of the statistical data, it should be less likely youâre ever going to
.
George sat at a Tim Hortons table and prepared a list for the next Saturday supper stir-fry in a potentially eternal series: shrimp, snow peas, broccoli...
six
JANUARY 2004
Sitting in the Honda on the bald hill over the sea, Gerry feels the buffet of the wind outside the closed windows. He listens to the wind bang at the wire garbage container in a wooden crib that keeps it from flying off this hilltop to Ireland. Itâs like a boxer warming up on the heavy bag, tentative shots at first, placing the target in space and muscle memory. Then it settles down to a piston-regular hammering.
Gerry has the radio tuned to CBC FM and has his notebook open. Vivian would say he is wasting time. Patricia would have too. If the two of them ever decide to get together and hold a seminar on Gerry, his tendency to go off and do nothing by himself for hours could provide the keynote address.
âWhere have you been?â Vivian asks. âHow can you just drive around all day?â
âWhere did you get to?â Patricia would ask. Sheâd ask after late nights at the legislative press gallery, or election road trips, or when she came back from visits to her family in Toronto or the summer courses she did: painting for the handicapped, French immersion in Quebec. Eventually, though, she stopped worrying about the answer. She joinedan amateur drama group. They were doing Boltâs,
Man for All Seasons
. She designed the sets and costumes and played a servant. When the play went out of town to the provincial drama festival, she went to bed with the man playing Richard Rich.
Where did you get to? Gerry thinks now.
Whatever the women he has married think, Gerry would deny doing nothing. Today, for example, heâs chronicling the toughness of the garbage container in the wind. Heâs keeping an eye on the sea to make sure itâs still there. He comes from a family that took a proprietary view of the universe. Itâs not that they felt they owned it. The arrangement was more of a long-established stewardship. It strikes Gerry that they should have had esoteric job descriptions like the titles in some Confucian bureaucracy. They should have been âThe Comptroller of Fogâ or âThe Warden of the Sunrise.â He takes a childhood fragment to the writing group.
Fragment: Ancestral Voices
In spring, in the city in Ontario where he grew up, Georgeâs family joined the flow towards the river. They joined the clumps of twos and threes and the giggling, officious tribes that went to watch the swollen river. They went to see the ice break up. They went for the annual morality play of the river flooding the house-of-cards shacks where people had camped on the edge of the wartime boom and stayed
.
In the prissy â50s, the shack dwellers seemed shabby, tattered and hung-over for whole seasons. However, in the summer when the ice was gone, they jumped triumphantly off bridges and ramshackle docks. They yelled defiance, with green Liberty torches of foam-trailing beer bottles in their hands. Their summer-night ferocity made their spring inundations seem a small price to pay
.
In the spring melt, the shabby-heroic cabins occupied a perilous no-manâs land between the gnashing ice teeth of the river and the road where the water lapped complacently, halfway across one lane. Here and there, front and back doors were left wide open to let the water flow through
.
A five-year-old George walked in incongruous new galoshes beside his father, sidewalk superintendents of the flood. Years later he wonders why galoshes should have been new in the spring. He decides it was because they were on sale at winterâs end
.
In summer, George and his family roamed the woods and dusty back lanes where the grass grew between the ruts. They commented on the wildflowers, the dust, and the frog chorus backstage in the marshes. They timed the
.
George sat at a Tim Hortons table and prepared a list for the next Saturday supper stir-fry in a potentially eternal series: shrimp, snow peas, broccoli...
six
JANUARY 2004
Sitting in the Honda on the bald hill over the sea, Gerry feels the buffet of the wind outside the closed windows. He listens to the wind bang at the wire garbage container in a wooden crib that keeps it from flying off this hilltop to Ireland. Itâs like a boxer warming up on the heavy bag, tentative shots at first, placing the target in space and muscle memory. Then it settles down to a piston-regular hammering.
Gerry has the radio tuned to CBC FM and has his notebook open. Vivian would say he is wasting time. Patricia would have too. If the two of them ever decide to get together and hold a seminar on Gerry, his tendency to go off and do nothing by himself for hours could provide the keynote address.
âWhere have you been?â Vivian asks. âHow can you just drive around all day?â
âWhere did you get to?â Patricia would ask. Sheâd ask after late nights at the legislative press gallery, or election road trips, or when she came back from visits to her family in Toronto or the summer courses she did: painting for the handicapped, French immersion in Quebec. Eventually, though, she stopped worrying about the answer. She joinedan amateur drama group. They were doing Boltâs,
Man for All Seasons
. She designed the sets and costumes and played a servant. When the play went out of town to the provincial drama festival, she went to bed with the man playing Richard Rich.
Where did you get to? Gerry thinks now.
Whatever the women he has married think, Gerry would deny doing nothing. Today, for example, heâs chronicling the toughness of the garbage container in the wind. Heâs keeping an eye on the sea to make sure itâs still there. He comes from a family that took a proprietary view of the universe. Itâs not that they felt they owned it. The arrangement was more of a long-established stewardship. It strikes Gerry that they should have had esoteric job descriptions like the titles in some Confucian bureaucracy. They should have been âThe Comptroller of Fogâ or âThe Warden of the Sunrise.â He takes a childhood fragment to the writing group.
Fragment: Ancestral Voices
In spring, in the city in Ontario where he grew up, Georgeâs family joined the flow towards the river. They joined the clumps of twos and threes and the giggling, officious tribes that went to watch the swollen river. They went to see the ice break up. They went for the annual morality play of the river flooding the house-of-cards shacks where people had camped on the edge of the wartime boom and stayed
.
In the prissy â50s, the shack dwellers seemed shabby, tattered and hung-over for whole seasons. However, in the summer when the ice was gone, they jumped triumphantly off bridges and ramshackle docks. They yelled defiance, with green Liberty torches of foam-trailing beer bottles in their hands. Their summer-night ferocity made their spring inundations seem a small price to pay
.
In the spring melt, the shabby-heroic cabins occupied a perilous no-manâs land between the gnashing ice teeth of the river and the road where the water lapped complacently, halfway across one lane. Here and there, front and back doors were left wide open to let the water flow through
.
A five-year-old George walked in incongruous new galoshes beside his father, sidewalk superintendents of the flood. Years later he wonders why galoshes should have been new in the spring. He decides it was because they were on sale at winterâs end
.
In summer, George and his family roamed the woods and dusty back lanes where the grass grew between the ruts. They commented on the wildflowers, the dust, and the frog chorus backstage in the marshes. They timed the
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