The Second Half of the Walk—DMK Ruby
Leaving work, I notice a young guy man in a beat-up old BMW in the parking lot, appearing to be waiting for someone. Is it someone going to one of the various clinics housed in our building, which is part of the larger hospital complex? Or is he waiting for someone who works here? He looks like he’s maybe 21 years old and instead of being on his phone like I would be, he’s taking the opportunity to clean the inside of his car. I watch him swipe the top of the dashboard with a wet wipe and in the few seconds it takes me to walk by, he’s beautified his space. I want to know everything about him. Who is he waiting for? What compels him to clean his environment instead of zoning out like I tend to do when I’m waiting? What does he do for work? Is he a student? In the story I start writing in my head about him, I want him to have every good thing he’s ever wanted by the end of the third act.
By the time I’ve walked on to the street where the chocolate caramel cat lives, I’ve switched to wondering about the woman who always walks her three identical dogs around this time. Are they clones? I mean, the dogs look EXACTLY the same. Is this some kind of Barbara Streisand dog cloning shit? She’s about 50 years old, medium sized, with fluffy blondish hair, just like her dogs. In my mind, she’s a woman content with her life, she’s worked in an office her whole life and is now winding down towards retirement. Or she took a severance package and is now living her best life. She doesn’t look like someone who invites drama into her life, radiating contentment as she passes me on the sidewalk. So, maybe the dogs are the ones living drama filled lives. Do cloned dogs have the same temperaments? The same thoughts? I see a YouTube rabbit hole opening up in front of me once I’m home.
Walking over the small bridge over the heavily shaded creek, my eye snags on something that doesn’t belong in the empty lot beside it. Someone has dumped a recliner chair in the wild space that, for the moment, is covered in Nootka roses and Himalayan blackberry bushes, all reaching two metres into the sky. The grey velvet fabric of the chair is in stark contrast to the myriad of green around it, facing the street and looking like someone just walked away to grab a beer, and took the remote with them. Look, I know, some terrible citizen just dumped the chair there so they wouldn’t have to pay to move it or take it to the dump. But there is something quite cinematic and beautiful about the chair.
Less beautiful as the week goes on and it gets rained on, looking soggy and sad. I’m anthropomorphizing the chair but there is something so strikingly sad about the sight of it there surrounded by wild plant life. And then one day, it’s gone. Within days, the roses and blackberries have taken over the space and it’s like it never existed. Just another beautiful dream. It makes me think of a surreal story, not a genre I read or have ever tried to write but I also can’t explain why the sight of that chair captivated me so much. It was incongruous and unexpected, all the elements you need for a good story.
Carrying on, I go past another of my favourite gardens, partially fenced with a wall of bamboo, the kind with slender stalks so it looks soft and feathery. I can’t help touching them every time I walk past. They have a gorgeous raspberry bush and it’s a moral struggle to not nick a raspberry in the summer. I mean, it takes ALL of my frontal lobe to not steal a berry, especially when I’m walking home and my brain is tired. Their garden is so beautiful, always tidy, the rosemary in full flower right now, making the bees and hummingbirds so happy. And yet they have a decrepit old Volkswagen camper van that has been up on blocks, I’m assuming to be repaired, for years. I wonder about the people who live there every time I go by.
I find it fascinating that part of their world is so well maintained but another part, equally visual, in the same location (their yard) is completely ignored. Are they a couple – I assume there is a couple living there – fighting about the same thing for 20 years? They agree on the garden, but he keeps saying he’s going to get around to the van but never does. I’ve seen a man in the garden many times and rarely, a woman, but if their body language is telling a story, it is one of disharmony. I wonder, does he find peace in creating a wall protecting his space from the street? Bamboo, a huge rosemary bush, and in the summer, raspberry canes protecting himself and his heart from breaking again? Or walling himself off from the pain of the outside world?
It all suggests a story where she leaves him and, in the beginning, he would sometimes hear from her but now hadn’t heard anything for more than a decade. Until yesterday, when a mutual friend told him he’d read her obituary on Facebook. He had been stunned; they were barely into their 60’s. He spent the day thinking about how they had fought about every little thing and instead of heartfelt conversation, one day, she was just gone. He had sporadic phone calls from her (it was pre-internet) for the first five or six years and then nothing until the news this morning. How could they have gone from loving each other so intensely to being angry with each other all the time, she reaches the breaking point before him. Not that he hadn’t thought about leaving, too, but he couldn’t make himself walk away from his garden.
I keep going, now I’m in the messy middle of the walk, when I’m too far away from both work and home. Nowhere to use a washroom if I need it, and not close enough to the grocery store to feel like I’m nearly home. It’s prime time to let my imagination wander. A little further on is another house that is new, tastefully fitting in with the other older homes in the neighbourhood, that is home to a sausage dog. I can never spell their real name, but you know the ones I mean, long, low to the ground, about the size of a large loaf of bread.
She never barks, barely seems to acknowledge her owner and in general, looks like a dog who’s neurodivergent with ADHD. She was a young pup with her head in the clouds, not paying attention to anything around her but lost in daydreams. Not a good guard dog, happy to just be, not really absorbing the world around her while her owner tries to break through to her and get her to go back in the house. Ever since I read Andre Alexis’ Fifteen Dogs, when I see a dog, I wonder about their inner worlds. What is that little sausage thinking about? Maybe she goes for long walks or spends her day outside in the yard, but I somehow doubt it, she has an indoor vibe. What does she do inside all day? Is she imagining a different world for herself? Or is she thinking of nothing? What is going in a dog’s inner world? Could I, as someone so afraid of dogs (I may have mentioned that I have been bitten twice, both times by a German Shepherd, once at age 4 and then at 14 years old in a campground in Penticton) write a story from the perspective of a sausage dog? Might be a good challenge to work on my fears.
As I make my way along the high street near my house, stories come to me based on the various businesses I walk past like the flower shop that fills its planters with rose petals for a bright spot of colour in the grey days of winter. I imagine the kind of heart that thinks of creating that moment of peace and beauty for passersby is one that has had a lot of love and probably loss in his life. I imagine someone sad like me, trudging home from work during the darkest days of the pandemic and stopping to look at the petals and another person, standing the required two meters away, also looking at the petals. The colours range from pink to orange to red to yellow to white and all the pretty shades in between like coral and blush. He is working from home, lives on his own and this is his daily walk. He is desperate for human connection and forces himself to talk to her. They agree to meet the next day by the petals and by the time the pandemic restrictions are lifted, they are in love.
And then I’m back home, right where I started from, happy to be back in my safe space and maybe ready to turn some of these ideas into stories that I can share when I’m feeling brave.
Addendum: Remember the young guy wearing a red sweatshirt with “You are enough” written in white letters across the front from my last blog? Well, I was walking to work on the same street a few weeks ago and saw a teenaged gal who looked to be the same age as the young guy, wearing a sweatshirt with stylized mountains and a sun on the front with “I hate people” written across the top. I immediately thought of a romance with the enemies to lovers trope, or grumpy/sunshine or black cat/golden retriever energy starring these two young people. They end up in the same class, and the cheeky teacher who clocks their wildly opposite sweatshirts can’t help but pair them together for a class project. They proceed to fall in love over the course of their senior year. I’ve never written a high school romance before, but this one is basically writing itself!