When I was a kid, my parents sometimes listened to talk radio. People phoning a blowhard host and venting. Him venting. It was always a he, and so were most of his callers. I hated it, especially when we were driving somewhere with the windows closed and the radio blasting. Now, with social media, it’s infinitely worse. Everyone has an opinion they feel the need to vent. They scream obscenities at one female politician getting into an elevator, tweet obscenities at another for dancing at a private party, knife a writer they disagree with onstage and leaving him hospitalized with life-threatening injuries. 

And the opinions themselves? They often seem to be based on Reddit rumours and weird conspiracy theories. I continually find myself asking: What are the facts?

I loathe the decline of facts in public discourse, and wish the media would do a better job of reporting, although I realize the financial constraints that many news outlets face. That isn’t an opinion but a feeling, although I’m sick to death of feelings, too. I think many people feel the same way, although my sample size is small, me and a few friends, so maybe I’m wrong.

However, for the record, here are four just-the-facts things that have happened recently–or in one case, not so recently–and I’ve found them all far more interesting than any of the opinions being bandied about, even when I’ve agreed with them.

One. This morning I opened the front door to see a squirrel lying dead on the front walk. This is the first time that’s ever happened in all the years we’ve lived here. It was lying on its back, legs splayed, and I think it must have fallen off the big maple tree above the walk. It didn’t look otherwise injured, and I assume if a hawk had got it, the squirrel wouldn’t have been in one piece, or that it would have been taken away to be eaten elsewhere. The wasps were very interested.

After breakfast, I went into the back garden beside the garage to dig a grave for the squirrel. In the process, I excavated three broken bricks buried about a foot down. Over the years, we’ve dug up quite a bit of construction debris from the backyard. I took out the bricks and dug deeper, then got the squirrel onto the shovel and into the hole, putting the bricks back on top of it. After filling in the grave, I said “Rest in peace, squirrel,” for lack of a known burial service. Since I was in my gardening shoes, I went on to cut the lawn, front and back, which I’d been planning to do later this afternoon, then came upstairs to my office to start work.

Two. I was walking along Bloor Street a few days ago after getting my glasses repaired and passed a man in his late twenties saying to his friend, “But I don’t want to have a conversation about that with my mother,” which is all I heard, but which lends itself to endless speculation.

Three. At dawn yesterday morning, the rising sun lit a clay figure from Mexico on a two-drawer filing cabinet in my office. Nothing happened, not the way it did the other two times. But as I drank my first cup of tea, I sat thinking about the way I’d bought it.

True story: I was living in Mexico City at the time, years ago now. Every once in a while a man would come to our door with a several bags of figures, announcing himself as Señor Luis de Guerrero, Mr. Luis from the state of Guerrero. The first time he visited, Señor Luis unwrapped several clay figures from old newspapers and put them on the dining room table, saying they came from ancient Indigenous sites. If true, this would have made him a trafficker in antiquities. I reminded him that no matter what his Mexican customers did, it was illegal for foreigners to buy antiquities. It was especially illegal to take them out of the country when we left, and I told him I agreed with this policy.

Señor Luis nodded thoughtfully, an Indigenous man himself who always wore a brown overcoat. He leaned forward and carefully divided the clay figures into two groups on opposite sides of the table, saying that I could buy something from one side and not the other, never saying that some were fake, but making it clear that they were. So I bought my first fake figure, and enjoyed it so much I bought several others during his visits over our three years in Mexico, including the one on my filing cabinet. 

I later read about a local initiative in Guerrero in which potters made figures in the pre-Columbian style and buried them in the ground for a while to make them look old. In truth, I think there’s a chance one of the figures Señor Luis sold me as a fake might be real, since it’s more finely made than the others, although maybe whoever made was just more talented than the other modern potters. The one in the picture is in the Olmec style, and while I enjoyed seeing the rising sun light it so prettily, whenever I look at the real Olmec figures in the Gardiner Museum, I realize that the facial features on mine are far more clumsily crafted, and feel relieved that it’s a genuine fake.

Then there’s the fourth thing, although it isn’t precisely factual. Also yesterday, when I went downstairs to make breakfast, I looked outside to see three goldfinches eating the seeds of the dried-up echinacea flowers in our back garden. They’d been there the previous afternoon as well, a scruffy bright yellow male and two more modest females. One of the females was a fledgling that sat on top of the fence at first abasing itself like a baby in the nest, fluttering its wings, beak open, waiting to be fed. But the prettiest thing was its call, which sounded to me like habib, habib, habibi, which I believe is an Arabic word for beloved, so it sounded as if it was calling out to its beloved parents, or maybe declaring itself beloved, which is fanciful and anthropomorphic but it’s also what happened, and I preferred it to the opinions in the morning newspapers, so there you go.