Cold at Christmas
     by Shivering Simon, the Spokesman 

Mom was in a car of young people one evening in the mid thirties, one Christmas Eve, and their Model T ran out of fuel. This happened somewhere near Friedensruh, some 7 to 10 miles from Winkler, MB. . She was wearing an ankle length dress, nylons and high-heeled shoes. Not 4 inch heels, of course, but probably an inch or two. Outside the car the temperature was somewhere near 25° below zero. Very cold. The group was heading for Rhineland but when they broke down outside of this other community they separated, each going to his or her home village. Before they did that, however, they tried getting help where they were. They walked through the village of Friedensruh, knocking on each door, hoping to be let inside to warm up. But no one invited them in, and no one even answered the door if my memory of mom’s story serves me right. How brutal! How inhospitable! Here the young people are freezing to death, cold and chilled to the point of near insanity, and their fellow Mennonites are too busy with their own Christmas Eve events to allow them in, wanting instead their own family time to not be interrupted by someone strange.
     There was nothing for them but all to go their own way. The distance for mom was approximately 3 to 5 miles. I’m not sure of the distance, but it was a long way. The depth of snow at some places reached almost to her knees. She walked the first miles and then could stand no longer and crawled on hands and knees the last half mile to her house. When her father saw her in her condition, with her hands, feet and legs frozen, he had her sit in the kitchen and he went out and got a pail full of snow and rubbed her arms and legs until the freezing left them. Strangely, mother did not develop any signs of gangrene. I have been cold at Christmas, too, in only a church outfit, a church suit, when the car stopped working and I had to walk in the wind from one end of our village to the other where my house was, about half a mile. On the way I got so cold I knocked on a strange person’s door and was allowed to warm up inside there until I was able to go the rest of the way. Such cold is hard to describe. It just simply hurts!          

Moomooji and the Science of a Boy’s Survival

Moomooji and the Science of a Boy’s Survival
     by None for the Money

Moomooji, an Indian Guru, says that human hopes for the resolution of anxieties by way of the mind and reasoning inevitably fail. Our attempts at discovering such verities as truth, the right way to proceed, proper behaviour, solid footing and correct understanding are futile. The mind never gets it right. Simplicity of mind, suspicion of reasoning and a concomitant submission to the quiet, gentle, peaceful Universal Harmony, hold out for humans the only means of  receiving and experiencing joy and happiness. That said, I wish to present a bit of reasoning concerning my personal scrabbling to survive my early adolescence. 
      My coping stance with my mother was placation. Here is the sequence by which it occurred between us. Mother dominated our household. Somebody had to. She never failed to feed us three times a day, though not more than three. I do not ever recall having a snack made for the kids, say at nighttime before bed. We didn’t ever starve though. Mom had a solid, unwavering world view and home view: 1) The world is in a competition for your soul, so don’t sin!  2) The home needs all the kids to be there helping with the work around the place.” My jobs: weeding the garden, shovelling snow, mowing the lawns, sweeping  the basement, washing and waxing the kitchen and dining room floors, cleaning up the garage, and many others. Only now and then would I be granted an hour, not more (usually once a day) to play with Lorna, my neighbour and friend. Mom disliked most of the things that I thought of or said, so I said little, did as she asked me to do and hid my inner person from her. 
     I learned to cope in this placating way as well with everybody else, since it seemed to me that others also did not care much for my style and reasons and questions. Teachers for instance, almost inevitably found me to be an affront to them. Not because I challenged them vocally, but because of something in my eyes or something in my stance, or the fact that I stuttered and therefore looked like I might be needy, and was tall and skinny and the farthest thing from good-looking. Who has any idea? I know that the English teacher (later) and other teachers (earlier) had particular kids that they enjoyed and treated favourably, by which I mean with smiles and nods of the head, invitations to help in the classroom, kind comments on essays and assignments, greetings in the hallway and so many other forms of approval, but that “particular kid” was not myself. And that was not the experience either of many of the rural boys in the classrooms that I sat in.        Placation was the only way (outside of outright rebellion) that a boy such as myself, with ideas and imagination and energy, could ever hope to weather the storms that were the inevitable disapproval of those who had control over his future. 
     I learned to placate as a way of survival, as a way of not being spanked (emotionally, but also physically) every minute of the day in order to keep me in line and out of the way, and to teach me that I was not likable. And so not to try to get in with this or that teacher or this or that important student.
     Pretty females, for instance, never had any of these issues. They never had to placate. A smile for a teacher from such a favoured slim female would do just as well for her thriving as any year-long subservient placation by the “best forgotten,” would do just as well as any fruitless and unheeded bowing and scraping meant to achieve, for us ner-do-wells, invisibility and avoidance of the hostility (which lurked and loomed and threatened, like an overcast sky, in the eye-range of every adult everywhere) for the boy-purveyors of exuberance. The lovely ones, with their subcutaneous excess of softness, learned ease and dimples (and such-like other attractivenesses—many physical), did not seem to have to survive. Maybe they were the very embodiment of Universal Harmony! My mind couldn’t seem to work it out.

Hallelujah, I’m Ready

[Written circa 2006]

 Hallelujah, I’m Ready 

     by Googlelas Brimemer

Grandfather Reimer died when I was ten. He had been sick for a long time. Unlike grandfather, grandmother was quiet and taciturn and I rarely saw her. My grandfather, at this time, lay in a bed and could not move his arms or talk. He turned his head toward people now and then when they spoke, but that was the only sign of life in him. “Unnggnnnnne,” he sometimes moaned in response to someone’s question or speech.

     “You will be in heaven soon,” a preacher would say.

     “Unggnnnnnn gngnnn,” my grandfather would reply, meaning most likely that he wished so, though he was mortally afraid that God might not let him in. 

        “I pray for you every night and often during the day, too,” my granduncle said to him, bending low over the bed and speaking it deliberately into grandfather’s ear. I watched from the side of the room. The purple bed cover, up under his chin, with his little bald head above it on the white pillow, still rises clearly in my inner sight at the recollection of that phrase.

     “Unngggnnggnnngnn,” grandfather replies, meaning that he appreciates it and hopes it will not come to nothing, since he hardly thinks himself worthy to be taken into glory. His round face, with its red spots on the cheeks, and the blunt nose thick with hard breathing, rest sideways on the pillow and the eight men around his bed, most sitting, one or two standing holding their hats, all bend closer and pay attention when he makes a sound.

     A stroke. To me then that meant something scary and dangerous, though not within my ken. There is an old Low German joke about a man who has a stroke and dies at the breakfast table. “Jo, sayjdse toaw Auntjemowem, nan funk a met eijenmol aown tow rutshe, nan viera veichj.” My grandfather was a sensible man, in some ways, always reading the Bible, forever asking people about the state of their souls. A righteous man, he compulsively worried about the likelihood of his entry into God’s beyond. Once, when we included him on a car trip to Abbotsford, British Columbia, he required us kids, every time we stopped, to run over to a garage or grain truck or sidewalk and hand out tracts to mechanics, car salesmen, moms pushing baby carriages, to everyone. Even to adults in cafés and businesses. My mother hated him for it. 

     I helped him one day feed the cattle in his low, yellow, flyblown, manure-spattered barn. If you could call it a barn. It stank to high heaven. He did not own one of those nice barns that make you wish to step inside it. Dark and dingy, its low ceiling floated there heavily just above the heads of the standing cows. It reeked of chicken, cattle and pig dung. Grandfather said nothing while we worked, the cows chewing, swishing tails and peeing around us. He was a little man, fat, short and short of breath, uncommunicative about everything except the Bible and salvation. One felt one’s sinfulness in his presence. 

     In 1954-56, as I remember it, in their little house near Steinbach a tall faded green-lidded barrel held buns. The little kitchen smelled of grandma’s baking. Her buns tasted different than all the other women’s buns I have ever eaten in the intervening 50+ years, and I loved the taste of them. Whenever we came to visit, I’d go tentatively over to the grass-coloured tin bin and lift the cover to find, every time, brimming there, often-still-warm, heaven-scented, lard-made, happiness-engendering buns. Tentatively, because I distrusted women in kitchens. My mother scolded us for wanting food, for being hungry kids. She—my fat, smiling, shortsighted grandmother—simply kept her happy back turned away from me, facing the sink, and said nothing. In other words, help yourself, Leigh Douglas. 

     Then, in the living room, a few steps away when I entered it, sat grandfather with his bald head, his wire-rimmed glasses, and his Bible in his lap, reading, not looking up immediately. I did not miss him when he died. He had been too solemn to create “missing” in others. He smiled little, he challenged a lot, he spoke only of the Bible, and never of anything such as the welfare of cattle, the location of chokecherries in the bush behind the pasture, the roughness of the idle of a car engine, the type of wood he was burning in his furnace in the basement, the wood stacked under the stairs or the pleasantness of an evening sunset or moonshine. 

     He did not notice our world. The world was not too much with him. He disliked this world and fervently wished for the other one. That is why he wondered if he would be allowed into heaven by God. Somewhere in him, for some reason, he believed that he’d been evil. He sensed, I think, that by insisting on the other world, and ignoring this one in its beauty given to us by God, he had sinned and forced all those he’d sired, and the generations to follow, to fear this earth and to continue to revile what God had made, to continue to teach such fear to their children. So, he felt he’d sinned—I suspicion he agonized over it—a great sin and wondered if God would let him in.

     What follows is one thread of thinking that I have encountered within myself, and certainly not the only way of looking at his life. He was sick for many years before he lay on his deathbed. He was a very sick man who preached incessantly. He died, finally, to his own relief and ours, too, and left this world to heal itself of his intolerance, of his pressing need to confront all beings in this place with the fear that they might not be good enough. He died finally, hallelujah! Praise be to God who in His wondrous mercy loves his children!

Where His Ambulances Sat

 [Written around 2000]

Where His Ambulances Sat

     By Peeing Pablo Picasso

Frederick Henry speaks of Udine as the name of the town where his ambulances sat stationed, ready for the call to the front. Hemingway must have been conscious of the urine suggestion: “The men in Udine waited, kicking stones of impatience, testing the will to be home and out of here.” It wouldn’t do of course. I (Salmi Slicthain) am a pizzeria cook who used to teach history at a university with a student population of 14,000. I gave up teaching for two reasons: one, that I became more interested in another discipline than the one I had trained for; two, as a result of something I am not able to divulge because it is still before the courts. 

     George Woondkoont (Dutch ancestry; literary critic and fiction writer) once said: “Formal training is ruseful; read, read, read and educate yourself. If you must supplant your personal, natural, bodily purveyance by enrolling in a university, then stay there for as short a time as absolutely necessary.”

Franky Dave took him to task for his “profound stupidity.” He wrote, at length and with obvious hostility, that Woondkoont deserved no followers. None whatsoever. 

     “George Woondkoont knows nothing about the dedication and devotion to knowledge of the Arts professor and scholar, never himself having stepped inside a postsecondary institution. Autodidacticism is overrated. Stay as far away from the idea that you can educate yourself as you would stay from the evangelical mantra that Satan is behind all that is evil.”

     Woondkoont responded, in the Vancouver Gazette, a year later, once he’d heard about the statement and read the piece. “Devious fails to notice my absolute devotion to precision and my care for nuance. Never, once, have I slandered anyone from a university. See how Devious slanders me? Well, Franky, go ahead. I am not bothered in the slightest. My course is set for me, and I continue forward as I always have. Write on, sir! Slander with a will! I, for one, will never again answer a letter or an article, nor will I ever again read anything, that you have written, for I consider you the spawn of Satan.“ 

     With that the two parted company and never were heard from again in the light of open contention.

      I am not impatient with my new lot, though I tend to make those pay who caused it. I welcomed this job, for it allowed me to continue to read and prepare lectures. I am known for two traits in particular: patience, and straightness of direction. The late John Jacob Astor, vice provost at my university, said this about me on more than one occasion. “Leave him to his peace. His rest has begun.“

     Not long ago, when a certain female of my acquaintance judged that she had awaited tenure long enough and that the time for her promotion had arrived at least a year ago, began to leave signs of her impatience at the doors of the members of the tenure committee. Her daughters’ dirty diaper, for one, and various items of used female toiletries, for another, found their way to the base of the four professors’ doors on successive weekends. No note indicated from whom these missives had originated, but the message found its mark and made a difference. Confused by the sudden hate mail, convinced that some sort of general change in their behaviour was necessary if they hoped to avoid further humiliation and, if truth be told, disgustment and downright abjection, these men and one woman unanimously voted into tenureship each of the seven junior lecturers who had applied. All received tenure, all were delighted, and even my acquaintance smiled as she reflected before me on what she had done. 

    I, by way of contrast, to make my point, do not abuse the peace of my colleagues. My patience knows no bounds. Some have said, however, that despite my longsuffering, I tend to waiver to one side or the other of an issue without knowing myself that I do so. Now, I object. Most strenuously. Never in all my life do I recall deviating from a promised action, or from a line of attack. I once vowed to myself, as a young man, to allow none to irritate me to such an extent that I would form plans of revenge and carry them out against another human being. History shows us that such vengeful individuals fail to prosper. George Washington, Genghis Khan, Fiona Judd, Leslie Fiedler, Winston Churchill, these are all examples of this self-defeating impulse. Attack someone viciously, and you will yourself become the object of onslaughts and hatred. 

     One reason only makes my job painful. The young women here do not cause a stir in me against my joy. The pets that cross on the crosswalk and get hit by speeding vehicles immediately in front of the pizzeria windows, make me sing and shout, for I have allergies to both those species of animals. Foods’ blandness (all pizza pastry tastes the same and even the salads become flavoured of flour and garlic) bothers me not in the least. 

     Here is my pain. The boss’s tendency to ignore me and speak rather to individuals who are younger and have a longer tenure at the place. This preferment, this snivelment, forms the subject of my inward discussions. Advancement for any of the staff here, and thus also our sense of self worth, depends on his attention to one. And he pays no heed to me. So, forgivably, I tote around a secret dislike of him and have already paid him back, though he does not know about it. There are ways (let yourself imagine them) of paying someone back in a pizzeria. Many ways. I’ll just say that six of these 200 ways have already been brought to fruition. The seventh and eighth are in their planning stages, but their effect already underway as I speak. They do involve, or one of them does at least, the collecting of a substance already referred to in the language at the opening of this account. The other requires to hand (that is, available) a certain material substantially connected to that less substantial product referred to a moment ago. Good luck boss. I will not quit my job just because of a little misunderstanding. No, not me!

Tough

Tough

     by Laughing Leigh Litesum

The years between 18 and 22 (22 was when I met my wife to be) were turbulent ones for me. I have often wondered about the fact that I had very little general understanding of how I fit into life and the world. I didn’t even know much about life in my own village, the village of Altona, let alone how to discover something meaningful in an urban place like Winnipeg.

      My friend Terry and I had for two years lamented the meaninglessness of life generally (he invented a term for our specific angst: “pafism,” an amalgam of pacifism and fatalism). It didn’t help that our older brothers both attended Canadian Mennonite Bible College and brought home stories of their readings in existentialism. We, that is the two of us, hearing its definition (that is, existentialism’s), felt that it fit how we saw this world; as a place where the pursuit of money and the acquisition of lots of possessions seemed to mindlessly dominate the minds of everybody around us. Those were the days when the word “conformity,” and “little boxes all in a row,” and “anti-establishment” typified our restless, anti this and that longings and desires, our despair.

     Yet, I was full of the joy of eating, drinking, thoughts about the bodies of women (although not their minds, I must admit), delight in books (I was a passionate reader), and exuberance over anything that smacked of adventure. Like most of the male adolescents in the entire world, I would venture to guess. For some reason I was more footloose than the friends whom I felt close to. These friends, Terry, Gordon, Norman, Ron, Alvin and Joe all exhibited, upon my reflection now, a stronger grasp of the need for a man to grow up into his society. I simply wanted to leave it. I wished for nothing more than a new place to find myself at, anywhere in the world, somewhere far away from southern Manitoba, far away from the Bergthaler church, and far away, far away from my parents.

     Sure, it happened that, philosophically-constructed as I was, I chose to follow two friends to CMBC because it seemed the only place in my small world interested in greater ideas than making a living. Things didn’t go that well for me there, however, and by the beginning of December, 1965, I had decided that I had to strike out on my own. I would have to leave the college and spend the rest of my student loan on travel and, once that ran out, on finding some sort of paying work somewhere, to put food in my stomach. 

     I told my father, who had co-signed my student loan, about my intentions. Not a pleasant task. I collected many of my books (I must admit that there were a fair number of Zane Grey cowboy novels among them) and bought a Lee Enfield .303 rifle. What the heck did I want with a high powered rifle? But it did announce to anyone interested (and I didn’t think anyone was) that my raison d’être had about it quite a measure of eccentricity (call it foolishness if need be).

     I bought a one way CN train ticket and headed for Vancouver. West, as young men have done since Canada became. On the way I met a very tall, thin, 30-year-old British person who conned me into playing blackjack to pass the time. I lost all my money to him except enough for a few meals and a bus ticket to Prince George. When I got there I took just enough time to discard most of my luggage in a locker in the bus depot (which, as far as I know may still be there waiting for me to return) and left immediately for Prince Rupert, further north and on the coast.

     I followed a lead I had received on the bus, that transients could stay at the Prince Rupert Friendship Center. When I got there, I saw 100 beds all lined up tightly together in a huge single massive room; rows and rows of them. To my astonishment, I  was given a bed in a separate room with only thee bunks in it. I thought I’d struck pay dirt. That night, when I got back to my room at about, let’s say, 10:00, the stocky little guy with whom I shared a bunk admitted that he had drunk my bottle of Raleigh’s lemony aftershave lotion. This was my second indication that the people I was to meet on this foray were not exactly the sort I was familiar with, were not the kind I’d grown up with in rural Manitoba.

     While in Prince Rupert I scouted out the employment agency every morning and found good work, mostly. Good daily work, that is. One day I loaded lumber onto a ship from across the ocean and made the unheard of sum of $27 an hour. Other days I was a sweeper, or a dishwasher, or anything that required doing by hand such as shoveling gravel in a new house-build. Once I got a two-week stint working for BC Hydro. Each morning we, a crew of three young men, were flown by helicopter deep into the mountains where we did various tests on ground density for the construction of future BC Hydro power lines.

     By the end of February I was lonely for home and scrounged together the dollars to buy a bus ticket back to Winnipeg. I had just enough left over to buy a sandwich. Actually, it was not a sandwich but a loaf of bread and a jar of jam. When I got to Winnipeg, uneventfully this time without gambling away all the money I didn’t have anyway, a record-breaking winter storm had shut down the entire city. Somehow I managed to get myself into a room upstairs with a couple of other equally scruffy hippies I’d never met before who got me to buy them beer (we’d pooled our money), encouraged me to get drunk with them and then proceeded, once I passed out, to steal whatever I had left in my wallet, which was not much.

     I worked in Altona at the bowling alley around this time. Actually, the bowling alley happened a little later when I enrolled in WC Miller high school to finish my senior matriculation. I still needed one credit and it happened to be a Canadian history course I chose. Before that, however, I worked in Winnipeg at the Northern Flyer Bus Lines for a few months cleaning rusty buses and doing various other odd jobs.

      That year in Altona I’ll never forget. My experiences working in the bowling alley, being suspended from high school for two weeks (Al Schmidt caught Roy Abrams and myself lighting our cigarettes just inside the back school doors out of the wind), which I spent in the Altona Sunflower Pool Hall and willy nilly meeting a few girls who wanted to have a good time but with whom I had absolutely no courage to do anything more than sit there. Nothing in my life till then, and very little since then, seems to have taught me anything. I am now a senior who happens to have an empathetic heart and for the most part an empty head. That is not entirely true, I suppose, but there are times when I wonder about myself.

corny b

 corny b
     by Repentant Rascal

barnacle bill lept on his horse
barnacle bill yelled out “remorse!”
barnacle bill was his nom de plume
his real name was cornwilliam bumm

Phillip’s Lake

[Corollary to the earlier story “Once Before”]

Phillip’s Lake 
     by That Skater Guy

I do recall a few details from another trip that I might add to the former story of a camping trip with the boys. Norman at home has a certain role to play. That role does not include domestic chores, I think. Sharon does the cooking, cleaning, grocery shopping, business and organizing the appearance of the house as well as the minutiae of their material peogress through this life, for the most part. I have found that each household treats the division of its labors in its own unique way. In some cases, the women do virtually nothing and the men bring home the money and change the diapers and wash the dishes and do the cooking. In other cases, the man has no visible purpose or activity in the house besides laying on the couch and watching television. Sometimes both members of the couple apply themselves equally to each labour that announces itself so that not one of them finds herself responsible for business but both do. If a fete or party has been decided to be in the offing then each of them springs into simultaneous action. In still other households neither member takes the responsibility for any of the jobs that come up and so the habitat and general real estate can be seen quickly deteriorating, unattended and unnurtured, Revenue Canada forever threateneimg, gnats and bugs of various kinds finding their way into the display of plants and also, of course, then into the food and larder. Money seems never to be available, fetes and parties either laconically or angrily considered but not brought into being, and all things orderly, clean, worthy, festive, meaningful, joyful and permanent find themselves fully and absolutely erased from this couple’s household existence. Now, Norman, on the     other hand, did have duties in his household and performed those well. What these specifically were I find myself at a loss to imagine. Whatever his domestic accomplishments at home, they were irrelevant to the performance of activities on this Phillips Lake journey.      Setting up of tents, preparing the fire for cooking, regaling the boys with stories of past adventures, deciding to replenish the firewood supply and then replenishing it, washing up dishes after eating, reminding others of agreed-on duties not performed, and other such common little expenditures of energy as any camping trip that I have ever taken has required, Norman’s skills seemed to have no connection to or place in the general melee of camping. However, this discussion of camping duties bears not at all on the whole experience the four of us participated in. We fished, we ate, we hiked, we portaged, we swam (I think), we drank a few beers (that is, the adults did), and in every way acted out the business of boyhood imagination while in the woods next to a lake. Then, when all of the above had been tested and done we packed up and, with a great deal of effort more than we had expected, paddled against wind back to the other end of Phillips lake, climbed the steep inclines that would bring us once more to the Grass River, paddled back along the way we had come and eventually got ourselves all the way to the vehicles we had left waiting for us. I don’t recall if it was sunny or cloudy, or if the wind was always up and never still or if it rained or snowed. But I do know that it, this trip, was the only one that my boys and I ever took with our good friend Norman. And that truly is a shame.                                       

Your Reward

[Written in or about 2005]

 Your Reward     

by Do Ugl(y)as(s)re Imer

When a begger asks for change, who among you gives? Do you open your heart and your wallet and pull out paper money? Have you ever given a fiver? Or a ten? Once, when a miser threw a $100 bill into the church collection plate by accident, instead of the one dollar bill he intended to give with what he thought of as generous charity, and before he could grab it back, though he tried, it had begun to travel down the row, out of reach. He approached the preacher after the service to ask for it back. 

     “No,” said the preacher, “what’s given to the Lord is given and cannot be taken back.”

     “Well, then, the miser said after a lengthy pause, a tear in his eye, I guess I’ll get my reward in heaven for the hundred dollars.”

     “Oh, no!” the preacher told him. “You’ll get a reward for what you intended to give. You gave a dollar in your heart and that’s all you can hope to be rewarded for.” So, do you give the begger on the street in winter a twenty five cent piece, even? Ever? Well, go your ways and sin no more.

     Willhelmut Klassen dragged out his sermon for a good half hour longer than the usual time for sermons allowed and 3/4 of an hour longer than the patience of the congregation tolerated. He droned on in his whispering way, smiling and genuflecting, firing off quiet words and ricocheting, till he  fairly shone with the sweat of it all. When he finally walked mild-mannered back to his seat under the choir and turned with happy self-satisfaction toward his expressionless audience, he gave himself a mental heave-ho up onto his own shoulders for having preached a good sermon. It was on the Mount of Olives. The sermon’s metaphor exhorted all to understand how olive oil is better than canola and both are our spirits, spirits slippery with hope, sweet with the taste of homegrown geography. 

     The audience members were former belongers to the church who had left and then come back to it later, having found no better place to attend. Regina Wangbutt, for instance, not a Mennonite, as her name clearly indicates, still found herself drawn to Klassen’s church because of her former ties here. She had once been in charge of the adult Sunday school and organized it each week without fail. And now that she had discovered her own dispensability away from this institution and this body of believers, she found that she would like once again to feel the false relief of being an important member of a group. No other group recommended itself to her, even though she attended many other churches in the interim. Back now, she dressed in long elegant dresses with slits up the side so that men in the vicinity of her seat might notice her one good trait. Her face left others cold. Her bosom was nondescript. Her bum, attractive in and of itself, was usually so covered up with bulky sweaters – since she was anal retentive – that no one knew for certain what it looked like, and her hands had the long and slender appearance of things unliving. Yes, she wanted to be here and learn once again the joy of full acceptance in a group that professed to love you.

     Candida Reimer, a longtime member, lived alone. She watched TV a great deal. She had no income, but nevertheless continued to eat and drink and afford the necessities with a degree of luxury uncommon in the penniless. Her cat loved her and kept her constant company, even at the most unlikely moments in her ablutions. She longed for a husband to console her on those bedtimes when she felt the cold wind of night waft over her limby frame. Never much of a thinker, she could not help but reflect with unusual intensity on the words Willhellmut Klassen had brought before them. She guessed that they were her call to mission work, but she was afraid of the dark-skinned men who she would meet. She was not afraid of them, exactly, but reconciled to the danger she posed for them and so determined to remain at home where she will be free of being tempting. 

     Hansberg Snive Ling was Chinese by origin, but a Mennonite in faith and tradition. He had been a Mennonite when those here had only been a thought in their parents’ young minds. He was 97 and spry as a chicken. He clucked his reluctance frequently as the minister spoke, and looked about him as if to say, “When do we get to eat?” No one paid him much attention and he had to content himself with looking at hymnbooks as a way of taking his mind off of Candida who sat two seats over. He groped himself now and then because he had no comfortable shorts in his underwear drawer and must needs be content with what his trembling hands came up with in the morning when he dressed. He coughed up phlegm and spat into a hanky and then put the hanky into his shirt pocket. Now and then he hurled a note or two from the hymnbook at the front as if to say, “Yes, this is a fine song and I wish we would sing it today.” He died in church at the age of 98 not long after this day’s lamentable sermon.

     Zeldanna Duecky and her former husband, Penner Duecky—now dead since that Sunday a few weeks ago, of a massive heart attack brought on by, the doctor thought, a total collapse of inner hope and longing—had found the comparisons apt though disquieting. They told no one at their family gathering what the context or content of Willhellmut’s reflection had been, but kept these things and pondered them in their hearts. Their dog, Sniggles, missed his master enormously and told everyone that. It shat uncharacteristically in the neighbour’s hedge and barked continuously throughout the first fortnight of nights after his interment. When Sniggles got hoarse and no longer could bark a single bark, a neighbor, fed up with the insistence of his nightly howling, shot him while he peed against the undertaker‘s car, and so Sniggles’ long illness ended. His testicles were emasculated and small from so much mouthing. His penis hung permanently out and elongated. When they laid him in his little coffin it got pinched in between the lid and the box proper and those who filed by it noticed its pink tip protruding and they looked away.

     At war with himself most of his life, Sniggles had given everything to his master within his power. The rest he did not give since he did not own it to give. He could not stop nipping at himself in private or in public. How Penner knew that Sniggles was at it again was that he would hear a howl and a sudden outburst of pain and whining from whichever corner of the yard Sniggles had retired to, to perform his shameful self-hurting. In public it was more obvious, even to the ones preoccupied with heavenly things. All you needed to do was to look at the dog there, bending toward himself, nipping, snapping quickly sometimes, and then immediately peering around him with laconic and guilty complacence so that any idiot could not help but know what he’d been up to.

     Nevertheless, Penner Duecky’s trials were over. He left to mourn him his precious doggy who died a couple of days later peeing on the undertaker‘s car. Zeldanna lived long and fruitful. She had seldom had any thoughts about their childlessness but, when Penner died, she began to make available for herself occasional interactions with her husband‘s brother, Ronnie, and found herself suddenly with child. This (finding herself thus maternally blessed) pleased her to no end. So, in her 33rd year, she produced an offspring who lived to a ripe old age and proved the old adage that the wise make a fool feel his foolishness. He became the president of a fountain drink company and prospered. His ashes are buried in the cemetery near his town and he has a large headstone over his grave with a picture of a dog neatly chiselled under his name.  And just below that the name Sniggles.

     Now, if you wish to give charity to those who need it, do not hesitate to give a lot. Ten percent won’t hurt you. Before you know it, you’ll end up like old Penner and Sniggles, peeing on tires and getting shot, so give and do not begrudge the poor their comeuppance.

 

    

Joyful Now

Joyful Now
Lucky Lukewarm Lucy Luke

I do feel things besides regret. Much as someone looking at my life and experiences might surmise (suspect) my fixation on the past, truthfully I notice instead a gentle presentness about my daily emotional being. 
     Please understand, I consider my past behaviour towards the gentler half of humanity troublesome. I regret the pain I brought to those who needed my wisdom, and I continue to believe that my life required admission of failures as well as a self-analysis bent on examination of and changing much of my former weltanschauung. I have spent a while mired in regret, but now for some time I have felt peaceful. 
     Not peaceful only, I enjoy a rich emotional life as well. I play guitar for an hour almost every day. I create diamond willow walking sticks. I read both intellectual materials as well as crime/detective fiction. I watch videos about Mars exploration, caving and spelunking, Sasquatch, UFOs, near death experiences, fishing, bushcraft, humour. I participate with others in exercises three times a week. I walk about 30 miles a month. 
     I feel great pleasure playing my guitar, a 1973 Martin D28 with a beautiful sound. It warms my heart every time I pick it up and strum it. How can I possibly express the rich, brightness of its high registers and the cleanness, the fullness, of its middle and bass registers! Because it sounds so fine, so familiar, I tend to wish to learn new songs regularly; and I do! 
     I enjoy the half hour coffee group that meets here in our housing community each morning at 10:00. I love baking bread and have with much practice perfected my sourdough bread-making using my own-made 5 year old sourdough starter (of which I feel very proud). I take joy, too, in giving my widowed sister a loaf of fresh bread each week. My brother and I (Rudi from Campbell River) laugh and talk very gladly about twice a month by phone. My old friend and fellow traveller, Terry, warms my heart and mind each time I speak with him. And, among other things that feel joyous to me, is my friendship with Norman, whom I visit for 2 hours weekly because he is bedridden. My fine friends, Joe and Lois, as well as three other old friend groups delight me frequently. 
     I feel blessed and grateful. How lucky my life is mostly! 

Mr. Char’s New Employee 2

Mr. Char’s New Employee  (continued)
     by do me re

Wesley, swift to appear as always, could hardly hide his amusement. This fact did not escape the preceptive Char. 
“What are you smirking at?“ Char asked, with rather a thick sense of hurt in his voice. He tried to reassure himself but to no avail. He laughed. He farted quietly, though Wesley heard and forgave him the small social misstep. He reached to help the large man and, attempting to grab his arm, he found himself strangely grabbing that goodly’s wanger. 
      “Oh! I’m sorry, Sir!“ he said, hastily withdrawing his proffered help. I do not know how I managed to reach you there by the, by the…. It was entirely unintentional, and accidental! I will go back to my room immediately, Sir. If you have no further need of me!” 
     “Not on your life!” Char thundered at him needlessly. The instant Wesley heard the stern request he re-entered the room with alacrity. He grabbed hold of the fallen superior’s shoulder. He had him by the collar, to be exact, and grasping this article of apparel for purchase, he heaved with as much force as he could muster, for a small man. The bigger of the two still lay there for a moment, balanced between moving up and staying down. 
     Once the movement upward began, however, it accelerated at a rather alarming rate. Up he went, and up some more, until he came flying out of his downward position with a speed that neither he nor Wesley had anticipated. He could not stop himself, being a big man, and already having energetically decided that he wished to be out of his former state, wedged into the corner between desk and wall. He fairly flew off the floor and toward the wall just behind and to one side of his desk. The tall window being open, he ran out of it in full stature, as if deliberately. He even seemed to step over it’s low lintel. He jogged hurriedly through the window, hovered an instant and disappeared from sight without a word spoken. Wesley stood there a second transfixed, uncertain of what had just occurred. Then he ran to look. The seventh floor window was high enough that he had just enough time to see his superior fall the last 20 feet or so to the grass below. He flailed the air, landed, sat up for a second looking toward his office window and then fell back on his stomach, dead beyond recovery.

Mr. Char’s New Employee

[Written between 2000 and 2003)

Mr. Char’s New Employee

    by Do Re Me

Wesley winked his coy concern. He  generally disagreed with his boss, but he would not be one to openly disobey. At the sound of Char’s voice Wesley had, within two seconds, made his entrance into Mr. Char’s room. 

     “What is it you would like,” he whined, ingratiating himself with gentle obeisance of tone and a slight bow into his boss’ good will, now as he had done at each opportunity since he took employment with the firm three months or more ago. 

     “Nothing really,” Mr. Char spoke, clearly interested in the man who stood in the doorway. Mr. Char wore gray wool, Wesley blue cotton. Mr. Char’s eyes flashed blue as the sunny sky outside the window; Wesley‘s stared bleakly and colourless out of slits without eyelashes. He had a good smell about him of fresh, air-dried laundry. 

     But for this odd fact of birth, indistinctness of eye color and a pinched look about the octicles, anyone who got to know him well admitted what a fine sport Wesley was, without a hint of rancour in his manner, and habitually kind to all interlocutors except young boys, all of whom be violently disliked and thought unworthy of either attention or affection. 

     Char considered him a vast improvement over the man who had fulfilled these duties before the advent of the said Wesley. The previous, Bartleby, now alas dead from consumption brought on by a fierce refusal to eat what they provided in debtor’s prison, had been rather difficult to motivate, especially in the area of the performance of extra little duties not specific to his contract, but still requested by his superiors. Wesley, praise God, obeyed him without a second’s hesitation when he asked him to attend to the smallest, nay, even the largest, details. Always, prompt as asparagus, he brought the spoken need to completion and fulfilment, and always without a word said. No, “I prefer nots,” as Bartleby had habitually thrown out, until he, in his arrogance, had reduced his responsibilities to nothing more than to write a note or two a day to earn his generous five shillings a week.

     “One day we shall have to dine together,” spoke the preeminent Char, studying Wesley‘s countenance for signs of approval. He noticed them at once. They flickered over the other’s features with instant fires, and played about his mouth and nostrils in a drama of approval.

     “Certainly, sir! That would be most agreeable, sir!” He bowed just an inch, and left the room until his superior would have more to say to him on the matter. Char, for his part, felt saintly and charitable and decided to extract the bottle from the drawer to the left of his chair. He reached for it. He slipped. He fell wedged up against the desk in a most awkward way and then, laughing, called once more for Wesley to approach and help him up from the angle he had tumbled into.

[to be continued]

Beat Me With the Light

 
beat me with the light     

     by dougie coaloil

if you think that you can govern 
all the thoughts that come your way
think again and then decipher 
in the clearer light of day
what exactly makes you certain 
that your reason will suffice
to predict the final ending 
of this earth’s diurnal round
of what happens to the body 
and the mind at close of day
and day here simply means your life’s end 
and the end of breathing’s reign
will it all be darkly over 
will the sun no longer shine
will the light we’re daily used to 
suddenly refuse to climb
will tom sawyer and poor christian 
cease to suffer swamp and cave
will old lewis and mcdonald
finally find peace in the grave
will all of norman’s many hopes and yearnings 
sink ignoble into dust
will the source of man's arrival 
peter out then cease to thrust
and will that time bring oh the end to
mankind’s cry in god we trust
so please help me understand this 
beat me senseless with the light

McTavish

[Written around 2008]

 McTavish
     By Cheese Box Less Leigh

A great uncle, when he was in his teens, chopped off his hand and threw it in his mother‘s lap. His father was milking in the barn close by when he did it. Apparently, he just walked up and dropped it in her lap. He said to her that she finally had what she wanted. I know that this boy’s sister later got sent to an asylum by her husband, but I don’t know what happened to the handless boy. My grandmother told me about it. When I brought it up with the boy’s surviving brother, he claimed that it was news to him. I heard from someone else that she’d been sitting in the kitchen peeling potatoes when she saw him coming in.
My sister lived for three days. She died in the ambulance between Morris and Winnipeg. My mother had made my father promise (they lived in Rosenort, a tiny village) that he’d get her to Morris in time but it had been pouring rain for days when her water broke. The road was seven miles of greasy clay that gummed up the wheel wells. The worst, stickiest clay in Manitoba. Dad phoned uncle Bill to follow with his tractor. At McTavish the car got mired down. Always having been claustrophobic, and now hysterical, mom left the car and ran around in circles in the muddy field. It was still raining cats and dogs and the dip in the road where they were sitting had too much water for their Model A to get through. A nurse helped dad and uncle Bill carry mom upstairs to maternity, muddy as she was. She’d kept falling down in the field. Dad buried Ruth by himself in a cheese box in the back forty near Rosenort. I wonder if she would have turned out evangelical like much of my family?
When my mother was about ten, my grandfather killed the neighbour’s bull. Mother had been visiting somebody, a preteen friend, and took a shortcut going home across a large, fenced pasture. When she saw grandpa, she was at first breathless and unable to speak a word. When he heard why, he drove to where the bull was and whacked it over its head with the iron bar used to keep the barn door closed. You had to have seen my grandpa to visualize this. He had huge hands, stood six three, and was very strong, even later at 75.
My mother was stooking grain for a farmer around McTavish together with a lanky boy by the name of Charles, the son of the farmer. He wasn’t much to look at, mother said, and she was afraid of him. He grabbed her and kissed her and threw her on a pile of hay. She managed to get away from him and ran to the house. As soon as his mother saw her she said, “Were you working with Charles?”
Mom got sent to work for an uncle the winter she was 11. She resented her sisters who stayed home. Why should she have to go and not they? She came from a very large blended family of eighteen children. 

There or Ever Will (continued)

There or Ever Will (continued)

     by The Right Dishonourable Mr. Wrung

to be no man but just a boy

the wives will not have given for

they will recall it all

if ever he should evermore

go drinking with a —ore

so where are we oh yes I see

about the bluegrass boys

they travel sing and entertain

and then go home once more

so take this lesson learn it well

and never ask me for

another bio for your mag

i will not send it o’er

this said small snippet gladly left

and got into his digs

he barked his need he licked himself

and prayed his way to bed

when he awoke he found that he

had licked his derrière 

but he told none and no one asked

it seemed that no one cared

go home sweet prince and spend your time

as you alone see fit

don’t do what others tell you to

but only as you wish

so saying snippet got into

a waggon drawn by doves

and off he flew and soon drew near

where he had lost his gloves

he saw them from on high and said

in no uncertain tone

there are the devils swoop down now

and give me back my own

they did as he commanded them

and soon he got back in

then off they went and he got home

and drank a quart of gin

yes off they went and he got home

and drank a quart of gin.

Aftershave and Closeshave

Aftershave and Closeshave

     by Raleigh Reimer’s Boy

I had many experiences with Raleigh products. My father, John D Reimer, sold them for about 18 years during the time I grew up, from 3 to 22. At that point in his life, he fulfilled a longstanding dream of his, ended his Raleigh career and moved his family lock stock and barrel to Abbotsford, British Columbia, where he set up as a real estate agent and became successful at it. Block Brothers was his institution of choice.      The first three or four years that my mother, father, sister and younger brother lived in Abbotsford, they suffered from severe poverty. That, however, is another story altogether. It’s the story of how they sheltered, what they ate, what kindnesses were required of them when a stranger or relative appeared and stayed and how dad pulled himself up by his bootstraps and became solvent. But, let’s get back to Raleigh products.

     I was 16 and I’d been taught, fortunately, by my father how to operate a vehicle. We had two, an old beater 51 Ford that my mother used to take us hoeing sugar beets, and a station wagon, newer and large enough to cart around dad‘s Raleigh goods. Occasionally, I received permission to drive the old beater to visit my friends and traipse around the countryside. Now and then, if I had earned the privilege, dad would hand me the keys to the station wagon. I would pick up my friends and we would find someplace to purchase liquids that had some influence on our mental state and, taking these out into the countryside, we would have some sips (quite a few) of beer or wine or, unfortunately, lemon gin.

      Since in those days, the early 60s, none of our parents consumed alcohol, we smarter-than-the-devil young guys thought we knew something about the sorts of alcohol available for consumption. Of course, we were not very smart about such a thing at all. By way of example, as I said, we frequently bought lemon gin, each of us having a micky of it and, sitting around a fire or lounging on the hood of the car, we would drink it slowly and begin to feel footloose and joyful.

     Now, Braun’s Drugs in Altona sold spirits and wines to townspeople. However, the chances of our disguising our identities enough to fool Don Braun were as likely as my grandfather Zacharias phoning for me to come over and he’d take me to Dairy Dell and buy me a triple-decker vanilla cone. The place that we found we were least likely to be recognized or denied happened to be in Neche, just across the border from Gretna, Manitoba. I was always chosen, given the job of going in and buying the liquor because, the boys solemnly agreed, I did look the oldest. I was tall, skinny as a rail, cocky as a Bulfinch (as Dylan Thomas would have it) and perennially eager. Maybe more eager than the rest, even, to escape the mental state I had been in for most of the week. 

     On the occasion that I’m remembering, dad gave me the car. Terry, Alvin, Joe and possibly Norman, and maybe even Gordon got into the vehicle, I  turned on the radio and we headed for the border seven miles from Altona. A border crossing always comes with some anxiety, doesn’t it? Especially if your purposes are not innocent. Ours were not. We intended to buy liquor, underaged as we were, spirit it across the border and drink it on Canadian soil. I pulled up at the window where a border guard, looking impatient, mean, contentious and worst of all, suspicious, opened a window and, leaning out, asked us where we were from and where we were heading. Then he left the window, came out of the building and stopped at my window. I rolled it down, of course, and he shone his flashlight into each of our faces and then into the back luggage area. After a long pause, he returned to the driver’s window and simply looked at me for a long, long time. Long enough for me to begin to feel quite fidgety and uncertain. 

     “Where did you say you were going?”

     I had told him already and wondered why I had to tell him again but I did and he asked me a third time where I thought I was going. By now I knew that some sort of game was afoot and that I would likely be losing on the count.

     “Neche,” I said. And the other boys agreed, nodding their heads more vigorously than strictly necessary.

     “Are you intending to sell anything?“ he asked, still stern but looking rather innocent. Now he suddenly leaned quite close to my face.

     “No, we’re not selling anything. We’re just going for a ride because we were interested in seeing what Neche was up to tonight.“

     Then he changed in a heartbeat. “You’re not going anywhere with that stuff!” I looked in the direction that he had his eyes pointed, at the back of the vehicle, and then it dawned on me. All of my father’s Raleigh products in boxes and carrying cases, all uncovered, open to the air, lit under bright station lights, brash as anything, filled the rear of the car.

     He wasn’t finished with me yet. In fact, he was just getting started. “You were thinking you’d pull a fast one on us, eh? I suppose I’m going to have to charge you with attempting to smuggle things across the border.” And much more of the same. 

     I was frightened. Very. How could i have been so stupid! I put on my best sorry face and said to him that I had totally forgotten that I was carrying my father’s goods with me. “We were just out having a good drive and decided to go to Neche to have a look. And… You’re right! Of course we can’t go across with these things! Really, I had just forgotten about it! We didn’t want to sell any of them!”

     “By rights I should call your parents!” he said, staring at me and then the others   “But…..I guess I believe you. I probably shouldn’t but I do, and this time I’ll let it go. But don’t ever do something so stupid again! Never! One of these days you’re gonna get into real trouble if you don’t think about what you’re doing.”

     I would like to say that I learned my lesson and that I never made any stupid foolish mistakes again concerning my father’s salesman’s car. But I did, and I continued to have to apologize to people, especially my father, for being thoughtless and foolish and not thinking ahead enough