None of This Was Planned Page 7

  But we found nothing. A big failure here today. Okay, I admit that sometimes Trout Lake, the jewel of parks, lets me down. On the other hand, maybe it’s not the fault of the park. Maybe it’s mine.

  That’s possible. That hurts, but perhaps I haven’t looked some­where for something and have given up too soon. Don’t we all do that?

  I looked back at the girl. She was sitting in the same spot. You never know. I took a long walk back to the pagoda.

  This will be bad but at least I’ll try, I thought. She will have problems with her boyfriend, her family, her teachers, her life, everything. I will regret this.

  “Excuse me, it’s none of my business, but are you okay?”

  She could have told me that I was right, it was none of my business, but no, this girl just spoke up and ruined the whole idea that the park could let me down.

  “I’m locked out of my house and this is the best place to wait.”

  What? Locked out of her house? A universal experience! Oh beauty, oh joy. The poor girl is locked out. We’ve all been there. Everyone at one time or another has stuck their hands in their pockets and said, “Uh oh. Where are they? Oh no!” She was one of us.

  I told you the park was good.

  She had left her keys at home when she went to school. Now she had to wait for her mother or her brother, she said.

  “I sure hope it’s my mother who comes home first.”

  “Why?”

  “Because last time my brother forgot his keys I kept him sitting out on the porch for twenty minutes before I let him in. He’ll do the same to me.”

  Bless you, and your problem. On television you were so sweet and you made everyone who has done the same thing remember that time.

  I told you the park was good, and I almost missed it because I was afraid of talking to someone who looked like she had a problem.

  That would have made me the one with the problem.

  ● ● ●

  In all, I have done more than one hundred stories at Trout Lake. On the other hand I have done more than one thousand stories in Stanley Park. Yes, that’s true. Someone at a previous television station once counted them. She stopped at a thousand.

  Now it’s your turn. Queen Elizabeth Park is good too, but just go to your local park. They are all places with people who have lives outside of television and work, like you. There is always potential for you to find something interesting there. Go on, find something and enjoy.

  Beyond Belief

  “Stop. She’s got goldfish in her shoes!”

  Right there, right on the diamond-studded golden concrete of Robson Street (of course it’s not really diamonds and gold but you have to have diamonds and gold to afford to shop on that street), right there was a woman walking with her fish.

  This is cruel. This is stupid. This is the kind of story that doesn’t need a beginning, middle or end. The sheer idiocy is enough to support it.

  She was wearing shoes with plastic cube-like heels filled with water and in the water in her heels were goldfish, two in each one.

  “Are they real?” I asked.

  Of course I could see they were real. She meant for all to see that they were real.

  “Aren’t they cute?” she said.

  I couldn’t answer. It was inhumane, it was thoughtless, it was mean, but I didn’t want to sound like a confrontational do-gooder, so I just said, “You think they are going to live?”

  “I had to take them back yesterday because they were dead,” she said. “They sold me bad fish.”

  It’s not the fish who are bad, I thought.

  “Why?” I asked.

  “I told you, because they were dead.”

  “No, I mean why are you wearing that? Them?”

  She tilted her head, trying to make sense of the question.

  “It’s stylish,” she said. “Everyone will have them soon.”

  Meanwhile video of the fish and the heels and the shoes was being gathered, and her words were being collected and my sympathy for the fish was building steam.

  “You know they bounce around in there and that can kill them.”

  Her head tilted the other way.

  “I wouldn’t hurt them for the world. And there’s even a way I can twist open the heels and free them,” she said with care and kindness and even sincerity in her voice.

  I looked down. “I think you have another dead one.”

  She looked down. She could see one of them floating upside down, which had happened just since we’d started talking.

  She was angry.

  “That does it. They sold me another sick fish. I'll take them back right now and get my money back.”

  “Do you have another pair of shoes to wear?”

  “I’ll buy some,” she said. “After I give them a piece of my mind.”

  And then she left, beating to death the three terrified remaining fish with each step she took back to the store, where she would complain—about the fish.

  A piece of her mind she would give them, she said. That wouldn’t leave her with much.

  The Painted House

  Stephen Harper, the politician who would not tolerate any deviation from his way of thinking in his people, was in Richmond.

  He was promoting a new program that would help families and help him get re-elected.

  What he needed was a typical immigrant family with children. He would stand in front of their home and make the announcement.

  Early in the morning painters arrived at the home. They painted the front as high as they could reach, but no higher. No ladders, just tiptoes.

  They did not paint the sides of the house, which could have used some paint.

  Also early in the morning his people (isn’t it great to have people?) went to a toy store where they bought a great selection of really great large toys.

  They spread them around the yard in a way that would make a parent furious at kids who would leave their toys out like that. Yes, this is plain fraud. This is deception. This is the way political leaders work even with kids and toys.

  Then his people used yellow tape to mark off the place where the television cameras would be allowed. From that position they could see only the front of the house and only if they pointed up, away from where the prime minister would be speaking, would they see the unpainted part. And they would not do that because they were paid to record his speech.

  As he left the house to stand in front of the cameras he passed by the toys. The cameras always follow him as he walks to the podium.

  It was an image of love and family and fun and gay abandon and children and peace and happiness. Of course, it was a lie.

  And then he spoke of whatever it was he was speaking of and left immediately by limousine for his next speech.

  The cameras left, following him.

  His people gathered up the toys and drove back to the toy store where they returned everything for a full refund.

  And the rest of the house remained unpainted.

  But on television, where the prime minister stood in front of a bright and clean house surrounded by the objects of joy and happiness, it all looked so real, as did the man giving the speech.

  A Real Garden

  We went to the Northwest Flower & Garden Show in Seattle. It is one of the largest and most beautiful anywhere.

  The normal thing for a reporter to say here is, it is the second-­largest in the us or it is one of the ten largest in the world. And then you get to thinking is it really so?

  Then you go to Google and do some instant researching, and that’s followed by converting the us square feet into international metric and then you have to decide whether to include the sellers of seeds and garden gloves in the show or just stick with the actual gardens.

  Sometimes reporters should be outlawed from reporting.

>   So my wife and I were walking around the show, and the gardens were utterly beautiful. One had a volcano with smoke drifting up and up and up. It was probably fifteen feet tall, or whatever that is in metric.

  “That would be nice,” my wife said.

  I thought about how we could get a volcano in our front yard and what the passing dogs would think—or do.

  And there was a woodland scene with a fallen tree and a stream and ferns and rocks and leaves. It was so real I thought I was anywhere in Lynn Valley.

  There was a desert land scrapping. I know that’s not a word, but “landscape” is boring. It’s a label. Land scrapping is active and that is what this was, with cactus and dried rocks and sand. I thought an old prospector with his mule would soon walk out of it.

  But in none of the gardens was there any place to sit and drink beer—or vitamin-infused natural spring water—while enjoying a quiet afternoon after working yourself to exhaustion making your garden look natural. These were not real gardens. These were works of art.

  There were no lawn mowers or empty bags of soil enhancers that you’d brought home from the supermarket along with eggs and milk. That was when the bags of soil were full and heavy and it was raining and some of it spilled over your coat and then the bags leaked in the trunk.

  That’s what makes a real garden. Those in Seattle lacked the human element, but they were beautiful and inspiring.

  “We should go home and do something,” my wife said.

  She is beautiful and I was inspired.

  By the time we got home it was dark and raining. When she opened the car door it got caught in the foot-high fence that lines the driveway. It is there to look pretty.

  When she closed the door it ripped up the fence.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I parked too close.”

  “I’ll fix it in the morning,” she said.

  “And I’ll put up more sticks, too.”

  The sticks are the sharply pointed mini spears that are used for making shish kebabs. You know them. You impale a small piece of meat, then slide it down the stick, then stick on a piece of onion and slide it down the stick, then stick on another piece of onion on the stick because the first one broke apart. Then you poke yourself with the stick and say something bad.

  When you are done you have a spear that could be lethal to a gnome. It is filled with meat and a few pieces of onion and peppers. You then cook it over a barbecue until the wood catches fire and you frantically wave it in the air to kill the flames until one of the pieces of meat flies off.

  Then you insert the stick in your mouth, like a sword swallower, trying not to stab yourself in the back of your throat while dragging off either the meat or the onion. Then you do stab yourself and you rip the whole thing out and use your fingers to pull off whatever is still stuck to the stick.

  This is the real paleo caveman diet, except the cavemen just chewed the stick.

  Anyway, my wife uses the sticks to make a Viet Cong trap for the crows that are ripping up our grass. We have those chafer beetle larvae. They were laid there last year by some rotten flying creatures of nature and now they are maturing into delicacies for crows.

  The crows fly in for breakfast, lunch, dinner and snacks. They rip up the grass looking for the larvae and when they find one, more crows fly in and start ripping up more grass. By the time they’ve finished for the day much of the lawn is not a lawn. It is a minefield after the explosions.

  Then at night the raccoons come. They simply rip up the areas of grass between the holes made by the crows. No larva escapes—and nor does the grass.

  My wife has covered the affected battleground with the barbecue sticks, all with their pointed ends sticking up.

  She puts them in at angles, she puts them in deeply, she makes a defence against the larvae and the crows and the raccoons.

  But what crow is really afraid of a stick stuck in the ground and what raccoon is afraid of anything that it can play with? So the larvae wiggle below the sticks, which the crows and raccoons use for markers to know where to find them.

  Before the beetles there was the moss. It rains a lot here and moss likes the rain. Every spring I try to rake out the moss but I have never succeeded. By summer there is some grass growing between the patches of moss.

  That is when I borrow my neighbour’s lawn mower to cut the grass.

  I have a push mower that I got to lose weight. It did not work. The mower worked but I didn’t. That is because it takes a great deal of effort to push a push mower. My neighbour Caroline felt bad for me last year and said I could borrow her motor mower.

  So I did. Then I hit a rock with the blade and it did not sound good. I turned over the mower to see what damage I had caused.

  The blade was okay. I rolled the mower back to its working position and pulled the cord. Bang. Rattle. It started with a bang and a rattle, misfiring and making a noise that the manufacturers would not use in a commercial.

  And immediately it belched black smoke, shooting out the back of the mower like an old, badly neglected diesel truck hauling a heavy load up a long hill—only worse, because there was no hill and no truck. Just me and a mower and my neighbours coming to look.

  I shut off the mower. This was not good, but I figured some oil had gotten into the cylinder and it would burn off, so I pulled the cord again. Bang. Rattle. Smoke. Black ugly smoke. Then phsss—the sound of a dying engine.

  I waited for Caroline to come home. Her husband, Perry, asked if I had turned it over.

  “Well, yes. To see if I’d ruined the blade.”

  I avoided saying “your” blade.

  “You can’t turn over that mower. Look. It says on the side, ‘Do not turn over.’”

  This I did not know.

  The next day he took it to the mower fixer shop and a week later he got it back. I wanted to pay for it, but since it was old and needed fixing anyway he said no. He is a very nice guy.

  I did pay for half of it and told him I would never borrow it again.

  He said of course I should, and now that I had paid for part of it I should use it whenever I wanted—which I did a few days later, with more guilt flowing out of me than sweat. And when I was through cutting I went to the gas station and filled a jerry can with gasoline and then went home and filled the mower with gas, until it overflowed. And the gas spilled into a hollowed recess in the metal housing and the only way to get it out was to turn over the mower.

  Which I could not do. So I mopped up the gas with a rag, and tried to wring it out back into the jerry can, which I could not. So I had gasoline soaking into the grass, which I did not tell my wife about.

  The rain probably saved me, and the grass. Winter and spring came and the beetles came, and the barbecue sticks. And the moss is worse.

  But when we came home from the Flower & Garden Show in Seattle we were inspired. The problem with the show is we have a real garden, the kind most people have. It’s not a show garden. That is why we go to garden shows—to pretend.

  Is This Us?

  This is very sad. Don’t read it. Seriously. You will have to face yourself as you may someday be and that is not nice.

  That sounds odd. It sounds either philosophical or stupid but it doesn’t sound good.

  First, go to a nursing home. I am in the process of visiting someone in a nursing home and I’ve been doing this for years. She is a family member. She falls asleep in her wheelchair on the way to the bathroom. She doesn’t remember if she had lunch five minutes after she had lunch. She asks where her great-grandchildren live, and then asks again, and again.

  Down the hallway there is another woman in a wheelchair holding a doll. She runs her fingers through the doll’s hair and smiles. Then she squeezes the doll and smiles again. She has not said a word in a year. Her husband goes to the home every day and sits by her side. He talks to her. She doesn’t
talk to him.

  Waiting to eat dinner is a man who is quite young, maybe in his late forties. He has a smile. He looks pleasant. He is pleasant.

  He crosses his legs, then uncrosses them, then crosses them again.

  “How are you?” I ask.

  “Fine,” he says.

  I almost think he is just nervous and is visiting someone.

  “Have you been here long?” I ask, meaning this afternoon.

  “Five years,” he says.

  Then he crosses his legs again.

  “It’s almost dinner,” he says.

  Then he uncrosses his legs.

  None of these people are the people they were just a few years ago. Many of these people were us just a few years ago.

  They started fading, so slowly that no one noticed, not even themselves. They forgot something. We all forget things. They got confused. We all get confused. They told a joke and could not remember the punchline. We all do this from time to time. It isn’t so much that we forget the punchline; it’s just that we didn’t tell it right and those listening didn’t get it.

  “What I mean is he went down the ladder, not up the ladder. Wait. No, he went up the ladder. Yes, that’s it. You get it now? I’m sorry. I always get that mixed up.”

  A year or so earlier, when he made up the joke, everyone laughed. What happens to us?

  We don’t know, including the husband who sits with his wife who doesn’t talk and who holds the doll. He doesn’t know what happened, how it happened or even exactly when it happened. He just sits there, every day, with his wife.

  It doesn’t happen to everyone, but there is the veteran who charged onto the beach with his rifle and was brave and strong and young and helped save the world. Now he doesn’t recognize his son who comes every week to visit.

  Meanwhile there are the friends of the veteran who were with him on the beach and they still meet for coffee and talk politics and joke about the old days. Sometimes they visit their friend in the home. Same background, same race, same religion, same finances, same diet, and so what? None of that seems to matter. It happens or it does not happen and we don’t know why.