If you’re a child when you see a calf born, you always know there’s a place as big as you inside a cow.
Kate Greenstreet, The End of Something
1.
There are stories that centre around a particular wisdom, cryptically-told, to the main character, a novice, who attempts the bulk of the story to understand the lesson’s meaning. Eventually, the lesson is interpreted to apply to a conveniently-imminent very specific situation, solving the hero’s inevitable quest.
My question becomes: is it the lesson itself that solves the puzzle, or what the lesson allows, relayed cryptically enough that it forces the novice to think and act in an entirely different way? However applied, this could mean just about anything.
The novice learns to pay attention, be open to new ideas, and adapt. Is that, in fact, the only lesson?
2.
There was a rock they would visit. As big as a car, one would say. No, said the other. But big. Large enough that neither could imagine it being moved, not even by one of their fathers’ tractors. How did it get here? A rock where they would agree to meet, when they did. Just after lunch, or tomorrow. Or Saturday. A stone at the boundary between their two properties. He would circumference the cornfield, and she, across wheat. They maneuver their crops. They would look for the moon, listen for crows, and the trucks on the highway. They would watch the contrails of overhead flights, and seek out their shadows across the margins.
From his bedroom window at night, he watched the ends of the rain drip from the leaves into their above ground swimming pool. The moon made it so. Ripples of shadow that rolled across the contours of the concrete bottom, bent from an invisible surface.
3.
I recently became aware of “hollerin’,” a vocal tradition that developed around North Carolina before the invention of the telephone: a staccato of shouts and hoots between distant neighbours, or a call to the men in the fields or the hills, too distant for words.
In the village of Antia, on the Greek island of Euboea, the elders communicate via whistling, a language that separately evolved in numerous global outlays, most often in populated clusters within heavily-forested areas. I speak to you in tweets and trills, in sing-song.
Prior to cellphones, my mother a single white bedsheet rolled out on the clothesline, to signal my father to return from the fields.
And then, my own children, held hostage by television. Come up for dinner, I repeat. And repeat. And repeat.
4.
Grasshopper Hill, where I have seen no grasshoppers, but the hill is significant. I stood at the peak of the park, aware of the afternoon’s Canada Day revelry on Parliament Hill, some seven kilometres or so north-west. I could almost hear it. The children, set on their swings. A morning of quiet, with the occasional bird, and a smattering of dogs in the dog park.
Soon enough, a streak of sound through the blue air as one of the Canadian Forces 431 Air Demonstration Squadron, or “Snowbirds,” utilized the space right above the playground to enact a hard turn, as part of their annual “fly-over” the downtown festivities. The single Canadair CT-114 Tutor jet in mid-turn, tilted, above where I stood, swirling out again, gone. Close enough I could see the pilot’s face, clearly; and he, mine.
The grown-ups in the park, agog. Awed. All the children indifferent.
5.
Somewhere a man is listening to a question. It is a question he does not know the answer to, and might not even fully understand, so he talks his way around it. The more he speaks, the more something clarifies, as the original question falls away. One has nothing to do with the other.
6.
Half-hidden behind brush, there is a blue and gold plaque attached to the outside of a house in Little Italy. Just down the street from her aunt, the century-old red brick montage constructed after the infamous fire, the accident that took neighbourhoods, hamlets and villages down to bedrock. From that, become this: a row of single-family repetition along the stretch towards Lebreton Flats. Now, this plaque. Someone lived here, or still does: an important location designated for historical value. Slipped down the walk. I hesitate to enter their driveway to read it, she says. I don’t know what it says.
7.
The author of these stories is forty-eight years old. He lives in a semi-suburban house on a busy street, in an area once the outskirts of the city, although more than half a century has passed since then. He lives with his wife, a book conservator and poet, and their two small daughters, whom he tends to full-time while his wife is at work.
Writing is slow, but it has always been so. For a few years now, his plan has been to work as the children play, sleep or school, but that hasn’t always been as effective as he might have hoped. After more than two decades of full-time writing before the advent of children, he isn’t that bothered by this. There will always be time.
None of this matters, clearly, as you read. A series of facts in a mishmash of fictions, blended together to create something other.
This, too, might be such a mixture. Tell our lies to get down to the truth.
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this story originally appeared in filling Station magazine,