On the subway, a father is doing exercises in a workbook with his six- or seven-year-old son. I’m sitting kittycorner to them, and I can see that the book open to a story with blanks left so kids can fill in the words. The v. attentive father is asking his son for a verb or an adjective, reminding him each time that a verb is an action word etc. then filling it in.

The story is about setting a trap in a forest. The boy volleys words about that fill in a narrative about doing this and that among the trees. I can’t hear everything he says as the subway screeches.

Finally they finish, and the father reads back the story his son has written.

“I caught an architect,” it ends. “I had never caught one before.”

***

Reading Robert Reich’s newsletter on my phone while waiting in a restaurant to have tea with a friend. He quotes Abraham Lincoln about “the mystic chords of memory.”

I remember jotting down another quote from Lincoln that I liked. Take out my notebook and leaf back to find it’s from food writer M.F.K. Fisher’s 1942 book, How to Cook a Wolf. Dismissing a dish he was served, Lincoln said it was “a homeopathic soup that was made by boiling the shadow of a pigeon that had been starved to death.”

***

Another quote, this time from Arnold Newman at a show of his photographs at the Art Gallery of Ontario: “A creative judgment is also a moral judgment.”

***

In a cab with an elderly driver who has a very long square white beard. We pull up to the lights at the corner of Broadview and Gerrard. Out the window is another old man, this one looking unhoused or maybe having other problems.

The man outside has an apple. Sits down on a stoop where I think he’s going to eat it. Instead, he washes the apple in a puddle of dirty water and peels off the product control sticker. Both the cab driver and I are watching.

As we pull away, I say to the driver, “I hope there’s someone taking care of him.”

He replies, “When you’re old, nobody cares. That time is finished.”

***

I’m waiting for an appointment to start, can’t remember what, and scroll through social media.

A tweet from writer Michael Winter:

“I took my son to Goalie Heaven to get his skates sharpened. On our way back to the car he said the blades were still warm from the sharpener. I said that’s the kind of detail you put in a story, to make the reader believe the next bit, the made-up bit that has life & death in it.”

***

From my journal:

Yesterday, X came to our house to do some mechanical maintenance, the way he has for years. As usual, he arrived smelling strongly of weed. He does very good work.

X greeted me enthusiastically. “Now there’s the writer I wanted to see. I’m going to write a book myself.”

“Excellent! A book about what?”

“It’s a feminist manifesto for men,” he said. “You see, I knew you were going to laugh.”

Sorry. But what got him there?

The care he’d received from women after his surgery, he said. 

I told him I was sorry about the surgery, but he was on a roll and talked over me. He wouldn’t have made it without his wife. His daughter. The nurses, who were mostly women. The best were women.

Also meditation, he said.

“What comes first?” he asked. “The chicken or the egg?”

“Protozoa.”

“I knew you were going to give me a smartass answer like that. But let me ask you, when you bring a carton of eggs into the house, they’re unfertilized, right? They don’t let roosters near them.”

“That’s true.”

“So you’ve got the eggs that are entirely the product of a female chicken. No rooster in sight. So what’s the obvious conclusion? The chicken came before the egg, right?”

“Well, if you’re talking about an individual egg, I suppose that’s true.”

“You see? You see?” 

He talked about men being useless. He was aware of that, and said he’d warned his daughter against them, especially since she has big boobs and that was all they were going to see about her.

I morphed the subject a little. If he wanted to write a book, I said, he could sign up for a non-fiction writing course in the continuing education program at Toronto Metropolitan University. I taught there when it was Ryerson, and think highly of the program and the instructors. I hadn’t been on their website lately, but a new course would probably start in January.

He wasn’t having any of that. “I figure that since I can talk, I can write.”

Writing is a different form of communication, I said. To reach people you don’t know, you need to find a way to interest them in what you’re going to say. At TMU, for instance, you would discuss how to write a first paragraph that draws your audience in. Then the instructor would get you to write one. You would discuss it with other people in the class and get their reactions. It helps, I said, and it’s not expensive.

Just then, my husband got home, and the guy started talking about mechanical issues involving the work he was doing. He also said he’d recently acquired the rolling stock from a bankrupt company and we might be interested in buying some. My husband and he discussed this, and my husband left as X was packing up. I was alone with him again.

“We live across the street from a dog park,” he said. “The dogs cross the street right in front of our house. I talk to the dogs there. They like me. So I could set myself up as a dog whisperer instead.”