Dear Mike,

It’s fall now. He’s got a new pair of And One Basketball shoes that are half baby blue suede, half white leather. And one size bigger than his last ones. He’s reading The Diary of Anne Frank in L.A. (language arts) and studying integers in Math. He and his friends are trying to plan a trip to Minneapolis in October to see the Vikings. It would be his birthday present. I guess you know he’s turning fourteen at the end of October.

This summer we went to L.A. (Los Angeles) and while we were there O. insisted that we go to Venice Beach. Specifically, to the Venice Beach basketball courts. They’re famous, he told us, movies are shot there, some of the Lakers play there once in a while, we have to go there. We’d be fools not to go there. We can’t not go there. Plus, he said, Jonathan Richman sings about Venice Beach. This summer he started loving the music of Jonathan Richman. When we drove all day through the sequoias to see the big one, general sherman, the biggest living thing in the world, he said he didn’t care, that he’d rather sit in the van and sing along to “I, Jonathan” one more time. So we went to Venice Beach.

At first we strolled along the boardwalk looking at different stuff, eating ice cream, talking, laughing, the usual. Then, suddenly, there were the courts right in front of us. And you could just feel this kind of tension come over O., like the way a dog gets when he sees a cat or a squirrel and just stops and stares and you know something’s going to happen. The happy, easy feeling of strolling along a boardwalk in the sunshine was gone and it felt like we’d just entered another zone or something. And O. says oh man, oh man, there they are. And then suddenly his voice kind of gets lower and his body kind of slumps around the shoulders to indicate that he’s one badass killer dude, unfortunately with an ice cream cone in his hand and with his mom and little sister standing next to him, and he says, in this low voice, uh, I’ll be over there, and jerks his head towards the courts, and starts walking away using the new L.A. killer dude walk that he’s been practicing. Can I have your ice cream, O.? G. yells after him, which at this moment is for him like being shot in the back with an AK-47 but because he’s such a sweet badass dude, he slowly turns around and holds out his cone to her before heading towards the courts.

Naturally, the rest of us can’t follow him. We know this. So we go and sit far away from the courts, on a wooden bench, and we watch. We can barely see him, he’s about an inch tall, but we can see enough to know, sort of, what’s going on. First of all he goes and sits on these bleachers that they have set up between the main court and one of the three other lesser courts. He’s smart enough to know that he’s not going to get to play on the main court. There’s a full game happening there already and these guys are really fucking good, and much older than O. But on the court beside the main one there are some other guys playing three on three and these are the guys O.’s watching. We figure that he thinks he can get to sub in one of these games. But he just sits there, he doesn’t make a move. He’s waiting.

And it’s really hot outside and finally G. says she wants to go to the beach, so C. takes her and I stay on the bench reading and watching O. from time to time. He’s still not moving, not playing, not doing anything but watching from the sidelines. Then C. and G. come back from the beach and C. sits down on the bench to watch, and G. and I go back to the beach. We’re there for a while, splashing around, digging in the sand, collecting seashells. Eventually we go back to the bench to find out what’s going on. Nothing, says C. He’s still sitting there. And I think to myself, he’s not going to do it. Then, suddenly, we see O. get up and walk over to one of the guys playing three on three. He’s saying something and the other guy says something, and then O. goes back and sits down. Shit! I say, they’re not going to let him play. But O. doesn’t leave the bleachers. He just sits there. The only difference is that now he’s taken off his baseball cap.

Behind us is the spot where those guys lift weights and swing from metal hoops and stuff, Muscle Beach, and C. and G. and I turn to watch these guys for a few minutes. Then we turn back to look at O. and right then, he makes his move. He gets up off the bleachers, walks over to the same guy as before, they say a few things, and then the guy sits back down where O. was and O. starts to play! He’s playing. He’s playing basketball at the Venice Beach Basketball Courts in Los Angeles, California, U.S.A. His dream has come true.

And then he plays for what seems like forever, he plays for at least three hours, while the rest of us watch him in between doing beach things, totally in awe of the kid’s nerve and patience. He looks good out there on the court too, he’s younger but he’s just as good as some of the guys he’s playing with, and better than a few too. He’s the only white guy and he’s so white and with his shirt off and his long, skinny torso darting in and out, moving around, he looks like a ghost or a flash of lightning or something. Afterwards I offered to take a picture of him in front of the Venice Beach Courts sign and he said oh god, mom, no. Then G. asked him why he waited so long to ask the guy if he could play, what was he waiting for, Christmas? I don’t know, he said, smiling through all his sweat and whacking her over the head with his T-shirt, yeah, whatever. We kept walking, all of us silent as though we had just witnessed a miracle, and then O., forgetting that he was the top shit brother of the Boyz of Venice Beach, kind of arched his back, put his arms up in the air, sank to his knees right there on the asphalt and said oh man, this is the best day of my life!

See you in the photos, Mike.

X.

Dear Johnny,

Two weeks ago I got a phone call from my mother. She was calling from a phone booth across the street from my apartment and said that she’d taken a bus up from Provincetown. She had some cheques that one of her Canadian friends had written her and she needed me to cash them.

When I let her in, she handed me a copy of The Making of Kenneth Branagh’s Frankenstein as a gift. The pages were stuck together as if it had been found in a box in the garbage. “I guess it’s kind of stupid because it’s a book about a movie,” she said. “But it’s still Frankenstein, right?” She had a tiny book about insects for Arizona.

I hadn’t seen my mother in about four years. The last time I saw her was by accident, when I ran into her at a house party in Richmond, Virginia. She had a Jean Cocteau book with her. She had underlined practically the whole book.

“It used to be a unique thing to have a pet rat,” my mom started rambling as she fell down onto my couch. “But now every punk on the corner has a rat on their shoulder. It’s like it used to be that if you saw someone with a shaved head, you knew they were cool. That you could like go and talk to them. But then everyone started shaving their heads, so you never know what’s up.”

She acted like I was rich. “Where did you get that necklace?” she asked me, staring with awe at this gold chain around my neck that had a pendant that said Heather. During the day she wrote letters to people who lived all over the states. They all said things like, “I miss you. I was thinking of maybe taking a break and coming to see you.”

My dad met my mom when she was nineteen. She had run away from home. She was sitting in a park with a small duffel bag of clothes, just being a hippie. My dad was twenty years older than her. He was a tough guy and wanted to take care of her. She left when I was six and has been drifting ever since, sleeping here and there.

Now she acted all excited that she and Arizona and I were all together in my apartment, like this would be an ideal living arrangement. She started saying things to make us sound like a team: “Aren’t we just like in the Grapes of Wrath? Three generations under the same roof.” She told me that Andy Warhol’s mother came to live with him after he made it.

She heard from someone at a bar that welfare was easy to get here as long as you have an address. So she got me to look for a place for her last week.

When I was a kid, my mom used to wear leather jackets and leather pants and her hair was naturally black and way down her back. I used to think she was so wild looking. But last week, when we were walking down the street together, I thought she looked like a homeless person. She chewed on a toothbrush at the bus stop. It was warm outside and she was wearing this military coat with red stars stitched all over it. I knew she considered it her dress-up jacket.

The first room we looked at was small and dark. The walls had been painted years ago. The green had lost all its color. There were spiders in the sink. The bed was standing up against the wall. There was a hot plate. There was only one window. You could put a photograph on the wall. Really it could be any room, if you wanted to be optimistic.

“I could buy a second-hand typewriter and put it on the table. I’ll be just like George Orwell,” my mom said, turning to me.

I never see these rooming houses when I’m not with my mother. They’re invisible. Loose-leaf papers above the door handles announce that there are rooms for rent. My mother knows where they are. She knows where to find them. She knows where the food banks and coke dealers are a week after she moves to a city. We looked at four or five other rooms that day.

After the fifth room, we decided to get a drink. We went to an alcoholics’ bar, the kind where the windows to the outside are tinted, and it’s crowded even though it’s three o’clock in the afternoon. I bought her a pack of cigarettes. She asked the bartender if she could order a glass of arsenic.

“Look at that guy,” she said. There was this young guy with his hair just matting. He had striped pants and an undershirt. He was dressed like someone in Africa in cast-off North American clothes. He was just one day away from being a bum. But that day is a special place: you think you’ve gotten away with it. You think you’ve gotten away with just doing exactly what you please and feeling good. There’s a brief moment before cool things become depressing.

“Nick Cave always keeps a suitcase by the front door. Did you know that?” my mom said. She kept having to make these analogies for me so that I would think that everything was cool, so that I would still be impressed with her way of life.

Sometimes she would take us on trips when we were kids. We always stayed in motels on strangers’ credit cards. She said that we were like the Beatles because we made such a mess of the rooms we stayed in. She got me into black jackets, sunglasses, cigarette vending machines, and graffiti. She got me into thinking that poor people were cooler than rich people, that art and expression were the most important things in life, that it is enough to have personality, that personality is next to godliness.

“I should go and get my stuff at the bus station,” she said.

My mother saw the world. My sisters and I grew up, meanwhile, in little apartments in the poor areas of Montreal. She told me once a long time ago that she needed to be free to be an artist. I can’t imagine giving up Arizona because of the notebook of poems in my pocket.

My mother wasn’t going to take any of the rooms that we looked at. It was just a ritual. She was waiting for me to tell her she could move into my place permanently. She was carrying all her stuff, so she said she would just stay at the Brewery Mission. She said that there was a section just for women. She said she went a few days ago and the lady who worked there was very nice and the mission itself was clean. But don’t tell your father I’m staying there.

There was a small line of people shuffling into the door of the mission. They looked like immigrants from some very cold place where all anyone does is read poetry. The window was a one-way mirror. When I tried to look in, I could only see myself.

I bought this pair of leather boots at the Sally Ann today that are skinny and turn way up at the toes. They made me think of that Bob Dylan line, “Shakespeare, he’s in the alley with his pointed shoes and his bells.” I thought my mother would love them. I called the mission when I got home but they said she wasn’t staying there any more. Now the boots are sitting by the front door with all the other shoes, until I see her again.

Love,

Heather

Dear Paul:

Let me tell you where I have been. For ten months or so my health had been deteriorating rapidly. New symptoms appeared and never went away: I presumed that I had begun to age too quickly and that I should prepare myself for death.

I hadn’t been to a doctor since 1966 and I thought perhaps I was paying the price for too many late nights: I was urinating every hour, an indication, I assumed, of a collapsing prostate; my eyes were getting weaker, an indication of advancing blindness. My knees and elbows ached and often I was unable to pick up my feet when walking: symptoms of advancing arthritis, surely; and the icy tingling in my fingers and toes I presumed to be “pinched nerves.” I began dropping things: coins, keys, pens flew from my hands. And I was becoming angrier all the time: this was the most disconcerting of symptoms, perhaps because it didn’t feel like a symptom at all: it was a state of mind and I couldn’t escape it. I was continuously in a near-rage, and began to frighten people who had known me for years: I couldn’t laugh at a joke, I couldn’t make a joke. At night I could feel anger washing over me in waves. And I got angry at the anger, because I knew somewhere in my mind that there was no reason for it, and that made me even angrier.

I was depressed and in a fog: I seemed to be continuously hung over. I couldn’t sleep more than two hours at a time. I became afraid of meeting people; I couldn’t bear to make an appointment: the world became heavy and there seemed to be too many things to do. I was losing weight as well, for no reason that I could see (I presumed that an unspecified “wasting disease” was overtaking me). One day in the supermarket, when I could hardly walk because my feet were hurting so badly and my ears were ringing, a friend I hadn’t seen for a year came me up to me and congratulated me on how well I looked (so lithe, so svelte!): I could barely form words in my mouth. A short time after that I woke up in the morning and heard a voice in my head say: “Osborne, you have diabetes.” A simple declarative sentence.

Diabetes was merely a word to me then; I knew nothing more about it. But the directive seemed clear enough and I went down the hill to the clinic where I learned that indeed I was suffering from a condition of the blood brought on by a defect in my pancreas, in the “islets of Langerhans,” to be precise, and that its name was diabetes, a condition described (as I would later read) by a Greek physician in 150 BC as “a melting of the flesh into urine.” So it must have been my pancreas (or perhaps the islets) talking to me early that morning and now I try to include my organs in my thoughts whenever I can (an interesting exercise: try acknowledging your spleen sometime, or your liver, or your pituitary gland).

The doctor prescribed pills and I stopped eating sugar (for months I had been drinking root beer in cans, thinking that caffeine and sugar might get my energy up), and within days I could feel the symptoms leaving my body: the fog in my head lifted, the pressure in my eyes disappeared: I could feel my body beginning to work as it had long ago when I was healthy; the tingling in my fingers went away, and suddenly I could go for half a day without emptying my bladder. I realized that I had never known what health was: certainly I had been unable to remember it during the time of my sickness, which, as health came to me, I understood to have been about four years. Soon I was awash in normality: my eyesight improved and I had to get out an old pair of glasses because the new ones no longer worked. I could lift things, and my keys no longer fell out of my hands. I began walking long distances. My bowel movements became pleasant (I hadn’t even noticed how wretched they had become) and my mind became clear again, which was perhaps the greatest gift of all: I could feel myself returning to intellectual life (my writing projects had gradually stalled out: now I was discovering them again, patiently waiting for me in file folders).

The diagnosis was a gift of knowledge as well as health. Now I knew something of healing, and how ill health makes the world invisible. For a while the doctor who gave me my diagnosis seemed to me to be touched with genius. But when I began to experience turns of breathlessness he measured my blood pressure, which was too high, and prescribed another drug; my legs were hurting again and he prescribed a drug for that too. Now I was dizzy with drugs and I began to remember why I had stayed away from doctors for thirty-four years. I turned to the “literature,” a great sinkhole of medical bafflegab and self-help nonsense (a book in the public library warns diabetics not to smoke marijuana because it is “an illegal substance”), and began monitoring my own blood sugar. Eventually I discovered that the pill I was taking was precipitating episodes of low blood sugar, and the breathlessness that I was feeling was the result of an accompanying adrenaline rush: this was the cause of my high blood pressure. The solution was to cut the dose and change my diet. I was in control again.

The pain in my legs began to diminish, and eventually I started wearing tights under my trousers, to soothe the nerve endings in my skin: now I am walking without pain. These complications made me angry only in a mild way, because I no longer experience rage: instead I make my way into the world a step at a time, patiently assembling a regime. I pull on my tights in the morning and feel like a secret Elizabethan courtier. I am learning to come back into the world, to pick up the many things undone over the last year, and to begin to do them now.

–Stephen

Dear Sirs,

I would be interested in how to do pull out pattern books in woodwork shop on wood bending, wood turning and woodcraft on different things such as flowers patterns, leaves patterns, wooden bowl patters, wooden plate patterns, toys and toy parts, different animals all sizes.

And different birds all sizes even how to make a casket, some people calls them coffins, what ever toy and parts can be made out of wood, send your price list, if theres any books to be free, mark free on them, on the book.

Books on how to make axe handles, hammer handles, broom handles, and other different makes of handles, pick handles, mop handles, handles of all sizes, fork handles, and shovel handles, even farm plough handles, wagon poles, wagon shaves, wagon wheels, wagon wheel spokes.

These kind of books with pull out patterns is my favorite, books on how to make coffins, some people calls them caskets, and wood bending and turning is my best book that i want, would you know where i can get these books, an address would help nicely.

Sincerely,

ELDON C.
NEW BRUNSWICK
CANADA

Paul,

Ma soeur, Carol, et son mari, Denis, qui possèdent une propriété à la campagne, en Alberta, ont chaque été la désagréable surprise de trouver leur sous-sol inondé, et cela depuis les derniers dix-neuf ans. L’eau monte toujours d’environ un pouce touchant presque les pattes capitonnées de la fournaise, au risque de la faire exploser, en entraînant la maison avec elle. Ce qui le mettait dans une fureur bleue.

Chaque année, Denis développait une telle rage axée sur le problème, qu’il lui était impossible de se contrôler. Il faut que vous sachiez avant tout que Denis est un psychologue, donc une telle attitude était difficile à imaginer et à comprendre surtout. En somme, Denis allait se préparer à partir en guerre.

Carol et Denis en avaient marre de vivre en ville, et pour reprendre leur tranquillité d’esprit, ils se sont offerts un terrain d’à peu près 60 acres. Leur joie était abondante à l’idée d’élever les enfants et de respirer un air pur, loin de l’étouffement de la grande ville. – «Une paix et un silence divins – disait-il». Il était toujours en train de raconter avec extase les découvertes qu’il faisait chaque jour aux alentours de sa propriété. Je me rappelle son ahurissement d’avoir trouvé un lac aux eaux presque huileuses et d’un vert bleuâtre d’une mer docile comme celle de la Méditerranée et en plus être assez large pour pouvoir faire de belles randonnées nonchalantes en canot. Son premier mot à cette vue, m’a-t-il dit, fut : «Ça c’est bien le Canada».

Il avait bien vu juste car ce lac «canadien» appartenait à une troupe, non, plutôt toute une colonie de castors.

Je fais une pause ici pour éclaircir un point très important et c’est celui du roman-fleuve de mon beau-frère et de ces castors, avait atteint un apogée légendaire dans notre famille. Avant ma dernière visite, on entendait comme ça des rumeurs de-ci, de-là avec des faits saillants ou banals ou imaginaires, etc. Mais toutefois, ce soir-là Denis était d’une colère noire et brûlait d’envie de me raconter toute son histoire de A jusqu’à Z, c’est à dire la vraie, l’entière, non abrégée, l’unique histoire et bien moi, je me suis dit, pourquoi pas, aprés tout, nous connaîtrons enfin ce qui c’est vraiment passé.

Le premier castor que Denis a vu avait l’air sinistre dans sa mort. Toutefois, Denis n’a pas compté sur la famille qui défilait un aprés l’autre à la file Indienne sur une eau calme et chatoyante à moitié couverte sous un crépuscule enchanteur.

Cette scène, rappela à Denis l’histoire du fameux Indien, Grey Owl (qui en réalité était un Britannique), lorsqu’il avait le don de se lier avec les animaux de la prairie sauvage. En imitant fièrement, Grey Owl, Denis a d’abord commencé à s’asseoir au bord du lac, sans bouger d’un poil, envoûté par ce spectacle. Peu à peu les castors, habitués à sa présence, venaient presque jusqu’à lui. Il regardait leurs petits yeux noirs et leurs dents jaunies. Il était en extase devant tant de splendeur et pensait dans le plus profond de lui-même que nul canadien ne pouvait admirer un castor sans sentir son torse se gonfler de fierté et d’admiration. Après tout, notre pays a été littéralement bâti sur le dos des ces pauvres castors.

«J’allais les voir tous les jours» me confia Denis «Puis l’eau a commencé à envahir mon sous-sol»

«Je commençais à mettre les points sur les i.» Dit-il en signe de compter, il leva son pouce droit. Notre maison est au bon milieu d’un champ aplati, pourtant il y avait un lac dessus.» Puis son index se leva. «Le lac paraissait prendre de l’ampleur et pourtant on n’a pas eu une seule goutte de pluie». En dernier il montra son médius. «Et les castors avaient l’air de doubler leur population à vu d’œil.»

Là, je fais une autre pause, car il est absolument impératif que vous ayez, tout de même, une petite idée sur les castors et leurs caractéristiques. Bon, alors :

1) – Un castor peut vous abattre un peuplier dont le tronc aurait la même épaisseur que le manche d’une hache en un coup de dent.

2) – Les castors sont des bourreaux de travail : Vous détruisez leur barrage dans la soirée et à la lueur du jour vous en trouverez un autre tout neuf et beau prêt à vous faire un pied-de-nez,

3) – Les castors sont intelligents.

4) – Les castors sont territoriaux.

5) – Les castors ont une attitude héréditaire qui s’exprime ainsi : «les premiers arrivés, les premiers servis»

Denis était plein de compassion et surtout c’était un homme très sensible et lorsque sa fille, Kerri, lui demanda de ne faire aucun mal à ces pauvres bêtes, il en est venu à la conclusion qu’il fallait trouver un moyen de s’en débarrasser sans offenser qui que ce soit.

Il avait lu quelque part que les boules de Naphtaline faisaient horreur aux castors. Il en a acheté un gros sac et après avoir détruit leur barrage, il en a éparpillé de partout sur la rive. Malheureusement, ce truc n’a pas tellement marché, car «Ils sont venus!, ils ont vu! et ils ont reconstruit!».

«Bon, alors, j’ai pensé à ce qu’un copain m’a dit sur l’efficacité d’un long tuyau de plastique. Il suffit de faite un trou dans le barrage et d’y enfourcher le tuyau, semblable à un chirurgien qui essayerait de vidanger une plaie. L’eau passe à travers le barrage et voilà! Il est inondé. Enfin ça, c’est la théorie.» Conclua-t-il.

«Pas marché, eh!» Ai-je dit.

D’un air abattu, il soupira avant de répondre. «Les castors ont construit une jolie petite péninsule de boue autour du tuyau et ils l’ont bloqué.»

Denis finit par appeler «à l’aide» et le Service de la patrouille des castors du comté du coin est venu mettre un piège. Bon, je dois vous dire qu’un «piège» c’est une sorte de mors en métal avec une suspension à ressort, installé ouvert dans l’eau et qui se referme sur l’animal aussitôt qu’il passe pardessus. Le premier piège a effectivement tué un castor. Mais au fond le Service de la patrouille des castors ne peut pas se permettre de mettre une douzaine, ou même une quinzaine de ces pièges, car en fin de compte qu’adviendra-t-il de leur «job» si les castors disparaissaient.

En moins de 24 heures, un autre piège fut posé dans la crique mais celui-ci disparu comme par magie. Ce que les castors avaient fait c’était de reconstruire un nouveau barrage (pour remplacer celui que Denis avait saccagé auparavant) par-dessus le piège. Assez pour avoir donner une peur bleue à Denis qui l’avait trouvé grand ouvert prêt à se refermer, au moindre geste futile, sur la jambe ou le bras ou toute autre partie du corps. Bon alors, adieu le symbole du Canada et tout le tra la la. C’est la guerre aux castors.

Quoique l’on dise, les Canadiens sont plutôt plaisants et bien dociles, même avec toute l’influence néfaste des nos voisins du sud, nous restons fidèles à la vision presque idéale de nos Pères de la Confédération, alors vous vous imaginez ma surprise de voir une carabine .22 dans les mains de Denis. La psychologie, c’est drôle des fois, vous trouvez pas? Un psychologue qui cherche à tuer des castors, c’est vraiment à s’en mordre les doigts.

Mais plus l’histoire se rallongeait et que les faits prenaient des détails saillants et alarmants plus je commençais à avoir pitié des ces pauvres bêtes, au fond, qui protégeaient leur territoire et leur droit national acquis.

Malheureusement Denis et sa famille, surtout Kerri qui l’empêchait au début de lever le petit doigt envers ces animaux adorables – «Papa, tu ne vas pas tuer ces adorables créatures, non? espèce d’Attila le Hun, que tu es!» – maintenant le poussait à les massacrer de droite et de gauche, car ramasser des boîtes et boîtes du sous-sol, moisies et trempées peuvent changer une brebis en loup.

Eh! Bien, le problème n’est pas vraiment résolu, loin de là, car la solution serait de plier bagages et mettre les voiles au retour au bercail tranquille, paisible et routinier de la ville. Seulement voilà, Denis n’en avait pas fini avec les castors et chaque jour accoutré comme «Elmer Fudd» vous connaissez?, il se dirige vers la crique et ramasse chaque brindille qui traine dans l’eau et qui pourrait par chance arrêter une des centaines de branches que les castors lancent pour trouver un endroit où construire ces infâmes mais extraordinaires et charmants barrages de «castors».

Je dois vous dire finalement que j’ai été immensément heureux d’avoir pu changer de place avec Denis en lui donnant la thérapie dont il semblait avoir le plus grand besoin et c’était celui de me raconter toute cette fantastique série d’événements. De temps en temps, la nuit, je rêve que le téléphone sonne et qu’un castor me donne des nouvelles de ma sœur, ma niéce et de Denis, surtout.

Bruce.

Dear Paul,

My brother-in-law, Dennis, has a heads-up, skeptical nature – some might call it paranoia – that I’ve come to tolerate and even respect. But I wasn’t prepared for what he said to me when I visited him and my sister, Carol, last August:

“I think the beavers are trying to do me in.”

Every single summer for the past nineteen years, the basement of Dennis and Carol’s home in the Alberta countryside has flooded. Always the water laps up to within about a thumbswidth of the top of the furnace-pad, threatening to cause an electrical short, leaving them without power, or worse.

And every year Dennis develops a more sharply focussed rage at the source of the problem. I should tell you that he is a psychologist in private practice. Rage is not in his nature. Rage isn’t rational, and it isn’t constructive – unless you happen to be fighting a war.

Dennis and Carol moved to their acre and a half to escape the frustrations and horrible mall culture of the city. To raise their kids in peace, in nature. And at first it looked like peace is what they’d found. I can remember how thrilled Dennis was to discover, on his first walk around the property, a lake – still and blue and big enough to canoe on. He actually said, “It doesn’t get much more Canadian than this.”

He was wrong. It did get more Canadian. The lake was home to beavers.

I should say at this point that the saga of my brother-in-law and the beavers has reached mythic status in our family. But until my last visit, most of us had only heard bits and pieces of it. For some reason, on this particular night, Dennis was burning to tell the whole thing. My job was to listen.

The first beaver Dennis spotted was – ominously – dead. But soon he began to see the extended family, arrowing in across the water, “just as the day was coming to twilight.”

The scene put Dennis in mind of Grey Owl, the professional Indian (who was really an Englishman), bonding with the animals in the prairie wilderness. In full Grey Owl mode, Dennis started sitting by the lake, perfectly still, giving off good vibes, until the beavers got used to him, or forgot about him, and came near. He watched their reflections in the lake. He looked at their dark eyes and stained yellow teeth from “as close as you are to me now.” He felt a little bit of awe. No thoughtful Canadian can contemplate a beaver without thinking about its place in the chain of our colonial history: this country was literally built on the beaver’s back.

“I was out there admiring them day after day,” Dennis said. “Then the water started coming into my basement.

“I began connecting the dots.” He hitched out a thumb. “Our house was in the middle of a flat field, yet there was a lake on it.” Index finger. “The lake appeared to be getting bigger, yet it hadn’t rained.” Middle finger. “The beaver population seemed to be growing.”

Sorry: I need to tell you a few things about beavers.

- A beaver can take down a poplar as thick as an ax-handle in one bite.

- Beavers are workaholics: You can destroy their dam in the evening and a new one will be there to greet you in the morning.

- Beavers are smart.

- Beavers are territorial.

- Beavers have a vestigial memory that they were here first.

Because he is a sensitive man, and because his daughter, Kerri, had made it clear no beavers were to be harmed in the making of this particular movie, Dennis decided he had to develop a way to deal with the problem that everybody could live with.

He’d read somewhere that beavers were repelled by mothballs, so he bought a big bag of them and he went to the creek. After he’d broken down the beavers’ dam, he scattered the mothballs liberally on the bank. The beavers were undeterred. They showed up for work as usual and built their dam back up. There were actually footprints on the mothballs where the beavers had trudged over them.

“So I bought a length of plastic tubing. This is something a friend who’s an animal-rights person had suggested. It’s humane and it’s supposed to be effective. You punch a hole in the dam and shove the tube in, the way a surgeon puts a drain in a wound. The water runs right through the dam. Or that’s the theory.”

“Didn’t work?” I said.

He shook his head. “The beavers built a little peninsula of mud around the pipe. They plugged it.”

Dennis called up the county for advice. It turned out the county had a beaver patrol department, and they sent a guy out with a trap.

A beaver trap is a sort of spring-loaded metal jaw that sits, cocked and open, in the predicted path of the beaver, and snaps shut as the animal swims through. The first trap the guy laid actually did catch a beaver. But it quickly became clear that the county’s approach to beaver control was laid-back at best. “They treat beavers as a sustainable resource,” Dennis said. “They never want to kill them all, because that would put them out of work. So they take a beaver here and a beaver there and then pat themselves on the back.” In truth, it’s doubtful the beaver-patrol guy could have caught many more beavers if he’d tried, because the beavers very quickly learned the ropes.

Less than twenty-four hours after the beaver-patrol guy laid his second trap, Dennis went down to the creek. The trap was gone. In its place was a fresh new dam. Dennis waded into the water and started breaking it up, “and then my shovel hit something metal.” There was the trap, gleaming between the poplar branches. The beavers had simply incorporated it into their project. Dennis dug the trap out and flung it toward the creek bank. Just as it left his fingers – “bang!” – it snapped shut. A trap designed to snap the neck of a beaver could certainly break the arm of a man; this one almost had. The implications sank in. Not only had they built the dam around the trap, they hadn’t even sprung it. “That,” said Dennis, “is when I began to get scared.”

In his counselling work, Dennis often uses stories he hears as therapeutic aids, and the tale of man against beaver – internecine, interspecies stubbornness in the Canadian North (involving the national symbol, no less) – ought to be ripe with usable metaphors. But Dennis refuses to see the symbolism. This thing is too personal.

Dennis owns a gun – a .22 rifle. Perhaps it was appropriate, even necessary, to have a gun on the farm where he grew up, but it seemed stupid and un-Canadian to own one in the city. He hadn’t used it in ages. As he walked to the creek, it felt foreign in his hands.

He tried to psych himself up for the job. “You can do this,” he said to himself. “Be the man. Be the hunter.” From a distance, he could see a beaver dutifully working on a new dam. As he walked closer, levelling the gun at the beaver, “I thought of that story of the soldier in Nazi Germany, who said, ‘The hardest to kill was the first one. After that, the hardest to kill were the next 10. After that, the hardest to kill were the next 100.’”

I asked Dennis how Kerri had responded when she learned her father had put a bullet in a beaver. “She was in tears,” he said. “She thought I was Attila the Hun,” They named the creek Kerri Creek, after their daughter’s Dian-Fossey-like defense of the animals.

Dennis stepped up his patrols after that. Rain or shine he’d be out there in his green down vest and duckboots and rifle, mosquitoes eating him alive. The only thing missing from the picture was the Elmer Fudd cap. Over time, he wore a visible path through the woods to the creek.

People who study beavers find it remarkable that they almost always manage to cut down trees within falling distance of water, since they have such poor eyesight. “They’re looking up from ground level – it’s amazing they’re that accurate,” Dennis said. “If the whole tree doesn’t fall in, at least part of it does. They never cut down trees anywhere else. Okay? Remember that when I tell you that I’m on my way to the creek, and there in the middle of the trail – nowhere near the water – three fallen trees have come down over the path.” Not onto the path, but snarled in the branches and hanging precariously, like traps set by the Viet Cong.

At this point you may be feeling a surge of sympathy for the beavers. I confess that as Dennis reached this point in the story, I was. But I also know I’d feel differently if it were my home that were threatened.

Every year, the do-no-harm position adopted by Carol and Kerri and her sister Kathleen softens. Carrying soggy boxes out of the basement and wrestling with a pump compressor will do that to you. “With Kerri, it used to be, ‘Dad, do you have no heart?’” Dennis said. “Now it’s, ‘Dad, did you kill the damn beaver yet?’ Over time, they all got converted, every one of them.”

To his credit, Dennis has himself come full-circle on the issue of non-violence. His current system of beaver management is one of early intervention. Twice a day, he walks the creek. “A beaver will float a stick down the river and then come back later and see if it’s got stuck anywhere. If it has, that’s a good place to start building. So any twig that looks like it’s been sitting there more than an hour, I scoop up.

“The whole key is to move fast. If you knock a beaver dam out within twenty-four hours, they’ll fight for that spot for a day or two, and then they’ll move away, downriver. But if you let them get a beachhead, they’ll fight you for months.”

I think it was good therapy for Dennis to talk about this. I know it was good therapy to hear it. But I must admit that, since arriving back home in Vancouver, I’ve been a little worried for the guy. As long as he and my sister live on that acreage, they will have no rest. I keep half-waiting for Dennis to tell me the beavers have been tapping his phone.

All the best,

Bruce.

Dear Dad,

So Mom got married yesterday. It was in a park, amid some lurid autumn trees. The ceremony was performed with the river and the mountains in the background, and the whole affair was small, and nice, and stress-free. Unforced.

For the week leading up to it I was in a lousy mood. I was having trouble being any good at anything, and it all seemed glum. I couldn’t be bothered to prepare for the wedding (usually, if an event is coming up, with family or people I haven’t seen in a while, I try to gather up some material beforehand: bits of biography for the what’ve-you-been-up-tos, jokes, etc., but at Mom’s wedding I might as well have walked in, in a rented tuxedo, by mistake). Waking up yesterday I did something that happens now and again when things just aren’t going well: I opened my eyes and said, “Not this again.”

Of course it had something to do with seeing my brother. We hadn’t spoken since the disaster last December, the unpleasantness at a family dinner at a Chinese restaurant. I’d been in the midst of some serious money trouble, and I spent two hours unloading on a dumbstruck table of relatives – upstanding businesspeople all – my opinion that everything they liked was garbage, and generally being a real charmer. I didn’t know how bad it was until the next morning, when my brother called with accusations and threats, which you remember bloomed into the row that cancelled Christmas. That it happened stings; the pure gracelessness with which I dealt with it stings more.

On the way to the wedding, I rode beside my brother in the back seat of our uncle’s ludicrous German lifestyle signifier, with a thrumming hangover, feeling conspicuously dateless, sweating in a rented tuxedo, talking too much. Somewhere near the Oak Street bridge I began sharing my thoughts on why I don’t like weddings. I’m all for people declaring official partnership, in the eyes of the law or whatever, but this deal where the validity of the union is measured by the lavishness of the party and the carats of the diamond and the vintage of the champagne is insane. Whenever I participate in a wedding I’m usually deathly afraid of fucking up someone’s big day; I realized, almost too late, that one pretty good way to do that would be to drone on and on about the wedding industry.

It was warm and threatening rain all day, and so humid. Perfect weather for maximum hothouse effect in a polyblend tux. I wandered about beforehand, sweating, feeling vaguely ridiculous, trying to remember the names of old neighbours as they pumped my hand. Grinning people asked what was going on with me, and I kept drawing a blank. I had a courteous strategy discussion with dear brother on guest arrangement, speech timing, and limousine doors.

The dapper groom, sprightly at sixty-five, was ready to go. I like him, despite the accent (which, I believe, has gotten a little stronger each year since he arrived as a young man from England), and his habit of taking half an hour to tell stories really only deserving a minute or two.

When the limo arrived, and the first round of pictures was complete, we escorted Mom to her place. The guests were arranged, and we assembled in a row on the riverbank. It seemed like everyone there was either videotaping or photographing. Whenever I see these sort of pictures after the fact, I can remember smiling, trying to look genuinely happy to be there, but I’m always wearing this expression of sort of bemused disappointment. Through the ceremony I stood, not knowing where to let my eyes fall, shifting weight from foot to foot, wondering if I should clasp my hands in front of my genitals or behind my back.

And then I don’t know where it came from, but something lurched inside me, my head cleared, and I stopped thinking about myself.

I looked at all the people facing us, sort of a map of my early life – grinning, sniffling – and I had one of those grainy, super-8, life flashing before your eyes movies scroll by as I watched Mom, who looked so happy, get married for a second time. I saw her mother, making Mom pay her entire life for being conceived out of wedlock, that cruel, bitter old grandmother of mine who called her cheap and common and made her raise her sisters and brother, and who seemed to be looming everywhere in her life until she died; I saw the tall, dorky, uncertain teenager who married the first person she slept with (sorry Dad), and found herself with two demanding boys and a volatile husband with a chip on his shoulder (sorry Dad) in her early twenties; I thought of the fights you used to have that seemed to go on forever, both of you stressed out from work and the mortgage and trying to live the life you thought you were supposed to live.

The ceremony was over and hands were being shaken and I was hugging Mom, and we were looking at each other and crying. My mother, almost sixty years old, having what I was too dense to recognize until that moment: a day that was just for her.

Traffic was held back with a huge ribbon of white chiffon as we proceeded along the road to the reception. Everyone was blowing bubbles – rice is bad for the birds, I learned – and laughing or dealing with snotty tears. The dapper groom’s granddaughters, three little fountains of curly hair in matching dresses, were darting around with flower baskets. I felt oddly unselfconscious and giddy.

Later on we had an evening like the ones I remember best from childhood, with aunts and uncles and cousins getting loud and telling jokes and singing. The guitars even came out, and Mom’s brother played some of the Bob Dylan and Van Morrison songs he used to. At one point toward the end of the evening I was full of scotch and sort of aimlessly attempting a Foo Fighters song on a guitar. I looked up and saw my brother, playing air drums.

Love,

Dean

Dear Scott,

Your doppelganger lives here, in South London. I passed him on Acre Lane the other day. He’s black – it’s Brixton, after all, which has the highest concentration of West Indians in the city – but the similarities were so incredibly strong, and just plain weird, that I put down my groceries and leaned up against the side of the building to watch him pass. He walked the same way you do. Not even a walk, he jaunted with the same wide, zig-zagging steps. And his hair was the same colour of absolutely unnatural yellow, and it was the funniest thing I have seen since coming here, topping the time a woman on a subway platform told me about the pleasures of Beef and Onion flavoured crisps in breathless detail, surpassing the moment I noticed Brut running down my leg and realized a cylinder of underarm spray-on deodorant had exploded in my packsack. Even funnier than that.

After the London-you passed I stayed up against the brick wall, watching him make his way towards the clock tower, missing the Canadian-you a little, missing familiarity. This all happened on the sidewalk outside Tesco, the supermarket, along the stretch of Acre Lane where the police have put up a sandwich board with an appeal on it for witnesses of a recent beating to come forward. If you want an exact locale, it happened about four steps from that sign, outside Tesco, inside the borough of Lambeth, the area called Brixton, south of the Thames, north of the McDonald’s on the corner, which is across from the KFC, down the street from Cold Harbour Lane where the riots took place years ago, and less than a kilometre from the estate housing, or Crack Central as my housemate Jo calls it. “The police don’t even go in there. Neither should you,” she said on my second day.

Two weeks ago, on my way to take the train to school, a girl walked up to me outside the Brixton tube station. Her mascara was running; she had been crying for a while. She was dressed in a private-school uniform and told me through her hiccups and tears that she was a long way from home. “I’m really sorry,” I said and walked on. She followed and stopped me again, this time at the lip of the station, where the raindrops falling from the overhang were the fattest. Her arm was on my jean jacket, which was a new sensation. I had never been touched in Toronto by someone panhandling. This was an actual, sincere touch. It was a schoolgirl trapped miles from her home. “Where do you need to get to?” I asked her. “Staines,” she said. I had no idea where Staines was, but the way she said it made it sound wicked – a place where the mothers stood cross-armed by the windows until their private-school daughters came through the gate. She shivered and looked expectant, so I acted. I walked her to the Brixton bus stop, gave her a pound coin, and stood beside her, hands in my pockets, trying to look sturdy. We waited. After ten minutes of watching double-deckers pull up and pull away, she looked at me, turned, and walked off without a word.

My London self – when I finally meet him – will not be taken advantage of so easily, or if he does he won’t stand there waiting for ten minutes at the bus stop. But my UK version is proving to be a little harder to find than yours was. Parts of the Toronto me – parts I was hoping to shrug off – have remained. The same laundry makes the same pile in the south-east corner of my room. I still look at people’s faces on escalators for a second too long, lurch around with my eggplant-coloured packsack without any sort of grace. I haven’t yet become what my roommate back home called an otter – one of those sleek urbanites who move through the city with ease, as if passing through warm liquid. They’re the ones who seem slow and graceful but are always covering ground; who cross streets without looking back and forth; who know how to fold a newspaper crisply in the middle of a packed subway car. These are people so sleek that the everyday garbage of the city slides off them. My pockets are full of receipts and Fruit and Nut wrappers. I am the furthest thing from an otter right now; I am not even a lemur.

After all my pre-departure talk of health and the purchase of the How to Live on 99 Cents a Day cookbook, I’ve embraced the opposite: a fondness for British candy. I now love Lucozade, an orange energy drink that comes in a dildonic bottle with a graphic of Lara Croft on the side, as well as the UK Mars bar, which is cheap, 35p, and distinctly creamier than the North American version, as if the makers mined the chocolate from a secret place closer to the source. It’s easy to get attached to chocolate bars here. Most have beautiful, visual names that conjure up pleasant things, like Wispa (a breath on the back of your ear) or Yorkie (that friend who saved your life in high school). Each has a different consistency; each one falls apart differently in your hands. If you break a UK Mars bar in half, the caramel twists out into tiny strings. There’s no clean way to do it. But after six weeks here, I don’t find myself breaking many chocolate bars in two.

Since our first meeting, the private-school girl has staked out her own ground on the stretch of pavement on the Brixton High Street between the newsstand where I buy my chocolate and the Foot Locker. She walks in a slow circle and sometimes leans up against the BT telephone box when commuters start pouring out of the station. I see her almost every week, same tears, same uniform. She even does her mascara so it runs down her face in those same dramatic channels.

Miss you tonnes,

Craig

Dear Heather,

I was feeling kind of blue and isolated in Greensboro, even though it had been almost a year since I moved down here from Toronto to be with my husband. In a desperate attempt to help me, he sat me down at the registrar’s office of Guilford Technological Community College on his lunch break and told me to pick out some continuing education classes. He’d say, “Do you want to do this one? Well?” And I’d say, “I don’t know.” It was that bad.

Could I really sew? Did I want to learn finances? Did I still hate computers? Then, under the music section, there was a course called “The History of the Rolling Stones.” I couldn’t believe it! Usually, the closest thing a school would offer would be the history of jazz, something like that. I couldn’t believe it was the Stones being offered and not the Beatles. I had those kinds of feelings. I went home and marked up my calendar. For the other courses, I used stars and circles, but for the Stones class I used hearts. The Stones’ “Hot Rocks” album was the first album I ever bought. I was in grade nine. I got the money off my mom. I bought it at one of those strip mall places. I remember I didn’t like it that much the first few times I listened to it and then I loved it. I don’t know how that happens.

When the Stones came to Toronto at the Dome for the Steel Wheels tour, I called up right at 10 o’clock on a Saturday morning and got four tickets. I got pretty good seats. I took my friend Mary and two of my younger brothers to “educate” them. My uncle gave us a lift down to the concert. He had gotten free tickets way up in the bleachers and was trying to emotionally blackmail me for my tickets and there was just no way. My brothers and my friend and I had McDonalds before the Stones came on. I remember stuffing the french fries into a smile. When the Stones came on, we stood on our chairs and I danced and shook my brothers from time to time. I got my period and leaked the whole time through the back of my jeans but I covered it with my lumber jacket and no one ever found out.

Who was going to show up at this Rolling Stones class? It’s been a challenge in this town to find women my age (late twenties) with no kids. My husband loves the Stones too but he wasn’t too into the idea of paying to hear about them. Going to the first class, I had that pre-concert feeling. The teacher, Rob Cassell, was in a business suit and had a briefcase and he shook my hand. He said, “I have some bad news and some good news. The bad news is the class has been cancelled because there weren’t enough people and I think last time I did this class the college got some morality complaints, I don’t know. The good news is I’m going to hold it anyway in my office and you will get your money back and it will be free.”

Slowly the rest of the students piled in. They were all over forty. Three men – Mike, Bob and Scott – and a woman named Robyn. Robyn was great. She handed out big Stones tongue stickers to us right away. She even reminded me of a female version of Mick Jagger, with the layered hair and big red lips. But is this something you can say to a woman? Who were the men? It turned out that Mike leases out the storage space that my husband rents for his band studio. Bob works for one of the banks in town. All I know about Scott is that he lived for a year in Argentina in the sixties, and that’s where he heard a lot of rock music as it was coming out.

After about half an hour, we all drove over to Rob’s office on the fifth floor of an office building, which is where we still have our classes. He is a mortgage broker with baseball pictures all over the walls and he lectures us about the Stones in his leather chair behind a big wooden desk. He reads typed pages out in a very animated way. And at the end of a section, he asks us the same question, “Any questions or comments?” It’s all very familiar by now and it feels like home. I convinced my husband to come to class and he got his bandmates to come and it’s a really good time.

We’ve been going through the Stones’ history year by year for two months, and we’re only at 1969. My favourite parts are always the details, the little things. Learning that the band photo on Aftermath was achieved by smearing vaseline on the lens filter and that Aftermath was originally supposed to be called, “Could You Walk on the Water?” but that was too much for the record company. Apparently, the pool where Brian Jones died was stripped and the tiles are being sold individually to the highest bidder on eBay.

Rob went on a Rolling Stones tour in England last summer and he brought to class an album full of photos he took, including: the railway station where Mick and Keith ran into each other for the first time and bonded over the albums Mick was carrying, Brian Jones’s grave, the new Mick Jagger Center with the words “Mick Jagger Center” in bold pink and black letters taking up a third of the building, the Marquee club where the band played, Olympic Studios where they recorded “Beggar’s Banquet” and “Let It Bleed” and various houses where the band members lived at different times. The photos of Brian Jones’s house where he died all have this little white square in the top left part that none of Rob’s other photos have. We decided it is Brian’s ghost.

Last week, we had a pre-election and we all threw our votes into an empty trashcan. It was pretty close. One vote for Nader, four votes for Gore and four votes for Bush. How can a Rolling Stones fan vote for Bush? someone asked. The Stones cut across the entire spectrum, Rob assured us.

Rob has collected a lot of bootlegs over the years. For one class, he brought in the Stones doing the London pop TV show “Ready Steady Go”. In the middle of the show there was a segment with the boys doing a pantomime version of Sonny & Cher’s “I Got You Babe” with the host of the show. Keith pretended to play the tuba and made funny faces while Bill and Charlie slow-danced together. It was hilarious.

When I look around that room where we meet, I’m both very present and very transported. Scott knows the answer to every question. Bob shows up even though his neck is in a brace. Bob and Scott actually take notes. Mike’s been having weird amnesia spells lately where he doesn’t know where he is and we hope he’ll be all right. Scott brings his wife Brenda now and they’ve been married twenty-five years and she bakes us brownies. Rob is going through a long drawn-out divorce which he always shakes his head and smiles about. Every time we see Mick Jagger on video, Robyn belts out, “I’m sorry but Mick Jagger can’t dance, he’s got NO rhythm.” And I like the song, “I Am Waiting.” Somehow I completely missed that song before this class.

Love,
Golda

Dear Friend Conners,

My Friend Conners is the way my Dear Son Donald Ross spoke of you when he wrote me the last letter he ever will write to me, said letter being dated “somewhere in France Aug 30th.” He was killed Sept 2nd, I believe the day you were wounded. You know I do not know what your name is but believe Donald mentioned it in his letter but I do not want to read the letter just now if I do I shall not be able to finish this letter to you. I am very sorry to know you are wounded then again if not dangerously so I am glad as you will be safe for awhile at least and now I am going to cry out a mother’s sore heart to you for some little news of my son’s death or at least something about his last days or hours on earth.

Ah if you only knew how I want to hear something about him you see he wrote me the Friday before he was killed and he said like this – my old friend Conners is Sargent and I am going in his company so do not be surprised if I get a stripe myself that is if I am lucky enough to stay here long enough to get one. And as I have nothing except the cable and a letter from a Chaplain by the name of Jackson who put another man’s name and number in the letter he wrote about my boy’s death so you see it had very little interest for me. So I just made up my mind I would appeal to you for news. Perhaps you can give me some details and if not get into connection with some of the boys who were near him when he fell and also try and have his little personal effects sent to me they are as nothing to anyone else but ah how precious they would be to me his Mother anything touched by his dear hands.

Ah Connors may you never have that longing to see anyone that I have to see my son for I am so lonely for him and have been waiting for so long and now ah now I must wait all in vain and I loved him so. Please do all you can in this for me and I shall give you a Mother’s blessing.

We are holding a Red Cross concert hear Monday night Oct. 28 and Kate went down to see if Frank Mallory would sing for us. Our Minister Rev. Le Bonnie got your address from Paddy Gale so I will get it from Mr. Bessner tomorrow and send this off to you hoping and praying that you will be able to write me some news any little thing about him even the fact that you spoke with him and how he looked etc. etc. would be a great source of comfort to me.

Now I will close and I do hope this awful long selfish letter will not tire you too much and that you will try to send me some little news.

Hoping this finds you as comfortable as can be and trusting you to do what you can for a poor lonesome mother. I will close with best wishes.

Mrs. Hugh Ross
Grafton Ontario Canada