None of This Was Planned Read online

  Maybe it does and maybe it doesn’t, but it doesn’t matter. It is beautiful and peaceful and full of birds and trout, with the fresh, sweet air turning into a calm homemade quilt that comforts everyone there.

  On the other side of the pond is East Hastings, with traffic and sirens and people and noise.

  I saw two women walking toward the park.

  “Hurry, stop, park. I’m going to find out what they are doing and do a story about it, and if I fail I am going to bang my head against your hubcaps,” I said to Todd.

  Maybe I didn’t say exactly that, but it was close because it was 12:30 and, in my idyllic life, worry was setting in.

  They were two friends, Jill and Jane. They were both retired nurses, they had some time to kill before meeting friends for lunch and they were bird watchers, so what place better to wait? That’s what they said.

  I agree, I said.

  There really was nothing to do a story about. No beginning, no end, and no middle between the no anythings at either end.

  The women recognized a few birds and then said they had to go.

  But Todd had taken pictures of their visit, and of the birds on the water and reflections of trees in the water. Each time a bird landed on the pond the reflections shimmered.

  Okay, I will write something nice about the pond, about the passing sirens, about the peace and beauty and calmness—or I really will bang my head against Todd’s hubcaps.

  Back at the tv station I worked with James Buck. He is a brilliant editor. The others are brilliant too, and I will tell you about them, but today it was James.

  “No story?” he said.

  “No,” I said.

  “So just pictures?” he said.

  “I will say nice things,” I said.

  And I did. I talked about calmness and peace and birds. I said that coming here was like going to an art gallery, seeing all the beautiful pictures. I said the best things I could say.

  Then came the end, the last line, the most important one.

  “I’ve said everything I can say,” I said.

  We were looking at the shimmering water with a reflection of the trees.

  “Tomorrow, a new picture in the same gallery,” I said.

  He said nothing. He just shook his head ever so slowly.

  “Every day a new portrait of nature,” I said.

  He shook his head.

  “So what?” I said, just a tiny bit exasperated.

  “How about, ‘Tomorrow, same canvas, new painting,’” he said.

  “Okay, that will do,” I said, and then I said it into the microphone. How could I admit that was the best line in the entire story? It was the best line I had heard all day. Maybe all week. And I was supposed to be the writer, not James.

  I was happy to finish. The story was nice, I thought. Not great, because there was no story, but okay.

  The next day I saw the news director walking to work as I was leaving. This was not good. I should not finish before he starts. On the other hand I’m sure he was at an early morning meeting where important things were discussed concerning the later morning meeting. News directors and executives often reveal their brilliance at meetings. Shoot for that position if you get the chance.

  “That story on the pond was beautiful,” he said.

  ok. I will stop walking and listen because this news director is obviously super brilliant.

  “Thank you.”

  “The writing was perfect,” he said.

  A bus hitting me in the back would not have moved me more. Doesn’t matter how old you are or how long you have done something, a compliment is like a snowdrop in winter. A wonderful surprise.

  “Thanks.”

  “Especially that line, ‘same canvas, new painting.’”

  “Oh,” I said. What I was thinking was: hurt, darn, pain, bummer, embarrassment—or simply an expected kick in the something or other.

  “Well, I’ve got to tell you . . .” I started to say.

  “Gotta go,” he said. “Late.”

  “But . . .”

  I know he thought I was going to say something humble, like “I’m glad you liked it. Thank you for noticing. You are a thoughtful boss.”

  He didn’t want to hear that, so he was gone.

  The next day I waited for him to be alone so I could tell him who wrote the line. He was never alone.

  I stopped by James’s editing room, James the editor who is not paid as a writer.

  “You know what happened?” I asked him, and I told him the story of the last line.

  He held up a finger by his lips. “Shhh. Don’t tell.”

  The moral: editors, whoever they are, the ones who fix news stories or books or suggest ways you can live better, like wives and mothers and friends, are the most valuable folks you will ever meet. Listen to them, and thank them.

  ps: The pond is beautiful. Go visit. Every minute you will see the same canvas with new paintings.

  pps: A week later I finally got to tell the news director. He laughed. The story behind the story is always the best one.

  Two Women, One Stupid Question

  I don’t know if they were a couple or not. My first thought was, “Yes, of course,” but that is stereotyping. My second thought was, “Don’t stereotype.”

  After we left and got back in his truck it was the first thing the cameraman asked.

  When I stepped into the edit room it was the first thing the editor asked.

  After it was on the air it was the first thing a friend of mine asked in an email.

  And it had nothing to do with the story.

  Here are the facts: cameraman Gary Rutherford and I were driving on a side street in Vancouver. He had just finished telling me about his dog getting sick on New Year’s Eve and having to take it to an emergency animal hospital. The dog survived. His wallet was near death. Not the kind of problem you want to have on New Year’s Eve.

  Then we saw a woman sweeping her front walkway.

  “That looks beautiful,” I said, because it truly was. A person doing something is always beautiful. It is the other end of doing nothing.

  Gary waved. She waved back.

  “Stop,” I said, as though he would do anything else.

  I got out and while Gary was getting his camera from the back of his mountain-climbing vehicle, I said hello to the white-haired woman with a smile.

  She said hello. Her name was Shirley and we were off to a good start.

  Standing near to the straw of her broom was a sign stuck in the soil of her garden: “Come Up to the Porch and Take a Look.”

  “Want to see my castle before I take it down?” she asked.

  Well yes, of course. Thank you. We stood on her porch and looked through her front window at a castle. Shirley pointed to the queen on horseback crossing a drawbridge. The tiny regal plastic figure was waving at us.

  She was entering a mammoth glittering silver fairy tale. Shirley told us the castle was made of Pringles cans and the middles from rolls of toilet paper and paper towel, all covered with aluminum foil: a giant, precise, beautiful, royal undertaking.

  It was as wide as my arms could stretch and half as tall as me. Beautiful.

  Then the front door opened and out onto the porch stepped another woman, also white haired and smiling.

  “This is Marilyn,” said Shirley.

  Marilyn was wearing slippers.

  There was only one thought I had, and it was a pure, golden thought, because two people who are the same gender living together is now as common as two raindrops falling together. But I had the thought. Not the question, but the thought.

  “Shirley makes them and then gives them away,” said Marilyn.

  Immediately the story was perfect: art, kindness, Christmas. All we had to do was get close-up pictures of the q
ueen’s men on horseback following her into the silver world and pictures of the turrets and windows and everything.

  Marilyn disappeared into the house saying she had things to do and Shirley told us that some of the plastic figures around the castle belonged to her mother and she, Shirley, was eighty-five, so the pieces are quite old.

  She was happy. I was ecstatic. Gary was taking pictures.

  We left with a happy goodbye and a thank you.

  Inside his truck Gary asked, “Do you think they are a couple?”

  “Well, I don’t know. They sure are nice. They looked happy together.”

  In the edit room Greg Novik looked at the pictures of them and said, “Such a nice couple.”

  Greg is a powerful, wise man who has conversations about everything: how the world is run, the history of television, the beauty of jewellery and planting squash. He never talks about his personal life, except to occasionally mention his partner. That’s all, nothing else.

  “Nice couple,” he said again, looking at the women.

  One of the first rules in television is a minute thirty. It’s right up there with facts and information.

  That means stories cannot be longer than ninety seconds. This is a good rule because:

  The attention span of many who watch is about ninety seconds. Please don’t take offence. This is a well-known fact told to me by someone who knows such things.

  There are only sixty minutes in an hour-long news show and if you take away the time for commercials there are only forty-four minutes left. And if you take away the time the anchors are on the air making you wish you were as smart and knowledgeable and beautiful and thin as they are there are only thirty-five minutes left for news. And if you take away the time the weather and sports are on there is not much time left for news stories. So to get the smorgasbord of information, the servings must be compact. One minute and thirty seconds compact, like eating sushi—small but tasty and full of nutrition.

  Please don’t complain to the crtc about this. In America the average length of a news story is down to about one minute and ten seconds, so we are much smarter.

  Anyway, if the stories go over a minute thirty here there are fewer stories, and that means fewer fascinating facts about new crimes, new politicians, new trends, new problems, new solutions to old problems and new discoveries on what we should not eat, late breaking fires, scandals, floods, earthquakes, traffic jams and more weather. Hence 1:30 is a good rule.

  And to get things into that time you have to leave out other things without leaving out the important things. That is the impossible job of the editor.

  Greg saw all the beautiful pictures of the castle. That was what the story was about. Listening to Shirley talk about building it was also what the story was about.

  In the allotted time it was done. One minute and thirty seconds, exactly. Perfect—but no Marilyn. She didn’t make the cut.

  “We have to get her in,” I said. “Can you imagine the two of them watching tonight and only one is on the screen?”

  Greg smiled his understanding smile. “Not good.”

  All Marilyn did was join us on the porch for a minute. She didn’t build the castle, but every bit as important as the majestic dwelling was the majestic twosome who lived in the old wooden house with the castle in the window.

  In short, she had to be there or we would be cheating the fact that they both lived there. It is not a stretch. This is what goes into a brief story about an aluminum foil castle built for Christmas.

  He trimmed a bit of this and a bit of that. He chipped away at one picture of a turret that seemed too long anyway, and in the end Marilyn joined us on the porch for a few moments.

  Nice.

  When I got home after the show I got an email from an old friend. He wanted to know how we had found the women and then said that very recently his daughter had told him and her mother that she was gay.

  All he wanted for her was happiness. All he wanted was that she not have to hide, and what he saw in the story was two women living together who seemed happy and not hiding. It made him feel good. It made his daughter feel good. They didn’t have to say anything.

  And in truth, we have no idea what Shirley and Marilyn’s relationship is, and it is none of our business. We should not even be thinking about it, but they were happy, and both of them were in the story—and the castle was not the only place that housed royalty.

  Dancing, with Women

  I have this friend named Grant Faint. I see him once every five years, sometimes less, but I see his work every day. He is one of the world’s leading photographers and I do not exaggerate.

  Many of the advertisements you see for beer or perfume or aquariums with whales on one side of the glass and a little girl on the other are his.

  You don’t call him brilliant; that underplays his talent. You don’t call him rich; that underplays his worth.

  He started out poor—dirt poor, if that is still a phrase. He told me that at Christmas the church people came and put food in his parents’ refrigerator. If they hadn’t, it would have been empty.

  He came from the East Side of Vancouver when that meant you had no money. He shot a television news camera for years, always, and I mean always, getting pictures that no one else did. He was closest to the fires, he was there at the scene of the crime, he got the tears in the reunions.

  Then he quit. He could not stand working with reporters who asked stupid questions. In fact if he thought the reporter was asking too many questions during interviews he would unplug the cable from the camera to the microphone and go off taking pictures of the event they were covering.

  The poor reporter, either too new or too self-centred, who did not know how to ask questions in the first place would go on asking questions unaware that the cable to his microphone was lying on the ground. And if the subject of the interview was a politician then that subject would keep on talking. It’s a reflex—see microphone, open mouth.

  If you were to try that now you would be up in front of the human resources department. They would be telling you how you were undermining the integrity and reputation of another employee, which is not tolerated, and there would be no further warnings.

  The difference with the reporters Grant worked with was they learned how to ask better, shorter questions.

  Anyway, after he quit he took a great many pictures and sent them to a company that sold stock photos to advertising agencies. He sent them many, many pictures. Eventually an agency bought one. Then they bought more. Now his photos constitute a significant portion of the company’s inventory.

  He spends much of the year travelling and taking pictures. In short, he has been everywhere and seen everything. With some of his profits he has built an orphanage and a medical clinic in Africa.

  He is a good guy.

  He sent me a note yesterday. He was in a small town in China. It ended with:

  ps last night i was in a town square about 40 people dancing outside in dark old style ballroom dancing older folks ...

  so that is not new but there was this couple one was a very old lady clinging onto her dance partner

  she could move only a bit her dance partner her daughter who was maybe 60 herself the two of them

  totally in love just sharing a moment together mother and her child dancing in the dark both with lovely smiling faces enjoying a

  simple life together soon the mother will pass and the memory will be in my head and yours

  grant.

  He did not send a picture, but you can see it. Just close your eyes—a story that is now in my head and yours.

  Thank you.

  The Tree and the Carver

  First of all, I do not like doing stories about Native carvers. There are so many of them and so many are so good and many of them have the same story:

  “I had a hard life and tu
rned to carving.”

  That is true. They did have hard times, often brought upon themselves, like many, many of the rest of us. One good thing for some Native carvers is they have something they could hold, a piece of wood or stone. It is good to hold something when you also have a tradition that a Great Spirit made that wood or stone.

  Yes, you still need talent, or at least massive perseverance, and you still have to learn from someone else and you still have to be sober and you still have to sell the thing after you have carved it. Ask any artist or writer or inventor or person with a resume: selling what you have is usually the hardest part. It is when most who have done everything else give up.

  Pass the carvers sitting by the side of the street and look. You don’t have to understand art. You can see that is a beautiful eagle or bear. And it is made of stone or wood. And the artist is right there in front of you. You could ask him about his work.

  Go ahead, buy a piece and you will be happy. You’ll even have a story that goes with it, and that you get for free.

  But it is hard for me to do stories about them simply because there are so many of them. “You did a story about him; what about me?”

  But sometimes there are exceptions.

  ● ● ●

  As always, we were looking for something. There was a man in a wheelchair looking out at the ocean, a sad but beautiful sight. We stopped and I could hear him yelling profanities, which was not so beautiful. He went on his way, still yelling, and I looked out at the sea and back and forth, and there, just over the Seawall and almost hidden, was a fellow sitting on a stool. Looking more closely I could see he was a carver, but there was something very different about him. It wasn’t so much his art as where he was doing it.

  In front of him was a little maple tree, behind him the rocks of the Seawall, and between the two were about two steps of sand. Okay, I think, this is his studio. And that was all I was thinking when I leaned over the rock wall and spoke to him.