The Al Purdy memorial statue in Toronto // By Shaun Merritt [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Seven ways of looking at something else

The colour that glances off
from another colour
looks at something else
aslant and tangential
and may not be seen alone
only in symbiosis
–rings around necks of certain birds
to see that not-blue and not-green
requires growing an extra space
in your head to keep them safe in
—followed by this girl into a museum
standing by a mummy-case
waiting for the sun on painted queen
at that moment watching the girl
watching the queen watching the watcher
unable to break the circle
—in the Mediterranean off Famagusta
sunken bronze and filigree gold memories
have taken the sun to bed on the sea bottom
solar fires burn in mud
and the sea-moan crying in lava caves
Greek women not crying for their lovers
aching for their doodads
—take for instance
that the planet they figured out
had to be there on accounta how
the others acted because of it
like a dance with invisible partner

Give me that final mystery
the invisible woman so lovely
she is beyond my conception of her
yet only possible because of me
sweet shadow in the bedroom
my rebellious beloved satellite orbiting me
yearning to be free

Anyone with a basic understanding of North America’s history knows this is not what happened. The rivers flowed and the grass continued to grow, but the ship brazenly built its success on the oppression of the canoe. Government mandated genocide, both cultural and literal, attempted to rob generations of Indigenous families from their autonomy. Canada’s residential schools (the last of which only closed in the 1990s) were devoted to the dismantling of Indigenous youth’s languages, spirituality, and culture—and were only a small part of the government’s assimilationist agenda. But the word assimilation doesn’t begin to embody the pain inherent to colonialism. It also does nothing to capture the strength of Indigenous peoples who are now reclaiming their spaces, languages, and knowledge.

Today, Canada’s collective dialogue is finally shifting to include reconciliation with Indigenous people. This year, after six years of gathering statements from witnesses and survivors of Canada’s residential school system, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) released 94 calls to action. The calls outline improvements that span across many areas of Canadian society, like child welfare, health, language and culture, media, the legal system, and education. Each of these sectors holds barriers rooted in colonization. And, in many ways, the TRC’s report acts as a guide for the Canadian government to address the chasms left by the residential school system.

In a country with a history of using the education system to oppress Indigenous people, academia has an intrinsic role to play in truth-telling. Given all this, says journalist and award-winning director Candace Maracle, the need for an improved, context-conscious curriculum is evident: “Not just as a Haudenosaunee woman, not just as a journalist, but as a person.”

That’s why the TRC report also addresses modern education, targeting every level of schooling from kindergarten to post-secondary. It’s something that many Indigenous and education activists are currently focusing on, and also grappling with. As these discussions gain traction, post-secondary institutions are newly focused on introducing more Indigenous content into the university curriculum—what’s being called “Indigenization.” But when it comes to translating this term to tangible, systemic action, it’s not so easy to parse out. Indigenization can refer to many things, from to the creation of more Indigenous spaces on campus, to mandatory courses added to universities, to adding more Indigenous context and perspectives into already existing curricula. Regardless of what form it takes, this emergent buzzword carries a connotation of pervasiveness, effortlessly suggesting systemic transformation. At its core, Indigenization is more complicated: these are institutions that, in many ways, are built on a rejection of Indigenous knowledge.

“These institutions and classrooms were never meant to be Indigenized. These spaces were created to not allow my people in,” says Andrea Landry, a 27-year-old University of Saskatchewan professor. Landry is Anishinaabe and comes from Pays Plat First Nation in Ontario. Now, she calls Treaty 6 territory home in Poundmaker Cree Nation, Saskatchewan. She teaches Indigenous studies and political science through on-reserve classes. “I grew up in high schools where being brown was a burden,” says Landry. She went to Vancouver Island University in Nanaimo, B.C. During her undergrad, Landry was involved with international politics. She did work with the United Nations. Idle No More had started. She was travelled to different countries every month. But every time she came back to the classroom, she was confronted with frustrating questions like Teach us about the ’60s scoop? Teach us about residential schools? Why do I always see Indians drunk downtown? “I was always questioning my professors,” says Landry, “and saying, ‘Where is the representation of my people?’”

All of which raises the question: How do you even begin to re-imagine institutions that were never meant to welcome Indigenous people in the first place?

* * *

There are 650,000 Indigenous youth under the age of 25 in Canada. This is the fastest growing segment of the country’s population. Yet, fewer than 10 percent of Indigenous people aged 25–64 have a university degree, according to Universities Canada, an organization which labels itself “the voice of Canadian universities.” Comparatively, 65 percent of non-Indigenous people of the same age category have a university degree—more than triple the amount. The reasons behind this are nuanced, not easily attributed to any single set of causes. Economic barriers, like a lower average income, make it more difficult to attend post-secondary institutions. There is also a sense of disheartening alienation that can come with travelling long distances from communities to universities.

“If we’re saying everyone needs a higher education in this country to be employable, how do we create the space so that everyone can attend? That’s the biggest piece,” says Darren Thomas, a 46-year-old working on his Ph.D. in community psychology at Laurier University. A member of the Seneca Nation, Thomas lives in the Grand River Territory of the Haudenosaunee. He also holds the unexpected title of professional entertainer, as an on-stage comedy hypnotist. Thomas is an easy-going conversationalist, with a relaxed smile that reaches his eyes. “I help people who have experienced trauma laugh,” says Thomas. He’s one of 13 designated role models for the Council of Ontario Universities’ (COU) “Let’s Take Our Futures Further” campaign, which launched in February 2016 and aims to showcase the successes of Aboriginal students in Ontario.

In a time where mainstream media and textbooks all too often cast Indigenous people as victims in their own narratives—or don’t cast them at all—showcasing the successes of Indigenous Canadians is long overdue. This is why initiatives like Future Further are important. “Many Canadians don’t know who we are, don’t understand what our resiliency is,” says Wanda Wuttunee, a professor of Native Studies at University of Manitoba. “You can hear many sad, hard stories. But what do they do with them? Are they resilient and keep going? Or do they sit?” There’s a need to make space, so that the triumphs of Indigenous scholars, thinkers, and creators across Canada can be shared. Narratives of struggle should not be dismissed, but they also shouldn’t stifle ones of success.

When Thomas first attended university in the late 1980s, he says there was a sense of trepidation from his home community surrounding Western education. “Fundamentally, there’s still that fear,” says Thomas, “that Western education is a mind changer.” The phrase “mind changer” comes from a very specific part of Haudenosaunee history, Thomas tells me. In the late 18th century, there was a Seneca prophet by the name of Handsome Lake. He had visions that told him how his people should live. One of the visions warned him of the mind changer, alcohol. Another told him that his people would become lost if they followed the white man. At the time, Thomas brushed off his grandmother’s warnings. “It’s the modern world,” he thought. “They’re not going to treat us this way.”

Now, he laughs gently at his youthful optimism, “Little did I know she was right.”

* * *

A few years ago, Maracle sat in a small living room, in her friend’s downtown Toronto apartment. She was hanging out with some colleagues from her Ryerson graduate program, casually drinking beers. One of her male colleagues turned to her, “I knew some Indians once…” There are enough people around that Maracle was embarrassed. “I knew some Indians once…” That agonizing anecdotal pretext. The man told Maracle they beat-up and robbed a friend of his. Five years later, recounting the story, Maracle laughs the sort of laugh that is fuelled by absurdity more than actual amusement. She’s able to laugh now, but at the time it stung, she says. Back then, part of Maracle rushed to offer an explanation on behalf of the Indigenous strangers. The other educated part, says Maracle, followed up her explanation with clarifications. “There was a part of me that sort of stepped back and said, ‘We’re not all like that and I probably don’t know them,’” she pauses, gently scoffing. “We might be a small population but that doesn’t mean I know every Indian there is and I certainly don’t hang out with robbers.” Maracle lets loose into a spurt of wry laughter. But she knows it’s not funny. These are the attitudes that often permeate classrooms—spaces that can be laden with ignorance and outright hostility.

Landry can speak, lengthily and with eloquence, to institutional hostility. She was the first Indigenous student to take the Master of Community and Social Justice program at University of Windsor. During that process, one experience stands out from the rest. The class was talking about Indigenous people, “because, of course, I brought the topic up,” says Landry, the only Indigenous student in the room. When the conversation shifted to genocide, one of Landry’s older male colleagues made eye-contact with her and said, “It wasn’t genocide, because it only killed thousands of your people.” He laughed. Landry locked eyes with him and just stared. “I remember my whole body got really, really hot. Even my insides and my stomach. Everything was hot.”

She felt instantaneous rage. Toward him, but also toward Canada’s institutions, for allowing him to believe such revisionist history. Her pause was brief and her decision to engage her antagonizer, in what she describes as a history lesson, was a quick one. She knew the numbers—that it was more than thousands. So, she talked about the statistics. She asked him if he knew the basics of Canada’s history of colonization.

Landry says she asks people “like that” questions, to lure their thinking outside of its usual scope. Questions like, What are your understandings of treaties? Or, Where did you learn about the history of the land? Her peer didn’t have any answers. He remained quiet, a contrast to his usual demeanour in class. Landry felt he undermined her because she’s an Indigenous woman. But she also felt he had been trained from a young age, by Canada’s institutions, to think that way.

That night she walked home, her anger propelling her tall frame quickly forward. It was the sort of anger that simmers for weeks. She called her mother and told her she wanted to quit, that she was done with the program. She dreamed of leaving academia and its promises of hostility, to be with her mother. To fish and live off the land. But, despite her disillusionment, she was determined to finish her degree (“Mama didn’t raise no quitter,” she later quips). Time and time again, she was expected to act as a spokesperson for all Indigenous people. Teach us about residential schools. Teach us about the ’60s scoop. Why do I always see Indians drunk downtown? “These kind of questions pick away at your identity,” she says, adding, “It took me six years to get my undergrad.”

* * *

University faculty are the only appendage of the great university body that has the ability to reach out directly and personally to students. They are, as Thomas puts it, “this body of people that drive institutional thinking from the classroom.” For many students, the classroom is the first (or only) place they will learn about Indigenous peoples’ histories—histories that, in elementary school, were given little to no space in textbooks, wedged between terms like “first contact” and “fur-trade.” Unfortunately, when students transition from the public school system to post-secondary institutions, university curriculums, shaped by the perspectives of professors, often manage to maintain the same established, outdated “truths.” Rather than drive institutional thinking out, many professors uphold the institutional status-quo.

After a year of doing his undergraduate at Laurentian, Thomas transferred to Western University. He felt fairly successful at Laurentian—a fact which he attributes mostly to being in an Aboriginal-specific program, surrounding by Aboriginal academics—but he couldn’t stand the cold. Western was closer to his community, but also much harder to navigate as one of the only non-white students on campus. He recalled one professor who handed him back a paper and said: “I don’t know anything about your people, how could I mark this?” The professor continued: “Stop thinking like an Indian.” Thomas quit on the spot. Thomas felt, “really, deeply, spiritually,” like he didn’t belong at Western—that it was not a safe space for him. Years later, he went to Laurier and took night classes to finish his undergraduate. Only then did he feel comfortable again.

University institutions do not change rapidly. Even when Thomas later did his master’s degree at Laurier, which he calls “a rich place to play,” he was asked questions like: Why are you here, then, if you’re always bashing the university? Why are you getting your master’s? “Well, no one asked me if they could come and create this country called Canada,” says Thomas, a rare edge to his voice. He adds that part of his university experience is him playing the game. “I’m getting these advanced credentials, because suddenly, in the eyes of the state, I know more.” Now, he sits with people involved in politics, with institutional power, and discusses issues that are important to him. “I’m just some radical Indian that’s trying to change the world,” he says, “but because I’m doing this, following and playing the game, it’s giving me access.”

There is hope for change. The practice of cluster hiring has taken off in North American post-secondary institutions. This involves hiring new faculty, across various disciplines, for the purpose of a common research objective. As a result of these cluster hires, more Indigenous professors are being hired across Canadian campuses. This is the most direct way to subvert the academic status quo and also the easiest way to avoid the co-opting of Indigenous knowledge in the classroom. In March 2016, the University of Guelph announced it will hire, over the course of the next 18 months, five tenured Indigenous faculty members. To encourage more Indigenous scholars, Guelph also announced the creation of five new graduate awards, worth $30,000 a year, for Ph.D. students and a $15,000 annual award for master’s degree students, as well as a new $45,000 postdoctoral award for an Indigenous researcher.

Another way to shift academic perspective is to create more informed educators. This year, Trent University launched a new five-year Indigenous Bachelor of Education program. It offers entry straight out of high school, or through transfer agreements set up with local community colleges and First Nations run schools. The first three years of the program revolve around Trent courses, then the fourth and fifth are spent in the Indigenous Bachelor of Education program. “The key to education is good teachers. That’s what we are trying to prepare here,” says David Newhouse, a professor of Indigenous studies at Trent University, who has also been chair of the Department of Indigenous studies for 23 years. “We’re guided very much by elders who keep telling us over and over again about the importance of education.”

Whatever guides a university’s hiring practices, the lived experience of whomever is doing the educating should be a significant factor in the decision. Lived-experience carries inherent truth, a truth which resonates and captivates. “You can’t teach something you haven’t experienced in your life,” says Landry, “You can try your best, but the emotional content is gone. And the emotional content is what gets to the core of people when you’re teaching in a classroom.” The wisdom and knowledge of Indigenous elders and scholars, for instance, is the core of Cape Breton University’s new MIKM 2701 course. Each week a different Mi’kmaq elder, knowledge keeper, or scholar co-teaches a lecture in their area of expertise. Unlike the rest of the newly incorporated courses offering Indigenous perspectives, this course is entirely free, accessible via live stream and, later, archived footage online.

“We wanted to create something that was free and was Indigenous-focused and Indigenous-led and could be a way for Cape Breton University to give back,” says Ashlee Cunsolo Willox, an assistant professor at Cape Breton University and one of the creators of the course. “To really take our responsibilities around the truth and reconciliation commission seriously.” This combination of honouring Indigenous systems of thought, while straying outside of academia’s capitalist nature created a result that Willox could not have imagined. Over 12,000 people, across 26 different countries, watched the lectures. Suddenly, people who would otherwise not have had the opportunity to enter a university lecture hall could learn about Mi’kmaq culture. Also, Willox tells me, generations of Mi’kmaq families were watching the lectures together. “A lot of people were indicating, as Indigenous elders, that to see their grandchildren, their children, their great-grandchildren watching it together with pride was healing.”

Landry’s classes also use a basis of traditional knowledge to deliver the content. This past semester, Landry asked her students to interview someone who knew about the land, or the old ways. Many of Landry’s students did interviews with people they had never thought to talk with, or had never made time to talk with, she says. A lot of her students broke down in tears when they were presenting. “I always want students to learn more about where they’re living and where they come from,” she says. “We have to stay true to who we are and where we come from, even through the learning process.” Her lessons touch on colonization, but outside the trauma-laden landscape. Instead, she prefers to encourage discussions of family, healing and the land they are learning on. What does your relationship to the land look like, now? What did your Mushum or Kokum teach you about the land? What was it like for them to grow up in colonial Canada?

Today, says Thomas, is an exciting time for emerging academics, because academia is at a tipping point. But for the system as a whole, the biggest challenge is still figuring out how Indigenous knowledge can fit into education. “How do we take Indigeneity,” he asks, “something that is so rich and lived and beautiful, and put it inside a Western institution?” It is important to understand, he adds, that Indigenous systems of thought and Western, Eurocentric systems of thought work from very different principles and have different ways of interacting with the world. The Western approach, cemented in Canada’s institutions and collective-mentality, is about evolving away from the past, whereas the nature of Indigeneity, says Thomas, is: How did our ancestors understand things?

Yet, if Western and Indigenous knowledge are going to cohabit academia, there has to be some sort of intellectual shift. What needs to happen is not a joining of two halves, but an understanding that Indigenous knowledge is inherently whole. For Landry, the answer is clear: First Nations run schools. Spaces rooted in Indigenous knowledge. Landry’s dream is to open her own school, out on the land, free of colonial academia. She doesn’t want Indigenous knowledge to be seen as an alternative to Western institutions of education. She wants her students to know that their academic and career goals and prioritizing their Indigenous knowledge are not mutually exclusive.

Some of these schools already exist (though in dismally small numbers). Blair Stonechild has been at the First Nations University in Saskatchewan since 1976, back when it wasn’t even called First Nations University. He’s been the department head, dean of academics, and was even the executive director of planning and development. Stonechild describes First Nations University’s approach as holistic, with an emphasis on physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual well-being of the students. For Stonechild, First Nation run schools offer Indigenous students an ideal environment. Whether or not people understand or respect Indigenous systems of thought, he adds, they need to make room for protocols and perspectives: “At least create space for Indigenous culture to have some integrity.”

In a country where a ship is a ship and a canoe is a canoe, it’s important to know where you come from. Indigenous students have to recognize that when they leave the reserve and go to university, they’re just visiting the ship, says Thomas. “At the core of their being they have to know they’re born of that canoe,” he adds. “That the strength and resistance of their Indigeneity will help them flourish.”

By Ephraim Moshe Lilien (Biblisches Lesebuch fuer den Schulgebrauch) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Noah on the 17th Day

So Noah
600 years old
and sick of it all
is standing on his boat
his Pandemonium
three stories high
and quite literally
full of life
finally tired
of the way
his wife
catalogues
their neighbours
as the bob by
wearing a coat of ha!
to warm her body
tired of going
below decks
threatening
sheep monkeys
moose
with marinades
and the grill
just so he can
sleep
his sons
more like
hyenas
every day
tearing into
each other
over endless
games of
poker
tired of the madness
in the clouds
drunk on
galaxies
the rain
applauding
against the
roof
so he lowers
himself down
into a lifeboat
nodding on the
gray on gray
cratered by rain
soaked to the skin
floating away
and
of course
they all call out to him
growls and screams
and whistles and words
but they can’t have him
this morning Noah
is deaf
and grinning
he slices
the water
with his line
and waits
quietly
to kill a
fish that
is fat
white
and full of
cruel victories

Interview with Sheila Heti

Iain Deans is a poet living in Toronto. He was born on a Friday in the early seventies in Montreal. After graduating from Queen’s University, he worked as a copywriter for about five years (“as did Hart Crane and James Dickey,” he is quick to point out), and now he works at a college in Toronto doing marketing and communications—unlike those two men, who are dead. Literary Editor Sheila Heti interviewed Iain via email, but she says her questions were vague. In this simulation of an interview, Iain’s answers are the answers he gave, but her questions are made up.

Sheila Heti: What is your approach to writing?
Iain Deans: My approach to writing isn’t terribly unique. Most of the time a poem comes together after a period of jazzing around—taking notes, automatic writing. I work in long-hand and try to keep a schedule.
SH: What happens if you don’t write?
ID: Things start to fall apart. I become edgier, unable to handle things. It’s been like that since my early 20s. It’s my medicine, and nothing seems to act as a suitable substitute—not exercise, not love.
SH: What about the poem?
ID:” “Noah on the 17th Day” came to be while I was walking through Montreal’s “underground city” during a crowded rish hour.
SH: Do you like to walk?
ID: I am a dedicated walker. I’m willing to walk for hours, but I’m not exactly romantic about it—I’m not out here scattering wildflower seeds. Downtown Toronto at night, when it gets really quiet, is fantastic. I love walking down side streets when everything is dark blue.
SH: What about cars?
ID: I hate driving. Too paranoid. I basically think everyone else is in a big hurry to die. I don’t own a car, and I won’t until the hybrid models are in price range. Many of the vehicles I see on the road seem to have more to do with vanity and bullshit than they have to do with getting around. I don’t get too broken up when I hear about someone torching a row of SUVs.

Illustration by Jason Skinner

Say Uncle

The uncles had basement rec rooms with pool tables or plaid couches. The uncles had histories in the military that you had no idea about. The uncles distilled their own alcohol in giant jugs, which they showed off to your parents proudly. The uncles wore wide-collared shirts and flannel pants. The uncles talked cars. The uncles held slideshows. The uncles insisted on paying. The uncles toured you around, pointing out the car window and giving you historical facts about their cities. The uncles mocked their own children who, even when they became defiant, said only, “Daaaad!”

The uncles called you over to them and said, “See if you can figure this out,” always presenting you something as if it was a riddle or a challenge, and you worried from that single phrase onward that you would fail before them. The uncles were men who trimmed their nose hairs, men who carried pocket knives, stubborn men who would ask nothing of anyone, men who ate and drank too much at Christmas, men with neighbors they told stories about as if they were enemies, men with large umbrellas, men with tackle boxes, men who knew the best route and the best way to remove a loose tooth, men who argued about politics into the night until you closed your eyes and the darkness replaced their voices with the gargle of rain.

As you grew older, the uncles said sexist things, or racist things. They seemed more stubborn than before. They said things to your mother you didn’t think funny. They tried to kid with you but only turned your face purple. They liked hack writers you had never thought they would like. Their waistlines grew, and they overcame cancers and operations and heart conditions and car accidents and mishaps that you were informed of as factually as possible. “Tell me about my uncle,” you said, but the answers were always brief and uncertain.

Eventually you would be at some family party and you could see them fading out, like ghosts, growing sallow right before your eyes, melting in the rain as if they were made of chalk. “I’ll never see you again,” you thought. “The next time we all get together, one of you won’t be here,” and it was true, but it was never the one you would have figured.

The uncles were dying. Slowly, softly, they were forgetting things, and falling away into graves that were damp with rain, and you had no poetry for them, though you wished you did, no real knowledge of who they were. There was only the absence of walking down a foreign laneway in a cemetery far from your own home and wondering how long until the next cup of hot coffee and if it was wrong to bend to wipe the mud from your shoes.

But the uncles weren’t over. They were still cracking jokes. When you closed your eyes, you still saw them. The uncle with the red shirt. The uncle with the shirt as yellow-gold as his tooth. The uncle in the bow-tie at the wedding. The uncle whose hair grew straight upward, and the uncle who had no hair, and the uncle with the beard growing half down his neck, and the uncle who lost a hand a long time ago, and the uncle with the big metal belt buckle, and the intellectual uncle in Hush Puppies, and the uncle who drove like your father, slow and staring straight ahead.

There is the uncle still singing carols behind your right ear in deep baritone. There is the uncle more silent than the rest, whose voice is the color of smoke, and whose fingers are the color of smoke, and whose eyes are the color of smoke. There is the uncle whose lap you sat on, though you have no recollection of it, have only a photo of yourself there, perched, telling a secret story to him when you were so small his hand was a country. A toy you don’t remember resting on his knee as if you had set up a camp.

No, the uncles weren’t over. The uncles were still crisp, and still smelled of peppermint and tobacco, and apples and wool, and new leather, and the very old pages of very old books. Even now when you fall into sleep, they are waiting, their voices steady in another room, just there on the other side of the wall where everything is in black and white.

They are caulking windows and killing bees. They are hauling old artifacts out of a barn and saying, “You think that’s worth something?” and setting it out to the curb. They are sawing the branches off a dead tree and stacking them in piles. They are launching a boat into the water—just there, just behind the wall, in that room, a whole boat. They are caught on video and they are laughing. They are younger than you remember, those men you know and never know. They are all together, the uncles from your mother’s side and the uncles from your father’s side, and the great uncles on both sides. They are looking up at the sky for rain, and saying, “Do you think she’ll hold?”

So when your father walks into that room and takes his place among them, wearing a white cap he favors for golf days, you can’t help but startle. He’s not your uncle, but he is an uncle. He cups his hand against the wind and lights a cigarette, lips pulling at the paper. He lifts his eyes to the sky they are still appraising, which looks something like your grandparents’ ceiling and something like the blue stratocumulus over Lake Michigan, and says, “I think it will.”

The uncles turn to him and nod.

Illustration by Drew Shannon

Lee Marvin, at your service

There was a time, and it feels like yesterday, but really it was an era of Cold War paranoia and black dial phones and colour-TV-as-novelty, when it seemed like everywhere you went, every corner you turned, Lee Marvin was there, ready to give you a hand.

You would flood the engine of your car, and you’d sit there in your driveway, still pumping away at the pedal, and a song by Paul Revere and the Raiders would be squeaking out of your tinny radio speaker, and there’d be a knock at your window. You’d crank the window down, that’s how you did it in those days, you’d crank your window down and peer up into the sunlight, and a tall figure would blot out the sun like there was some goddamn eclipse or something. And before you could say, “Are you Ray Walston from My Favorite Martian,” the giant silhouette with a brush cut would say, “Lee Marvin, at your service.” And within minutes, seriously, you’d be picking up your date and you’d both go five-pin bowling.

Maybe your father would die, or no, your grandmother who lived in the family room and didn’t know any English, only spoke Russian, but she made a great snack by frying up chicken fat and onions, and the whole family would sit in front of the Marvelous Invention of Colour TV and watch Laugh-In while dipping into the greasy bowl Grandma had prepared. And now she was gone, and you’ve all just come home from the funeral, and Solly says, “We’d better cover all the windows,” and Sarah says, “No, we have to take the pillows off the bed and paint Jewish stars on all the mirrors,” and Dad says, “Everyone take off your shoes and put on slippers or flip-flops.” But really, no one had ever paid attention before to what you had to do when you were sitting shiva, because it had only ever been other people’s shivas. And then there was a knock at the door, and when Mom answered, a tall blond man with muscular front teeth would thrust his head inside and say, “Lee Marvin, at your service.” And before you knew it, you’d have all the Jewish mourning customs down pat, and Lee would be leading the minyan in the Kaddish.

Same with if you were in a bank and lining up for the teller and you were confused by how to fill out the deposit slip, or if some skinny thug was robbing the bank, or if two kids in striped shirts were yelling at each other in the schoolyard, or if you were short a few pennies when you were buying a pack of cigarettes or a bottle of cream soda, or if you had trouble making one of those cardboard pinhole viewers when there was a solar eclipse — next thing you knew, before you had even begun to panic: “Lee Marvin, at your service.” That familiar square-jawed grin, the big hand reaching out to shake your own more mortal hand — “Lee Marvin, at your service” — and then he’d do his thing, it would only take a second, and everything would be better and you’d be on your way and the grilled-cheese sandwich wouldn’t even have gotten cold yet, if there was a grilled-cheese sandwich involved in the situation.

But it’s not like Lee Marvin didn’t have his own problems. Lee Marvin had plenty. Just ask Jane Fonda, or Jean Seberg, or John Cassavetes. Or, if you don’t like people whose names begin with the same letter as Jesus, ask Angie Dickinson. Anyway, this all happened so long ago, it’s like it was another lifetime. I’ve put on weight, my hair is white now, and when I get my picture taken, it always looks like I’m lying in a coffin, like when Polly, our Ukrainian cleaning woman, showed us a photograph of her husband back in the Ukraine, and he really was lying in a coffin. We caught Polly stealing some of Mom’s jewellery, and that was the end of Polly in our home. She wasn’t very good anyway — sometimes we’d find cobwebs up near the ceiling after she left.

Our next cleaning woman was Clara, and Clara was from Argentina, and she never stole anything, not even if we deliberately left something out to test her. That’s the difference between Ukrainians and Argentinians. Also, when Clara found my Playboy collection hidden under my bed, she didn’t tell my parents. She just put the magazines in order by year and month and straightened out the stack. Bruce Jay Friedman, who is a very good writer — I’ve read four of his novels — used to always write for Playboy. I always noticed his name at the top of his articles — it was such a Jewish name. It surprised me to see people with Jewish names writing in a magazine with nudie girls. My favourite Playmate was a lady from Hoboken, New Jersey. I think she’s selling real estate now.

The thing about selling real estate is you have to really love what you’re doing, because it’s only genuine enthusiasm that is going to compel someone to fork out the kind of money necessary to own their own house. And you have to be able to look at the bright side of things — you have to always find the rainbow in the goddamn bug-infested swamp. If you lose your excitement about selling real estate — like, if you were really good once but now there’s no challenge left — it’s time to do something. People who don’t think positively can’t be in the real estate business. Sure, they might be able to sell a ramshackle bungalow here and there, but they could never be really successful. They should go into a business they can be more passionate about, like owning a hardware store or testing makeup products on animals.

The best Bruce Jay Friedman novel, according to me, is Stern. The former Playmate from Hoboken, New Jersey, is Janet Lupo.

May I suggest that you schedule an appointment with a career counsellor? These are people who come in all shapes and sizes, and they can make a genuine difference in your life. They may not be able to guarantee you a job, but they can help steer you towards the kind of professional pursuit that you are qualified for, and that you would find meaningful. Something you can really get behind.

Some think that a meaningful job is one that affects a lot of people, such as coming up with an important and complex theory like Einstein did, or being a prime minister, or becoming a police officer in a bad neighbourhood who really connects with the young people and encourages them to get meaningful jobs instead of being hoodlums and layabouts. A meaningful job might only be meaningful to the person who has the job, but that is enough. Meaningfulness is not measured by quantity. Being a meaningful job means being meaningful to the person who holds the job: it gives them self-respect and a purpose in life. It might just be playing a particular chord on a pipe organ once a year on the same date. It might be laying pipe for the delivery of oil. It might be sitting on a porch in a pioneer village smoking a corncob pipe like you were from the 1840s.

Early in 1840, the first issue of the American magazine Electro-Magnetic Intelligencer was published. It appeared on January 18. On the same date, but in 1961, the lie detector was first employed in the Netherlands. Another interesting fact about the Netherlands is that one in three Dutch people belong to a sports club, plus approximately 300 castles in Holland are open to the public. These are “fun facts.” You will find many more “fun facts” sprinkled about in other stories that I have written.

By Ariefrahman (Own work), via Wikimedia Commons

Squirrel

A crow descends on
Queen’s Park Circle at rush hour.
He tries to pluck
the stubborn stringy liver from a squirrel.
Previously the squirrel
had direly underestimated the pep of a Honda Civic.
Prior to that there had been enthusiastic dining
all around the lunch fry truck and garbage.
The crow pierces the liver with his beak and tugs,
then starts to play
like someone’s strung up the mop at the jugband jamboree,
swinging, deft, on one leg.
The squirrel is no Prometheus to the crow’s idolatry.
It’s not like that.

Photo by Gaye Jackson

What the Belgian Wrote

It was the last Sunday of the month, so Kalman was throwing a bottle into the ocean. Sometimes on calm days the club rented canoes and paddled out from the shore to maximize their chances. That was what Martin, the club president, said. But Kalman wasn’t sure exactly what it meant. The chance of what, and increased how much? And what were their chances on days too cold to rent the canoes?

The Bottlenecks were Martin’s idea, so he called the shots. The rules weren’t many. You couldn’t miss the meetings, which was fine with Kalman. You had to bring a bottle every time. Whatever else, you had to write your address and telephone number inside the bottle. That was about it. You didn’t have to say what else you’d written, if anything.

Sometimes Kalman couldn’t think of anything to write, so he would fold the paper an extra time and push it inside with only his basic information. Capping the bottle, he would dip it into the wax he melted for sealing. When he first joined, Kalman melted the wax in whatever vessel was handy, then spent an hour scrubbing it clean. Now that he was an old hand, he had a small bowl set aside for melting the wax. He didn’t bother cleaning it. When the wax ran low, he chopped up dollar store candles with a bread knife and threw them in the bowl. He melted the wax in his microwave oven, which his ex-wife hadn’t bothered to take with her.

After joining the club, Kalman found himself noticing bottles more. He noticed them in women’s hands, or parting their lips; he noticed them broken on the ground.

The point of the club was to have someone else find your bottle. There were other clubs in other countries doing the same thing all the time. So far five bottles had been found by club members around the world. One of the club people who found a bottle was a young girl with a lazy eye in Kent. She wrote to the man who had thrown the bottle, who lived in Belgium. When he found out she had not only discovered his bottle, but that she too threw a bottle in the ocean once a month, the Belgian came over to meet her. A short while later they were married. Martin told Kalman and the rest of the club this story almost every month.

Walking home from the August meeting, Kalman was squinting into the sun. His arms ached from paddling. He stopped in one of the city squares, where the only bench was occupied by a young woman with dark hair cut short up the back of her neck. She was sitting to the extreme right of the bench, drinking liquid from a plain looking bottle. It was green glass, smooth and tapered in her hand. Kalman sat down on the bench, so much to the extreme left that the corner jabbed into his rear. Shifting, he saw the girl was looking at him.

“Hi,” she said.

“That’s a nice bottle,” said Kalman.

“I’ve had it for years,” said the girl. “It was my mother’s, it was the first bottle of beer she ever drank from.”

“Really? That’s a long time to keep a bottle.” And then, so she wouldn’t think he was being judgmental, Kalman added, “Wow.”

The girl put the bottle against her cheek. “Too hot out here,” she said.

Kalman nodded, and looked quickly at the place between the girl’s breasts. He thought she maybe wasn’t wearing anything under her shirt. Her breasts were the little triangle kind. He thought of the girl with the lazy eye in England, and wondered for the first time what the Belgian had written in his bottle.

“Okay. It wasn’t really my mother’s. I just ripped the label off. It had lemonade in it. But I have had it for a while. Not that long. But a while.”

She looked at a small gold watch she was wearing. “I have to go soon,” she said.

“Right,” said Kalman. “It was nice to meet you.” He held his hand out.

“Do you want to walk me home? It’s not far.”

“Oh,” he said. His sore arms screamed and he winced. “Yeah, okay, definitely.”

She got up somewhat awkwardly, like it was a complicated process. Kalman thought her feet looked unusually large. They walked along the street for a short while without talking. The girl kicked a rock, twice, and then missed.

“Do you recognize me,” the girl said.

Kalman flushed, frantically scanning his mind.

“Are you the girl from that coffee commercial?” he said finally. “The one with the yellow flowers?”

“No, no. I work at A&P. I see you come in a lot. I’m a cashier. You buy a lot of root beer.”

For the life of him, Kalman could not place her. She was so young and pretty. He couldn’t believe himself.

“It’s okay,” she said. “That you don’t remember me. That I remember you and you don’t remember me.” Then a short while later: “Well, this is me.”

She had stopped in front of a wooden door, whose stoop was right on the main street. She took a keyring out of her pocket and tried half the keys on it before she managed to get the door open.

“Do you want to come in? I have water in the fridge.”

Inside, her apartment was at the top of the stairs. It was one long, narrow room with several small tables lining the walls. Kalman turned his face from the low bed under the window. He noticed that the walls were covered in mint coloured brocade. He could see the staples just under the ceiling and down above the baseboards.

The girl put her bottle down on the windowsill and fetched two plastic water bottles from the fridge.

“It’s not fancy,” she said. “It’s just store brand.”

Kalman smiled as he tipped it into his mouth. The water was barely cool, as if it hadn’t been in the fridge long.

“I think I had better go,” he said after he finished the water. Before he could leave, she put her hand on his arm. Her face was flushed red when she looked up at him and said, “Could I have some money?”

“I don’t have any money with me,” he said. She nodded and she was chewing on her lip from the inside, pulling her mouth to one side.

“Sorry,” she said. “I’m really sorry.”

“If you need money, why don’t you become a model?” he said.

“I’m not pretty enough,” she said.

“Sure you are.”

“No. I’m really not.” Now she looked angry.

For a moment neither of them said anything and Kalman felt strange.

She took her hand off of his arm.

“Why don’t you come visit me sometime,” she said. She walked to the window and picked up the green glass bottle. “Here,” she said. “You can have this.”

Kalman accepted the bottle and fled to the flat, even street below. He was running before he noticed it and felt cruel when he realized she would have seen from her window. If she was looking.

Kalman took the bottle out of his backpack. He had sealed it with purple wax, buying the coloured candles at the dollar store rather than the plain white ones he usually bought. He thought it looked pretty, the purple wax dripping down the green glass.

He and Martin were sharing a canoe.

“I told you about that girl, the one with the lazy eye, right?” Martin said while he steered the canoe from the back. Kalman was lilypaddling from the front, but Martin was a large man and had no problem moving through the waves without Kalman’s help.

“She found that guy’s bottle. They got married two months later. Isn’t that something?”

“That’s pretty neat.”

Martin was looking out into the open water – or at least in that general direction. Kalman couldn’t see Martin’s eyes behind his sport sunglasses.

“See, it’s all about tides. If you know the tides, you can make your bottle end up wherever you want.”

Kalman nodded. The skin on his upper arms was already starting to burn where his t-shirt left them exposed.

“That’s a nice bottle,” Martin said generously. “Can I see?”

They traded, and Kalman examined Martin’s bottle. It was a clear bottle, maybe one of those summertime coolers that college girls got drunk on. Kalman felt a hook pull behind his navel, like he was in an elevator. The paper inside was yellow.

“What did you write?”

Martin started, and almost dropped his paddle, as if he had forgotten Kalman was there. “In the bottle?”

“Yeah.”

He took off his sunglasses and wiped them on his t-shirt. “You know. Just the usual stuff.” He rubbed the sunglasses meditatively. “Fucking hot out here,” he said.

Then he knelt up in a half-squat, half-stand, so as to not tip the canoe, and whipped his bottle a good forty yards.

“Wow,” said Kalman. “What a toss. But how do you know what the tides are like out there?”

“It doesn’t matter,” said Martin and he began to turn the boat. “Oh, sorry,” he said. “Do you want to throw yours now?”

“I haven’t got an arm like you. That was some throw. I’ll just drop it on the way in. Do bottles close to the shore ever go anywhere?”

“Oh sure. I think that Belgian guy was just standing on a freaking pier when he tossed his. Didn’t even paddle out. And that girl found it, didn’t she?”

Kalman hung his bottle over the front of the boat. He mimed dropping it into the water, dunking his whole hand, but he couldn’t seem to let it go. He yanked the bottle back in and stored it between his feet.

“I’ve got a good feeling about that one,” said Martin. “Somebody’s going to get these.”

She said: “lie down on the bed with me,” and Kalman did. He could hardly believe he’d even knocked on the door.

“So what do you do, Kalman?”

“I’m a chemist.”

“Cool. Did you go to school for a long time?”

“A while. Not as long as I could have.”

“So what exactly do you do? Are you trying to cure cancer and that sort of thing?”

“I work for a food company. My job is to figure out how to get the dehydrated ingredients in a dried package to taste like the chef’s recipes. Like those pasta side dishes. Soup. You know what I mean? Do you ever make those?”

“You mean the ones you add water to? Or milk?”

“Yeah. Sometimes butter too. The butter makes a big difference. The lipids  – well, it’s not important.”

“That’s an interesting job. Much better than being a cashier.”

“Are you in school?”

“No.”

“What do you want to do when you’re done being a cashier?”

“I dunno. Maybe go somewhere. Travel. If I can save enough.”

Talking like this was surreal to Kalman. He felt like an undergrad, as if he should have a joint between his fingers and be lying on his side, head propped on his fist. He remembered such conversations from his university days; it was the way he used to talk to Angela when they first started dating. Talking about the things they would do, how she would get a tenure-track position and Kalman would go into research.

There had been after a ski trip on their reading break. They were traveling back in a handful of borrowed station wagons, each of them half empty, the arrangements dictated by the social politics of their university circle. Kalman was in a backseat, stretched across the length of it, seatbeat off, a guitar at his feet. There was a sound like a gunshot and then, for no reason at all, the back window transformed itself into bubbles. Before he had time to think, it fell in, and the bubbles were tiny pieces of glass pebbling his legs. A few shapely teeth remained at the borders but otherwise the whole of it was spread out on Kalman’s body, his seat, already getting lost under the seatbeat fastener. They never knew what broke it – a rock flying up, a pre-existing crack, faulty manufacturing. It didn’t matter.

“Don’t move,” said Angela, who was driving. “I’ll get off the highway.”

She ushered their friends into Wendy’s for hamburgers and climbed into the backseat with him, methodically picking the glass off, throwing it into a paper bag she’d snatched from the restaurant. When he was free of it, she looked over her shoulder and shut the back door. She climbed up and straddled him, and as she kissed him her long hair got into both of their mouths. She was moaning softly, small underwater noises that Kalman found arousing and embarrassing at the same time. They had already been dating for a few months at the time, but he hadn’t felt comfortable to tell her about the stray piece of glass that had fallen into the waistband of his jeans, that was pressing into his hip as she ground against him.

“Doing nothing is doing something,” she had said to him when she brought the divorce papers home. “But you still don’t understand that, do you?”

The girl was still lying beside Kalman, stretched out so she was taller than him. Her ribs seemed too wide for her small body, and the bottom of her ribcage stuck out strangely under the thin shirt she was wearing.

“I miss the weight of a man on top of me,” she said.

Kalman said, “Do you want me to lie on top of you?” He heard himself say it and was astonished at the recklessness of it. But all he felt was a warm hollowness, a gentle bobbing inside his stomach. Not quite seasick.

She laughed, a big surprising horsey sort of laugh.

“Sure.”

So he got on top of her, not like a lover but like he was floating on her in the ocean, his arms tucked into his sides. He lay his face on her neck, craning back to see her: the giant foreground of chin and jaw, the eyebrow vanishing point so far, far away.

“Feel better?” he asked.

She brought her hand up and stroked his hair. His erection was pressing against her skirt.

“A bit,” she said. After a while she said, “That should do it for now.”

He climbed off and they lay side by side. She rubbed the top of her foot against the sole of his.

“I always notice now when people buy those dehydrated soups and noodles. It makes me think of you.”

Kalman had a terrible impulse to ask her to marry him, sharply followed by an impulse to leave.

“That’s nice of you,” he said.

She got on her knees then and climbed onto him, much as Angela had in the clunky old wood-paneled station wagon. She took off her shirt and her skirt, and then had to stand up to take off her tights. She did it somewhat gracefully.

While they were having sex, Kalman could think nothing, but afterwards, he wanted terribly to say something kind to her, something kind but measured out, something cleanly divided from having to say anything further. She hadn’t opened her eyes the entire time, as if swimming in a chlorinated pool. He ran his hand along her jaw, and under his fingers she was as smooth as glass. Inside her, surely, he had been a message. Something he’d almost been able to read, like when the subtitles of a movie went by only a bit too quickly.

Beside him the girl turned over, preparing to sleep on her side. Even while moving, she kept her eyes closed. It looked strange, like seeing a sleepwalker moving confidently through the dark. Kalman dressed, standing beside the bed and remembering to put his socks back on last. He said nothing, agreeing with the girl that she was asleep when she obviously wasn’t.

Then he left, closing the door gently, half expecting it to shatter in his hand.