Just Between Us

Canadians often put me in mind of Dorothy Parker’s quip about Katherine Hepburn, who, she once said, “ran the gamut of emotions from A to B.”

Some weeks ago, at dinner with my friend Hal, he said he had been feeling emotional.

“Which one?” I asked.

“What do you mean?” he said.

“You know—happy? Sad? Pissed off? 

“I don’t know—emotional,” he said.

Then we changed the subject.

As North American white guys, we tend to avoid direct expression of feeling in day-to-day conversation.

Unless, of course, the subject is hockey. 

And yet, my stiff upper lip has been known to quiver. I have the kind of face that registers everything—worry, delight, perplexity, and suspicion.

I am terrible at poker.

I’ve had to learn about feelings—the hard way, by being tyrannized by them. Had I been born in southern Italy, I’d have had no problem. Or so I imagine. But I was raised in St. Louis, whose dominant culture was Anglo and Teutonic, despite the French name.

 The fourth Saturday of every month, the Lutheran Urban Mission Society serves a hot meal at 373 East Cordova Street. Before the gate opens, Pastor Brian Heinrich serves mass to the volunteers at St. Paul’s next door.

Today, the volunteers are from a protestant youth group in Burnaby, 15-20 of them, mostly teenagers, and not quite sure what to make of it all. They are in unfamiliar territory—Canada’s poorest neighborhood, a catholic church—and before them stands the imposing figure of a pastor well over six feet tall, sporting a Mohawk, and with both earlobes full of cobalt blue spiral earrings.

Brian invites them to come closer, into the front pews. 

“I need your help,” he says. “I’m not going to do all the work here. I want you to listen to the text. Then I’m going to ask you some questions.”

A boy gets up to read from Jeremiah.

When I sit down on the bench outside, I see a sheet of notebook paper with writing on it. The sheet has been unfolded, and the writing might be Polish. A poem, by the look of it. I lean over to see if I can spot who might have left it, but there’s no one around.

Someone so moved or offended—devastated by impossibility, or annoyed by the attention—simply walked off without it. Or so I imagine.

I hesitate to pick up something so intimate, and yet I feel I have to. There are five poems on three sheets of paper. Then I see the envelope they’ve been torn out of. A Canada Post “Return to Sender” label covers the address.

I imagine the poet, confident that the poems are on their way, their intended recipient waiting. Or would they have been a surprise? And a welcome or unwelcome one?

I assume they are love poems, but they may not be. One thinks of Rilke’s short poems describing animals at the zoo. Or William Carlos Williams’:

so much depends

upon

a red wheel

barrow

glazed with rain

water

beside the white

chickens.

Luckily nobody called the police. There was, in the end, no need to panic. “Pas de panique,” as some of the guests put it. Others weren’t sure. There was a good bit of general confusion on Saturday evening as people assembled at L’ÉCOLE SECONDAIRE JULES-VERNE to see Le Trio Boris and found a gang of badly dressed, misshapen people pushing each other out of the way to get at the hors d'œuvre.

So there is everybody arriving, many of them dressed for a nice summer evening of entertainment based on excerpts of Boris Vian’s novels and the poetry of Jacques Prévert.

First: the shock of seeing a gang of Buffoons. Then: the horror of their approach.

“How do you like my ass? I know what you’re thinkin’. You’re glad you don’t have one like this, eh? Well I say you gotta love what ya got. What do you got to say to that?”

When Madame Rouge walked in with her riding crop, I thought: Uh Oh.

So that’s what I said: “Uh Oh!”