The box garden

Chapter 7
Friday. My mother’s wedding day. I wake up early and something whispers to me: get this right. Remember every detail. Be accurate, be objective, be thorough. Make a Chronicle of this, make a Wedding Album, get it Right. Begin with the cloud-crammed dawn, the sky oily-blue and unsettled. A heavy dew, a choking, webby haze. Around noon the sun nuzzles its way through, making the day exceptionally humid. A little cooler late in the afternoon. At six there is a brief downpour, at eight a swollen, streaky-eyed sunset, but by that time Eugene and Seth and I are on our way back to Vancouver and it’s all over.

We start the day by eating breakfast together, my mother and I, Eugene and Seth, Martin and Judith. Since there are only four kitchen chairs, Eugene carries in two from the dining room. It occurs to me that this is perhaps the largest number ever to gather in this room for breakfast.
We drink coffee—my mother allows for exactly two cups each—and eat buttered toast. “Margarine is cheaper,” she reminds us, “but the day hasn’t come when I can’t afford a bit of butter in the morning.”
There is a great deal of conversation around the table; the six of us are surprisingly comfortable together. Eugene, laughing, tips his chair back slightly and fails to respond to my mother’s sharp, disapproving glance.
My mother speaks to Seth—this grandson she scarcely knows, this grandson whose arrival has occasioned embarrassment and chaos but whose presence has somehow enlivened and restored the household—“I suppose you’d like some corn flakes for breakfast?”
“Yes,” he answers, “if you have any.”
“Well, I don‘t,” she returns. “I refuse to spend good money on rubbish like that.”
At this Seth laughs uproariously, as though his grandmother has said something exceptionally witty.
“What you need is a good haircut, that’s what you need,” she continues.
Seth claps his hands over his ears in mock horror. Or is it mock horror? I refuse to meet his eyes.
“Maybe you’re right, Grandma,” he says amiably, demonstrating his instinct for the inevitability of things. “I’ll give it some thought.”
“If I were you I’d give it more than thought,” she retorts with spirit.
“I think there are some hedge clippers in the basement,” Martin says.
We linger over our coffee with the languor of passengers on a steamship, the last leg of the journey in sight. The wedding looms ahead-three-thirty in my mother’s living room—but even that event is overshadowed by the liberating awareness of our separate departures, the return to our other lives which, like real sea voyagers, we view with a mixture of reluctance and anticipation.
“Martin,” Judith says after breakfast as she tidies my mother’s kitchen, “did you see that thing in The Globe and Mail about the judge?”
“No,” Martin answers, “what judge?”
“You know, that Supreme Court judge, old what’s his-name. Seventy-six years old and getting married.”
“Oh yes,” Martin says, “I think I did see the headline.”
“And he’s marrying a woman about the same age. Second marriage for both of them.”
“Hmmm,” Martin comments.
“So it’s not so odd really, people getting married in their seventies.”
“Who ever said it was odd?”
“Maybe it’s the coming thing.”
“Maybe.”
“It’s logical, when you think of it,” she says thoughtfully. “There’s a nice—you know—economy to the whole thing. In fact, it sort of fits in with the recycling philosophy.”
“Oh?”
“After all, here’s Mother getting an escort and chauffeur. And Louis is getting a cook and housekeeper.”
“Is that all?” Martin looks up amused.
Judith scours the sink with energy.
“Is that all?” Martin asks again. Then he starts to laugh.
“What’s so funny?” Judith asks turning around.
But Martin is laughing too hard to answer.

My mother spent almost all morning at the hairdresser’s.
It had been Judith’s idea: “Look,” she had reasoned with her, “you don’t even have a hair dryer. And it’s so damp this morning your hair will never dry. It would be a whole lot easier if you just went down to that little beauty place next to the Red and White. Eugene could drive you over, couldn’t you Eugene? And you can have it washed and set and be back by noon.”
“It’s such a waste ...”
“I’ll phone right now and see if they can work you in. I’ll explain ...”
“There’s so much to do here ...”
“Charleen and I can tidy up the house. You have a nice restful morning under the dryer. I’ll phone ...”
“I don’t know ...”
“I’ll ask if they can take you at ten-fifteen.”
She had gone. Judith had won. It was in every way a sensible plan, but I had been appalled by my mother’s quick surrender, her willingness to be led. This weakness is something new; she is getting old.
“She’s getting old,” I say later to Judith.
“Yes,” Judith nods briskly. She is plugging in the old vacuum cleaner, and I watch as she attacks the living room rug. How realistic Judith is, how offhandedly she deals with the externals of life. She knows how to manage our mother, how to persuade her against her will, and she accepts her victories with stunning ease.
The vacuum cleaner is thirty years old, an upright Hoover with a monstrous black bag, and the sound of its roaring motor fills the house.
I picture my mother in the hands of a bullying shampoo girl in platform shoes, I think of the painful plastic rollers and the chemical sting, the scorching heat of the hairdryer, the futile aggression of Harper‘s Bazaar, and suddenly I am swept with a desire to rush out and find her and protect her. That is when it strikes me that I must ... love ... her in a way which Judith would never comprehend.
“It’ll do her good to get out of the house,” Judith yells over the roar of the vacuum cleaner.

Yesterday morning Louis came to put in the shrubs I had bought. He worked slowly but with pleasure.
“Good healthy roots on this one,” he said, patting the soil around a mock orange.
“I don’t know why you thought I needed more bushes,” my mother called to me crossly from the back door. “There are already more than I can look after.”
“I like the smell of a mock orange,” Louis said to me. “When it’s in bloom it’s the most wonderful perfume in the world.”
After my mother went back into the house, Louis whispered to me, “Remember what we were talking about yesterday?”
“Yesterday?” I blinked.
“About that friend of yours. The priest.”
I stared.
“You were going to ask him to come to the wedding.”
“Oh,” I breathed, “oh, yes, I remember.”
“I’ve been thinking it over. And on second thought maybe it wouldn’t be such a good idea after all.”
“Oh?” I said.
“I appreciate it, I really do, but you know, a stranger and all,” he paused and nodded almost imperceptibly toward the house, “maybe it wouldn’t be such a good idea.”
Later, when he had finished the planting, he went inside the house. He and my mother sat at the kitchen table talking a little and drinking coffee, Louis stirring in sugar, and my mother primly, awkwardly, perseveringly sipping. Seeing them sitting there like that I had a sudden glimpse of what their life together would be like. It would be exactly like this; there would be nothing mystical about it; it would be made up of scenes like this.
Not that I understand the complex equation they teeter upon, or the force that brought them together in the first place. It occurs to me that there are some happenings for which the proper response is not comprehension at all, but amazement and acceptance.

Eugene drove my mother to the hairdresser‘s, and Seth, feeling restless, went along for the ride. While they are gone Judith and I vacuum and scrub, dust and polish. Martin, whistling, helps us wash the windows with vinegar and old newspapers. Then we stand back and regard the living room with its old, slipcovered chesterfield, its bulky armchairs, dark tables, heavy curtains and the rounded archway into the even gloomier dining room. It is scrupulously clean, but for all the crowding of furniture it looks barren, pinched and depressing.
“We’ll put the lace table cloth on,” Judith decides. “That should help a little.”
Martin takes the tablecloth down from the top of my mother’s linen cupboard, and throwing it over his arm, begins to tap out a soft cha-cha-cha. “Ta ta tatata, ta ta tatata,” he sings as he whirls and swoops in the narrow space between the china cupboard and the dining room table. The tablecloth swirls and circles, cascading to the floor as he steps deftly and lightly around the chairs. “Down, down, down South America way,” he hums to the lacy folds.
Judith smiles at him lazily. “You’ll tear it, Martin, and then you’ll catch it.”
“Then I’ll catch, catch, catch, catch it,” Martin sings, dipping gracefully past us.
Judith takes the cloth from him and opens it on the table. “Well,” she eyes the yellowed edges, “you can’t say it looks exactly festive.”
But then Eugene comes in the front door carrying armloads of spring flowers.
“Flowers!” I exclaim.
“I never thought of flowers,” Judith marvels.
“Voila!” Martin cries, and, slowing to a cool elbow-spinning, shoulder-dipping softshoe, he shuffles into the kitchen to look for vases. For an instant—it couldn’t have been more than a second really—I wish, feverishly wish, that I could dance away after him. I wish Judith would stop frowning and tugging at the edge of the tablecloth, and most of all I wish Eugene would stop standing there in the doorway, heavy and perplexed, with the tulips slipping sideways out of his arms.
Then Judith cries, “You’re a genius, Eugene, I love you.”
Then something happens: I look at Eugene in a frenzy of tenderness and begin to be happy.

Yesterday afternoon Louis offered to cut the grass.
“It’s too much work,” my mother told him, “especially after putting in all those useless bushes.”
“I’ll cut the grass,” Seth volunteered.
My mother considered, “Might as well keep busy,” she said. “Idle hands ...”
Seth laughed; he seems to find his grandmother’s sayings shrewd and amusing. He carried the old hand mower up from the basement, oiled it carefully and began cutting back and forth across the tiny back lawn.
Watching him, I suddenly remembered the box of grass I had left behind in Vancouver, Brother Adam’s grass. I had left it on the window sill, abandoned it without a thought, when I might easily have arranged for a neighbour to come in and water it. By the time I get home it will probably have turned brown; in all this heat it might even have died. How, I demanded of myself, had I been so neglectful?
The idea came to me that there may have been something willful in my oversight, that I may unconsciously have conceived a deathwish for my lovely grass, hating it while I pretended to love it. (The mind is given to such meaningless mirror tricks.) Had I subconsciously recognized Watson in those lengthy, grassy letters, had something about them touched a vein of familiarity, a flag of memory? Toying with these thoughts, I couldn’t decide, but my aptitude for self-deception pressed me closer and closer toward belief. Poor Brother Adam, his love of grass which I had believed was prompted by an Emersonian vision of oneness, was only one more easy commitment, an allegiance to a non-human form, a blind and speechless deity. And poor Watson, his life hacked to pieces by his endless self-regarding; every decade a ritual pore cleansing, a radical, life-diminishing letting of blood. (After he had disappeared down the fire escape, after the excitement of seeing Seth had died down, I had picked up the book he had been reading; it was titled The Next Life.)

It is a good thing Eugene kept the rented car because it turns out to be quite useful. At noon he picks up my mother from the hairdresser’s and brings her home. Seth arrives a few minutes later by foot; he has had his hair trimmed and, smiling sheepishly, he allows us to admire him.
We eat sandwiches standing up in the kitchen, and then Eugene drives Martin and Judith to Union Station to meet their children who arrive on the one o‘clock train.
I hardly know Meredith and Richard, and Seth has never seen them. Richard is shy, somewhat sulky, and, after three hours on the train, wild with hunger. Meredith at eighteen is beautiful. Judith has told me that her daughter’s beauty has made her own aging bearable. “It’s an odd consolation, isn’t it?” she said. “You’d think I’d be jealous, but I revel in it.”
Meredith kisses her grandmother with surprising force. “Well, how does it feel to be a bride again?” she bursts out.
“I was just going to lie down for my rest,” my mother says in a wavy-toned way she has.
“Right now?” Meredith’s eyes open wide.
“Just for an hour. I always have a rest after lunch, you know that.”
“Hold it for five minutes, Grandma. I’ve got a surprise for you.”
“A surprise?”
“You wait here. I’ll set it up in the kitchen.”
Meredith, shopping bag in hand, races into the kitchen, opens her blue umbrella on the kitchen table, balancing it carefully on two spokes. Underneath it she arranges a dozen small parcels wrapped in silver paper and tied with pale pink ribbon.
“Okay now, Grandma. You can come in.”
“What in the world ...”
“It’s a shower, Grandma, a kitchen shower.”
“But I’ve got everything I need ...”
“I know, Grandma,” Meredith dances around the table, “but you’re a bride, you’ve got to feel like a bride.”
There is a new set of measuring cups in copper-tinted aluminum.
“But I have some measuring cups ...”
“But they’re all dented and ancient. I noticed last time we were here.”
There is a new ironing-board cover.
“Now you can throw that old rag away.” Meredith chortles.
There is a little needle-like device to prick the bottoms of eggs with.
“So they won’t break when you boil them,” Meredith explains.
“But all you have to do is add some salt ...”
There is a wooden spoon. A new spatula. A twisted spring for taking lumps out of gravy. Two tiny soufflé dishes in white china.
“For you and Mr. Berceau,” Meredith tells her joyfully, “and you can put them right in the oven.”
There is a miniature ladle for melted butter. A painted recipe box made in Finland. And a beautiful, new streamlined egg beater with a turquoise plastic handle and whirling, purring, silvery gears.
“Lovely,” everyone agrees.
“Just what you needed.”
“Meringues, cakes ...”
“—a beauty—”
“But I have an egg beater ...”
“Grandma, smile. This is your wedding day, you’re a bride.”

While my mother rests we set up the presents on the buffet. There aren’t many. Judith and Martin are giving bedspreads.
“Two bedspreads?” I ask.
“Well ... yes. One seemed sort of, you know, suggestive. I mean, that’s the way she might see it. Two sort of cancels out the whole thing. One for the guest room and one for her room, more like a general refurbishing. God, I hate all this delicacy, but you know how she is, and the fact is, we couldn’t think of anything else.”
Eugene has bought them a kitchen radio which we think was rather an inspiration, a trim little model in white plastic with excellent tone and a year’s guarantee. And since my shrubs hadn’t been very successful, I decided yesterday to buy something else, something small but personal: I decided to give them my complete works, my four books of poetry.
Curiously enough my mother has never read anything I’ve written. She has, in fact, never expressed the slightest desire to do so, and a species of shyness has prevented me from ever sending her a copy. Furthermore, though she is not an astute reader, it has always worried me that she might comprehend something of the darkness in my poetry. It might wound her; it might remind her of something she would rather forget.
But now seemed like a good time to make a presentation. Like Judith, I had begun to know that I might never be able to talk to her. Who knows? Perhaps this was a way.
I had to buy the books retail by going to a bookstore and paying the regular price instead of getting them directly from the publisher as I normally do in Vancouver. Eugene and I went downtown yesterday to a very large bookstore, and there, in the poetry section, I found all four of my books. (They have recently been re-issued as a rather attractive set.) My picture in rainbow hues smiled happily at me from the back covers.
It was an altogether surreal experience to be buying my own books; I felt as though I were participating in a piece of cinema vérité. I felt, in fact, extraordinarily foolish placing those books in the hands of the cashier at the front of the store.
She checked the titles and then she turned the books over to check the price. Now, I thought, now she’s going to suffer a brief instant of confusion; then her mouth will fall open in astonished recognition.
But none of this happened. Instead she took my twenty dollar bill, slapped it down on the cash register, sighed sharply, and snapped at me, “I suppose this is the smallest you’ve got.”
“Yes,” I said weakly, faintly, “I’m afraid that’s all I have.”

Meredith and Judith and I make three bouquets, one for the dining-room table, one for the mantle of the artificial fireplace and a tiny one to set on the telephone table by the front door.
“Shouldn’t we save some for Grandma’s bouquet?” Meredith asks. “Or is Mr. Berceau bringing that?”
Judith and I stare at each other; neither of us had thought of a bridal bouquet. “Damn it,” Judith bursts out, “I should have ordered something.”
“Maybe Louis will bring one,” I say, not very convincingly.
“Hmmmm,” Judith says, “I doubt it.”
“I don’t suppose she could carry some of these tulips?” Meredith asks.
“Not really,” Judith says, “tulips aren’t quite the thing for a bridal bouquet.”
“Maybe if we phoned a florist right away ...” I begin.
“Lilacs!” Meredith says. “They’d be perfect.”
“I don’t know,” Judith says doubtfully.
“They’d make a perfect bouquet,” Meredith assures us, “and there are tons of them in the backyard. And they’re at their best right now.”
“Well,” I say, “why not?”
“The only thing is,” Judith hesitates, “well, you know how Mother always was about lilacs. They’re just weeds, she used to tell us. Remember that, Charleen?”
“No,” I reply, “I don’t remember her ever saying that.”
“We were always wanting to take a bunch to school—you know-flowers-for-the-teacher sort of thing. And she’d never let us because she said they were just weeds.”
“I don’t remember that,” I say again, and saying it I am conscious of a curious lightening of heart. It is somehow wonderful and important to know that at least part of the burden of memory has been spared me.
“But lilacs are beautiful,” Meredith protests, “they’re heavenly flowers; I can’t think of more gorgeous flowers. I’ll make a bouquet for Grandma, just leave it to me,” she says

Eugene, who is not normally introspective about his profession, just as he is not particularly critical or adula tory about it, once told me that he occasionally has moments when he is visited by a sharp sense of unreality. It happens most frequently when he is delivering to his young patients lectures on the importance of brushing their teeth. For a moment or two he feels himself undergoing a dizzying separation: suddenly he is the farmboy from Estevan eavesdropping on a solemn, middle-aged professional in a white jacket who is piously pressing for dental hygiene as though it were a system of morality. He is invariably self-amused when this occurs and at the same time awed by the transcendental experience of seeming to overhear himself.
I had something of the same feeling myself yesterday talking to my mother about Greta Savage; I had replied to her questioning with a calm I hadn’t known I possessed, and hearing myself I had felt very close to being the person I would like to be.
“What are you going to do about that woman?” she asked.
“What woman?”
“That crazy woman. That kidnapper.”
Without really intending to, I heard myself defending Greta, explaining to my mother that Greta had taken Seth as an act of love. She loves Seth, and, in a neurotic, labyrinthian way, she loves me too.
My defense of Greta was all the more surprising because I defended her instinctively. Like the kind people of the world—like Eugene-the-orthodontist—I had judged with instant charity; like the good folk in fairy tales I had performed magic, spinning gold from straw, transforming apples to golden guineas. Kindness, kindness—a skill which I have nourished and rehearsed and worried into being—had jumped out and taken me by surprise. Without thinking, without laborious reflection I had fallen into its easy litany.
Even more surprising, it had given me a temporary ascendancy; my mother had been silenced; perhaps kindness and bravery have a common root.
“Greta acted out of love,” I told my mother again, and, overhearing myself, I knew it was true.

“Here comes Louis Cradle,” Martin calls from the front window.
“Louis who?” I ask.
“Louis Cradle. And he’s all zooted up.”
Judith, setting out teacups, explains, “Berceau is French for cradle.”
“Oh,” I say, for an instant stung by my ignorance—how spotty my education was—was I going to spend a lifetime meeting such voids?
Louis Cradle, Mr. and Mrs. Cradle. Mentally I thrust about for the symbolism, cradle of a new life, no, too pat, the sort of pearl the “pome people” dived after—the “pome people” could never leave a paradox unturned, seeing life as a film strip jerking along from insight to insight, a fresh truth revealed every three and a half minutes—better forget about symbolism; yes.
Louis coming into the house looks no more dressed up than he was when he took me for lunch; indeed he wears the same old navy blue suit which does, however, look as though it has been brushed and perhaps even pressed.
But he is wearing a hat, a soft cloth cap in a fine wool, rather a strange choice for so warm a day. Yet, the effect seems not unsuitable. I’ve often noticed that men who cover their heads, sweetly and solemnly concealing the tops of their heads with turbans, hoods, fezzes and skull caps, seem to be putting on a spiritual covering which announces piety and humility and which, in the shorthand of costume, declares that life is perishable, vulnerable and worthy.
At half past two my mother has her bath; then she retires to her room again in order to get dressed. The house is ready. Martin and Eugene have even managed to pry open one of the living room windows, long ago painted shut, and a breeze drifts in. The cake has been delivered, and there is a box of tiny, paper-thin cookies too. Judith and I arrange them on a tray; we put out milk and sugar, and I even set out a circle of lemon slices on a glass plate.
The only thing missing is a scene which I half-imagine might take place, the scene where my mother takes Judith and me aside and asks us if we object to the fact that she is remarrying, if we have any sensitivities about our father being more or less supplanted. Some faint, quivering, awkwardly-delivered apology, a seeking of approval or even permission, at the very least a fumbling for consensus or a simple explanation: she is lonely, she needs someone to look after the furnace, see to the insurance, someone to talk to. But now it’s almost time for the wedding. The missing scene is clearly not going to take place; thank God, thank God.
“Where’s Grandma?” Meredith asks us.
“Getting dressed,” I say nodding at the closed door.
The minister has arrived, a young man, no more than twenty-five, with a prominent bridge of bone above his eyes; his face gleams with sweat. “Hot day for May,” he announces nervously.
“Wonderful, isn’t it?” Judith says a little defiantly. She has changed to a striking sleeveless dress in rough, lemon-coloured cloth.
“Perhaps you’d be more comfortable if you took off your jacket,” suggests Martin, who does not intend to wear a jacket.
“My mother will be out in a minute,” Judith says. “She’s just getting dressed.”
“This really is a happy occasion,” the young man remarks.
Louis, supremely relaxed and almost dapper, invites him to sit down by the window. “It was very good of you to agree to come.”
“Do you think I should see if Grandma needs a hand?” Meredith whispers to me.
“No. She’ll be out in a minute,” I answer.
“It’s half past three.”
“Really?”
“On the dot.”
“Not like her to be late.”
“Especially for her own wedding.”
“ ... really should check, don’t you think?”
“Give her a minute or two.”
“You’re sure she’s all right?”
“Maybe we should ...”
“Ah, there she is now.”
“Mother.”
“Mrs. McNinn?”
“Oh, Grandma!”
“My dear.”

The ceremony, a shortened version of the traditional marriage service, is performed in front of the artificial fireplace (symbolism?) and, since it is short, we all remain standing. Judith and Martin stand in the archway to the dining room, Eugene and I by the window, and the three children beside the television set.
My mother’s voice repeating the vows is exceptionally matter of fact. She might be reading a recipe for roast beef hash, and curiously enough, I find her lack of dramatic emphasis reassuring and even admirable. Louis, on the other hand, seems quite overcome. He chokes on the words and once or twice he dabs at his eyes, though this may be the result of asthma rather than emotion.
From where I stand I can see only their backs; my mother leans slightly to the left; perhaps her operation has unbalanced her. And Louis stoops forward as though anticipating an attack of coughing. They look rather fragile as people always do from the rear; it is after all the classic posture of retreat. Retreat from what? Age, illness, loneliness? Louis slips a ring on my mother’s hand and they stand for a moment with hands joined. Two is a good number, I think, and like a chant it blocks out the remainder of the service for me. Two is better than ten; two is better than a hundred; two is better than six; when all is said, two is better than one; when all’s said, two is a good number.

“That’s a lovely bouquet you’re carrying, Mrs. McNinn. Oh, I’m so sorry, I should have said Mrs. Berceau.”
“Well, lilacs aren’t my favourite, but my granddaugh ter here ...”


“Won’t you have some tea, Louis?”
“Yes, please, Judith, that’s just what I need.”
“And a piece of cake?”
“A nice cake, isn’t it?”
“You weren’t a bit nervous, were you, Louis?”
“Well, to tell you the truth—”
“Welcome to the fold, Louis.”
“Well, well, thank you, Martin, very kind of you.”
“Great institution, marriage.”

“Do you think she’s holding up okay, Char?”
“She looks a little tired. But not bad.”
“Considering ...”

“Nice you could come east with Aunt Charleen, Eugene.”
“I wouldn’t have missed it, Meredith.”
“You’re just being polite.”
“No, really.”

“What do you think, Judith, should I bring out the champagne?”
“I don’t know, Martin. You know Mother. What do you think?”
“I don’t know. Oh, hell, why not?”

“And that woman over there? Mrs. Forrest? She’s your aunt, is that right?”
“Yes, she’s a poet. Most people think we look alike.”
“And the man with her? Dr. Redding? In the grey suit?”
“That’s Eugene. Her lover.”
“Lover?”
“You look so shocked. Are you really shocked?”
“Of course I’m not shocked. Why should I be shocked?”


“You must have been scared getting kidnapped like that.”
“Scared?”
“I mean, did you think she was going to try for ransom or something like that?”
“Naw, it wasn’t like that. It was—I don’t know—it was kind of fun, the whole thing.”

“You look beautiful, carrying that bouquet.”
“Have some more cake, someone has to eat all this cake.”
“It’s good cake.”
“A little dry, if you ask me.”

“May I propose a toast ...”
“Good idea.”
“I’ve never had champagne before.”
“Neither have I.”
“Really?”
“Delicious.”
“Like ginger ale, only sour.”
“Ah, look at the bubbles rising.”
“You’re supposed to sip it, Richard.”
“Here, have another glass, Judith.”
“If you’re sure there’s enough ...”
“Lovely.”

“Tea is plenty good enough for me.”
“Here’s to marriage.”
“Here’s to the bride and groom.”
“Here’s to the future.”
“Happy days.”

“I love you, Eugene.”
“Charleen, Charleen.”
Nothing is what it seems. Our plane flying west is defying a basic natural law which says that on any given day the sun sets only once; but here it is setting over Lake Superior, again over Winnipeg, over the prairies, over the mountains. We’re diving into its fiery, streaming trail, we’re chasing it down to its final, almost comic, drowning. Don’t tell me about the curve of the earth.
Eugene, peering down through grey mist, says, “What we should do is buy a farm. A few acres. For weekends, you know. Maybe grow some vegetables, have a horse for the kids. Might even be a tax advantage there ...”
My childhood is over, but at the same time—and this seems even more true—it will never be over. Say it fast enough and it sounds like a scuttling metaphysic of survival. Who ever said you can’t live without logic.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” a voice says, “this is your captain speaking.” But how do we know it is our captain?
“We’ve just been told there’s a light rain over Vancouver—” A light rain, a light rain, the beginning of a poem, a light rain.
“But visibility is excellent—” Watch out for symbolism now.

“We hope you have enjoyed your flight. This is your captain wishing you a good evening.” Good evening, good evening.