True Story #3

Same Day - September 21, 2009

        I stop at the “LINK” centre in the hotel lobby to check e-mail. The LINK is an area that Sheraton provides, in some of their hotels, to provide free internet access to guests.

     I am involved in an ongoing e-mail discussion with a very good friend about relationships and how I should really try dating again because you never know, blah, blah, blah. And I keep trying to tell her that I'm tired of the “Your such a nice guy...” and “I don't want to lose you as my friend...” crap that I've been hearing for the past umpteen years. Yes, I freely admit I'm boring, and for what I consider good reasons. My daily working world is full of real, hard deadlines, and a lot of petty artificial ones. Then there's the human cost, and drama, in terms of being at crime and disaster scenes, and of my fellow workers struggling under grinding deadlines and expectations. I have come to appreciate the value of living gently and quietly, and as far out of the way of conflict as I comfortably can. But I digress again.

       Just as I log in an older gentleman comes along and stands next to me and starts to tell me a lot about himself. His 144 nieces and nephews, and countless cousins, and brothers and sisters, and soon I’m enjoying the heck out this guy's life story. He tells me about being an economic orphan. His mother died giving him birth, and at the age of six he was sent to a farm in rural Massachusetts by the state welfare authorities because his father was destitute. He is quite frank about the woman who took him in, and who used to whip the children in her care. He speaks with some humour about his six nephews who became cops. He speaks lovingly and proudly of his successful daughters. If the pride of a father could have a face, it would be of this man.  He tells me of one of his multitudes of relatives who have started a website with the family tree. He even gives me the web URL.

       He tells me of his  job as a groundskeeper at one of the cemeteries in Valhalla, New York. Valhalla is apparently home to several well-known cemeteries. A lot of famous people are buried there. Lou Gehrig, author Ayn Rand, TV pioneers Fred Friendly and David Sarnoff, amongst many, many others. It is the final resting place of Billie Burke, an actress best known for her role as Glinda the Good Witch in the Wizard of Oz. It was up to him to tend the grounds. He took the job because it didn’t pay as well as some other work, but it had benefits that were the kind a man with a growing family needed.

       I really like talking with him. His life is an American life. Not the fable or storybook version that is the profoundly idealistic “American Dream” myth. His is a real story of hard work, of loving and raising a family, of hard times, and larger than life characters. Through him I realize that every real and true life story should have its share of larger than life characters.

I suggest he should write his wonderful stories down, to preserve them, and that's when he brings up the web site. But the web site doesn't tell of his life’s adventures. I get only a wondrous glimpse of him, and his journey, and he and I have been chatting for only 40 minutes.

     I really wish I could stay longer and listen, and learn, but I still have laundry to get done, and his daughter is hovering at his elbow. We say our goodbyes, and “it was nice to meet ya’s”, but I get the feeling that with these polite goodbye’s that it’s more my loss than his.
       Over the next few days I have wished that I would run into him again. I’m curious to hear how his luau show went. One of his daughters brought him to Hawaii for a vacation, and she wants to treat him to the full experience. I am sure his take on it would be far better than having lived through it myself.

And so the face retires back to the quiet solitude of the oceanfront room. As the laundry goes around and around, I sit on the balcony and stare at the ocean and soak up some hot tropical sun. The surf is quiet, and contemplative. It’s early in the day even for me, but I crack open a cold beer, and sit on the deck chair to soak it up. I ponder what it is about the face that encourages people to open up to it without invitation, and after a while realize that I don't really want to know.

I spy a lone turtle down in the water going about his daily turtle business. He’s alone. I don’t think anyone sees him but me. There are no human shouts of wonder, or delight, or discovery. Nobody is swimming anywhere near the turtle. Maybe he doesn’t have the right kind of face.

True Story #2

September 21, 2009  Two Weeks Later

       I get up late, just after seven thirty Hawaiian time. I missed the alarm again. I meant to catch the first bus to the Arizona Memorial. But not today – again!

I shower and dawdle on the balcony of the oceanfront room, admiring the view before heading for the Cheeseburger Beachwalk. It’s a restaurant about a block away, just the other side of the hotel's parking garage. I have finally discovered civilized prices for breakfast. A leisurely cheese and mushroom omelette later I amble across Lewer’s Street to my new favourite Starbucks. They're out of Awake tea today, but it's probably my own fault since I've been the one drinking it all. Every morning since I arrived I head there to take advantage of their free wi-fi to check e-mail. There are only 4 tables outside, all of them full.

       A middle-aged woman with short spiked red hair and a tattoo on her right shoulder is sitting at one of the bigger tables and says I can sit with her. I thank her and explain I just want to do a quick e-mail check and then I'll be off. Unbidden she starts to chat on. I'm trying to be friendly without being rude, but I have to get back to do some laundry. I only brought four days of clothes with me, and this is the fifth day. I have had to get an extra day out of my walking shorts and I've used a brand new Margaritaville t-shirt just to walk out of the hotel and not be obnoxiously oderifous.

       And soon we are into a conversation about her travels, and how she likes Hawaii, and how she's walked maybe 75 miles since she arrived here last week, and how she can't do any sort of physical activity in the heat of the Texas city where she lives. And how she and her late husband moved to all sorts of places while he was in the Air Force. We chat about cel phones and service plans, and how much her phone bill was when she took her i-Phone to Europe. We discuss Amazon's new Kindle, and how useful they are going to be. We have a long discussion about how she would like to sell her house, and how much she loves Seattle and that she has friends in Vancouver, the other one in Southern Washington, and how maybe she should visit Seattle and Portland. I tell her about how much I liked Portland when I was there last year, without mentioning I spent all of three hours in Downtown before getting the heck out. At the time I had other places to go. I was on a schedule to see Bonneville Dam and Mt. Hood. I was saving touring Portland itself for another trip. And one day I might even take that trip.

       So she asks about what I have heard about Portland. I unload temperate weather, forward looking politicians regarding urban access for bike trails and walking paths, and environmentally friendly buildings. That’s all I really knew, and even at that the information comes from vaguely remembered news stories I had seen over the past couple of years. She is highly encouraged. We talk about her going in the winter to see it at its worst, and I suggest going again in the spring to see it at its best, and she likes the idea.

       And suddenly I realize its forty-five minutes later and I have laundry that must be done before I become an odoriferous pariah, and I want to be on the beach before noon.

I make my excuses about having work to do, and get up to leave. She makes noises about maybe we'll run into each other on one of her walks, and I say perhaps, and good luck on finding someplace to set down new roots. And I walk away, laundry is calling. I never really got the chance to check e-mail.

SOME TRAVEL STORIES

Whether I wander far from home to the tropics or just around the corner for coffee I am always amazed at the ability of my face to attract people and their stories. It's not like I have the dreaded "talk to me I'm a sucker" tattoo on my forehead. I know because I checked, twice, and some days more often depending on daily happenstance.
Having said that I would like to share with you some of those stories that I gathered over a two week period in 2009. I have removed their names from the narrative out of respect for their privacy, but in each case their stories made a difference in my life and the un-managed perceptions we all have about strangers who pop up from time to time while we journey from one day to the next.
These stories will be posted over the next few days.

True Story #1

September 3, 2009

        For the first time in my life I am going to a place called the Rain City Coffee Company. I have lived in this neighbourhood for eight years and hardly ever venture out to my local coffee shops. I'm into the first week of a five-week vacation. Now I have both time and a willingness for a new, but quiet adventure. It’s been about forever and a half since I had such a long stretch of vacation time. After a horrendously busy summer of last minute road trips, forest fire coverage with heartbreakingly long hours, and now riddled with physical and emotional stress. I pushed myself past my what I thought was my newly determined safe point, and I have redlined. If this vacation time had not already been booked I would have had to take it anyway. I am getting physically old and increasingly having to rely on Ibuprofen and other, more liquid painkillers, to get my body and mind through to the end of the day.

       In the week prior, I had asked my boss to limit my overtime and to not ask me to go out of town. It didn't really work out that way through no fault of hers but she tried, and I was grateful for her efforts.

       My upper back has locked solid, and my right shoulder spends most of the day feeling like there are daggers being thrust in it. The doctor sends me for physio, and the physio is not impressed. She has worked my back and shoulders, given me mobility exercises, and taped my shoulders so far back I now walk a bit like Frankenstein. My facial features aren't that far off either. The wrinkles of stress and fatigue are beginning to look like deep scars, but I digress.

       It's a sunny Thursday and for early September it's not overly warm. It's not that cold either, but after the previous 7 weeks of hot and dry, today seems cool. Overall it’s fairly pleasant as I stroll the two blocks from my apartment. I get an Organic English Breakfast tea and sit at an outside table. This week I'm reading Bill Bryson's “Neither Here Nor There”, the story of his European walkabout twenty years after his first exposure to the continent. Like his other books, it's a hilarious read.

       Out of the corner of my eye a battered old Chevy Lumina mini van pulls up and parks. A diminutive woman gets out with something in her hand and disappears around the corner. And you’re asking yourself why I would note this? One is because its colour of electric blue is similar to the colour of my old GMC Crew Cab. The other is because it has Ohio plates. I voluntarily spent many years of cold winter nights working anti drinking driving patrols with my local police department looking for things like expired insurance tags. I sub-consciously notice a lot of things about licence plates.

Soon the woman re-appears and walks right past me. I look up very briefly more because of the motion. I never catch her eye. She stops and turns to face me from around ten paces away. And she starts to talk to me. Not the two guys at the next table closest to her, not the people at the table next to that either. She talks directly to me.

       She’s had her ID stolen while she was in the Salvation Army shelter. She left her purse hanging on the bathroom door during a shower and when she went back to get it, well you get the idea. She’s been to the pawnshop around the corner to sell an electric guitar effects pedal, but without ID they won't touch it. An honest pawnshop is a rare thing. So she asks me if I'll go and pawn it for her with my ID.

This when I realize, it's “the face”.  You know the one, it's the one I wear that says “I'm a fool and an idiot and I will believe any story you want to tell me. So come on over here and let me prove it to you”. But today I'm having one of my better days and I make sympathetic noises, but in the end tell her I can't help her.

       But somehow the face urges her on anyway. It asks about what the American Consulate said about getting new ID. Apparently they can only access federal records not state records, so she needs to go back to the border because American Border Services has access to state records. I’m not quite sure how that works, but I have a small amount of experience with large bureaucracies so for all I know maybe it's true. The face makes small noises of sympathy. And the woman starts in on how she's almost out of gas, and how she doesn't want to go back to the shelter because of the mindset of the people there. About how shelter life can take hold of you and drag you down because of its negativity, and about how she doesn't want to be part of “that”. She's an artist, a busker, a poet, and a singer. And she tells me her name. Oh yes, the face rises to the introductions. Three minutes in and we are already on first names. I should know better, but I still carry that small spark of innocence inside that says maybe I can help! Where does innocence stop and suspicion begin in such a mind?

       And then the wet eyes start. She's not in a hopeless circumstance, just temporarily broke. She was going to pick Okanagan fruit with three Mexicans she knows, but they got there between harvests, and they had no money to stay, and the old Lumina's transmission doesn't like the mountains. After a few minutes she gets herself under control, and the rest of the story comes out. About leaving her home in Columbus for Dallas at the age of 16 with $98, her ancient Olds Cutlass (that's a car for those of you haven't heard of one), and a boyfriend with a sketchy past but who had reformed since he spent a year with the Amish. And the story kept coming about the boyfriend's supposed sister in Dallas, but who didn't really exist, and they were down to their last piece of bologna when they parked in a small church lot, and the minister who helped them find food and a place to live. The boyfriend ripped off the people he was living with, and that was almost the last she ever saw of him. And so she worked, went to college after getting her GED, floated around doing temp work, etc. She even worked for Medicare as a call centre clerk. She's almost as old as I am, but shows fewer miles.

       And the story moves on about family troubles, moving back to Columbus, living in the projects, etc. It didn't all come out at once you understand. Stories like this need time to come out, and rarely in a linear fashion. And she talks, and the face listens, fascinated, but saying little except encouraging her to keep going on with the story. And she does tell the story until its four hours later, just after 5 in the afternoon.

       I ask how much she wants for the guitar pedal, and she hems and haws. I ask how much they are new, and she tells me. I give her all the money I have in my pocket which is $20. I don't need the pedal even though I have an old electric guitar and amplifier that follow me whenever I move. In reality I'm paying her for the stories. She's a gifted storyteller. And I try and observe a time honoured but largely forgotten custom, the storyteller should be paid. The face walks away feeling like it cheated her. Five bucks an hour to tell compelling stories is not just cheap, it borders on theft.