On the Predictive Value of Hotel Room Art

Here’s a little tale that illustrates why the pictures in your hotel room are worth looking at:

Friend Rita flew in from Portland last week for a visit. Although we rarely get to see each other nowadays, and hardly ever exchange emails, every time we meet up it’s as though we are continuing a discussion suspended only moments before. We plunged right back into the easy conversational flow of long time friends, speaking in half sentences, cracking one-word, inside jokes. (If you ever meet Rita and want to hear her laugh, just say oh-pie.) Her flight had arrived too late to embark on the two hour drive home, so we put up at a downtown hotel for the night. Over two crisply perfect martinis in the hotel bar, we made plans to do a bit of sight-seeing the next day before picking up her rental car.

In the morning, while waiting for my prink-time in the bathroom, I studied the pictures on the hotel room walls; black and white art photographs of famous Toronto architecture taken from unusual angles. Having lived and worked in Toronto for over twenty years, I was able to recognize all the photographs but one, a perspective shot of receding white arches towering over a familiar-looking building, all enclosed in a glass cube. 

It reminded me of a train station, although in which city, or even which country, I couldn’t say. I puzzled over the familiar-looking building until Rita came out of the bathroom, then turned my full attention to the much more important task of taming the stick-ups caused by a recent encounter with an overly enthusiastic hairstylist.

Rita and I are both knitters, although in fairness she is less rabid about the hobby than I am, so we made our first stop of the day at Romni Wools on Queen Street West, possibly the most famous yarn store in Canada. This was a mistake. The knitters code of ethics demands that upon entering a yarn store, every fuzzy ball in the store must be squeezed to test the hand.  Romni Wools is a vast, mind-bending cornucopia of floor-to ceiling-bins filled with yarns from around the world. And that’s just the ground floor.

After blissful hours of intensive squeezing, we staggered out of Romni, clutching bags filled with must-have additions to our yarn stashes, and into a nearby coffee emporium, where we flopped down at a table to re-caffeinate and squeal excitedly over each other’s purchases. Sufficiently revived, we toddled a bit farther along the street to a French restaurant, where they had just received a delivery of aromatic Enokitake mushrooms, so naturally, we just had to have lunch there. Emerging from the restaurant, clutching bags filled with must-have additions to our yarn stashes against distended tummies, we realized we’d used up our entire sight-seeing day squeezing yarn and it was now time to pick up the car.

Unfortunately, Rita had left the address of the car rental place in her backpack, which was in the luggage room of the hotel. I knew the only two car rental places downtown were on Bay Street, so we headed in that direction. Rita thought the street number was 161. I thought that was the address of our hotel and asked her if the car could have been rented from Eaton Centre. She said it sounded familiar, so we tried there first. No luck. We decided to call the help number on Rita’s AVIS card. She punched her way through an epic phone menu, listened intently for  a couple of minutes, then pressed the repeat button and handed me the phone, which I promptly dropped. I managed to pick it up in time to hear “BCE Place, Bay and Front Streets, Unit 10”.

Finding Bay and Front Streets was easy; we just allowed ourselves to be swept along in the tide of office workers scurrying toward Union Station to catch the GO train home. BCE Place remained elusive. We found a skyscraper labeled Brookfield Place at 161 Bay Street, but no BCE Place. I began asking passersby. No one had ever heard of BCE Place. Finally we found a security guard on the steps of Union Station who pointed toward Brookfield Place, so we went back and asked people coming out of the building if they knew where to find the AVIS rental office in BCE Place. They all shrugged denial. With no other clues to follow, we decided to at least look inside the building before trudging back to the hotel to get Rita’s backpack…

… and there they were; soaring white pillars arching over a 19^th century bank building enclosed in a glass cube. Warm certainty settled over me like a lace-weight merino shawl. Despite the wrong name, this had to be the right place. A friendly newsstand vendor confirmed it, adding that the building had been renamed from BCE Place to Brookfield Place ten years previously.

So this is why you should always pay attention to the pictures in your hotel room, because you never know when you’ll need a sign.

Throwing Stones

I’m in a good mood as I make my way up the hill to visit a friend. The weather is transitioning to autumn; cool nights, misty mornings and bright, warm afternoons like this one. Against a brilliant blue sky, the leaves of the ancient maples lining the street rustle cheerfully in a light breeze. Fat squirrels bound across the front lawns of once grand Victorian houses, carrying last minute additions to the stockpiles that will get them through winter. I pass a nodding acquaintance from the library. We nod, giving each other smiles just wide enough to acknowledge familiarity, but not so wide we’d have to stop and chat. Even my knees are in a good mood, protesting the extra effort of the climb with mild twinges instead of the agonized yowling that usually accompanies a steep incline.

I crest the hill and round the corner onto the street where my friend lives. Yellow tape cordons off a stretch of sidewalk. On one end, the tapes are tied to the porch railings of a shabby rooming house. On the other end, they are wrapped around the bumpers of an old bus that has been converted into a police mobile command post. I hear the crackle of two-way radios as I walk around the bus and up the front walk of the restored Victorian house where my friend sits on the miniscule balcony of her second story apartment.

“What happened here?” I call up.

She tosses the answer down to me along with the key to the front door. “Murder.”

In her tiny perfect kitchen, she makes me a spectacular cup of coffee – fresh ground beans, steeped in a French press – then we sit out on the balcony for a smoke while she tells me about the murder.

There have been problems with the next-door neighbors this summer, all-night parties that regularly spilled stoned guests out onto the street where they shouted incoherently at each other. Two days previously, at the height of a particularly boisterous party, my friend heard her neighbor shout out a death threat. Shortly after that, a young man lay bleeding to death in the middle of the road, stabbed, possibly, by the woman who uttered the threat.

My friend wonders what would have happened if she had called the police. She threatened to do so earlier as the noise levels rose, but they turned down the music so she never followed through. If she had, she might have saved that young man’s life. I listen to her guilt and remember how, a long time ago, I felt the same way.

During a brief downturn in my life following the end of my first marriage, I lived in a dilapidated apartment building next door to a motorcycle gang house. It wasn’t unusual to arrive home from work and find myself unable to get to the door of the building because police swat teams were arresting my neighbors for possession of illegal firearms or busting up one of the broken-bottle rumbles that took place in the parking lot outside my living room window.

One morning, in the middle of winter, a friend who’d been visiting me went out to the bus stop and found a young woman wearing motorcycle leathers lying on the ground. Her arms were wrapped around her belly. She retched and vomited continuously. She had a split lip and a swollen bruise covered half her face. Despite the sub-zero temperature and her lack of warm clothing, she was drenched in sweat and reeked of alcohol.

I went inside, called 911 and took a blanket back out to the bus stop. We sat with her until the ambulance came while I kept a fearful eye on the front door of the gang house, worried her biker boyfriend might decide to have another go at her. She ignored us, panting and moaning in the intervals between vomiting up pale yellow bile. As the paramedics were lifting her onto the stretcher, I decided to stay with her.

In the hospital, after telling the admitting nurse everything I could, which wasn’t much, I sat alone in the waiting room listening to the young woman scream. The doctor came out and told me the she was aborting a fetus, probably killed by a blow to her stomach during the beating. She screamed because she was too intoxicated to be given pain medication.

When it was over, I went in to see her. She was still drunk enough to have problems focusing her eyes. I asked her for the name of someone I could contact, hoping to find relatives or friends. She shrieked at me to go away, to leave her alone. I returned to the hospital waiting room for a while, then realized there was nothing more to be done and went home. I felt guilty about abandoning her until I called the hospital to check on her later that day. They told me she had somehow managed to dress herself and walk out without anyone noticing.

When things like this happen now, I no longer feel guilt.  

Imagine life as a river and events as stones. Choices we make for ourselves have the most impact, like boulders tossed into the water, creating great splashing waves of consequences and redirecting the flow of life. The casual actions/inactions of others are like pebbles landing in the backwash of the waves, tiny perturbations whose ripples ultimately have little, if any, effect.

And this is how it should be. It’s okay to toss a pebble or two in someone else’s river, when the need arises, when we believe we are doing the right thing. But it’s best to reserve the big stones, the stones of commitment, responsibility and regret, for our own rivers.

Things I Never Learned in School

The other day, while I waited for the microwave to nuke a bowl of Shanghai noodles, I heard the muffled ringing of my cell phone coming from the bedroom. It rang four times before I found it in the laundry hamper. In an attempt to intercept the call before it went to voicemail, I flipped open the phone without checking caller id and found myself ear-to-voice with a telemarketer.  I wanted to hang up but couldn’t, because for a soul-harrowing four hours I was once a telemarketer myself and have no desire to encourage suicidal tendencies in others.

One November day in the late sixties, I was called to the principal’s office of my high-school and informed my attendance in class would no longer be permitted. (No, I wasn’t expelled for anything really bad like drug-dealing or beating kids up for lunch money. I was expelled for voicing negative opinions about education, frequently and in language best described as unladylike.  At the time, I was quite proud of my scurrilous vocabulary and gave others every opportunity to admire it. In retrospect, after learning to curse in four other languages and having spent a few months working as a deckhand on a package freighter, I know the cuss words available to a seventeen-year-old farm girl scarcely qualify as profanity.) Expulsion from school resulted in expulsion from home, where my opinions were equally unpopular,  and I soon discovered a big mouth is frequently an empty one. Tucking my attitude into a back pocket, I went looking for work.

I landed my first job, magazine subscription phone sales for five dollars a night plus twenty cents for every subscription sold. Back then, the only qualifications required for telemarketing were a good speaking voice and clear enunciation. (Recent conversations with telemarketers lead me to believe there are now no qualifications whatsoever.)  On my first and only night of employment, they sat me in front of a grungy black Bakelite telephone, handed me a script and some white pages ripped from a phone book. I never sold a magazine. I rarely made it all the way through the first sentence of the script. To this day, the sound of a disconnect followed by the hum of a dial tone makes me feel personally rejected. At the end of the night, I picked up my five dollars and trudged from the room, determined to starve to death before subjecting myself to that level of humiliation again and equally determined never to inflict it on another.

So, I listened politely to the young man from the cable company explain how I could save ten dollars a month for three years by switching to a new HD PVR, (high definition personal video recorder) then told him I didn’t have an HD TV. He checked with a co-worker and informed me the PVR would still work. After further questioning verified there were no hidden charges,  I agreed to order a new PVR, feeling a twinge of guilt at giving the poor kid a glimpse of success.

We chatted as I slurped up my noodles and he stumbled his way through unfamiliar computer screens, areas of the system he rarely saw. I sympathized with his complaints, telling him I’d worked in computers and had had the same experience with third party software many times, to which he responded he’d taken a few computing courses in university and asked me what programming languages I knew.

“You went to university?” I blurted out before I could stop myself, and learned I was talking to a recent graduate with a BA in English Literature. I shouldn’t have been so surprised.

Six years after putting telemarketing behind me forever, while my less obstreperous schoolmates were leaving university and taking jobs as waitresses, truck drivers, receptionists, and even telemarketers, I was working as a computer programmer at an insurance company, making enough money to support not only myself, but my deadbeat first husband, who never remained employed one second longer than it took him to qualify for unemployment insurance.  I’d scrambled my way up from the filing room in basement, via the first floor mail room, second floor telephone room and third floor claims department. It wasn’t an easy climb, but it taught me things I’d never have learned in school, where courses like “Buckling Down 101” and “Getting Your Ass in Gear 202” and “Taking Responsibility for Your Future – Advanced” are not on offer.  For some people, these are innate abilities. For a foul-mouthed, know-it-all like me, they were lessons that had to be bludgeoned in. I’ve always felt fortunate to have learned them while I was still young enough to benefit from them.

A few days after ordering my new PVR, I met up with a bunch of old-fogey friends and we had one of those kids-these-days conversations. If you’re over fifty, or know anyone over fifty, you’ve heard things like this before:   

Nowadays kids want two-hundred dollar running shoes and expect to be driven everywhere. When I was a kid, we walked to school barefoot. Five miles every day. Uphill. In blizzards.

We didn’t have Nintendo when I was a kid. We made our own fun with corn cobs and imagination.

Someone, I can’t remember who, pointed out that suspension from school was a dumb form of punishment. “Those kids don’t want to go to school anyway,” she said. “It’s like rewarding their bad behavior with a vacation.”

Not having any kids myself, and unwilling to voice an opinion on something I know nothing about, I’d been letting the talk flow around me. At this point, I felt I could join in the conversation. “Getting expelled from school,” I told them, “was the best career move I ever made.”  

 

Where Ideas Really Come From

Recently, people have been asking me, “Where do you get your ideas from?” As it happens, my current book has an impeccable pedigree. Future works, however, may not be as explicable.

At the end of an incredibly dull day last week, I decided to perk up my evening by checking out a free music concert down by the lake with a friend. We had no clue who was playing, but after the day I’d had, the local seniors’ kazoo band would have been an improvement. Shouldering our camp chairs, we made our way to the park, where it became apparent, from the number of cowboy hats dotting the audience, that we were in for a country and western evening.

I’m not a big fan of C&W. The music is energetic and pleasing in a predictable way, but the whiney, adenoidal delivery of the pity-party lyrics drives me crazy. A good C&W performer can make a love song sound like a last minute plea from death row. Still, given that the alternative would be sitting at home feeling sorry for myself, I was willing to be entertained by someone else’s pain. We set up our chairs on the weedless grass at the edge of the park.

(Surrealistically weedless - like none. This is utterly amazing, because two years ago, the province passed a law banning the sale and use of pesticides and herbicides. Since then, despite backbreaking hours of hand-pulling dandelions, plantain, thistles and vetch, my lawn and every other privately owned lawn in this town now looks like a post-apocalyptic wasteland while government-owned property remains a lush monoculture of pristine blades. Is City Hall smuggling in bootleg weed killer from south of the border? If so, this would explain the shocking hike in my property tax bill.)

The headliner, Jason McCoy, stepped onto the stage. The crowd, which now filled the park and spilled out onto the streets around it, went wild. I was too far away to see what he looked liked – heck, I’d have had to be sitting on the stage to do that - but I googled him later and he’s firmly in the cowboy hunk category.  His first few songs were the standard busted-truck, dead-dog offerings delivered with an appropriate nasal twang. Then he launched into a song about never arguing with his wife in the interests of getting laid on a regular basis. The melody and chord structures were standard, but the lyrics were funny, and one line in particular struck me as unusually clever:

 “It’s a mighty fragile ego system.”

I immediately began plotting out a novel about an image obsessed couple who adopt a Chinese baby because it’s fashionable and the child turns out to be disabled in some obvious and unglamorous way. The instant I got home, I sat down at the laptop and looked up “fragile ego system” to see if my brilliant idea had already been commandeered.

I found a surprising number of articles, comments and blogs written by people apparently unaware that “eco” and “ego” are different words. (Okay, one of them is just a prefix. Even funnier, don’t you think?) The best was a set of council meeting minutes from a California town considering a new development. In addition to the ego/eco confusion, one woman “felt that annexations are inedible” and she “doesn’t want to see her rates go up farther [sic] and have water shortage and conservation because then have [sic] existing water is being adverted to the other side of the bridge.” I decided malapropism would make an excellent characteristic for my socially sensitive protagonists.

(For those of you who don’t have my twisted writer’s sense of humor, advert, when used as a verb, means to call attention to in speech or in writing. Picture a tour guide standing on bridge saying, “And if you will direct your attention to the other side of the bridge, ladies and gentlemen, you will see even more water.”)

Rock climbers in Virginia have named a difficult climb Fragile Ego System, which is, hilariously, located on Gonad Wall.  Hollywood and Brooklyn appear to be hotbeds of fragile ego systems, (Brooklyn? Really?) and it’s a fairly common derisive accusation flung about in forum bun-fights. The phrase is not, however, in the lyrics of any song. The actual line, that I finally found on a C&W website, goes like this:

“It’s a mighty fragile ecosystem.”

Before I write my novel about the disabled Chinese baby with malapropic parents, I’ll have to make up a story for when I’m asked where the idea came from. The truth makes no sense at all.