The Girl in the Boots

I didn’t really notice him until we were about to pass each other on the sidewalk. Tall, skinny, straight blond hair. Wearing a windbreaker with a logo for some trucking company. A ball cap. Jeans. Sneakers.

It’s a uniform in some parts of this city. Many parts, actually. Winnipeg is a strange place. White collar, blue collar. Rich, poor. Refined, rejected. We’re all mashed together by history and geography and extreme climate.

He was already behind me when I heard him say something.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Can you spare a dollar?” he repeated.

I reached into my pocket. I just do it. It’s easier that way.

“Or maybe two dollars? You can’t buy much for a dollar.”

He wasn’t aggressive. He was just asking.

I pulled out a handful of change, mostly quarters and dimes.

While I did so, he looked me up and down.

“I guess you don’t have to worry about money.”

I was wearing a Jets T-shirt. A grey hoodie. Jeans. Not much different from his uniform.

How did he know?

“Everybody worries about money,” I told him. I looked at my handful of change. There might have been two dollars there. Certainly not much more. Certainly nothing for me to worry about. I handed it to him.

“If I see you again…” he started to say. He was trying to tell me he would pay me back. If he could.

“It’s alright,” I said. Then I went my way. He went his.

I don’t have to worry about money? No, I guess I don’t. I’m not gonna starve. I’ve got a nice house.

And yet I do.

I worry about money way more now than when I was young; when I had very little.

I worry about other things, too. What I’ve done. What I’ve not done. What I should have done. It all clatters around me like tin cans on a string.

Right after university, I took a job driving a Coke truck while I looked for the job I really wanted to do. All I needed to do was get a job with a newspaper and everything would be great. It would be amazing.

When that finally happened, it was amazing. So I thought.

But then, a few years in, a person I’d been developing a friendship with said, “If I asked you to tell me about yourself, what would you say first?”

“I’d say I’m a journalist.”

“I thought so,” she said. “I find that kind of sad.”

I didn’t think it was so sad at the time. I was a little bit offended.

Now, when my journalism career is on the endangered list, I see what she meant.

So lately, when people say, “tell me about yourself,” I try to come up with a different answer.

It’s funny. The jobs I had before I started my so-called career? My interim jobs? I think that is when I was happiest. An orderly in a hospital during university. A Coke truck driver after grad. Because those jobs weren’t me.

Back then a friend, a different friend, wanted me to read a book called Be Here Now. It was written by Western-born yogi Ram Das.

I took it, but I was never going to read it. It was a self-help kind of book. I don’t like self-help books.

The title stuck with me, though, because lately I find myself repeating it.

Be here now.

I repeat it as I walk to my car to go to my endangered journalism job. Bicycles are chained to signposts. Grit is piled up beside the curb. Last fall’s Tim Hortons cups are still waiting to be put in a recycling bin. Some leaves have popped out on the scrawny downtown trees between last walk and this one. The smell of Brazilian barbecue wafts from one direction, the smell of Dumpsters behind a condo conversion wafts from another.

Be here now.

I repeat it as I stand on my balcony and feel the wind. From the north. From the south. From the north and south all at once. It’s warmer than it was yesterday. The sun won’t shine today, but that’s OK. The rain will clean things up a bit.

Be here now.

The river is a little lower than it was last week, but my favourite path is still submerged. Ducks paddle there.

Be here now.

That’s what I am trying to do.

What does this have to do with the guy I met on the sidewalk?

I don’t know. But sometimes I wonder why I’m the guy who has a pocketful of change, and he’s the guy who wants some.

I’m not religious, but I’ve heard this text: “Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin.”

It’s from Matthew, Chapter 6, if you are wondering. I Googled it.

I’m not entirely sure what it means. It could be seen as a justification for the status quo. There are the haves. There are the have nots. If you’re a lily, you’re lucky. If not… too bad.

It could be saying that all of man’s striving is futile and meaningless.

Or maybe it’s saying who we are is more important than what we do. Or what we have. Or what we want. Or what we worry about.

It’s something to think about.

A friend, yet another friend, posted on Facebook a quote by Stephen Jay Gould: “I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.”

That’s something to think about, too.

I remind myself to make sure I have change in my pocket in case I see that guy again.

What’s two bucks? Not much to me.

Probably a whole lot to him — even if he does just use it to buy a beer.

We were leaving a Winnipeg Fringe Festival performance in Augustine United Church. Two tenors, who were really quite talented singers, had put on a show parodying the whole ‘tenors’ musical genre.

The showstopper was a version of Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah that, the tenors promised, would reveal what the song is really about.

Not that Cohen’s song beats around the bush. Consider this verse:

 

There was a time when you let me know

What’s really going on below

But now you never show it to me, do you?

And remember when I moved in you

The holy dove was moving too

And every breath we drew was Hallelujah

 

Pretty clear what’s going on there, right?

But a lot of people just hear the Hallelujah.

 

So, we were on the way out after the show and the audience was talking about the song, and my companion and I couldn’t help but hear the conversation between two women behind us.

“I love that song.”

“I love it, too. Their version was pretty funny, though.”

“It was.”

“My sister-in-law would have hated it.”

“Why?”

“She refuses to listen to that song.”

“Why?”

“Somebody told her it is not about… something holy… you know? It’s about having sex. Like those guys just sang it. So she went home and read the lyrics and saw that was true. It is about sex. She was so shocked. She won’t listen to it anymore. And she used to love that song so much.”

“Huh.”

“Yeah. ‘You shouldn’t write songs about that,’ she told me.”

The woman went on to say that her poor sister-in-law was at the folk festival when k.d. lang sang Hallelujah, and she got up and went to the back until it was over.

 

Hallelujah is about sex? I was shocked, too. I thought it was about so much more than that.

Yeah. Of course it’s about sex. That story about David watching Bathsheba bathing on the roof that Cohen references early on is pretty sexy. And it’s straight from the Bible. So’s the story about Samson and Delilah. It’s about the things we do for sex. Sometimes bad things. Sometimes things that doom us.

But it’s also a song about how the “Oh, oh, oh God, oh God, OH GOD!” rapture of sex is a mere practice run for the Hallelujah of spiritual rapture.

And I am pretty sure it is about a whole lot more than that.

Probably even Leonard Cohen doesn’t know the full extent of what the song is about, because creative rapture rides the same bus as sexual rapture and spiritual rapture, and all three of those things are pretty irrational.

You say you listened to the lyrics, sister-in-law? Did you really listen to them? Then you must have caught this:

 

You say I took the name in vain

I don’t even know the name

But if I did, well, really, what’s it to you?

There’s a blaze of light in every word

It doesn’t matter which you heard

The holy or the broken Hallelujah

 

Here on Earth, we’ve got lots of broken Hallelujahs. Earth is a broken Hallelujah. But each broken Hallelujah can take us closer to the holy one.

Hallelujah is about everything. War and peace and love and hate and holy and profane and creation and destruction.  And everything between those things.

And sex.

It’s about life, sister-in-law.

Why on Earth would you want to shut yourself off from that?

 

They are gone in the morning, when the sun rises above the cottonwoods and poplars along the river.

The drops splatter on the rail and make little rainbow bursts. Whole universes are born and die in a second.

The sun’s arc is a little higher in the sky than it was the day before, but still not high enough.

By early afternoon, they’re back.

The slippery fingers of winter.

We’re prisoners. We should have made our getaway when we had the chance.

We thought we had more time.

There are so many things that are out to imprison us.

Old age. Prejudices. Doubts. Fears.

Old habits.

Winter. Real and metaphorical.

Maybe tomorrow the fingers won’t come back.

So what will come in their place?

 

(Photo taken March 25, 2013, on my 61st birthday. I don’t like birthdays as much as I used to. Too many drops have hit the rail.

But having a birthday is certainly better than the alternative.)

 

When you read — and write — historical fiction, there is one thing that you learn pretty quickly: people just don’t learn.

Yes, we know more. Or perhaps I should amend that to read we have access to more knowledge. When a high proportion of graduate students (even those living on the east coast) can’t even identify the Atlantic Ocean on a map without the help of Google, one could make a strong argument that many of us haven’t accumulated all that much knowledge along the way, either.

So, we live in a world where we can land spaceships on asteroids and close in on the Higgs bosun and discover the origins of the universe… and many of us don’t know where we live.

Before I continue, I must say something here in the interest of full disclosure. I am 60 years old.

So, here we go… another rant against the younger generations, right?

Wrong. This post was inspired by the fact that I am tired of rants against the younger generation. I have had to listen to them my entire life.

When I was a teenager, I had to listen to rants about how my peers and I had no respect for authority, didn’t know the meaning of hard work, our hair was stupid and our idols, The Beatles, were just an overrated flash in the pan.

And boy, were we in for a rude awakening.

When I was in my 20s, I had to listen to rants about how my politics were stupid and my idealism was too idealistic and we were playing into the hands of the stupid Communists. And my music? Well, I have to admit, they were right, there. Much of it was pretty stupid during that particular era.

And boy, were we in for a rude awakening.

When I was in my 30s, I was busy raising a family, so I’m a little fuzzy on what the younger generation rants were then. Stupid shoes? Stupid big hair? Stupid big hair bands? Stupid nihilists?

And now… now that I am an old guy, I’m still having to listen to rants — and I am even expected to participate in them.

Stupid teenage girls constantly texting. Stupid self-indulgent social media. Stupid geographically challenged university students. Stupid gamers. Stupid sense of entitlement.

“Get your heads out of your smartphones. Take a look at the real world around you.”

Well, guess what? They’re doing it.

I saw them.

I spent the day at Winnipeg’s winter party, the Festival du Voyageur. It was full of the younger generation. Dancing jigs. Chowing down on tourtière. Posing for goofy pictures with the ice sculptures. Jumping up and down to keep warm around fires. Rolling up frozen maple syrup on a stick.

These teenagers and young adults were very much aware that there was a real world around them — even if this one happened to be a re-enactment of a world that existed many, many generations ago.

The fiddle player I happened to hear while I was there was a slender, handsome guy in his 20s. His fingers moved over the strings like he had been playing for hundreds of years. Some of the songs he played were hundreds of years old.

He’d be a hell of a gamer, being able to control his fingers so well.

Maybe he is a hell of a gamer.

We’re basically just talking about tools here. My generation learned to use the tools of more accessible university education and easy travel and upward mobility.

This generation is learning to use the tools of instant communication and instant knowledge and instant gratification.

There are stumbles along the way. There are excesses and dead ends. But they’ll figure it out. Just like we did.

So, some things we do learn, I guess. But the big things? Not so much. We’ve learned it is not politically correct to hate races, religions, ethnic groups and certain lifestyles.

But does that mean there is less hate in the world?

No, it is just more spread out now. We are equal opportunity haters. Read the comments on the average online newspaper article to get a sense of that.

Humans are still greedy and selfish and dishonest. We still prefer to blame other people or places or things for our own shortcomings and unhappiness.

We still can’t see ourselves as others see us.

We still feel an overpowering urge to chop down the tallest poppy.

And despite all this, sometimes we sparkle.

Often we sparkle.

Maybe we should rant about that once in a while.

 

Does where you live have an effect on who you are?

Of course, it is going to affect your wardrobe, and, to some extent, it will affect your activities.

Hawaiians probably go to the beach much more often than, say, North Dakotans.

Does that make Hawaiians different from North Dakotans?

Well, consider these words spoken by George Clooney as the character Matt King in The Descendants:

“My friends on the mainland think just because I live in Hawaii, I live in paradise. Like a permanent vacation. We’re all just out here sipping Mai Tais, shaking our hips, and catching waves. Are they insane?

“Paradise? Paradise can go @#$% itself.”

Of course, Clooney said those words while wearing a colourful Hawaiian shirt and sporting a tan — a couple of things you don’t see much of in Fargo this time of year.

But his sentiment is clear: Your life can be shit wherever you happen to live.

You are who you are.

One’s geographical location is something Winnipeggers may ponder more than most. This is because, when you meet up with an old friend or relative who you haven’t seen for a while, and you are catching up with each other, one of the questions they will almost invariably ask is, “Why Winnipeg?”

There is a whole big world out there.

There’s The Rockies. There’s Sonoma Valley. There’s the Blue Mountains of North Carolina. There’s the hipitude of Portland Ore. (or Maine, for that matter). There’s the music of Nashville. There’s Montreal.

And that’s just one continent. There are six more.

Meanwhile, back in Winnipeg, it’s cold. It’s flat. It’s prone to flooding. It’s in the middle of nowhere. A city of this size has no right to be here and probably wouldn’t be if it weren’t for the world’s penchant for beaver felt hats a few hundred years ago and tough Scottish and Ukrainian immigrants who were sold a bill of goods.

So, why Winnipeg?

Right off the bat, we’ve found a definite effect that geographical location can have on an individual: Living in Winnipeg means you have to answer a lot of questions.

This makes some Winnipeggers defensive.

“Yeah, well, we have…” What? The Winnipeg Folk Festival? An orchestra? Grand Beach (for the four months the ice is gone and it is actually warm enough to swim there)? Wheat? The home of the Guess Who?

Right. That will convince them.

It makes other Winnipeggers aggressive.

“Yeah, well at least we’re not (insert name of place you despise here).

And it makes a few Winnipeggers bitter. It the depths of winter it sometimes seems like there is a disproportionate number of people here who spend their whole lives wishing they were elsewhere.

A recent commenter on a Free Press story remarked, “my favourite view of Winnipeg is in my rear-view mirror.”

But he, or she, is still here.

Perhaps it’s fear.

What if he, or she, put Winnipeg in their rear-view mirror and kept driving all the way to their perceived paradise.

And then, what if, in a few years, they found themselves, like George Clooney, saying, “Paradise can go @#$% itself.”

Then what?

 

So, my best answer to “Why Winnipeg” is this: It is because it is where I am at the moment.

What Winnipeg has is a bunch of people who find themselves here for whatever reason trying to make the best of it.

It’s got diehards. Diehard artists. Diehard musicians. Diehard entrepreneurs. Diehard workers. Diehard complainers.

That’s got to be worth something.

 

PS: For what it’s worth, Winnipeg also has its own diehard world-renowned ballet company. I just thought you should know.