SHORT STORY: "Our Little Getaway"

Our Little Getaway

Winter seemed much longer this year. People here say this is a sign that we’re getting older and can’t take winter like we used to; but, on the whole, the general consensus in St. Jude is that this winter dragged on and on. That`s why Cathy and I drove down to St. Joseph Island last week to take in the maple syrup festival; we needed to get away.

Not that we were getting away from winter; the spirit of the Old Man clung to the area all the way to Sault St. Marie, it was the change of pace that we sought. So Cathy packed our bags and our cooler, which we always take on our little getaways, and we were off.

The drive from St. Jude to Sault St. Marie takes seven hours, all things considered; but Cathy and I never rush it. She always makes fresh muffins to take with us, and with a hot thermos of Folgers we’re good for two or three hours of leisurely driving.

“I know this is not a real holiday, sweetheart,” I said to her as we pulled out of our driveway, “but it’s the best that I can do under the circumstances—”

She laughed. She always laughs whenever I tell her that our little getaways aren’t real holidays. It’s an inside joke that we share; an ironic play upon what a lady in the post office said to her one day four or five years ago.

“Why doesn’t he take you on a real holiday?” the postal clerk said to Cathy, as she slid the stamps across the counter for the large envelope with sample chapters of my new novel.

We had just returned from our yearly leafing holiday in the Sault area where we go every fall, and because we hit the colors as they were peaking it was one of the most glorious and refreshing little getaways that we had in years (it takes lucky timing to catch the flaming red maples and golden oaks, which we don’t have in Northwestern Ontario, at their peak, beginning just south of Wawa, the small town with the giant Canada goose), and Cathy was alive from the blazing beauty of the autumn colors and wonderfully refreshed from the absence of the familiar, like the pretentious postal clerk and her ilk.

“Like where?” Cathy asked.

“Cancun,” the postal clerk replied.

“Oh. Did you go to Cancun this year?” Cathy asked.

Caught by surprise, the postal clerk couldn’t lie. “No,” she sheepishly replied; “but we’re planning to go next year.”

“I would never trade our leafing holiday for a trip to Cancun,” Cathy said, and meant it, adding to the postal clerk’s resentment.

It was raining when we pulled out, and foggy; and the cold rain and fog didn’t let up all the way to the Sault. But we didn’t let that dampen our liberated spirits.

Last year we had an early thaw, the snow nearly gone by the end of March, and Lake Superior was open all the way to Sault St. Marie; but this year we were into April and still had huge dirty snowbanks. The rain was helping, though; as long as it didn’t turn to snow.

But it didn’t matter to us. The drizzling cold rain and obfuscating fog brought us closer together. We couldn’t enjoy the scenery, so we enjoyed the close proximity of each other’s company; and we rounded off many conversations that had been left open during the long, hard winter.

We stopped for gas in White River, whose claim to fame used to be the big thermometer which registered the chilling record-setting temperature of seventy-two degrees below Fahrenheit but which now boasted its Winnie-the-Poo connection, and we also had a light lunch of Chubby Chicken and fries at A&W.

And after using the washroom, we were off again; still raining, and foggy.

Every so often the fog did lift, giving us a glimpse of the naked landscape; but not until Batchawana Bay where we stopped for a fresh cup of coffee and date square did the fog disappear. It continued to drizzle off and on, though; but we didn’t mind.

“That snow just doesn’t want to go away this year, does it?” the waitress at the Blue Water Café, whose reddish-blond hair was so thin that both Cathy and I thought she must have just come off a treatment of chemotherapy, said when she brought our coffee. “It was all gone by this time last year.”

“Yeah, it’s been a long one,” I said, giving her a big smile.

“You folks aren’t from around here, are you?” she asked.

“No. We’re from St. Jude,” Cathy replied.

“Oh,” the waitress said, with a look of happy surprise. “Another couple from St. Jude passed through here yesterday. They were on their way to Orillia.”

I looked at Cathy. “That was probably Linda and Bill Towns. They said they would be leaving for Orillia this week. Their son lives there.”

I had just done some painting for them. In fact, their payment of seven hundred and thirty-five dollars provided the spending money for our little getaway.

“Small world, isn’t it?” the waitress said. “Would you like me to warm up your date square? It’s good with Vanilla ice cream.”

“You talked me into it,” I said.

“Are you sure you don’t want any?” the waitress asked Cathy. “It’s really good.”

“I’d love to, but I’m watching my points.”

“Points?” the waitress queried.

“She belongs to Weight-Watchers,” I explained.

“Enough said,” the waitress said, and turned and left.

“Interesting how women understand these things,” I mused out loud.

“You should see the turnout we had last week,” Cathy said. “We had seventeen new people join up this year.”

“No kidding? All women?”

“One man. He came with his wife.”

“Who?”

“Norman Harrison.”

“Oh, him. Yeah, I can see him there with all you women. I’ll bet he fits right in.”

“As a matter of fact, he does.  Why, don’t you like him?”

“I neither like nor dislike him. I’m just making an observation. Like our waitress here. I’ll bet she just had chemotherapy.”

“I’ll bet she did too,” Cathy said.

When we left the restaurant I pointed out to Cathy that they had changed the color of the trim, doors, and windows of the motel which was part of the same business as the café, from a sky blue to a dark forest green; but it didn’t go with the white and blue of the Blue Water Cafe which looked out as far as the eye could see onto Lake Superior.

“They’ve ruined the look,” Cathy said.

“Another one of life’s little incongruities,” I chuckled.

We pulled into the Sault and booked a room at the Villa Inn Motel on Great Northern Road, where we stayed last fall when we came to catch the colors. We asked for the same room on the upper floor, but that section of the motel was still closed until May; so we got a non-smoking ground level room with two beds and a fridge.

After we settled in Cathy said, “Would you like to eat out tonight, or should we go to Rome’s and get something from the deli and eat in and just relax?”

“To tell you the truth, I’d like to just lay about and relax. You don’t mind, do you?”

“Not at all. We’ll go to Rome’s then, and after we eat you can relax in the room and I’ll go down to the Red Apple and browse. You don’t mind, do you?”

“Why should I mind? You’re a free agent, aren’t you?”

“I am,” Cathy said, and laughed; but instead of getting something hot from the deli at Rome’s Independent—which was a joy to shop in and one of the little highlights of our little getaways to the Sault—we picked up some fresh Italian buns, a variety of Italian cold cuts, a nice piece of provolone cheese, a container of marinated grilled eggplant, red peppers, Portobello mushrooms, olives, and garlic, and also a cantaloupe, a container of orange juice, and some snacks to munch on while watching TV; and after we ate Cathy went to the Red Apple. I changed into my sweats, read a story from Updike’s new book of stories, Licks of Love, and then watched TV until Cathy returned several hours later.

We showered, made love, and fell asleep in our separate beds; and at five-thirty in the morning I went down to Tim Hortons on the corner of Great Northern Road and Second Line to work on my short story, “Kimberly’s Gift.”

I ordered a large coffee and expected to get a mug, but the waitress gave me a paper cup instead. I paid for it and found a good table to work on. I took out my story, pen, and notebook from my black leather carrying case and began reading my story from the beginning.

This was another tip I had picked up from Hemingway. He would read his story from the beginning to get his mind back into it before he started working on it again (he read The Old Man and the Sea over three hundred times before completing it); but when I got to page twelve I was so absorbed in “Kimberly’s Gift” that when I reached for my coffee I accidentally tipped the cup and spilled coffee all over my manuscript and down the table onto my sweater and crotch of my pants, so I never got to write that morning.

“Been there, done that,” the man sitting with a woman at a nearby table said, and smiled sympathetically.

I cleaned up my mess and got two cups of coffee to take back to the motel. Cathy heard me come in. “What are you doing back so soon?” she asked.

“Look,” I said, showing her the wet spot on my pants.

She laughed. “What happened?”

“I spilled my coffee,” I said, and laughed too.

I changed, then took out the coffee-soaked pages of “Kimberly’s Gift” from their green folder and laid them out individually on my bed which Cathy had made up for me; and then we drank our coffee and chatted and she went back to bed while I read another story from Updike’s Licks of Love, which I was beginning to find more and more ironic.

I re-discovered Updike last year and fell in love with his prose. Actually, it was more of a love-hate relationship. He was so brilliant he turned me off; but I had to read him to ferret out his secret. However, his stories did not stick with me, and I wondered why. “Would you do something for me?” I asked Cathy, sometime between Christmas and New Year.

“What?” she asked.

“Would you read an Updike book of short stories for me?”

I had already asked her to read some other short story writers—Carol Shields’ Dressing Up for the Carnival, Alice Elliot Dark’s In the Gloaming, and Russell Banks’ The Angel on the Roof (she gave up on Alice Munro after two stories)—because, being my only reader, I wanted her to compare my short stories with the proven published authors, of whom I now considered John Updike to be one of the undisputed giants.

“Why?” she asked, innocently enough.

I wouldn’t tell her why. “Trust me,” I said, and with an ironic smile handed her Updike’s collection Trust Me, which took her several weeks to read; and then I asked the question that I knew she dreaded: “So, what do you think?” Which implied, how do they compare with my short stories?

She liked John Updike’s writing. She liked how he could write a story about something so simple and ordinary. She liked how evocative his stories were. She found him brilliant in his descriptions, his images and metaphors fresh and exciting, but “they don’t stick with you,” Cathy, who saw herself as an average reader, concluded.

“BINGO!” I exclaimed.

“What?” she asked, startled.

“Give me the title of one of his stories?” I asked.

“I don’t remember any titles. But that’s my point. His stories are really engaging while you’re reading them, but they disappear an hour or so later. Your stories stay with me for a long time. That’s why I don’t understand why you’re not published yet.”

“It’s all in the packaging, sweetheart. But I had to find out if I was right. That’s why I had you read one of Updike’s book of stories.”

“What do you mean by packaging?” she asked.

“It’s not so much what you have to say, it’s in how you say it; and I’ve made an observation about successful writers today that sticks in my craw—”

“What observation?”

“I chuckled. “It’s almost formulaic.”

“What?” she insisted.

“The less a writer has to say, the more descriptive and abstruse they seem to be,” I replied, with an ironic snicker.      

“I think you’re right. That’s why I can’t read Alice Munro. All that description gets in the way of her story. Are we going to St. Joe’s Island for a pancake breakfast?”  she asked me, as she came out of the washroom all ready to take on the day.

The sky was overcast, threatening to rain again; but we still didn’t care. We stopped at Country Style Donuts on Trunk Road on our way out of the Sault (Country Style has become our favorite take-out coffee, and we always make a point of picking up several tins to bring back home), and on our thirty minute or so drive to the maple syrup pancake breakfast I said to Cathy, “What defines a good short story for you?”

She thought for a moment or two, took a sip of coffee, and finally said: “It has to tell me something about people that I didn’t know before.”

“So it has to be insightful?”

“Yes.”

“What else?”

“It can’t be boring.”

“Define boring.”

“Alice Munro,” Cathy said, and laughed.

“But you’ve only read two of her stories. Maybe you should give her another chance.”

“I tried, but she describes too much. It’s like reading a laundry list. That’s what I mean by boring. I know you like her, but I can’t get into her stories.”

“Are you saying that her descriptive prose gets in the way of her story?”

“Yes.”

“There are those who say that this is exactly what makes her a great short story writer. They call her stories mini novels because of all the detail she puts into them.”

“I don’t care what they say. She bores me with all that description. Just like Margaret Atwood. I can’t read her writing either. She’s even more boring than Alice Munro.”

I broke out. “Incredible,” I said, still laughing. “You just shot down two of our most successful writers. They must have something going for them to be so popular.”

“Well they don’t do anything for me.”

“Why?” I wanted to know. “Is it their style, is that why you can’t read them?”

“I don’t know. I guess so. They just take too long to get to the story.”

“Then define story for me.”

“I don’t know if I can.”

“Please try.”

“Okay,” she said, and thought for another moment or two. “I think story is something that happens to people. Something out of the ordinary.”

“But many stories have been written about ordinary people in ordinary circumstances. In fact, that’s the genius of Updike’s stories.”

“Well I don’t know what a story is then. Do we have to talk about this now? I’ve only had two cups of coffee this morning and I’m not really with it yet.”

“I guess when it comes to Munro you will never be with it,” I said, and laughed.

“Who cares?” she snapped back at me.

“Okay, enough about writing,” I said, and backed off; and the rest of the way to Richard’s Landing on St. Joseph Island we sipped our coffee and listened to the radio. But to my dismay, who did we bump into at the pancake breakfast but two familiar faces from St. Jude that we had driven all the way to St. Joe’s to get away from?

I felt violated. The sanctity of our little getaway had been desecrated by my two friends, Leo Kubochev and Gordy Manitou. Not that I didn’t like them; I just needed a break from their predictably boring, parsimonious personalities.

Over coffee one morning in St. Jude I just happened to mention to Leo and Gordy that Cathy and I were driving down to St. Joseph Island for the maple syrup festival, “just to get away from everything,” I added, with an ironic chuckle which they failed to pick up on.

Gordy Manitou, a distinguished looking but paradoxically ordinary man in his early sixties with salt-and-pepper short-cropped hair and always cleanly shaven and neatly dressed in smart casual wear who had some unusual life experiences (he proudly belonged to AA) whose mother was Ojibway and biological father an English Canadian (rumor had it that his father was one of St. Jude’s most upstanding citizens, a three-term town mayor), and who could pass for half a dozen nationalities, any of the Latin and mid-Eastern races, anything but a Canadian aboriginal which he took pride in being because he didn`t look like them but who was not ashamed to hold a treaty card that entitled him to all the benefits of the indigenous people, said to me: “I’d like to go with you, but Cathy might object,” and then he gave me a self-conscious little giggle. Gordy fancied himself a lady’s man.

Leo Kubochev, the son of a Ukrainian mother and Polish father, both deceased, didn’t laugh at Gordy`s remark; he just smiled. Not yet sixty, but desperately looking forward to it so he could apply for his early Canada Pension, was fifty-nine and counting, a lifelong bachelor, and unemployed. In fact, Leo hadn’t worked for the last fifteen years but managed to survive within the poverty line since his parents died and will cleverly continue to do so if he can help it but whose constant refrain of “I can’t afford it” so gets under my skin that I just have to pull away from him every now and then, sometimes for two and three months at a time; that was another reason I was looking forward to our little getaway.

And there they were, sitting down to their second, or in Big Leo’s case probably third helping of silver dollar pancakes and sausages (they both seek out the most economical places to eat, especially all-you-can-eat buffet restaurants); and the moment Gordy, who was facing us, spotted Cathy he gave her a wave and leaned over and told Leo we had just come in.

My heart sank. They were the last people I wanted to see at the maple syrup festival on St. Joseph Island, but I had to make out like I was delightfully surprised. We both waved, and then Cathy turned and said to me, “We just can’t get away from them, can we?”

“Maybe we should have gone on a real holiday,” I said, and laughed. “They’d never pay for a real holiday, would they?”

Cathy laughed. “All I need now is to turn around and find old sour face sitting there.”

“Old sour face was Cathy’s co-worker Brenda Henderson at the St. Jude District Hospital whose petty, sabotaging office personality so got to Cathy that she decided to take a whole week off to extend our little getaway to the Sault.

“Wouldn’t that be something?” I said. “You know it’s our own fault, don’t you?”

“What do you mean?” Cathy asked, as we moved up the breakfast line.

“We shouldn’t have told anyone we were coming here. You know how people are. They want what we have but don’t what to pay the price to get it. It’s our own fault.”

“It is,” Cathy said, and stepped up to the big-bellied Legionnaire with the red-veined nose who was serving the tiny pancakes and sausages.

“I guess we’ll have to sit with them,” I said.

“We don’t have a choice, do we?”

“We do, but it wouldn’t be wise.”

“Oh life,” Cathy sighed, playing upon the theme of my work-in-progress…

It seemed that the entire St. Joseph Island Maple Syrup Festival consisted of a day-long pancake breakfast for the first two weekends in April at the Legion Hall in Richard`s Landing, and a tour of the maple syrup making process if one of the producers on the island was boiling and had his sign out welcoming visitors, but in the Legion Hall they had booths set up along the whole right side and the back wall selling maple syrup, maple butter, and maple candy and three or four booths of crafts; so after one helping of pancakes and sausages Cathy and I made our way to the booths to explore what they had to offer.

“We might see you guys later then,” Gordy said, as we got up to leave.

“Who knows. We might bump into you guys in one of the malls,” I replied.

“When are you headed back?” Leo asked.

“I don’t know. It’s open-ended,” I said.

“Don’t you have to get back to work?” Leo asked, vainly hoping that I did.

“I don’t have to start painting the municipal office until the first of next month, so I’ve got lots of time. And Cathy’s off all next week.”

“Oh,” Leo said, with that sad little sigh that always revealed his hidden resentment of other people’s freedom to do more of what he would like to do but couldn’t afford to. “Well, I guess I’ll see you sometime next week then. We’re going back Monday. I can’t afford to stay more than three days.”

“Okay, I’ll see you when I see you,” I said, and turned and joined Cathy who was browsing one of the booths which displayed maple candy, maple butter, and a maple syrup cook book which I made a point of buying. I also bought some maple candy and maple butter, which made wonderful gifts for friends and family.

When we got to the maple syrup booth, which displayed the maple syrup of various producers on the island, Cathy’s eye centered on the little maple leaf bottles of syrup.

“This would make a nice gift,” she said, and bought one for her widowed father and one for her elderly widowed coffee friend that she picked up every Tuesday night.

I bought the one litre brown jug of maple syrup for a gift for our tenant, and a half gallon can for ourselves. We still had some St. Joseph Island maple syrup from the fall which I had purchased in one of the gift shops in Richard’s Landing, but I was anticipating new uses for it with the new cookbook I had just purchased.

“I’ll bring these out to the car,” I said to Cathy, as I paid for the items. “Then we can browse the other booths.”

When I came back Cathy was still at the maple syrup booth talking with Gordy Manitou. He was in a real quandary and was asking Cathy what she thought.

Gordy’s new lover, a double PhD (Psychology and Sociology) Professor at Lakehead University, twice divorced and once betrayed by a man who lied about his marriage, who met Gordy (thrice married and recently dumped by his lover of seventeen years) on one of her de-stressing hiking tours on one of the Sleeping Giant trails, had asked him to pick up a gallon of maple syrup for her, but Gordy couldn’t bring himself to pay forty-nine dollars for it.

Seeing the humor of his quandary, I quickly spotted the solution to his parsimony: “Why don’t you also buy her a maple syrup cookbook over in the other booth and that way Sandy can try out some of the recipes on you. That should be worth more than the price of a gallon of syrup and the cookbook,” I said, with an ironic chuckle.

Cathy laughed, but Gordy’s mingy nature wouldn’t allow him to see the bigger picture; so he ended up buying his new lover a one litre can of syrup and no cookbook.

“You only get out of a relationship what you put into it, sweetheart,” I said to Cathy on our way back to Sault St. Marie as we mused on Gordy’s dilemma. “And they wonder why the love goes out of their relationship,” I added, with a wry chuckle.

“Cheap in, cheap out,” Cathy said, and laughed.

“Yeah. Gordy and Leo. What great examples my two friends are of the law of diminishing returns,” I concluded, with another snicker.

“What law?” Cathy asked.

“The law of reciprocity. The same law that Jesus taught his disciples. Remember the parable of the talents. Well, that can be applied to all of life. The less we put into life, the less we get out of life; and conversely, of course.”

After we browsed the other booths, which wasn’t all that much to look at (I was hoping they would have a knitted sweater that I could get for Cathy, but she didn’t care for the selections they had; nor did she care for the local Puddingstones or wood carvings), we drove around the island to see if we could find a producer who welcomed visitors; and we did, the largest producer on St. Joseph island—Gilbertson’s.

In one corner of the lot, on one side of the entrance, two young men were stoking the fire that heated the huge black pot full of maple sap, and the steam was just billowing out of the pot. There was also a huge column of steam billowing out of the boiling room of the long bush camp type of building (I used to work in the bush camps in my youth, cutting with a chainsaw first and later as a skidder operator) that also housed Gilbertson’s camp-style eatery.

We took pictures of the two young descendants of the Gilbertson family and then went into the boiler room where a man in his fifties, who never introduced himself but whose demeanor told us that he was a Gilbertson, explained the process of making syrup (they had twenty-eight kilometers of tubing from maple tree to maple tree collecting sap), then we went into their little eatery where we bought two more bottles of maple syrup for gift giving.

They were serving regular pancakes and sausages all day long also, as well as baked beans which I noticed one woman paying for at the cash register. “I gather those beans were baked in maple syrup,” I offered, with an easy smile.

“They’d better be,” the lady responded, very seriously.

Caught somewhere between my humor and the lady’s seriousness, the young cashier quickly responded, “Oh, they’re baked in maple syrup alright. I put the last pot on myself!”

“Well, if we hadn’t just eaten breakfast at the Legion we’d try some of your beans,” I said, to overcome my feelings of guilt.

“You can take some with you,” the cashier, probably a Gilbertson also, replied.

“Okay,” I said. “Give us a container. We’ll try them out later in our motel room.”

“If they make it that long,” Cathy said, and laughed.

“They probably won’t,” the serious lady added. “They’re really good. We get some here every year.”

The young lady put our container with two plastic spoons and napkins into a bag, and with a big smile on her pretty face, said, “Enjoy!”

“I’m sure we will,” I said; and on our way out we took more pictures, with Cathy standing by the big black boiling pot, and one with her and the two boys, some of the building with all the steam billowing out, and a few more for good measure; and then we drove around the rest of the island until we spotted another sign welcoming visitors, but we didn’t go in; and by the time we drove back into Richard’s Landing it was time for lunch.

We went into Wharf Restaurant, which was empty except for two boys and a girl smoking and drinking coffee. We kept the beans for later because Cathy didn’t want to eat them on our drive because beans gave her gas, but we didn’t eat them later either; I ate them the following day while Cathy did the Red Apple and other stores at Wellington Square.       

After lunch at the Wharf we walked up to THE OTHER SIDE gift shop, which had special meaning for me (I was torn between the title “Crossing the Border” and “The Other Side” for a new novel I had written, and I said to Cathy on our fall getaway that if the Oracle of Life gave me a sign for “The Other Side,” that’s the title I would keep for my novel; and, as serendipity would have it, the Oracle spoke to me literally with THE OTHER SIDE gift shop sign and that’s the title I went with), and after browsing the shop and purchasing a piece of custom jewelry for Cathy we drove back to the Sault and browsed the Cambrian Mall for an hour or so before returning to our motel room for a refreshing little power nap.

Later in the evening, I took Cathy out for Chinese dinner at the Hong Kong Restaurant, one of our favorite restaurants in Sault St. Marie; and then we went to Galaxy Cinema to see the movie Along Came a Spider, starring Morgan Freeman.

Cathy enjoyed the movie, but for me the movie’s hole-ridden plot was held together only by Freeman’s powerful acting which led me to say, “Any other actor and that movie would have bombed. Morgan Freeman had the gravitas to hold it together.”

“What was the last movie we saw him in?” Cathy asked.

“The Shawshank Redemption.”

“Right. I loved him in that movie. I love the way he acts without talking. Just the way he looks—”

Back in the motel room we made love, long and tenderly this time, climaxing together, and Cathy fell asleep in my arms. A half hour later I slipped into my own bed and gradually fell asleep; and at five-thirty I drove to Tim Hortons to work on “Kimberly’s Gift.”

I ordered a large mug of coffee this time, thinking that if I accidentally hit the mug with my hand it might not spill over like my paper cup did, but the waitress gave me a paper cup again. “May I have a mug instead, please,” I said.

“Sure,” the waitress said, and poured the coffee into a mug. “You can keep the cup as well,” she added, with a friendly smile.

“I don’t need it, thanks,” I said, handing her the money for my coffee; but the waitress gave me a funny look which I couldn’t decipher until later when a man and his very large wife and their young grandson sat at the table in front of me.

The woman was much too large to squeeze into the chair welded to the table, she had to sit on a free-standing chair that her husband got from another free-standing table, her huge buttocks freely and comfortably hanging over both sides of the chair; and when they finished their coffee and several selections of choice pastry he rolled up the lip of his paper cup, which puzzled me. Then I heard him say, “Nothing again. Let me see if you won anything,” he said, taking his wife’s cup and rolling the lip up for her.

A light went on. That was why the waitress had given me that funny look. I didn’t know about Tim Hortons prizes, and I had rejected her generous offer of the cup which might have won me a new car, or something else. Smiling, I returned to my story…

We didn’t want to do St. Joseph Island again, so we decided to look up a friend.

I called her up, but Helen wasn’t going to be home; she was going to be baby-sitting her eight-year-old grandson. Her daughter, a working single mother, had just graduated with a Master’s degree in Business Administration and was going to attend a party at her professor’s house, stateside; so Cathy and I bought a map of Sault Ste. Marie at the Lucky Seven variety store just up from our motel and looked up Helen at her daughter’s address.

It was easy enough to find, and Helen met us at the door; her daughter was in her bedroom getting changed. “It’s nice to see you again, Helen,” I said, and gave her a big hug; but Helen was so thin it felt like I was hugging myself.

Cathy and Helen hugged also, and then we sat in the living room and chit-chatted for a moment or so before Helen asked us if we wanted a cup of herbal tea.

“Please,” I said.

“What kind?” Helen asked.

“Whatever kind you drink, Helen,” Cathy said.

“I drink two or three different kinds,” Helen, who was into herbal teas and nutritional supplements, replied.

“How about peppermint?” I said.

“I think we have that,” Helen said, and went into the kitchen. “Yes, we do,” she said, coming back into the living room with a box of peppermint tea in her hand. Her daughter came out.

“Hi,” she said. “I’m Ronda.”

For some reason, I expected Ronda to be tall and thin; but she wasn’t. She was about five six and three times the size of her mother; but she did not have her mother’s facial features, high cheekbones and fine nose. Ronda’s face was round and serious.

We introduced ourselves, then Ronda said, “I’m sorry I can’t stay and visit with you. I’ve got a couple more things to do before my friend picks me up. She should be here any minute. Please excuse me—”

Helen came back into the living room and sat down and we talked for a few minutes when someone knocked on the front door. It was Ronda’s friend. We introduced ourselves and then Helen got up to get the tea and we talked with Celia, telling her that we had come for the St. Joseph Island Maple Syrup Festival. But curious to know what our relationship was with her friend’s mother, Celia asked, “Are you related to Helen?”

“No,” I said. “We’re just friends.”

Still curious, Celia wanted to know how a couple from St. Jude were friends with Ronda’s seventy-seven-year-old mother in Sault St. Marie. “So, did you know Helen when she lived in Marathon?”

“No. We met Helen here in the Sault, actually. We share the same spiritual teaching. That’s how we became friends. Cathy and I picked Helen up a couple of summers ago and drove to a spiritual seminar at the Villa Loyola in Sudbury, and now we visit every time we come to the Sault. We make a point of coming every fall to catch the colors.”

Wide-eyed, Celia just stared at us. I could hear her mind working: The same spiritual teaching? What on earth does he mean by that? Just then Ronda came into the room.

“I guess you’ve met,” she said.

“Yes,” Celia said.

Helen came back into the room. “Do you have time for a cup of tea?” she asked her daughter and Celia.

“No, mom; we have to go in a few minutes,” Ronda replied.

I could see that Celia was bursting to find out what our spiritual connection was with her friend’s mother, so I decided to open that door for her, just in case she was in need of a new spiritual direction in her life—

“Ronda, we were just talking about the spiritual teaching that we share with your mother,” I said, for Celia’s benefit.

A look of horror came over Ronda’s face. I knew from Helen that Ronda didn’t share her mother’s spiritual beliefs, and neither did her older brother; but her other brother did. In fact, it was her brother Ken who had introduced his mother to the fledgling New Age teaching. Flustered, Ronda blurted out, “Don’t look at me. I don’t believe in that stuff—”

“What stuff?” Celia asked, with a bewildered look.

“It’s nothing you have to apologize for, Ronda,” I said, to dispel the air of any notion that we belonged to some kind of strange cult. “We believe in reincarnation, that’s all. There’s no mystery about that, is there?”

“Well I kind of believe in reincarnation too,” Ronda quickly responded, trying to reorient herself. “In fact, I went to a psychic a couple of years ago and she told me that my son is a very old soul, much older than me,” she added, for our sake.

This was news to Celia. “I heard about reincarnation, but I never met anyone who believed in it before.”

“You’re kidding?” I said.

“No,” she replied.

“My God, in this day and age? Celia, you must be living a sheltered life. Reincarnation isn’t a secret belief held by a handful of people. There are whole nations that believe in the spiritual laws of karma and reincarnation.”

“Well you`re the first people I’ve ever met who believe in reincarnation. How does that work, anyway? Your soul is born again in another body, is that it?”

“Essentially,” I replied, and smiled.

“Does that mean you can be born again into an animal’s body?” she asked, and then grimaced as the thought registered on her mind.

“Highly unlikely,” I said, and laughed.

“Look, we have to go,” Ronda jumped in. “I’d like to talk some more about this, but we have to catch the bus in a few minutes. I’ll tell you about this in the car.”

Celia looked at Cathy and me, studying the way we looked to see if there were any visible signs of difference; but she couldn’t find any. I smiled at her. “Listen, Celia; I don’t want you to get the wrong impression about us. You’re probably a Christian, aren’t you?”

“Yes, I am; but I don’t go to church much these days.”

“Well, all I want to say is this. At one time Christianity was considered strange by the world. Today it’s not. It’s one of the mainstream religions. But Christianity doesn’t believe in reincarnation. It believes that we only live one lifetime and that Jesus came into the world to save us from sin and eternal damnation; but at one time Christianity did believe in reincarnation. That’s a long story, though. The point is that we believe we come back to live life over again, and with each new life that we live we gain spiritual experience and grow into our true nature, the person we are meant to be. That’s our spiritual path in a nutshell. There’s nothing mysterious about this teaching, nor is there anything to apologize for,” I added, looking at Helen’s daughter all dressed up and ready to go.

Ronda smiled. “Okay, we’re off mom. I don’t know what time I’ll be back. Sometime tonight. “Devon!” she shouted. “Mommy’s going now!”

Devon came out of the bedroom and gave his mother a hug and then quickly turned and went back into his bedroom. He was watching Sunday morning cartoons on TV.

“Nice meeting you both,” I said

“Me too,” Cathy said.

“I wish we could talk some more about this,” Celia said. “Maybe the next time you come down?”

“Sure. When we visit Helen in the fall we’ll give you a call. In the meantime, if you want some reading material I’m sure Helen has some books she could lend you.”

“If she wants,” Helen, who had kept quiet during this whole exchange, no doubt for her daughter’s sake, said. “I’ve got all kinds of books you can borrow.”

“Maybe I will,” Celia said, with a look of unexpected surprise. “Okay, nice meeting you both,” and her and Ronda left and Cathy and I stayed and visited with Helen for an hour or so and then we went to Rome’s and had a toasted egg and bacon and cheese bagel and a cup of coffee, amusing ourselves with our curious visit.

“There’s a few items I want to pick up for my father at Food Basics,” Cathy said, as we finished our coffee. “Do you want to come with me, or go back to the motel room?”

“I’ll come with you,” I said, and at Wellington Square Cathy went to Food Basics and I browsed the mall and found a booth set up at the far end which caught my interest.

“Emu oil?” I said, inquisitively.

“Yes. It has many uses,” the lady said, short and blond and with what I thought to be an Australian accent which excited me because I once had my heart set on moving to Australia and was also told by a psychic that Australia would be much more receptive to the kind of writing that I did; but she turned out to be English, not Australian.

She told me about the benefits of emu oil, from dry skin to helping my bursitis, a whole list of cures which I read on the pamphlet. “In Australia,” I was informed, “emu oil is accepted as a natural anti-inflammatory for pain relief and a contributor to skin healing.”

I wanted to try some, so I was definitely going to purchase a small bottle of the pure emu oil, as expensive as it was; but I wanted Cathy to see their hand and body lotion because she was always rubbing lotion on her feet and legs every night before going to bed, so I said to the very pleasant lady who during the course of our conversation told me that her and her husband had an emu farm in Bruce Mines just south of Sault St. Marie (where Cathy and I often stayed overnight at the Bavarian Inn and had fish and chips at Bobber’s) and invited us to visit if we were ever in the area, “I want Cathy to see your body lotion. She’s in Food Basics right now. I’ll be back in a few minutes—”

Cathy did try the emu lotion, and it smelled nice and felt good; but she didn’t know how good it would be until later. She decided to buy a bottle.

I bought two small bottles of the pure emu oil, one for my bursitis and one for Cathy’s legs which every so often in damp weather ached with arthritis and which the pure emu oil was supposed to be good for.

We thanked the lady and her husband, who had just returned to the booth as we were paying, and left; but as we turned to leave I spotted a small outlet that sold fresh bread, pasta, and other Italian sundries “Let’s see if they have orecchiette,” I said.

We couldn’t find orecchiette (“pasta di semola di grano duro” shaped in the form of little ears; orecchiette in Italian means little ears) anywhere, and we had a recipe that we tried once and liked very much (with rapini sautéed in olive oil, garlic, and anchovies); but happily the lady had two packages left, and we bought them both.

We also bought a bottle of Caruso Balsamic Vinegar (from Modena, Italy; the Sault has a large Italian population), some fresh Calabrese buns, and a few other items; and we went back to our motel room for a bunwich and short rest before going to Station Mall.

I pulled into Giovanni’s Restaurant on the way to the mall to make a reservation for dinner. I didn’t expect to get one on such short notice (whenever we drove by Giovanni’s to our motel room in the evenings their parking lot was always full and overflowing), but I did; and Cathy was delightfully surprised—

“Wow. Last night the Hong Kong and tonight Giovanni’s! I’m really enjoying our little getaway this spring!” she said, and leaned over and kissed me.

“You’re welcome,” I said, and kissed her back.

At Station Mall they were showing a wild life display, stuffed animals from all over the world; so we spent a good half hour taking in the exhibition (I couldn’t get over how big tigers really were when standing up close to them) when Leo and Gordy walked by—

“I knew I’d bump into you here,” Leo said, with a big boyish grin. “So, how are you doing?”

“Fine. What are you guys up to?”

“We’re just looking,” Leo said. “We’re going to a hockey game tonight. What are you guys going to do?”

“I’m taking Cathy out for dinner.”

“Oh? Where?” Leo asked.

“Giovanni’s,” I said.

“Is that a nice restaurant,” he asked.

“The best Italian restaurant in the Sault,” I said, being mischievous.

“Oh? I’d like to try it sometime. Maybe next year if we come down? I can’t afford it this trip. We’re going to the Great Wall for dinner. Have you heard of it?”

“I have,” Cathy said. “That’s in Wellington Square, isn’t it?”

“Just down from Food Basics,” Gordy said, anxious to be part of the conversation. “I picked up some stuff at Food Basics this morning. You can’t beat their prices.”

“They have an all-you-can-eat buffet at the Great Wall,” Leo said. “I can handle that.”

I laughed. “Where’d you guys eat yesterday?”

“You won’t believe it,” Leo said, his face lighting up like a little boy. “We found a restaurant on St. Joe’s Island (Miceli’s Trading Post and Family Restaurant) that has an all-you-can-eat fish buffet every Saturday and Sunday. Well, you know how I am when it comes to fish—”

“Especially if it’s all you can eat,” I snickered. Cathy nudged me in the ribs.

Gordy smiled; then, turning to Cathy, said, “The waitress came over to me when Leo was getting his fourth helping and asked me not to bring him back again. She said he was eating up all their profits,” and then Gordy laughed his little laugh.

As much as she tried not to, for Leo’s sake, Cathy was forced to laugh, and so did I; but Leo didn’t seem to mind. When it came to free food (or free anything), my friend Big Leo Kubochev was without shame.

Gordy stepped in closer to me, with a sly smirk on his face. I knew he wanted to tell me something juicy, but he didn’t want Cathy to hear; but Cathy—who didn’t really care for Gordy’s personality (“I can’t stand his energy. He’s always whining about something,” she confessed to me, a comment that many people in St. Jude had made about Gordy whose three topics of conversation were: 1, Gordy Manitou’s health (he had a quadruple bypass and belongs to the HOPE Program); 2, Gordy Manitou’s promiscuous sex life; and 3, Gordy Manitou’s crazy life as an alcoholic (he woke up in Ohio once from a week-long bender) and his life as a recovering alcoholic (he swears that Jesus saved his life, but he’s over his salvation phase now)—deliberately asked Leo how he was enjoying his little trip to the Sault, and stepped in closer to him so she wouldn’t have to talk with Gordy.

“You won’t believe who I bumped into back there,” Gordy said to me, all excited by his chance encounter. I guessed that it must have been a woman. “Roberta,” he said, with a big smirk on his light brown, handsome face. I had heard his Roberta story, three or four times. “She came in from Elliot Lake to do her weekend shopping.”

Gordy had met Roberta through the hiking community, and being the lady’s man that he believed himself to be (oblivious to the fact that most of the women he slept with were emotionally wounded and desperately lonely), he led Roberta to believe that he might move to Elliot Lake (with the closure of the mines, Elliot Lake had become a retirement community because the houses were selling well below market value). “They’re going to take my license away eventually,” he confessed to me one day over coffee in St. Jude. “Elliot Lake has a bus service for seniors and all kinds of discounts, and they’ve got hiking trails, cross-country skiing, snow-shoeing trails, bowling and curling leagues—all kinds of activities for seniors. Roberta wants me to move in with her, but I can’t take the stress.”

Gordy’s heart condition was his excuse for not making a commitment with a woman (his heart attack damaged his heart, and only three quarters of his heart was working); that’s why his lover of seventeen years finally dumped him. She wanted him to move in with her (she lived in The Lakehead and he in St. Jude), but he said his heart couldn’t take the stress, and he was using the same excuse with his new lover Professor Sandy Olsen. “If Leo wasn’t with me, I would have taken Roberta back the room,” he proudly boasted; he and Leo shared a room with two beds in one of the cheaper motels on Trunk Road.

“What about Sandy,” I said, curious to see what he had to say.

 “Roberta’s damn good in bed. A hell of a lot better than Sandy will ever be—”

Boastful narcissist that he was, it didn’t take long for Gordy to tell me about Sandy’s sexual problem—which wasn’t a problem at all, really; Sandy came too soon for Gordy, who could make love up to an hour before climaxing, leading Sandy to believe that she was incapable of satisfying him sexually. But that was just another excuse. Gordy had gotten in over his head with a university professor who guest-lectured across Canada, and the only thing they had in common was hiking, cross country skiing, and sex; and Gordy, too vain to admit it, was beginning to feel the pressure of his intellectual and cultural deficiencies.

That’s why he came to the Sault. Sandy had invited him to Duluth for the weekend. She was attending a meeting for the preservation of Lake Superior, but he felt out of place with all those university people; so he chose to take in the maple syrup festival on St. Joseph Island instead. I knew it would only be a matter of time before they went their separate ways, but it was a gift from heaven watching their relationship unfolding…

After dinner at Giovanni’s (we had Pasta a la Putanesca, a simple oil and vinegar salad with crusty buns, and a bottle of Chianti with our meal because it was only a short walk up to Giovanni’s from our motel room), we made love again; but I asked Cathy if she wouldn’t mind if I didn’t climax because I was going to be working on the ending of “Kimberly’s Gift” in the morning and needed my best, most creative energies for my story.

“Oh sure,” she said; “I get second best. Your writing is more important than I am!”

Even though she was only joking, I knew there was truth to what she said; so I chose to risk my story and gave myself completely to our lovemaking.

I left for Tim Hortons at five-thirty in the morning. Cathy woke up for a minute or so, and then rolled over and went back to sleep. I kissed her and left.

At Tim Hortons I asked for a large mug of coffee. The same forty-something waitress who gave me the funny look served me. I asked her for a paper cup also. “And if I win anything you can have it,” I said to her, with a wink and a smile. She smiled back. I found a private table to work on and began reading my coffee-stained story from the beginning; and when it was time to continue my story, I called upon my muse to guide me.

It was the church scene. I didn’t want to, but I had to go back there again. I dreaded writing it, but I had to be true to what I felt during the funeral service (once again, I let Hemingway’s credo to tell it the way it was guide me); but I didn’t know if I had the courage to write what I felt as I watched and listened to Kimberly’s service.

But I had no choice. I had to write it as I experienced it, and what I experienced was the emptiness that I felt about the elaborate Christian ritual; and so I put my head into my notebook and wrote, and wrote, and wrote oblivious to my surroundings.

Finally, I came up for air. I ended my story with the thank you card from Kimberly’s mother for the nineteen yellow roses that I had brought for her nineteen-year-old adopted daughter, and so moving was her card that it brought me to tears again.

I wiped my eyes and looked around to see if anyone had noticed, and I got up and got another cup of coffee. I had to read what I had written to see if it was as good as I felt it to be; but then the strangest thing happened that coincidentally confirmed what I had just written about my guilty feelings for the elaborate Christian ritual—

A smartly dressed woman out for her morning walk with her husband, a tall, silver-haired, straight-backed man with the demeanor of one who once held a position of authority, had come into Tim Hortons for what I assumed to be their ritual cup of coffee after or during their regular morning walk; but the lady, all bundled up in her winter walking jacket and matching green hat and scarf, which puzzled me because it wasn’t that cold out, was holding a thick handful of paper napkins in her hand, which puzzled me even further.

As excited as I was to read what I had just written (I knew what I had experienced, but the joy of creative writing is how it plays itself out in a work of fiction), I kept my eye on the woman who had begun wiping the table.

She took some of the napkins which she held in her right hand and wiped the table with her left hand, and then the chair in which she was going to sit, and then the chair that her husband was going to sit on. In the meantime, her husband had gone to get their coffee. Then I watched the lady open up three napkins and place them on the table in front of her chair to form a placemat, and then three more napkins to make a placemat for her husband; and then she sat down and waited for her husband to bring their coffee.

He returned with a tray and two mugs and two medium paper cups of coffee (for the prizes, which I had figured out earlier). His wife then took each mug and wiped it thoroughly inside and out. Then she poured coffee from one cup and handed it to her husband, and then she did the same for herself; and as they drank their coffee, slowly and with all the decorum of a formal dinner, their elbows resting on their napkin placemats, I couldn’t restrain myself — “What the fuck was that all about?” I said to myself.

I couldn’t believe my eyes, so absurd was their little ritual; as if wiping the table and chairs and mugs was going to get rid of any bacteria—it boggled my mind. “That makes no more sense than Christian rituals. It’s all in their mind!”

And there it was, the confirmation that I needed to absolve myself of the guilt for having the courage to write what I experienced at Kimberly’s funeral service…

“Kimberly’s Gift” was a painfully personal story to write, but getting it out of my system left me so light and free that I knew I wouldn’t come down for a day or two; so when I got back to the motel room with Cathy’s coffee I asked her if she could occupy herself for the day while I stayed in the room to write.

“Didn’t you finish your story this morning?” she asked.

“Yes, but I have an idea for another story.”

“What about?”

“My experience with Updike.”

“I’d ask what it’s going to be about, but you won’t tell me; will you?”

“Sweetheart, you know I never talk about a story until I get it on paper.”

“I know. Okay, I can keep myself busy most of the day. But I’d like you to read your story for me before I go out.”

I often read Cathy my stories when I finished writing them, unless they were too close to home like my story “Sparkles in the Mist” that I wrote when I took Cathy to Duluth for her fiftieth birthday. “I can’t wait,” I said, and took out “Kimberly’s Gift” from my leather case and made myself comfortable on the chair by the window.

Cathy was crying when I finished the story, and so was I in tears again; then she got up and kissed me. “I love it,” she said. “I think you did your experience justice.”

I sniffled. “I think so too. Okay, love; what do you plan to do today?”

“What do you think?” she said, snapping back into her getaway personality. “Do the malls, of course.”

“Of course,” I said, smiling. “But can you make a day of it?”

“You want all day to yourself?” she asked, with some surprise.

“I’ll need it. I have to strike while the iron’s hot,” I replied, thinking of my mentor who wrote “The Killers” immediately after writing another story.

“Okay. Do you want me to come and get you for lunch, or are you going to have a bunwich here?” Cathy asked.

“I’ll eat here,” I said; and when Cathy left I began working on my story whose title I had jotted down in my story idea notebook the day after I had my experience in the city with Leo, “The Genius of Updike,” which came out in one burst of white-hot writing, five hours and twenty minutes; and then I devoured two Capocollo and provolone bunwiches.

Cathy came back to the room with four shopping bags, two from Cleo’s, telling me she had finally found something to spend her Cleo’s gift certificate that I had gotten her for Christmas, one from Dockside, and one bag which I didn’t recognize.

“I had a really good day, sweetheart,” she said, with a triumphant smile. “What kind of day did you have?”

“I’m exhausted. So, what did you buy?”

“You won’t believe what I found at Cleo’s,” she said, and began taking her purchases out of her bag. “Do you want to see what they look like on me?”

“Of course I do,” I said, and she modeled all four new outfits, two summer dresses and two pants with mix and match tops; but only one pair of shoes, which surprised me.

She also bought a pair of light tan Dockers and a dark blue and white Dockside polo shirt, which looked very smart on her. Then after a short rest we went to Boston’s for a vegetarian pizza and returned to the room and changed and lay on the bed and watched TV and Cathy fell asleep in my arms. We both had a good day.

The following morning, we checked out of the Villa Inn and went to Rome’s and did our grocery shopping for the coming Easter weekend (Cathy was having her father over for turkey dinner), and then we went to Country Style and filled our thermos and left for home; but no sooner did we pull into our driveway just after seven in the evening and it started snowing, and within hours it erupted into a fierce winter storm that blew and blustered so heavily the following day that MTC had to close down the Trans-Canada Highway from St. Jude all the way to the Sault, like God had been watching over us.

——