Saturday 11 February 2012

Last Weekend of Summer

Chapter 6

On a sunny September Sunday afternoon when I should've been outside enjoying the fair weather, I was indoors sitting on the couch and skimming classified advertisements in newspapers, because I was hoping to find a reasonably priced, good condition used piano for sale. By chance, an unusual advertisement snagged my attention, which read, "Men and women around the world seeking pen pals, friendship and romance through correspondence. For details send $20.00 in US funds to Mercury..." 

The address was in West Germany. 

"Is this for real?" I wondered.

An interesting name though, wasn't Mercury the mythological Roman messenger? 

Try as I might to ignore the peculiar ad, it had captured my imagination nonetheless, and for some inexplicable reason, the ad seemed to be offering a possible alternate route out from the solitude and silence I disliked, but was living nonetheless. 

Was I so desperate that I'd finally sunk to this low level?

Was I going to be stupid enough remit $20.00 to a post office box address in Europe? And if so, for what?

Or could letter writing to others elsewhere who were interested in correspondence with others elsewhere, provide me with a means more to my liking, and a style I might be more at ease with? 

Fresh in my mind also was a newspaper article I'd read several weeks ago, a heart-touching story concerning Quaglio the barber, and one of the few people in Vancouver whom I'd met. Several times I had visited his small shop located on West Cordova Street across from CP Rail's venerable railway station, and where I'd been going to get my hair cut. Anyway, Quaglio's story had appeared in the Vancouver newspapers, and a remarkable story about how he'd met his wife in South America through letter correspondence. After exchanging many letters he travelled to South America to meet her, they married there, and now he was fighting with the Canadian Government to obtain a permit to allow his wife permanent residency in Canada.

"Could I do the same and find someone special that way?"

"Or am I out of touch with reality?"

Both sides of my internal debate were inconclusive, so for review later, I cut out the ad and set it aside on the already cluttered bed, my usual filing place. No further thought was given to finding a piano, and having finished with the newspapers, I placed them aside. Most of my afternoon had been frittered away, so I wanted to get out and spend time at Kitsilano Beach before the entire afternoon was gone.

The Kitsilano waterfront had become my favourite retreat at any time, and while visiting the park didn't solve my problems, walking and pondering helped in taking some edge off life's issues, and frame them in better perspectives. Upon reaching the highest bluff along the point, I stopped to gaze across English Bay, because the calm water was bright blue instead of those more gloomy hues of greys and dull greens I saw more often. I stayed a while and watched as those mountains across the bay made slow but constant changes in appearance as the sun moved and late afternoon shadows on the slopes shifted. 

Although a fair distance away, I noticed smoke rising from one of the nearer treed slopes. Soon an aircraft appeared, and circled about over there before releasing a load of what appeared to be water. The aircraft made several subsequent passes, and released more water until the smoke began to dissipate. While listening to the radio later that night, a news item reported a small forest fire had been extinguished earlier in the day on the slopes above North Vancouver, thus what I'd witnessed was the airborne part of the fight against those flames. 


Out in English Bay, numerous ocean freighters were anchored, all waiting to be berthed for the loading or unloading of cargo. Some days the bay looked like a parking lot for ships. Once on a while I'd wonder what countries they came from, or which ports they'd visit next, but I could never envision myself working and living on one of those ships for months at a time. Isolation can take on many forms, and I didn't need that one.

Minutes later I noticed a slow moving, small white boat resembling a lifeboat approaching. Crew members from one of the freighters no doubt, and heading shoreward for a visit in Vancouver. When the small vessel was near and passed by on its way into the False Creek channel, I counted a dozen or more seated men, and all wearing the same bright blue uniforms. Not to be outdone by the motor's constant noisy drone, occasional indistinguishable shouts came from the men. After passing beneath Burrard Bridge, the small boat disappeared from view, and thus the parting scene became another of my afternoon at the seashore memories.

Later on I noticed water had begun surrounding those rocks below the bluff, meaning the tide was sneaking in. What first snagged my attention however, were several bobbing pieces of broken tree branches that had been driven ashore by waves, and now bouncing against the rocks. Seeing those jogged my memory of something I'd either heard or read once before.
 
Centuries earlier off the northwestern island coast of Scotland, my ancestors were said to have been shipwrecked, but were saved from drowning by clinging to pieces of drifting wood they used to get ashore. Perhaps an innate inherited trait of Hebridean ancestry attracted me to the edge of this sea delineating the western edge of Canada's most mountainous province. I liked walking along the beach and shoreline at any hour, in all seasons, and any type of weather. 

"The windier, the better; the stormier, all the more alluring." I thought for a second, but then I realized such an uninviting scenario would never be the setting in which to meet that one and only special person I kept hoping to find.

As I spent my evening hours in the park, stealing inconspicuous glances at hand-holding couples strolling along the walkway, or spying on an arms-around-each-other pair seated on a nearby bench, made me envious, and conscious of being alone. My thoughts shifted back to that newspaper ad I'd clipped for later. 
 

Placing advertisements in newspapers to initiate contacts with other people was a practice almost unheard of here in Canada, but one not completely unfamiliar to me. I'd first encountered these types of ads in German newspapers that were suggested supplementary reading when I was learning German. At the time I thought the ads bizarre, so I dismissed them as perhaps a cultural difference unique to Germans. But the more I thought about the means now, the less ridiculous the idea seemed.

The horizon sky made its spectacular eye-soothing transitions from pale yellow, to fiery orange, to burning red, to dark purple, and finally to black. This was Labour Day weekend and the first weekend of September. I'd always regarded the first weekend of September as the last weekend of summer, because without fail school resumed afterward, but this year would be the first when I wouldn't have classes to return to. 
 
To me, the weather always seemed to change after this particular weekend, because on following autumn weekends, my parents would haul us all to Grandpa's farm to help him with the harvest, Mom to help Grandma with the canning, and the rest of us to assist in storing up enough firewood to last through the winter. Heating an aging stone-foundation farmhouse with a wood-burning stove consumes a barn full of wood in a short time, but this year I'd be absent from those in-person experiences.
 
September had always been my favourite month, yet feeling nostalgic for my far away Septembers past, in silence I greeted, "Aye, this is September and here's to it!"

A while later I vacated the unoccupied bench I'd claimed earlier in the evening, and ambled back to the small basement apartment I still couldn't bring myself to call home. Perhaps too few months had passed, and maybe I'd feel differently later.

Again I pondered possibilities pen pal letter writing might provide, and by the time I was standing outside the doorway of my humble three-room closet of a dwelling, I'd made up my mind to risk the twenty dollars. During Tuesday’s lunch hour I'd pay the post office a visit and purchase the money order.
 
 
Two days later, and beyond...

Tuesday evening I placed my letter and money order into the already addressed envelope and sealed it. 

To pre-empt further second-guess dithering, and maybe end up changing my mind, right away I went out and made the short walk from West 1st Avenue and Arbutus to the mailbox on the corner at Yew. At the letterbox I paused for one last moment to question again what I was doing, but then thrust the envelope in to end any further indecision. The proverbial first die had been cast.


In less than two weeks, an anonymous looking envelope post-marked from West Germany arrived in the mail. Inside was a magazine-like booklet comprising of pages and pages of photographs of women and men, young and old, from many countries around the world. Beneath each photo was the person's name and address together with a list of code numbers that served as a concise biography and short-form listing of the person's interests. A defining glossary of all the code numbers appeared on the booklet's inside front cover, whereas the inside back cover was information about submitting a listing, therefore every person who was pictured and listed in the booklet had paid for their entry. 

Mercury's magazine wasn't what I'd imagined, but then I hadn't really known what to expect. 

I was dumbfounded, because about seventy-five percent of the listings were young, attractive looking young ladies of every nationality from every country imaginable, and all were seeking correspondence with other people. 

Why mostly young ladies?

Have I stumbled through the entranceway of a very different world previously unknown to me? 

Are there really so many others out there around the world who might've been feeling as lonely as I was? 

Or are they only curious?

I had no way of knowing, but I'm certain that if told, every story would have been different.


From the hundreds of possible candidates to select from, I thought making a choice would be easy, but it wasn't. Picking people out of what was nothing more than a catalogue seemed so cold and impersonal, yet strangely enough, no hurt feelings wouldn't ensue on their part, but on the other hand, a missed opportunity might be my lot in life from making a wrong choice. After hours of looking and pondering, I narrowed down my selection to three, and from there I chose to write to a young lady in South Vietnam. Tran thi Lien Huong was 18 years of age, a student, and lived in a city or town called Tay Ninh. I had no idea where Tay Ninh was other than somewhere in South Vietnam. 

To this day I don't know why I chose someone in South Vietnam... maybe for no other reason than a new flare-up in the ongoing conflict there had been once more grabbing the news headlines here... or perhaps the Spirit of God had nudged my heart.

Nonetheless having made my final decision, I knew there was no guarantee I'd ever receive a reply from Miss Tran. Although this was only a catalogue of photographs, I still felt a twinge of guilt upon eliminating the other two possible future friends, and having done so, I'd never know if my choice had been right or wrong. 

Making up my mind about whom to select was confusing enough, but sitting down and writing was far more difficult. I wrote my name, address and date in the top left corner area of the page liked I'd learned in school years earlier, but after writing, Dear Miss Tran, I was stuck. I spent a long time looking at that almost blank page. 
 
Setting pen to paper to compose a letter to a complete stranger in another country, a person who may or may not know much English was different, and certainly not the same as writing home. After several subsequent starts and revisions, I'd written a complete paragraph.

"What else do I write about?" I wondered.
 
"Do I write about where I work?"

"Should I tell her about my family... and maybe why I'm living in Vancouver?"
 
"Does she know anything about Canada?

"Would she be interested in why I chose to write to her?"
 
"Will she even be interested in anything I might write?"
 
I had no clue, and Mercury's booklet offered no advice whatsoever. The only light bulb moment of illumination I did experience that evening, is that I'd fretted over the very same issues I would've sweated over had Mom set me up for another blind date, like she'd done once before about two years ago. Not a bad experience at all, but nothing came of it.
 
Although after midnight, I was still stuck at the end of that single paragraph I'd written. Out of frustration I tore the sheet from the pad, crumpled it tightly into a ball and threw it into the waste paper basket. That projectile followed a dozen or more previous attempts at writing a letter. Giving up, I placed Mercury's booklet and my writing pad aside.
 
"Tomorrow." I rationalized while turning in for the night, "I've got tomorrow night to try again "

After leaving work the following evening, I stopped-off at a bookstore and purchased a world atlas, because last evening's experience had laid bare how little I knew about the world, and my unfamiliarity with geographic locations. The Atlas's one-page map of Indochina was tiny, but Tay Ninh was significant enough to be shown. From the map's scaling, Tay Ninh was about fifty miles northwest of Saigon, and near the border with Cambodia. I'd also been motivated to look-up the countries and cities where some of the other people in Mercury's catalogue dwelled. If nothing else, at least I'd obtained an overdue geography lesson. 
 
Upon arriving home, I was determined to sit down, write a complete letter, and have it ready to mail the next morning. Within minutes of starting, I found myself stuck, and again staring at an almost blank sheet of paper. Taking a quick walk over to Kitsilano Park and back, broke the writer's block.
 
While spilling out one's thoughts onto paper didn't seem much easier than in-person dialogue, the written medium did allow me the advantage of editing prior to words being sent. True, any words I placed on paper would reveal a certain amount about who I am and what I think, but those same words on paper also permitted me a certain degree of safety behind a wall of anonymity. By safety I mean I wouldn't be seen, nor heard, nor judged on the spot by facial responses, as well as by words spoken or left unsaid. Body language was a foreign language, because I didn't understand it, and rejection an unwanted yet familiar companion I'd learned to dislike.
 
After several hours of stops and starts, I'd penned a full two-page letter to Miss Tran. I was pleased with my small accomplishment, and rather than wait until morning, I went out and mailed the letter right away.
 
The second proverbial die had been cast, and all that remained now was to wait and hope a reply would arrive.


The Oddblock Station Agent

No comments:

Post a Comment