SWEET CHARITY

I like boutiques. They offer a certain warmth, coziness, a friendliness and personal touch not to be found in department stores. Then too, they sell luxury goods, trinkets and those little non-necessities one needs. Thus it was I entered one such local shoppe in search of scented candles my daughter had told me were now half price.

The candles were advertised as being 100% beeswax and made by the homeless or former homeless. Even at a 50% reduction they were a hefty price, but who counts dollars when it comes to assisting the homeless? My arms full, I placed several pounds of wax on the countertop. Products such as these often carry a label stating what percentage of the profits go to the charity in question, but these candles didn’t. I remarked to the shopkeeper, “I wonder how much profit the homeless make?”

Whirling around, she said, “I don’t know! I’ve wondered that myself, but they get a wage you know.”

“Yes, I suppose they do, but do you think it’s a living wage?”

“I don’t get living wage, considering all I have to do here,” she replied picking up a candle with one bejeweled hand. “You know these smell so nice even if you don’t light them,” she added.

Was it not wrong, I thought, for me to scent my home using a candle made by a person without a home? “Still,” I persisted, “do you think they make even minimum wage?”

“Oh it’s a very good company. My daughter has been there and seen the factory.”

“Mmm, but do they pay a minimum wage? I mean we both know waitresses don’t get one and there are so many people who have to work at two jobs. I wonder why there are so many homeless in America?”

“I’ll tell you why there are so many homeless in this country, and I’ll look you straight in the eye when I tell you.”

I was in for it. Unwittingly, I’d pushed her buttons.

“There don’t need to be any homeless. It’s because they won’t work. They don’t have the motivation or gumption to get off their behinds and get a job.”

“You think that’s why?”

“I certainly do! And I’ll tell you another thing. The poor in this country can send their kids to college without it costing them a cent.” She glared at me.

“Perhaps, but I wonder if this company pays minimum wage.” I persisted, feeling more and more like a bulldog in a boutique. “Anyway,” I added, moving to safer ground, “do they burn well?”

“Oh, they sure do,” she replied still glaring.

“I guess they would, being beeswax.”

“Oh, these aren’t beeswax,” she corrected.

“But the sign says they are. Look,” I said, returning to the bookcase laden with candles. I pointed to a prominent sign above the product announcing the 100% authenticity of the beeswax and their homeless manufacturers.

“Well, I was just doing inventory, and I had beeswax candles right here on the shelf.”

“That may be, but now you don’t, and the sign is still here. In fact, it’s the same display and sign you had before Christmas that motivated me to buy these same candles at the full price. So you could simply remove the placard.”

She made no move to do so.

“You know, I don’t think you want to buy here. Coming in here and from the first moment upsetting me. This isn’t Macy’s you know. This is just a little store, and if you want to fight big corporations you can shop elsewhere. I’ve worked here for years, and nothing like this has ever happened to me before!” she shouted, her body visibly tense. “You must be a very unhappy woman!” she concluded.

“Funny, when you were yelling at me, I was just thinking the same about you,” I replied.

“Well you can just take your business somewhere else!” she spat.

Turning to open the door, I said, “Thank you, for refusing to do business with me.”

“I don’t need your business!”

“Obviously not,” I shrugged, thinking it would have been better if she had minded her beeswax, and I mine.

JER-RY! JER-RY! JER-RY!

Like him or loath him, Jerry Springer provides a service to the American public, or so it seems to my nonresident alien eyes. It provides a mirror. The program shows what the U.S.A. has become, a nation without dignity.[1] Twice a day Jerry Springer, America’s number one television show, airs. We were wondering if we aliens could better integrate ourselves into American society by appearing on Springer’s program. The thought came to mind one Saturday morning when my husband was cooking pancakes for the children.

“Jeez pop, do you have to wear that shrunken dressing gown?” my eldest daughter asked.

“Yeah dad, it looks so queer,” her sister added.

“Well, didn’t you know? I am gay!”

“Oops!” I said, aghast. “Now they know. We’ll never get on the Jerry Springer show.”

“Oh, he is not, mom. You’ve been married sixteen years!” my fifteen-year-old piped up.

“Should we tell her?” I asked.

“How long we’ve been married? Why not?”

“Kid, we got married just after you were born,” I announced.

“Haw, haw, haw, haw,” her younger sister sing-sang.

“Guess she hasn’t seen the adoption papers yet,” her dad remarked.

“Now you’ve let another cat out of the bag!” I added, horrified.

“No fear, we still have an ace up our sleeve.”

“We do?”

“Yeah, we can go on Springer yet!”

“We can? Mind letting me in on the fun?”

“Sure but not here and now.”

“So you think only an appearance on Springer’s show can truly Americanize us?”

“Something like that.”

“You don’t want to be an alien anymore?”

“Well, it’s not exactly part of the American Dream, is it?”

“You guys are crazy!” my youngest daughter said.

“Yeah, we want a divorce.” announced her sister.

“Don’t be silly. Kids can’t divorce their parents,” I told them.

“They can in America!”

“And we’re gonna!”

“Yeah, and we can get a pretty good settlement too.”

“Is this true?” I asked my husband.

“No doubt.”

“So we’re leaving.” The little one said shoving a last hunk of pancake in her mouth, maple syrup dripping down her chin.

“Where are you going?” I asked.

“To call our lawyer.”

“You guys got a lawyer?”

“Sure mom, every kid does. This is America, ‘member?”

“Don’t sweat it,” my hubby reassured me. “They’ll have to prove paternity first.”

“Yeah and I don’t think grandpa will cooperate.” I added.

---

[1] This piece was written during Kenneth Starr’s investigation of President Clinton’s behavior in the Whitehouse.

Bone Appetite

All the experts say so; dogs should not be fed table scraps. Maybe, but try convincing my dog, Toby. He insists on table scraps. And why not? Those leftovers were once human food after all. I've tried feeding him nutritious, perfectly balanced-for-all-your-dog's-needs kibble.

While placing the bowl before his nose I enthuse. "Mmmm, yummy Toby. Look, new improved flavor!"

"And how would you know that?" he asks with his doubting Tobias look. Then he'll take a whiff, wrinkle his nose and look at me with disgust.

"What's this dog's dinner?" his expression asks. "You call this dog fare? Where are the veggies, the sweet potatoes, and the skin of baked salmon cut into little squares just the way I like it?" Some mutt's looks can speak volumes. He'll then sniff the air and exit, stiff-legged. He'd rather starve than stoop to eat plain dog food.

I fret, of course, but try to hide my concern from the family.

"Don't worry, mom. He'll eat when he's hungry," my thirteen-year-old counsels.

"Yeah, mom, you spoil him," adds her older sister.

From his basket beside the refrigerator, Toby, with sunken eyes, looks at me reproachfully.

He's starting to emaciate already. I panic and rush to the pantry in search of a can of tuna. Casually I drain the oil over his biscuits.

"Whatcha doin, mom?"

"Oh just making tomorrow's lunch pack," I lie.

"Tuna again? Can't we have peanut butter and jam, this time?"

I think, sure you could, but I wouldn't want to be caught smearing peanut butter on kibble.

I replace Toby's bowl under his nose. He inspects it with displeasure. He too is sick of tuna. He'd rather go hungry.

"To hell with you then!" I sneer leaving him to waste away.

He sighs as I turn out the kitchen light.

Later that evening, as I prepare to take Toby out for his evening walk, I notice his biscuits slightly swollen from the tuna drippings but otherwise untouched. Too weak to leave his basket he watches me.

"Oh, all right then!" I concede knowing everyone has gone to bed and I won't get caught rooting through the fridge. Pulling out leftovers from that evening's meal, I take a wooden spoon and lovingly mix the mutt's biscuits with potatoes, zucchini, broccoli and cauliflower au gratin. As I place his special china bowl on the floor, Toby, reconsidering his hunger strike and summing his last vestiges of strength, leaps from basket to bowl in one mighty bound.

Delicately, my canine gourmet munches while I look on relieved.I'll sleep well tonight. At that precise moment my husband arrives in the kitchen. Rubbing the sleep from his eyes, he glances at our cur, then me and pronounces, "Sucker!"

Parental Guidance

While living in the U.S.A., we noticed much was made of teenage drug use. Practically every small town we drove through had signs posted near the school announcing that it was drug free. I was never sure if this were wish or reality. Neither as it turned out. Apparently, anyone caught selling drugs within the borders of the drug free zone would have to pay higher fines than outside it. Within this area drug pushers’ overheads are high.
But drug abuse is of course not restricted to American schools. From the International School in Basel, we got a handout telling us that the administration decided to hire an outside agency, Freedom from Chemical Dependency (FCD) to raise parents’, teachers’ and students’ awareness of drug abuse.

It was the meeting with a representative of FCD, at the International School on December 17/99, that reminded me of our American experience, our European attitude, and a conversation I had with our youngest daughter two years ago in the USA. There, we frequently received reports in the mail or handed out from the school on teenage drinking and drug use. We were encouraged to be ever vigilant with our children, that we police their parties, their lives and our liquor cabinets. In our family, we’ve never really fussed about alcohol intake. I suppose it’s our European background that led us to think it’s not a sin to take the occasional glass of wine, beer or other alcohol. Over the years we’ve built up quite a substantial cellar of good wines we must get round to enjoying, before we have an equally substantial collection of good wine vinegars. In any event, prompted by school handouts, newspaper reports, school meetings, television warnings, bill board and radio campaigns against the evil drink, the devil weed and demon drugs, I decided I had best speak to my daughter and started by casually asking her:

“Do you drink?”
“Oh Mom, you know I do.”
“You do? What do you drink?”
“I dunno. Whatever you offer me. Riesling at Thanksgiving.”
“Oh right… did you like it?”
“Wasn’t bad with some ginger ale.”
“Of course, with a little ginger ale, but—do you drink at other times?”
“Sure mom—don’t you remember last Christmas? We drank some Pinot gris?”
“Right, right, Pinot gris you say?”
“Or Pinot noir, something pee no.”
“So what about marijuana, if you wanted some, would you know where to get it?”
“Sure. What’s this all about, mom?”
“Well you know Petra, it says in the school newsletter that I’ve got to talk to you?”
“Yeah? What about?”
“About drugs, alcohol dangers and family values.”
“So?”
“You know we do our best to set a good example?”
“Yeah, so?”
“Let’s start with drugs,” I said, looking for my cigarette lighter.
“Mom, I don’t do drugs.”
“You don’t?’
“Naw.”
“But you would know where to get them if you wanted them?”
“Yeah.”
“Where?”
“School.”
“SCHOOL! What do you mean at school? It’s supposed to be a drug-free zone, all the signs say so.” I pulled a cigarette from the pack.
“Geez, Mom. You can be so gullible. You can’t believe everything you read, you know.”
“No, I guess not,” I whimpered. “So what sort of drugs can you get at school?”
“Everything.”
“Everything, meaning?”
“Marijuana, crack, ecstasy, coke…”
“Coke? Since when is a Coke a drug? They were supposed to have taken out…”
“Not a Coke, mom, coke. Co-caine.”
“Oh, right. Have you ever tried any of these?’
“Naw, why would I wanna spend all that money to wreck my body?”
“Good point,” I agreed, exhaling a cloud of cigarette smoke.

Book Worm

Whenever I enter a room whose ambiance pleases me, my head automatically tilts to my right shoulder and I find myself, before even beginning to engage in meaningful chatter, involuntarily sidling along the bookshelf-lined walls. It’s not an uncommon tic. I’ve often seen others suffering from it in my own living room. Many a time, with a wine glass in each hand, I’m confronted by my guest’s back, his head also skewed at this uncomfortable angle. Of late, however, my bookshelves have offered slim pickings. I doubt that my collection awakens quite the awe, envy and covetousness other personal libraries do, ever since I’ve begun to ruthlessly weed out the fluff. It’s not that I fear being judged by the books I keep; it’s just that after carting books from one continent to another, I have begun to feel the burden of ownership. Potboilers are easily the first to go, if not to any of the local libraries boasting an English section, then to a needy neighbour keen to improve his use of the English idiom.

I find it difficult not to find a new home for my books. I’ve tried telling myself they’re only paper ever since some thirty years ago, I watched a bookstore clerk rip the covers off books he planned to return to the publisher.

“They’re just paper,” he explained, catching my horrified expression.

Some books I toss with alacrity, Lord of the Rings for example, more like bored of the rings as far as I’m concerned. The most Tolkien’s trilogy ever did for me was induce guilt for not being able to say I’d read it. So too, do I toss should-have-read-but-never-did-and-probably-never-will-novels, classics excluded.

Books that have turned to dust are made to bite it, like the thirty-year-old copy of Slaughterhouse Five that crumbled in my fingers. I chucked it, elastic band and all. Commonsense dictates that duplicate copies should pose the least problem, but they pose the greatest. Whose volume to dump, mine or my husband’s? One criterion for reshelving the peripatetic tomes was that hard covers usually prevail over soft, except once, when both kept their ground.

I had recently married and since I planned to live happily ever after, decided we could as easily share a book as a bed. (My husband would deny this, not the part about the bed, but the bit about the book. He just has to hint that a book he’s reading might interest me or guffaw once, and by the next evening it will have migrated to my bedside table, never to find its way back unless sought and forcibly returned.)

When it came to the Odyssey, it was an ode of a different genre. We owned both a hard and a soft cover edition. Logically mine, the paperback, should have been tossed in the trash but his Homer was older, worn and musty smelling, altogether less attractive than my pristine copy. Just before pitching it, I glanced inside hubby’s high school Homer. From beginning to end, it was annotated in his handwriting.

“Can you read this?” I challenged.

He opened the book.

“Μήνιν άειδε, Θεά, Πηληιάδεω Άχιλη̃ος ούλομένην η̃ μνρΐ Άχιοι̃ς άλγε’ ̉έϑĸε, πολλάς δ΄ίφϑίμους δέ ξλώρια τεύχε κύυεσσιυ οι̉ωυοι̃οί τε πάσι—Διός δ̉ ε̉τελείετο βουλή—ε̉ξ ού δή τά πρώτα διαστήτηυ ε̉̉̉ ρισαυτε Άχιλλεύς! he said, or words to that effect.

Adirondack Chair

Without the slightest preamble, a chair appeared in our back yard. It was large, white, wooden and hideously uncomfortable. As a child, I would sit in it and wonder why I bothered. My butt literally sank to the bottom of this chair not because it was cushioned, but because the seat tilted at a sixty-five degree angle. I’d slide down leaving my legs reaching up toward the branches of a pear tree, on the far side of the garden. As I hauled myself up to the top of the seat, I wondered how adults could be comfortable in such a thing? Once I reached adulthood, I imagined, this would become clear to me, as many such things would. I also thought that if my feet could only touch the ground it might even be comfortable to sit with my knees higher than my crotch. And maybe by that time, I'd also be able to cross my legs!

I never saw my father sit in this chair. I suspected he constructed it in our basement during one of those never ending Canadian winters. (I never went down to the basement. Monsters lived there, many of them gorilla-like.) Year after year “the chair” would appear in the back yard, always sparkling white and well maintained. Summer after summer I'd sit in it, always hoping this would be the year to sit on it, not in it—comfortably. That summer never arrived.

At some point the chair was replaced by something more expensive, more elegant and more comfortable—a chase lounge. At least that’s what I thought my mother called it. I supposed it got the name because you could 1) lounge on it and 2) hold it like a wheelbarrow while chasing the dog with it.

In the meantime, while the intruder chaise settled in, the huge wooden chair began to decline. The armrests rotted. That was indeed a pity. Those broad, plank-like arms could support an oversized glass of tangerine Kool-Aid or two, unless the seat was unoccupied and someone chose to sit on the other armrest. Then the chair would, in one fell, flying swoop, relinquish all its glasses of Kool-Aid (no matter what flavour).

I don't know what happened to that chair. It disappeared as abruptly as it appeared. The only concrete evidence of it ever having existed is a photo of my brother, my best friend, her sister and me, all being supported magnanimously by this chair.

I never knew another family in my town to have such a chair. They had light, tubular, aluminum, fold-up jobs—useless for child support.

In North America, I occasionally see a couple of these elegant white garden chairs parading like swans across a vast expanse of emerald green lawn.

No one is ever sitting in them.

Message in a Bottle



Toby’s mining expeditions have finally paid off. Today the little digger found the putrid remains of a cow or maybe a human; I don’t know which. Yogi dropped the ribs when I shouted at him but Toby somehow couldn’t bring himself to do that. Maybe it was because half of what he was swallowing was already down his gullet and the other half was hanging out. I had to pull it out of him. Good thing I had Karel’s special running gloves on.

I walked fifteen kilometers today (9.330 miles for those of you who haven’t made the conversion yet) to the village where we used to live in a 600-year-old half-timbered house. Imagine! It has survived the French Revolution, the Plague, the Basel earthquake, two world wars, occupation, liberation, occupation, liberation and so forth. I’d say more but my knowledge of French history is lamentable.

I also officially become a bag lady toting a big plastic bag through the forests and along country roads in search of beer and wine bottles, even tin cans. I can spot a glass beer bottle at twenty-five paces, provided I walk like one of those stupid dogs you used to see in the back of people’s cars with the heads bobbing from side to side. It’s the only way to spot the glass, plastic and car stereo speakers flung in the ditch.

It's also the best way to spoil my enjoyment of the walk. However, to put a positive spin on the preoccupation, I have decided to make bottle retrieval my mission in life—like the man I met in Cambodia who has made it his mission to rid Cambodia of landmines or if you prefer, anti-personnel devices or some such rubbishy moniker. I expect to be on a reality show soon. There must be a slot for me.

No science podcasts on my Ipod today. I’ve run out. I even switched off the BBC political stuff and immersed myself in the ‘spirituality of sports’. At least those were the first two Tapestry (CBC) podcasts I heard.

Since the leaves are emerging, a month too soon, I won’t be able to see the bottles in a couple of weeks, so I am looking forward to getting in touch with my ‘inner self’. In fact, I almost did about a week ago.

I was fuming (as usual) about the thoughtless felling of trees best situated to hold back erosion, and the damn beer bottles, and the garbage thrown here and there, when I realized I couldn’t take it any more. It was at that moment I experienced an epiphany. I know it’s a bit late for an epiphany. Everybody’s already had theirs and appeared on Oprah long ago, but I’ve never been one to follow a trend. I think I finally gave into the idea of a mini skirt around the time of the Annie Hall look.

In any event I came home and told Karel I had found the meaning of life.

“An epiphany?” he said.

“No really!” I said, ignoring his uncanny ability to read my mind. “I think I’ve had a sudden revelation about the meaning of life.”

“And it’s located in the centre of your body?” he leered at me in my tight running pants.

“Well that might be where it is for you but my epiphany was more profound.”

“Tell me,” he said, still with that lascivious look.

“I discovered that I don’t have to take the weight of the world on my shoulders. I don’t have to be pissed off all the time at everything and how badly people behave, the sins of the world and all that.”

“Oh?” He sounded genuinely surprised.

“Yeah, I finally got it. There’s Jesus for that. His back is broad enough. He died for our sins.”

“Are you just getting that now?”

“Yeah.” I felt a little deflated but then he’s the son of a clergyman.

“It’s always been like that, didn’t you know?”

“Maybe I knew, but I didn’t really 'get' it. What a relief!”

But that was last week. I don’t know how long an epiphany lasts, I suppose for all eternity, but today I must have picked up thirty empty beer bottles and one Gewurtztramer 2006 Medaille d’Or wine bottle.

I feel my faith waning.


This piece will appear in the April edition of Hello Basel 2008.