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My Christmas Eve “Alone”

 By Erwin Coombs

Courtesy: Creative Commons

Years before I became a teacher, I found myself in the sad position of having a four-year BA and being in the middle of a recession. The recession was the economy. On a personal level, I had a pretty good depression going. Not being able to get into a Faculty of Education and not being able to find a decent job, this newly married fellow was forced to take the only job he could find as a security guard.

Now I don’t mean to disparage security guards. They have a nasty job with a nastier pay. But you’ve seen these people. They are usually on the cusp of what we might term the unemployable. When I say cusp, I mean they are leading the parade of that group. And it’s not their fault. Many are new immigrants whose education credentials have not been recognised. Or they are retired men who cannot stand to watch their lives fritter away at home so come to malls and office lobbies to wear a uniform and do the same. And then there are young people, as I was, who are caught in hard times and have no other choice.

After a couple of humiliating jobs waiting tables in chain restaurants where I would remarkably come home with less money than what I would take to my shift, I jumped at the offering of a job as a security guard. The next time you’re in a chain restaurant, I want you to look kindly on those employees too. They are usually bright and assigned the all-important tasks of making sure the salad bar is inviting. And while you’re in there take a closer look at the salad bar. It is old and crusty and sprayed with oil to make it look shiny. But we had to make it look less toxic. Any idea how few employees eat that salad? Lots and lots.

Okay, when I say jumped at the job, that might be an overstatement. One doesn’t jump at that sort of employment. One stumbles, slithers or falls into it. But here I was offered a job at $5.75 an hour!! It was an olive branch. That very phrase has a biblical origin, apparently. But there was nothing biblical or God giving in a job like that for those wages. Don’t get me wrong. I was raised in a white trash upbringing where one didn’t expect anything necessarily good. Instead, one only hoped very hard that nothing too bad would happen that day that might lead to a poor night’s sleep — such as the arrest of a family member, an eviction from your apartment, or the like. As a survivor of this sort of upbringing, the prospect of a job didn’t seem that bad. What, after all, was I going to do with a specialization in English Lit. and a major in history? Apparently, I was going to guard office buildings in the wee small hours of the morning.

But while that might seem a sad conclusion to years of study, there were some perks. Imagine, for example, the sheer utility of having to wear a tie that clips on! Think of the minutes, and in the totality of a year, the hours saved not having to struggle with said tie. Pop it on and you’re ready to do whatever it is that fellows with clip on ties do. Oh yeah, that would be security work. The assumption being giving workers like me, those ties in the event of an altercation, you wouldn’t be choked with that tie.

When you are making $5.75 an hour, and you are brandishing what has appeared to be a useless university degree over your head, what’s going to happen if an altercation does occur? Let me tell you, you are going to, to put it politely, not intervene. There was no chance of my tie ever being touched by anyone except my sad, trembling hands before a sad, trembling shift at wherever they put me.

And for my second shift of what was to be my “permanent placement” I was assigned to a tall office tower in downtown Toronto. It was a plumb job, high end lawyers, businesses that made obscene amounts of money doing God knows what God knows where. And they had entrusted me to keep it safe throughout the long dark winter nights. Was I honoured? No, I wasn’t honoured. I only felt deflated. And to make matters worse, my first shift was on Christmas Eve, the graveyard shift, from nine p.m. to nine a.m. Christmas morning. Envisage if you will a bleaker prospect. Here I am, a young man, head full of ideas (granted, not his own) and lines of poetry and hope for the futures of his world and the world in general, newly married and, yes, making minimum wage, working on Christmas Eve. Gradually the poetry and the hope faded.

But to be fair it wasn’t entirely without a bright side. My wife had gone to visit her family outside of Toronto for Christmas. Had I not had a shift to cover, I would have gone with her. Her family were a small-scale variation of a war zone. Nobody got along and there was never a peaceful moment, instead there was only a lull between battles. There were tears and accusations and more tension than one might find in a tightly strung tennis racket. When I told her that I was expected to perform my duties as a poor imitation of a cop for this special night, and that she would have to go enjoy the majesty of her family without me, I was not as sad as one might think. In fact, I had a novel to read, a thermos of tea and the prospect of 12 hours of not watching a family engage in a bench clearing brawl over two days.

But fate had other plans for me. Other plans of a Christmas Carol variety.

I showed up early to get the very precise instructions of how to get through the night. My boss, a veteran of many years, who commanded all the respect one might command when sporting a polyester jacket uniform, was very specific.

“There’s no one in this building tonight. Except you. There is a fellow on the second level parking garage, but he never leaves his cubicle. And, uh, between me and you, that should make you feel safer.”

“Safer. Why?’

I started having visions of a madman on some kind of a parole programme given parking duty having committed the most heinous offences.

“Well,” my boss continued…” he’s one of them.”

He let that comment hang in the air for me to absorb and be shocked at. Of course, I knew what he meant. This was 1987, and the world was still in the throes of homophobia and misogyny and racism and all the other features of Neanderthal thinking that was, thankfully, about to be knocked on the head by people with fully developed brains. But I wanted to have a bit of fun with this monkey boss.

“You mean, he cheers for the Montreal Canadians?” I tried to sound both outraged and frightened that such a man would be my workmate through this long night.

Bob, the Neanderthal boss, was a little shocked that I hadn’t picked up on his primitive subtlety.

“NO… he’s a fag!”

I pretended that it would take me a while for that to sink in and put on a shocked face.

“You mean, he….?”

“That’s what I mean.” He said, almost in triumph of having gotten his point across. “But don’t worry, as I said, he never leaves his cubicle, thank God.”

Within ten minutes, Mr. Meathead had left the building and I was alone. Except, of course, for the serial homosexual rapist that I had been warned about. I went right down to see him two floors below to introduce myself. And there he was, sitting in a tiny cubicle with classical music playing and reading what looked to be a fairly serious book.

“Hi, I’m Erwin, tonight’s security guard. It’s my first shift so if there are any problems please don’t call, I’ll likely be napping on an office couch somewhere.”

He laughed and we joked about Bob the Ape man and how if were both in this job one year from now we would have a mutual murder/suicide pact. I left him alone and went upstairs to begin my action-packed shift of watching. And watching. And, if there was time later, watching.

Now as this was my first shift, I thought I should probably do some of what was expected of me. We were told to go on perimeter patrols. These were walks around the out and inside of the building looking for narcotics dealers and nuclear terrorists and generally the sort of high-end criminals who intrude into empty offices in the night. And we were to record in our little make belief police notebooks where we had patrolled and at what time and what we had discovered. After a couple of weeks, it dawned on me that the patrols were not necessary. But I was dedicated enough to still record the patrols in my book. Had I been a little more honest I would have recorded the following:

10:15 p.m. went to office lounge and took delicious 15-minute nap

11:00 p.m. found cookies in staff lounge… ate same

12:30 a.m. finished latest novel…surprise ending quite good

2:00 a.m. considered the merits of suicide as I peered over 15th floor balcony onto atrium…. otherwise, no unusual activity

4:00 a.m. wondered why my cat sleeps so damn much

But as I said, this was my first shift, so I dutifully walked about and scribbled down my report. All had been very quiet until I got to the first level of parking. There were literally no cars in either lot, everyone with lives being at home while I celebrated Christmas Eve in their empty building. But it was not as empty as I thought it was. There, across the lot, I spotted what was obviously a homeless old man who had broken in no doubt to escape the frigid outside. My several hours of rigorous training had taught me what to do in this situation, so I called out the lines I had learned that might save my life one day.

“Hey! You!! You shouldn’t be here!!” I yelled in my deepest, most authoritative voice. The old man, who was shuffling more than walking turned his head to look at me and gave the most peaceful smile. And then he hid behind a concrete column in the middle of the lot.

I have read enough detective novels to know what my next step should be. I must go to the other side of the column to find him. That’s the kind of skill set one acquires from reading. I did, but the shuffling old fellow was a bit faster than I imagined, for he had run around the column to avoid me. I followed. He ran, I followed. Before long I was running around the column chasing no one, and the image of the dog chasing its’ own tail came to my mind. There was no way he could have escaped my most professional pursuit, but he had. I stood there, out of breath and dumbfounded. There was an intruder in the building, and I had let him, somehow, get away. And now I had to report it.

I jogged down to the serial rapist one floor below. He was surprised to see me, perhaps because I was not the same calm looking fellow who couldn’t give a flying damn about this job. I looked worried. Mostly because I was.

“Listen, Mark, not to alarm you, but you should know, there’s an intruder in the building.”

“An intruder?” he looked concerned enough to put down his book.

“Yes, I think it’s a homeless fellow. I’ve got to call it in to headquarters and then notify the police.”

This all sounded very by the book and what ought to be done. Naturally, I was making it all up. I had no idea what procedure was, and I had never read “the book”. And as far as headquarters went, I knew it was staffed by the same South African lunatic who had trained me, if he was even awake. And as for the police, I supposed that made sense as this guy was, strictly speaking, a break in sort of fellow. I was hoping for some guidance from Mark who looked, sadly, like this wouldn’t be his last year at this cubicle. He must have had a lot of great books he wanted to read.

His attitude became casual.

“So, what did this guy look like?”

“Well, he was old, with a gray beard…”

Here is where he cut me off.

“Long gray coat, shuffled when he walked, pleasant smile, fairly short…?”

“Christ, you saw him too! Did he come up to you?’

“No, he never does. He just walks and smiles and disappears.”

Now at the idea that Mark allowed this guy to walk about at his leisure my security guard instincts (never very sharp) kicked in.

“Did you report it??” I asked accusingly.

“Oh, Erwin, you can’t report a ghost. Well, you can, but why bother?”

I looked at him in a predictably stunned way.

“A ghost?”

“Oh yeah…I see him every so often and he just comes and goes and just goes. He has disappeared before my eyes more often than first dates I’ve had. But unlike my first dates, he always comes back with a smile. Don’t worry, he’s harmless.”

Now here’s something else to imagine. You are alone in a big building, you’ve seen a ghost, you have the prospect of many more hours alone and you are told you’ve seen a ghost and that you might see him again but not to worry as he’s harmless. I don’t doubt that ghosts exist and never have. I also believe that they are harmless.

Does this mean that I want to be with one overnight in a building alone? Nope.

I can also tell you that security guards do several things most people aren’t aware of. They pilfer little things, like pens, staplers, cookies (as I hinted at earlier) and they sleep. Sitting alone for a long time and trying to stay awake, it’s tough. Sure, you can play a radio, you can read, you can make plans for an escape from this life that you couldn’t have had nightmares about when you were younger. But ultimately sleep stampedes towards you and you nestle your red eyes into your polyester shirt sleeve laid out on the desk and sleep. But not when you expect the old ghost of Parking Level Two to come by for a Christmas visit. That was the only night I stayed awake for a whole shift. And it was purely from fear, not dedication to my profession. The paltry pay was compensated for with this experience, so I have no regrets about having taken this job. Who knows what adventures lie in the most seemingly bland corridors we travel through!

Erwin Coombs is a retired teacher of philosophy, history and literature who has rejected all forms of retirement. He is an avid writer, reader, and observer of life. When not observing and reading and living, he is writing. Erwin has lived in Egypt, Jamaica, England and travelled a great deal but, in his mind, not enough. His writing is a celebration of people and opportunity, both of which life gives in abundance. These stories are from his, as yet unpublished book, Dusty the Cat: Her Part in My Downfall.

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PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL

Categories
Slices from Life

Getting My Nemesis

By Erwin Coombs

You might be wondering how on earth Dusty, the cat, played such a huge role in my downfall. I suppose I should use the defence that the title of this piece is nothing more than literary license because for one thing, I have never had a downfall. Oh, I’ve had many falls and stumbles, but no major catastrophic tragedy that cast me into the pits of despair. I suppose rather than the pits of despair, I have just visited the suburbs of despair. And having lived in the suburbs, I don’t mind equating these two. That is one of the many wonderful things about life, that we can fall, but invariably we rise again, as it is said in a part of the Bible I can never remember, though I fall I shall rise. Confucius said it as well: that our greatest glory is not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall. The title of this book is misleading, to an extent. I never fell, absolutely, and Dusty had nothing to do with my stumbles. In fact, she was a factor in helping me to get up again and again. A cat? Yes, one might be amazed at the soothing companionship that pets offer generally. I don’t mean all pets. I can’t imagine a turtle, for example, offering solace at the end of a rotten day at work or after your partner has just told you that you are now a lone wolf and good luck with your future. But let me get back to when I finally decided to get a cat.

I was on my own and had rented a bachelor apartment. I was determined to have a pet, particularly a cat, as cats had been a big part of my life since I found the stray Dickens twenty years ago. It was the first of the month, moving day, and as I had not a lot to move for reasons to long to go into, I thought I wouldn’t go a day without company, so I asked my daughters to come with me to the Humane Society to pick one out. My eldest daughter was a little hesitant as she and her boyfriend had adopted a dog few months earlier and had to return it, for reasons once again too long to go into. As a result, she felt that she was blacklisted and that her picture was up on screens and walls and would somehow be subject to abuse at the hands of the workers there. I tried to explain that these people were very well intentioned and likely not wanting to seek revenge for the return of an animal. I mean, I asked her, what could they possibly do? Shame her in front of the other caged animals? Sick a wild pack of rabid pooches on her? But she was nervous enough that she left the choosing of my cat to me and Josie.

My other daughter and I went cruising through the rooms looking at the imprisoned beasts. Any visit to one of these places can be sad. They really do look like prisoners as they pace their small spaces and when you pass by a cage, they seem to do their best to be alluring, realizing on some level, that this stranger might just be their ticket out of Sing-Sing. They rub up against the bars and look at you with these pleading eyes that seem to say, “Please like me, take me home.” It’s every meathead’s dream of what a single’s bar should be like but isn’t for meatheads. My daughter finally found one that she connected with and told me to come over and have a look. It was an American Shorthair, grey and with lovely kind, green eyes. The assistant opened the cage for me and let me put my hand in to have a pet. It was a lovely meeting until the blood was drawn. Mine, I mean, not hers. She lashed out not too fiercely at my hand and I pulled back too late. Josie looked up at me and said,

“Dad, you moved too quickly!”

My argument was that the quick move was the result of having been assaulted and not the cause, but she was intent that this was the one for me and so, naturally, I agreed, as I held my hand up to prevent my life’s blood from escaping.

“There not used to being touched, poor things.” said the worker.

I looked at my gash and wondered if there would be any pity for me, or only another condemnation at having been doing jazz hands in a cat’s cage, but there was none. Nevertheless, I agreed to take this one home and started the paperwork. The woman across the desk took my particulars and my cheque and told me, quite casually.

“And we won’t charge you for the cream.”

“Cream?” I asked, “What cream?”

For a moment I thought that they were going to offer an antibacterial tube for my hand given that one of their inmates had attempted murder on me. But not even close.

“The cream for her backside” came the “as if you didn’t know” response.

“Why would I need cream for her backside?” I asked bracing myself for an answer I knew wouldn’t be pleasant. I mean, any conversation around creams and cat’s backsides is not going to work out well, and this one didn’t.

“As you probably noticed, the kitty is a little bit bigger than she should be.”

A little bit? This was one fat cat. Cats as a rule are about as sedentary a creature as you’ll find so being a little bit chunky is par for the course, but this one was two pars for the course. I didn’t mind as I thought I’ll get her slimmed down with a gym membership and controlled diet.

“And the cream on her anus will help her lose weight?” I asked hopefully.

“Oh no, it’s just that she is so big she can’t really reach her anus to clean it, so she has a wee bit of an infection. The cream will help clear it up. Twice a day, but I suggest you wear a glove as you do it.”

If there was one thing I didn’t need a suggestion about as to when to wear a glove it was that. I didn’t relish the idea with a glove anyway. We took her back to my sparsely furnished new apartment and put her down on the floor while I set up the all-important pooh box and, more important to her, the food and water bowl. She was still a nameless cat, so I asked the girls as I was busying myself rushing about, as much as one can in a bachelor apartment, setting up for my new roommate,

“Well girls, what should we name her?”

“Dusty.” Came the immediate response from Josie. And it made sense as she was a gray furred kitty with lovely white bits as well.

“Because she’s gray?” I called out from the bathroom as I scooped kitty litter into the target box.

“No.” said Josie. “Because she’s eating a fluff of dust.”

And that is my cat, Dusty. As if being so obese that you can’t clean your own backside wasn’t evidence enough, she has an eating compulsion that will not stop, even at dust. But we forged strong bonds and became good friends. As a matter of fact, there is a gay theatre in Toronto called Buddies in Bad Times Theatre Company, and they are quite good. So, from day one I would refer to Dusty and I as just that, buddies in bad times. Of course, the times weren’t bad exactly, but they were certainly getting better.

Erwin Coombs is a retired teacher of philosophy, history and literature who has rejected all forms of retirement. He is an avid writer, reader, and observer of life. When not observing and reading and living, he is writing. Erwin has lived in Egypt, Jamaica, England and travelled a great deal but, in his mind, not enough. His writing is a celebration of people and opportunity, both of which life gives in abundance. These stories are from his, as yet unpublished book, Dusty the Cat: Her Part in My Downfall.

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PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL

Categories
Slices from Life

It’s Amazing the Things We can Do

By Erwin Coombs

That’s the title of a narrative that needs explaining. I have to start off by being quite honest: I was raised in a cloud of cynicism and despair. As I’ve already hinted — my upbringing was classically dysfunctional with a broken home at age six and all kinds of attendant problems. Poverty was one. Actually, poverty is never one problem because it has a ricochet effect like shooting a gun in a metal room as it leads to a whole bagful of treats that make life that much more difficult. Apart from the outward signs of misery, there were all kinds of internalised ones.

I am a huge optimist by nature and why I don’t know. It might have to do with a faulty IQ or some brain injury suffered in youth that I can’t recall, for obvious reasons. Mind you, I did fall out of my highchair when I was a toddler in Cairo, Egypt. I don’t know if the highchairs at that time were substandard or perhaps my mother didn’t bother to do up my safety belt, but I went down like a ton of bricks to the non-carpeted floor. I’m sure there was no permanent damage, except for the fact that there is an indent in the middle of the top of my head.

When I was young and had hair, I remember occasionally coming across that indent and thinking “Thank God I have hair to cover THAT thing up with!” But God has a delicious sense of irony and between Him and gravity, or rather with gravity working as his foot soldier, time chipped, or rather pulled away at my hair. And as my hairline receded like a Maple Leaf fan’s playoff hopes, that deformity became a feature of mine. I’m not a vain man, by any stretch, but this was a bit to deal with. Over time, I got used to it.

I recall one day I was helping out in one of my daughter’s grade two classrooms. I was sitting reading a story to several cute little kids when one of the girls asked, in a completely good-natured way, “What’s that big lump on your head?” I wanted to explain that rather than a big lump it was actually a crevice which gave the appearance of a big lump, but how lame would that have sounded? Instead, I did more of that thinking on my feet thing and said, “You see, Ariana, I have so many smart thoughts that I don’t have room for them in my brain. So, I store them there.”

She looked wide-eyed at this new marvel she had never heard of before and I could tell she was impressed. I had turned what could have been a potentially embarrassing deformity for my daughter into a point of admiration. I had new cache as the really smart guy. Score one for Dad.

Thinking back on that highchair fall, there was another potentially brain damaging incident that took place in Cairo. Given that there were two such events it’s amazing I can even remember them. But I guess the damage was fairly minimal, though I’m sure several former teachers of mine would claim otherwise. We had just arrived in Cairo as my father was posted at the Canadian embassy, but our house wasn’t ready yet. That meant a two week stay at the Cairo Hilton on the public coin. Being a toddler, I couldn’t entirely appreciate how cool this was, but my family did and when Dad was at work we spent a lot of time at the pool. I couldn’t walk then but neither could a lot of the guests who made good use of the pool-side bar. My Mum no doubt did, and my siblings were busy playing childish games. I was plopped on the steps of the shallow end of the pool to bake in the sun and hopefully not teeter into the water. Hope is a fine thing, but you don’t want to risk a toddler’s life on it. And sure, as shooting I did the teetering and as with the highchair, toppled to the bottom. The landing wasn’t so bad, it’s just that there was no resurfacing to go with it and so I sat comically at the bottom, no doubt waving my arms and looking wide eyed.

Meanwhile, on terra firma, someone thought to look for me.

“Has anyone seen Erwin?’

If I had a toddler that was missing poolside, I would have phrased it a little more urgently. But the whole family circled the pool until my brother Eddy spotted me at the bottom, now fairly blue through lack of oxygen and called out.

“There he is!” I believe he said it like a child finding a hidden Easter egg in a hunt instead of a drowning sibling. But for all that they did pull me out, dry me off and I was not much the worse for wear. Here’s a funny follow up lest you think that our childhood experiences don’t have some kind of resonance in our adult years. I was never told of this almost drowning incident until I was well into my teens, for some reason. Yet my whole life I had been, and am still, subject to a recurring nightmare where, you guessed it, I am at the bottom of a pool, gasping for breath and I wake up panting. As the song says, take good care of your children. If you don’t they might end up with misshapen heads and poor sleeping habits.

There was a third incident in Cairo involving a camel and the pyramids. My God, but it sounds like I’ve had this exciting life but really most of it has been spent holding onto a channel changer and dreaming of better days. While in Cairo the family decided to take a tour around the pyramids riding camels because, hey, that’s the thing to do there. And it would have been a grand idea except that my Mum had just strapped the baby me onto the camel before she got on when the camel decided that one passenger was enough, and it bolted. Camels are ornery beasts and when they get a mind to something they do it and apparently kidnapping the blonde baby was a bee in its bonnet so off it went. Soon one of the camel instructors leapt onto another camel and chased me down in the Sahara after a few minutes. Had he not, I might well have wound up as a Bedouin being raised in the desert as some sort of a poor man’s Lawrence of Arabia. Looking back on my time in Egypt, it seems clear that my parents had decided to do away with me but lacked the foresight for a proper plan or the energy to keep at it. But I hold no grudge. They did have three other mouths to feed, after all.

Despite all those damages to my brain at an early age I have managed to negotiate this old world with some degree of success. And one of the points I want to make in this narrative is that people are extraordinarily able to do things they think they wouldn’t otherwise be able to do, if that doesn’t sound too convoluted a sentence. In other words, we can accomplish things under the most enormous pressure and under terrible conditions that we think we might not be able to do even under ideal circumstances. What this says about human beings is that we are to be marveled at and not despaired over, as we so often do. We look down on our species and God knows we look down on ourselves countless times a day.

The old ‘pop’ psychology of examining the self is not just a cutesy way of filling up self-help books with advice. Self-help books are generally, a dark alley to visit. They are great at momentary inspiration but generally don’t last beyond the initial reading. That’s why people keep poring over them again and again. And here is one of the problems with self-help books; they tell us what we already know to be true and what should be done. The advice is common-sensical. But following advice is much more difficult than just seeking it out and so we repeat the patterns of dumb behavior. And as long as we are seeking advice from a friend or a book, we get the feeling we are doing something. It calls to mind the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius who said, “No longer talk about what a good man should be. Be one.” Or in the words of my father, “shit or get off the pot.” I’ve always thought a good title to reveal this problem with self-help books would be Breaking the Self-Help Dependency Cycle: Volume 8.

Returning to my narrative highlighting the amazing things people can do and not even realise they can do it. I have a life and death example from World War II. I knew an old woman whose life had been a series of tragedies. Sure, she had had some joy. She was born in the First World, had children she loved and grandchildren, had friends and all manner of hobbies from knitting to crocheting and everything in between. Mind you knitting and crocheting are close so there might not seem a great deal in between, but there is, and she pursued them, getting a joy out of the little things in life. This despite the fact that she was raised in Nazi occupied Holland, had a brother who died in a Nazi work camp, one of her children was killed in a traffic accident while just a boy, her husband had died of cancer, she had defeated cancer, well, the list goes on. But despite the list of reasons to give up and surrender to despair she found joy where she could, displaying a strength of character that people who have suffered much less and whined much more would do well to learn from.

Here is her story of doing what you think you can’t when circumstances demand you step up and find a solution instead of an excuse. This lady, Gail, was living on a farm near some woods during the Nazi occupation of her country. One of her two brothers had died in that German work camp so the other one who was at the same camp, decided that he was not going to stay. He escaped from Germany and somehow made his way home to the farm. His family hid him, but he had to spend a lot of time living in the woods to avoid the SS (Shutzstaffel) who knew he was there but couldn’t catch him. One day he was at the farm splitting wood when word came that the SS were coming for him. He naturally ran to the woods. Here was the trouble. The Nazis arrived and demanded to know where he was. Gail was the only one home and denied that he had been there for over a year. The crafty head of the unit spied the partially split pile of wood and asked who had been doing this job. Gail calmly said she had, and as the Nazis had taken away the men, she had no choice, now did she? The head of the unit nodded calmly and in an equally calm manner took out his revolver.

“You are doing a very good job. You’re pretty skilled for a little farm girl, aren’t you?”

He looked at her smilingly and gestured to the pile of logs.

“Show me how it’s done. If you can prove it wasn’t your brother who did this, well, that will be fine. If you cannot, you die here and now at the hands of an officer that you’ve lied to.”

He stepped back, keeping the gun pointed at Gail. She told me she had never picked up an axe in her life, but she knew that if there was ever a time to do it and to learn how, this was it. She said that she was trembling inside but knew that that fear had to be kept hidden. She also knew that if she failed and was killed it would redouble the SS man’s commitment to track down her brother. Even when her life was hanging by the swing of an axe, she was concerned with the fate of someone else. And this also speaks to me about the true nature of humanity. Despite the fact that whatever selfish tendencies we have can be played upon to act in more selfish ways by people who make a profit out of selfishness, we are fundamentally a caring species with streaks of unselfishness that are not merely streaks but represent our true colours.

Gail stepped up to the pile, picked up the ax and said a silent prayer of desperation and hope while she put on a brave face,

“Dear God, please, just let me swing this axe true, just this once.”

She had seen others do it and tried to replicate their movements, placing a log on the stand, shifting her hands down the shaft and giving a mighty swing. The log split in two with the softest sound. She hid her own amazement and looked at the man holding his gun and her life in his hands with a bored “See?” sort of expression. The Nazi uncocked his gun and placed it back in the holster.

“Couldn’t have done better myself. Carry on,” and he and his men walked away to continue the search for the brother that I’m happy to say was never successful. That’s the brother whom I knew as a delightful old man who had given me those sharks teeth all those years ago. He, like his sister, was so full of life and happiness despite all they had gone through. Or perhaps not despite but because of all they had gone through. From the wonder of a hundred-year-old shark’s tooth to the smile of their babies in their arms, they loved all that life had to offer because they knew how precious and, surprisingly, readily available joy is in this world.

.

Erwin Coombs is a retired teacher of philosophy, history and literature who has rejected all forms of retirement. He is an avid writer, reader, and observer of life. When not observing and reading and living, he is writing. Erwin has lived in Egypt, Jamaica, England and travelled a great deal but, in his mind, not enough. His writing is a celebration of people and opportunity, both of which life gives in abundance. These narratives are from his, as yet unpublished book, Dusty the Cat: Her Part in My Downfall.

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