Treasure the Moment
Richard von Fuchs
Smashwords Edition
Copyright 2009
Richard von Fuchs
Smashwords Edition, License Notes
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TREASURE THE MOMENT
by Richard von Fuchs
Chapter 1
A Rude Awakening - A.W.O.L Goats
October, 1985
Matt woke up around 8 o’clock and looked up at the skylight.
Yellow alder leaves scrambled around the plastic bubble. He could just see the tops of a row of fir trees dancing in the wind. It was raining lightly. Grey clouds slid over each other. On the other side of the cabin, Julie was asleep on the water bed. Matt preferred his own Mexican rope bed, in a frame he made himself, and covered with Japanese quilts. He closed his eyes and did the ten to one countdown, seeing each number three times in three different colors, taking a deep breath for each one. Today’s affirmation was: “I will be kind, and I am getting rich.” He was down to the yellow number three when he heard a crash.
He bounced out of bed, naked, and ran into the kitchen. His girlfriend’s four year old daughter had climbed up on a chair to get herself a box of sugar frosted cereal (with honey and chocolate) and had knocked down a glass jar full of brown rice. Her little bottom was sticking out of her T-shirt. Her jet black hair was tied in 2 braids with different colored ribbons.
“Don’t move, Melanie! Just stay on the chair!” (God, she is a cute cherub) he thought.
“I want cereal. I’m hungry”
“I know honey. That’s fine. Just don’t move until I sweep up. I don’t want you to cut yourself.”
“What are you doing?” Julie asked, still half asleep.
“I’m trying to figure out how to separate the rice from the broken glass.”
“I don’t want to eat ground glass! Throw it out!”
“That’s wasting food.”
“It’s saving my life. Don’t be nuts.”
“Alright. Where’s the broom?”
“Ask your mother.”
“Melanie! Stop! Stay on the chair!”
“I’m hungry. Is there any milk?”
“Yes. Just a minute. I’ll get this cleaned up in a – DAMN! God damn it!
Jesus Christ!”
“Matt! What the hell are you doing?”
“I just stepped in the broken glass, trying to keep Melanie out of it!”
Julie lurched out of the water bed. She was thin, taller than Matt, in her late 30s, with short brown hair. She was wearing a long linen night gown with a pink ribbon at the neck.
“I’ll find the bloody broom for you.” She tried to grind the sleep out of her eyes.
Matt was hoping slowly on one foot, trying to examine the wound on the sole of his other foot, while his blood dripped slowly onto the floor. Melanie started to climb down from the chair, clutching her box of cereal.
“Melanie! Stay there till we clean this up!” Julie ordered.
“It’s all right, Mommy.”
“Stop!” Julie grabbed her child and set her down on the kitchen counter, hard.
“Ow! You hurt me!”
“More child abuse,” Matt said, letting his wounded foot drop.
“Shut up and get me the broom!”
“I just asked you where it is.”
“I’m not the good fairy, Matt.”
Matt scratched his brown beard and patted his balding head. He hopped and shuffled toward the back door. He fumbled behind a checkered curtain which marked off a closet-to- be. “Here you are.” He leaned over the danger area, and pointed the broom handle toward Julie.
“Great pose. Where’s the camera?”
“Ask your mother.”
Melanie started shoving handfuls of dry cereal into her mouth. “Is there any milk?”
“Yes in the fridge.” Matt started hobbling toward the monster sized olive green refrigerator.
“I mean real milk, not that awful goat milk.”
“That is real milk, honey.”
“Yes, and there is cow’s milk too, sweetie.” Julie said.
“Goat’s milk is better for her.”
“She doesn’t like it. What are you going to do, beat her up?” Julie shoveled most of the rice and glass into a plastic dustpan and smacked down a pottery bowl (made by Steve Jensen, 1982) on their cedar plank table. “I’ll get you the milk, honey. Watch your step.”
Matt shoved a piece of solid cedar log, (with carpet glued under it), closer to the table. “Here you go, Melanie. Bon appétit.”
“Matt, you’re bleeding all over the floor.”
“Sorry, should I go outside and bleed to death so I won’t mess up our house?”
“Let me wake up before we do battle. There are some band-aids in the bathroom.”
“I know where they are. Is it O.K. if I bleed a little on the way?”
Julie went back to sweeping up the mess. Julie started pouring milk into the bowl on the table.”
“Use both hands, honey,” Melanie said.
“She’s too little to pour it by herself!” Matt yelled.
“How do you think she’s going to learn?”
Matt disappeared behind the burlap curtain that separated the future bathroom, and fumbled around on the plank shelves. Pink insulation gave that corner of the cabin a warm but unfinished look. He would have to get that inside wall up soon. He thought of this every time he went to use the toilet or wash. The insulation had been annoying him for 20 months.
When Matt returned with his foot cleaned and bandaged, Melanie had abandoned her half eaten breakfast and was playing “Garage Man” with her plastic garage and cars. (Weird kid. That’s what comes from having a feminist mother,) Matt thought. He climbed back into his bed and tried to continue meditating. He was down to green number 5, when there was a knock on the door. Matt threw off the quilt and hopped to the door. It was Mrs. Piercy, the pianist for the Unitarians.
“Aren’t you cold?” she asked smiling.
“I wasn’t planning to stay up. The bed’s plenty warm.”
“I’m afraid you can’t hide under the covers much longer. One of your goats is terrorizing the village.”
“Oh, no! Which one?”
“I don’t know them as well as you do. Pete Varney phoned me. He said he saw it running around downtown.”
“Ah, shit! I’ll bet it’s Gracie.” I’ll go round her up.”
As Mrs. Piercy left, Matt called up to the loft: “One of the damn goats is out. I gotta go downtown.”
Julie was already working at her loom. “O.K. I hope you are not inviting me to the roundup.”
“No this is man’s work,” he smirked.
“You said it, not me.”
Matt put on his favorite green corduroys, a green and black checkered work shirt from China, his Irish fisherman’s sweater, a hooded ski jacket and rubber gum boots. He carefully closed the door with its ornate cedar latch. He walked along the veranda, down the 3 plank steps at the end and looked in the goat pen beside the garage. “Zam,” named for the former Premier of British Columbia, was lying on some hay under the roof, chewing his cud. “Gracie,” named for the most prominent woman of the Social Credit Party, was missing. Matt hurried back to the front of the house. He unchained his Italian racing bike from one of the 6 by 6 cedar porch posts. For the first year he had lived on Hornman Island, he had boasted that he never had to lock his bike. The island was an oasis of civil calm. Anybody leaving the island had to go by ferry. If something was reported stolen, the Mounties waited at the terminal on Vancouver Island. Besides Julie was a relief purser on the ferry. If she did not spot some stolen property, one of the deckhands would have. He always locked it now. The character of the island changed as the population exploded. The new subdivision up the hill was just another piece of greater Vancouver. People came because it was cheap, and immediately started bitching about the ferry service, wanting a bigger school bus, and campaigning for a bridge. They wanted to screw up the island the way they had Vancouver.
The bike was not suited to the island’s unpaved roads. It was left over from his former life in the city. He made a face at the flecks of rust that were starting to appear on the axels. (Damn rain doesn’t even fall down straight in this crazy place.) If it wasn’t for the wind, his bike would have stayed dry on the porch. It hardly ever rained without a southeaster blowing. On the other hand, clear weather usually meant a dead calm, which made trying to sail a frustration. His thin tires crunched over the oyster shells which paved his driveway. Since he did not have a truck, they would never get crushed to a finer consistency. He rode under the cascara tree and between the two red cedars that marked his “gate.” It was a gap in the driftwood fence, laid split rail style, the way the pioneers built when they had plenty of wood and a shortage of nails. There never would be a gate, but it was a clear demarcation between public and private land. Rolling down hill, Matt fiddled with the toe straps until he remembered that his gum boots never had and never would fit into the straps meant for cycling shoes on small Italian feet. He hunched over the under-slung handle bars and steered around some rocks as big as bricks washed down from the edge of the road. He was enjoying coasting down hill when he remembered he was unprepared for his mission. (Ah shit! No rope!) He braked as much as his wet wheel rims would allow, hopped off and started walking back up hill. (Got to get a mountain bike as soon as I have the cash). He could have shifted into his lowest gear and struggled up the steep hill, but he was annoyed by the interruption to his day, and in no hurry to start the frustrating job of capturing Zam.
Back at his house he poked dispiritedly around the garage the last owner had built. It was too dark to see anything when he got inside, even though there were no doors. At last he remembered the woven rope he had used as a halyard on his sailboat. (Seems to good to use on a goat, a dollar a foot!) He bundled the rope onto his rat trap carrier, taking care that the loose ends would not tangle in his spokes, and headed down hill toward “town” again. From the road, it was hard to see that anybody lived on the island except for the mailboxes every few hundred meters. Many of them were works of art, decorated with sunflowers, windmills, or psychedelic colors. Most of the properties were deep, but narrow, like the old river-front homesteads on the St. Lawrence River. Without access to the road, life was unthinkable.
The first building he came to was “Last Chance Gas” named as if it were at the edge of the desert instead of just before the ferry landing. Next there was a gift shop with driftwood over the windows and door, then the “Eternal Joy” massage and aromatherapy place, and then the Co-op Store with a new video rental service tacked on like a tumor, and a fast food service window recently punched thru the front wall. He leaned his bike on the front of “Pete’s Photo, TV Repair, and Water Witching Service.” Pete had been a literature teacher somewhere in Alberta, after he had exiled himself from London. He still had a stagy air about him, a residue of his stillborn acting career. He had an amazingly deep voice, bushy eyebrows, and a black and white Van Dyke beard, which he lovingly kept pointed. He eagerly took up the island’s fashion of dressing “Nuveau Pauvre”. Matt suspected that he hung his clothes outside for 6 months to weather before he actually put them on.
“Mrs. Piercy says you saw one of my A.W.O.L. goats.”
“That was an hour ago. I asked it not to move until you came to fetch it, but it was thoroughly disobedient.”
“Any idea where it is now?”
“I assume it is pursuing its life’s quest, or looking for something inedible to eat.”
“Come on, seriously, was it headed toward the cove?”
“I didn’t ask, since I don’t speak ‘goat’.”
“I see you are in your usual form. I missed breakfast, so I have to struggle to appreciate your humor.”
“Why the hell don’t you fix your fence, or at least get a phone?”
“It is not for want of trying, my dear fellow.” This was supposed to sound affectedly Shakespearean. Resuming his normal voice, “My goats must be a cross between kangaroos and octopi. If they can’t get over a fence, they squeeze thru it as if they didn’t have any bones.”
“You must treat them cruelly.”
“No, they are just god damned perverse. If I kept them outside the fence they would dedicate their lives to breaking into their pen.”
“You might try that. Anyway, why don’t you get a phone?”
“This isn’t the city. They charge by the foot for a new line, and the other reason is something out of my sleazy past in the city that I don’t want to reveal to you.”
“You could have found it an hour ago if you had a phone. I have no bloody idea where it has got to now.”
“Fret not, dear friend. I shall follow its spoor and subdue it with this $50 dollar rope.”
“That’s a bit dear for a goat, isn’t it?”
“It’s all I got. By the way, can you come up for a sing song Sunday night? We are short of men as usual.”
“You should start a girl’s choir. It’s perfect hunting ground.”
“No more of that. I’m a thoroughly respectable dude these days. Didn’t you see my halo?”
“That’s another good line. Women just love rescuing repentant sinners.”
“If you come up Sunday, I’ll talk to you about the present state of my soul. Right now I got to find that damn goat.”
“Good luck.”
The rain started to come down with enthusiasm. (Were you taking a break while I was dry inside?) He really had no idea where to go. He chained his bike to the porch post of the “Renaissance Music” store. (Sorry to leave you out to rust, old buddy.) At the ferry dock, Willy, a sandy haired young guy who was actually born on the island, was hanging onto the dangling control switch for the ramp as if it were his security blanket.
“Hey Matt, lookin’ for your goat?”
Matt choked down his irritation and decided to be civil to Wily. He was a decent enough sort, even if he was a bit simple.
“Yeah. Where was it headin’?”
Willy pointed to the conglomerate rock cliff on the lee side of the landing. “Went right up there. Don’t know where it is now. Jesus, can they ever climb!”
“Like a goat,” Matt said over his shoulder as he started climbing himself. The pine trees were stunted and pointing inland, crippled by the wind. (I wonder why long needled pines grow on the shore, and Doug firs grow inland?) He wondered if they were native to the island, and promised himself once more to get a book about local trees and flowers. The air was fresh. Matt looked across to Vancouver Island and saw a plume of smoke from a pulp mill. (There ought to be a law against that. What the hell’s the use of having an NDP government, if they can’t stop that? Must be 40 km away. It’s a wonder I can see that far in this weather.) He could not smell it today, - another benefit of rain.
On Pirate’s Cove beach a thin nude man was assuming yoga positions. (Stupid exhibitionist bugger. Hope he freezes to death.) It had to be Jake, a former Jesuit priest who was still pursuing a spiritual path, but in esoteric ways which the Roman Catholic Church would not have allowed. Pirate’s Cove was famous as the skinny dipper’s beach. They even sniggered about it on the Vancouver radio stations. (I wonder if he is mortifying his flesh. It would be a hell of a lot warmer on a desert. Why does a well endowed man always look slightly ridiculous? Where can that goat be? Any normal animal would look for food, shelter or companionship, but goats are the embodiment of the perverse. They disdain tall fresh grass and look for thorns and brambles. They ignore soft flat places and play “king of the castle” on rocky crags, garage roofs, or any place life threatening.)
A narrow trail went up the hill next to the cliff and went out of sight. If he fell he would be killed on the rocks and then drown in the ocean. Farther ahead, a flat plain spread out from the base of the cliff so he would only be maimed for life if he managed to fall out that far. It might have been a lava flow. (Geology is more interesting when you live in it than it was in a classroom). Today it was Hansen’s farm. They kept sheep and riding horses, but their long term plan was to subdivide. No crop or domestic animal could be as profitable as vinyl-sided New England Colonial style houses or fake plantation manors with pillars holding up nothing in particular, with brass lamps on brick gate posts. Jammed in cheek by jowl, they looked like Hollywood sets shoved together in a storage lot, since they had no manor to set off their grandeur, - only hordes of newly arrived, rootless refugees from Vancouver, made instant millionaires from selling out to the Chinese fleeing Hong Kong.
Matt almost forgot the purpose of his mission. He was enjoying himself. He took his mental temperature. He was hungry, slightly wet, a little too warm. What about his “Wa”? Was his inner spirit in harmony? He was still frustrated from the chaotic start of his day. His meditation had been interrupted twice. His foot ached. How could he drop his expectations that he should have some peace and quiet? If not here on this out of the way Gulf Island, then where? How could he feel upset that his goats were life-long freedom fighters, preferring life in the open to the tacky prison he built onto his unused garage? Matt knew that in theory he was supposed to “go with the flow” of experience instead of raging that his rigid preconceptions were wrecked. Still, he was pissed off.
Near the top of the hill there was a grove of arbutus trees. Americans call them “madrona.” They bobbed in the wind like ancient prize fighters. Their stringy red bark always looked as if they had been attacked by vandals. When a normal tree looses its bark, it is doomed. Evolution developed a tree that thumbed its nose at common sense.
The wind picked up and there was no sign of Gracie, the runaway goat. (It is stupid to try and search the whole island. Should I go to known goat hang-outs? Look for a goat informant? Following the smell might not be too hard, even for a human, if the southeaster were not blowing so hard). Matt had felt obliged to leap into action when his property was gone. It was the manly thing he was expected to do. Suddenly he recognized the futility of his effort, and walked and slid back down the hill to the ferry landing. He got his bike and slowly pedaled uphill toward his place. When the grade got really steep he shifted into his lowest gear; the chain moved clear off the largest sprocket and jammed against the wheel.
(It is getting damn hard to maintain my “wa” today). He knew better than to try to try to free the chain and keep his hands clean at the same time. He grabbed the chain as if it were not covered with the most tenacious grease science could develop and hauled it back onto the sprocket. Without bothering to wipe his hands, he held the handlebars gingerly to minimize the amount of grease he would smear on them.
Julie and Melanie were gone. “Gone shopping” said the note in green crayon. Matt felt a twinge of conscience. (How the hell did I miss her? The downtown is not that big, and there is only one road. They must have been inside the Co-op store when I went by). The Co-op was the center of community life, especially for those settlers who came after Timothy Leary told them they did not need to endure the tedium of completing a B.A.. After the last meeting, three weeks earlier, Matt had let himself be seduced by Susan, the Chairperson of the Purchasing Committee. (I had no idea she was interested. Now she is as cool and indifferent as if nothing ever happened. She must have taken lessons from a man.) There had been a fierce debate about carrots. The California carrots were thickly coated (by hand with a 3 inch brush) with cancer causing chemicals. They didn’t taste like much, but people bought them because they looked good. The politically correct carrots from Vancouver Island were usually misshapen and harder to sell. Then one of the lefty loonies delivered his thunderbolt. Former Trotskyite, J. Clarence Davidson II, (scion of the Vancouver sail making business,) revealed that the main supplier of local carrots was, in fact, a political enemy. The fiend had been lustily lobbying the provincial government to have his land taken out of the agricultural land freeze, so that he could raise mobile homes instead of veggies. Although tarring and feathering had passed out of fashion, he must be slowly starved to death by a rigorous boycott of his politically tarnished carrots. A rebuttal from Candice (no known last name, U.S. Peace Corps, Ethiopia, Retired) said that an information picket line would only give free publicity for the miscreant, probably increasing his sales to our class enemies who were intent on paving paradise to make it a parking lot, (Joni Mitchell, not properly credited).
Some fanatics were so intent on destroying the NDP land freeze, halting residential construction on land which grows our food, that they would switch from the large woody California carrots to the punier handicapped versions grown here, just to help a fellow right- winger. Long before the argument reached the stage of terminal boredom, Julie took Melanie home to bed, which left Matt free to a accept Susan’s invitation to provide after hours service.
If he had been honest about it, Mat would have admitted that the casual encounter did not mean anything to him either, but he still felt annoyed that Susan could forget it so lightly, and they still had to be careful to act “natural.” If only there was a comfortable middle ground between being whipped, branded, having a scarlet letter “A” hung on your neck, and the soulless encounters with swingers, who prattled about “Open Marriage.” The loudest advocates of “honesty” and “normal” sexual relations were usually the most desperate to escape from the domestic cocoons that had spun. Matt did not like to see himself as one of G.B. Shaw’s representatives of the middle class who were moderately faithful and reasonably honest.
Matt decided to visualize the return of Gracie, the lost goat. It beat wandering around in the bush and getting soaked. He poked up the fire with cedar wood scraps from “The Eternal Child” toy making business, beautifully finished bits that ha d split or broken, and gave a shot of adrenalin to the most recalcitrant fires. He sneaked over to the water bed, (since Melanie was out,) kicked off his Mexican house shoes, and tried to get into an alpha state, hopefully heading toward theta, to calm the storms raging in his mind. First he focused on the sound of the rain beating on the skylight. It was always a relief to close his eyes to the unfinished reality of his dream home. The recycled paneling and pressboard which was available and affordable was a travesty of his glorious images of his own castle on an island.
It was always a welcome relief to enter an altered state. It was so absurdly easy, - no drugs, no fasting, no pilgrimage to Tibet. Instead of paying a ransom to a guru, you could just stretch out on a bed and do it. Like good singing, or a good bowel movement, straining defeated the purpose. However, if people wanted to suffer, or divest themselves of extra money to learn the “secrets,” why blow the whistle? It could be that a hair-shirt, or a flat wallet was the triggering mechanism which allowed the desired condition to manifest itself. “I will succeed, as soon as X, Y, and Z are fulfilled.” That was like pulling back a rubber band. It really aided success by giving measurable conditions, like highway mileposts, which assured you that you were going to arrive at your destination. The image of Gracie, the Dalmatian colored goat was easy enough to call up, but the image of a docile animal remaining in her pen was impossible to hold. The damn goat kept jumping out. In the midst of this mental battle, Matt dozed off.
“Hello Matt!” Julie called out; “You here?”
“The body is here. The spirit may be elsewhere.” He quickly pulled his shoes on. It did not look good to be caught dozing in the middle of the day.
Melanie ran up to him, waving a plastic figure.
“Look at my Destructo Robot. He kills everything!” She began to make the sound effects of mass mayhem. (Weird kid, girls are not supposed to do that.)
“What the hell did you buy her that for? Doesn’t she get enough violence on T.V.?”
“She can’t grow up in a vacuum. All the other kids have them. I don’t want her to feel deprived.”
“Why don’t you buy her an assault rifle, so she can practice wasting all the other kids in the school yard?”
“It’s not the same Matt. Don’t be such a puritan. By the way, I’ve got some good news.”
“Yeah, are they predicting a drought this winter?”
“No, Mrs. Waters wants you to tune her piano.”
“Great! We’ll survive another 72 hours.”
“Stop being negative.”
“No, I’m serious, this is a windfall.”
“Can you call her today, and make an appointment?”
“Naturellement, Madame,” he bowed and flung out one arm.
Melanie pointed Destructo Man at matt and shouted: “Briow! Kazow! You’re dead!”
Matt obligingly fell down on the floor and pleaded, “Don’t ray-gun me! I’m allergic to neutrinos!”
“Don’t be silly, Melanie said with simple superiority. “You’re dead.”
Julie served lunch of guacamole, gazpacho, and a salad made of two kinds of parsley, two boxes of sprouts that were too old to sell, cabbage hearts, chopped cauliflower, turnip, tomato, raisins, raw mushrooms, lemon juice and dangerous amounts of sea salt. Melanie could not be bribed or coaxed to try it, so she had white bread, peanut butter with sugar added, and a soft drink.
“Find the goat?”
“Pete said he saw it going up toward lookout Point past Pirate’s Cove, but I didn’t see any sign of it.”
“Which one is it?”
“Zam is still here, so it has to be Gracie.”
“Are you going out after lunch?”
Matt gestured out the window next to their breakfast nook. “Not in this.”
“Afraid you’ll melt?”
It was their standing joke, that Matt was a sugar cube who would melt in the rain.
“Rusting to death is a ghastly fate. How’s the rug going?”
“It’s coming along, but I’m going stale. I can’t think of how to finish the design. I tried something that looks sort of Navajo, but it feels inauthentic.”
“What’s in your heart?”
“That’s a crazy thing to say.”
“Art is heart. It doesn’t matter if it is applied or so-called fine art. All your productivity is an expression of what is in your heart.”
“Look we have been through this before. I have to use the materials I can get hold of. I have to sell in the market I have access to. I am limited by my experience and my imagination.”
“Who says your imagination has to be limited?”
“I am not God almighty. I can only imagine so much.”
“How is anything new ever created?”
This was too much for Melanie. She felt excluded and knocked her soft drink can off the table. “I’m sorry.”
(What a bizarre look, like a mad scientist examining his mice. What are the big people going to do?)
Julie said “Honey, be careful,” and got up with a sour look to wipe up the spill.
(If I yell at her, Julie will get mad and Melanie will stage a victory tantrum. If I laugh, Julie will get mad, and say I am not taking my role as a stepparent seriously. If I ignore the kid, she will think up something more house-wrecking to get our attention.) Matt looked out the window at the waving trees. “You know how your customers can never explain why they like your work?”
“It could be they are communicatively challenged.” (Julie loved exploring “newspeak.”) “They are just burned out old hippies who happen to be solvent. It’s a marvelous evidence of satisfactory brain function, a checking account that is not overdrawn.”
She was referring to their own muddled finances, without actually mentioning the taboo subject.
Melanie said, “I hate this bread. Do I have to eat it?”
“If you are full, you are excused,” Julie said in her prissy voice. (Echoes of the gentility of London, Ontario. Should we teach the brat to curtsey?)
Not content with this dismissal, Melanie bored on. “I don’t like this bread. Why can’t we get good bread?”
This time instead of keeping his mouth shut, Matt went for the bait. “Jesus, you hate the brown bread from the Co-op. You won’t eat your mother’s bread made her own loving hands. We buy this white crap, especially for you, so you can get tooth decay, and be as sick as all your buddies. What the hell is good enough for you?”
“You are mad at me again.” That was quite true. She started to cry.
“Honey, I’m not mad at you,” Matt lied. “If you have had enough for lunch, why don’t you practice being Garage Man, or make lunch for your dolls, or paint a picture.”
“I don’t wanna.”
“Would you like to visit Snowflake or Evangeline?”
“No. I don’t want to visit anybody. Leave me alone.”
“Matt, stop trying to be her social director. She is in a funk, and you will have to let her work it out in her own way.”
“Where do you get that wisdom of Buddha? You are neither fat nor bald.”
“It’s genetic.”
Melanie plugged her thumb in her mouth, and planted her feet apart like she was on a boat in a storm. Julie took Melanie’s elbow and tried to guide her toward the waterbed.
“Come on, it’s time for a cuddle.”
”I don’t want a cuddle!” But she went anyway.
When mother and child were wrapped up in each other, Matt said: “Did Mrs. Waters say when she wanted her piano tuned?”
“I told you she wants you to call her.”
“I assume you mean now.”
“Your perception amazes me.”
“What I have been trying to say, Julie, is that the reason people can not explain why they like your weaving is that you reach them on a subliminal basis, directly to the heart.”
“What I have been trying to say, Julie, is that the reason people can not explain why they like your weaving is that you reach them on a subliminal basis, directly to the heart.”
“You make me sound mystical.”
“You are. You are. Why do you fight it so much?”
“I’m just a really tall 4 year old. Don’t say I won’t discuss anything with you, but if you could nail down that job with Mrs. Waters, you would do wonders for my sense of security.”
“Better than a visit to the mental health pro herself?”
“A thumb in the mouth, dollars in the credit union, better than words any time.”
Matt continued sitting. “I guess I had better see how much I can get out of her.”
“What about the goat?”
“Everybody on the island knows it’s loose. There is not a hell of a lot I can do about it now.”
“Don’t you want to look for it?”
“I have been looking for it,” he said testily, “but I haven’t got a helicopter and God only knows where it’s gone.”
“Are you going to forget about it?”
“I am going to tune the damn piano, put some dollars in our account, and the damn goat will have to work out its own destiny.”
He grabbed his coat from the antique coat rack and stamped out.
He was back in a minute. “Where the hell’s my hat?”
Melanie called out gleefully: “It’s in your pocket.”
“You are a ‘Wunderkind.’ Know where the goat is?”
Chapter 2
Struggle for Harmony Ends in Discord
Matt decided he would get less wet if he did not ride his bike. It was still a novel feeling not to jump in a car and roar off to wherever he was going. Places out of sight, over the horizon were not really that far off in time if you walked. He still felt vaguely guilty about wasting so much time to walk, when a normal person would cover the same distance in a few minutes driving. It was hard to let go of a life time of conditioning that we must always travel at maximum speed, make maximum profit, maximum production, and just live. Somebody in the Green party claimed that insanity increased in direct proportion to your average speed of travel.
Twenty minutes up the road from his house, Max was enjoying the feeling of just moving, not carrying anything. (How the hell can I tune a piano with no tools?) In disgust, he turned back toward home. Then at the corner of Long Lake road he remembered that he was supposed to phone first, so he turned down the other road toward Nancy’s place. Of course she would have a phone. Nancy Farkas was the elementary school music teacher. She had come from the States when her husband was dodging the draft, and got rid of him somewhere in their travels. Her double wide trailer looked incongruous among the geodesic domes of the newcomers, and the white clapboard boxes of the pioneers. It was so – “Alberta.” (I hope she is home from school. If not, her latest “significant other” is probably hanging around. I can’t believe it. I can’t get near her with a barge pole. She’s not that great looking, but she’s got one good looking guy after another. As she gets older, they get younger. The last one looked like Superman in his Clark Kent disguise.) Matt had attended Nancy’s “Over the Hill,” 40th birthday party, and groped her a little, pretending to be drunker than he was. She gently but firmly repulsed him and threatened to use judo if he persisted. (War-like Yanks).
There was a cedar fence separating her property from the unpaved road. Instead of a yard, she had a paved parking lot. People used to yammer about things being “un-American.” This abomination was “un-island.” Matt pressed the doorbell and heard the opening notes of something famous by Wagner. (I bet she builds a piano shaped swimming pool.) Clark Kent opened the door.
“Hi Matt. What’s up?”
“Um, would you mind if I used Nancy’s phone?”
“Sure. Calling somebody in Hong Kong?”
“No, Mongolia. It’s just Mrs. Waters. I want to be sure she’s home.”
The telephone was shaped like a piano. While dialing, Matt looked resentfully at the white Yamaha baby grand. He was forbidden to touch it because he was “untrained.” (That woman has the mentality of an Austrian, where you have to have a business school diploma to sell pencils in the street.) There was some rancor in his resentment of the “licensed” piano technician from Courtenay, on Vancouver Island. He was probably better. He was certainly faster, and he made more money. He divided his customers into the deaf and the blind, robbing the blind and doing a quick lousy job for the deaf.
“Hi, Mrs. Waters, It’s Matt Robbins. Julie said you wanted your piano tuned.”
Mrs. Waters was the District Mental Health officer. In simpler times she would have been a kindly neighbor giving unsolicited personal advice, and meddling in everyone’s private affairs. Now she had 6 and a half years of indoctrination on top of the Mountain at Simon Fraser University, two diplomas and a government job. She was shop steward of the B.C. Government Employees Union. Mrs. Waters was at home, enjoying one of her “flex time” days off. This resulted from the current Master Contract which stipulated that employees in her classification should work only 36.14 hours a week. Instead of going home at 3:14 p.m., she worked till 5 p.m. most days and took a certain number of days off each month besides weekends. On those days, islanders with a mental health problem had to work it out themselves.
Mrs. Waters made polite conversation on the phone. She actually seemed to want to know how he was. Matt fidgeted and looked at the darkening sky.
“I could be there in about half an hour, well forty minutes.”
She tried to tell him he could do it another day. Matt pressed for an immediate start. He wanted to get some money ASAP and pacify Julie.
“Well let me get a start on it. Then if I can’t finish it today, I can do the fine tuning tomorrow. Sometimes it’s better to let them sit over night to get used to the change.” (I always feel like the “Tin Man” selling aluminum siding to suckers. These buggers on government salaries cannot understand that those of us out in the cold world cannot wait indefinitely to get money or to eat.)
He said goodbye to Superman, asked him to thank Nancy, and headed back to his own place for the tools. They were easy to forget because it was just a small package with a tuning fork, three felt strips, two small rubber wedges, and the $100 dollar socket wrench, or “tuning hammer” as the professionals liked to call it. He no longer bothered to take the oscilloscope because it did not work any more. Now he had to side with the purists who said that aural tunings were the only way to go, and that machines were a crutch for the deaf. Without his machine, he could not hear any difference in the bottom half octave. With it he could at least put some kind of regular distance between the rumbling notes at the left end. The top octave and a half were another problem. If he did it strictly by ear, he was likely to stretch the octaves too much and leave an irritating sharpness. With the machine he could at least be reasonably sure they were not too far out. The top notes on most pianos sounded like the dinky notes on toy pianos, no matter how mellow and rich their tenor and bass notes were. He wished that the classical composers had agreed to boycott those damn tinny notes.
Matt tried to tiptoe into his house, letter the big cedar latch down ever so gently.
“Hi Matt!” Melanie shrieked, without looking up.