, but after another few minutes he realized it was farther than he could wait. “Look man,” he said finally, desperation creeping into his voice, “I know it was really irresponsible of me to drink so much coffee back there, but I gotta go!”
“We can’t stop till Longlac,” Percy said flatly.
Ten minutes of unspeakable agony passed, every jarring bump on the road forcing Jimmy closer to the edge. It wasn’t long before he’d reached the point of no return. “Listen man,” he pleaded, “I can’t hold it any longer! Either you stop the truck or it’s going on the floor!”
Percy looked at him coolly and repeated his mantra one last time. “I’m not stopping till Longlac, kid. If you’ve gotta go that badly, here’s what you’ve gotta do.”
A minute later, Jimmy opened his door, wrapped one arm around the truck’s running bar, and stepped precariously onto the six-inch steel grate. Blasting along at 120 kilometres per hour in the middle of a Northern Ontario deep-freeze, he gingerly unzipped his fly, pulled out his equipment, and aimed for the ditch. When he clambered back into the truck a couple of minutes later—red-faced and shivering, ice crystals hanging from his hair—he found Percy doubled over the wheel laughing.
“You know, I’ve told a hundred hitchhikers to do that,” Percy wheezed, trying to catch his breath. “But you’re the first guy who ever did it!”
Canmore, Alberta
ORANGE JUICE
Twenty years ago I worked as a waitress in a mediocre Italian restaurant in downtown Toronto. The restaurant was at the corner of Queen and Bathurst, which at the time was in the throes of an identity crisis—trying to trade in its back-alley image for a hipper, trendier look.
Between shifts at the restaurant I often killed time at Galaxy Donuts—a coffee shop that was home to the neighbourhood’s castaways. The people I met in Galaxy Donuts were vulnerable, defensive, and streetwise. They were everything that I—a trusting twenty-year-old from small-town British Columbia— was not.
One morning as I sat with a coffee in front of me—more for the company than the caffeine—I heard a raspy voice behind me.
“Hey you!”
I squirmed in my chair.
“You!” the voice said again.
I turned and found myself looking into the hollow eyes of a woman whose life was the street. It was hard to guess her age. She might have been fifty; she could have been seventy. Her hair was shoulder-length, grey, and matted to her head. The contents of her life, rolled up in two canvas duffle bags, lay like faithful dogs at her feet.
“You got any red-haired girls?” the woman asked, staring at my own head of red hair.
“No,” I replied.
The woman had opened one of her sacks and was rummaging for something.
“No,” I repeated, “I don’t have any kids.”
But it didn’t matter now—she hadn’t heard me, it seemed. She was intent on digging something out of her bag. Relieved, I turned back to my coffee.
“Here,” she said, handing me a small plastic doll. The doll was about six inches tall. Her cheeks were freckled and her hair was an outrageous shade of orange. Her name, according to the words printed on her speckled dres
s, was Orange Juice. The expression on her face gave her a perky, impish look.
“When you get a daughter, give ’er that,” the woman said.
“Thanks,” I said. “I will.” I offered a smile to show that I was sincere, but by then the woman had turned away.
The little doll named Orange Juice followed me through the next decade of my life, to different cities, other provinces, even a new continent. Each time I packed up my possessions to set forth on another chapter of my life, I would take Orange Juice down from whichever shelf or tabletop had served as her perch and pack her in my bag. The cheery-faced, orange-haired doll that had once been a part of that woman’s life was now a part of mine. There was something special in that.
A few years ago when my daughter became interested in dolls, she asked about the doll standing among her mother’s perfume bottles and jewellery boxes. The time had come to fulfill the old woman’s request. I removed the doll from my dresser top and placed it in the hands of my little red-haired girl.
The doll named Orange Juice has become a part of my daughter’s life now, and the woman who had no home and no name, whose life seemed so detached from any other, has made one more small connection.
Nelson, British Columbia
RUNNING IN THE FAMILY
As a child, I loved the thrill of a good race. “I’ll spot you half a block,” my father would say, and I’d run like the dickens toward the stop sign at the corner of our street. That was our finish line. And it wasn’t until I’d crossed the line that my father would catch up with me. It was exhilarating. I was just a kid, but I could always beat him.
Time Now for the Vinyl Cafe Story Exchange Page 2