jumpingfish

My mother came to town.

One day we went to a sandwich shop to get some lunch. It was busy, and there was no clear path to the spot where you order.

“Excuse me,” I said as I squeezed around a woman standing next to a chair.

I walked quickly by and got in line, only to see that my mother was talking to the woman and her two friends.

When she came up to me, my mother said, “Did you see that woman check you out. I told her you were my son!”

Little did she know that the double take was more likely a scowl at the rude man who so quickly squeezed behind her in his rush to order lunch.

1. The Red Witch

“Did you try to check in at the kiosk?” she asked when Trudy and her husband stepped up to the counter.

She was wearing a read coat with a silky, poofy scarf tied around her neck. She looked straight at the fair and industrious Trudy. No smile. A grim, blank stare on her face.

“I tried to, but it only gave us one boarding pass,” Trudy said and then tried to explain that …

“The kiosk doesn’t print boarding passes,” the woman said, leering at Trudy.

“Well what I tried to …”

“I see you in the system,” she snapped, giving Trudy a nasty look. “Did you check in online?”

“Yes,” Trudy said.

That was all she needed to hear. She stared at Trudy, clearly implying that she had not answered the questions correctly.

Within moments the paperwork was complete, their boarding passes were in their hands and the Red Witch was behind them as they made their way to customs, happy to leave the woman in red behind.

2. Trudy and Her Husband

As they stood in line, Trudy mentioned the encounter at the counter. She talked about how the woman in red was so rude. Sadly, she got no sympathy from her husband.

“I tried to explain, but she just wouldn’t …”

“You didn’t answer her question,” her husband interrupted.

She tried to explain …

“She asked if you tried to use the kiosk, but you wanted to talk about boarding passes.”

Trudy tried to explain again. Her husband would have nothing to do with it. It was a simple question that didn’t get answered. That was there all there was to it.

3. Mallory

There was some confusion with the airplane.

Clearly no pilots had arrived, although it was parked at the gate. Looking out the windows onto the tarmac, they could see that the cockpit was dark. The plane was sitting silently in the cold and dark of a Canadian winter morning.

Mallory was behind the counter working furiously to rebook all the passengers on different flights. Yet despite her fury at the keyboard and her tenacity on the telephone, the line was hardly moving. The passengers were all certain to miss their connections, and they were getting very impatient. Mallory didn’t let it phase her. She kept working at the computer working on one passenger at a time.

There was a group of six at the front of the line. Mallory had booked them all on a different airline. It must have been a complex process, because it took a very, very long time.

The telephone rang, and Mallory picked it up. “I’ll be there in 15 seconds,” she said.

She hung up the phone, gave each of the six passengers a new boarding pass, threw a scarf around her neck.

“Go to that gate over there,” she said. “I need to go get your luggage.”

She put on a coat and disappeared.

4. The Red Witch Returns

“It’s cold outside!” Mallory said to when she finally returned.

“You transferred their bags yourself!?” Trudy’s husband asked.

“But it kind of felt good to be outside,” she smiled.

He leaned over the counter and whispered, “You’re doing a really, really good job. Thank you.”

Just then, the doors behind the counter opened, and the woman with the red coat and the poofy scarf around her neck walked out. She strode into the room, her face carrying that same blank plastic stare.

“Oh no,” Trudy groaned quietly to her husband.

“Yep,” Mallory said.

“What!?” Trudy asked. “You agree? You know!?”

“Yep,” she said with a slightly stern expression replacing her previous smile. “Yep, we all feel the same way. Can’t explain it.”

Trudy looked at her husband and jabbed her elbow into his ribs.

“I was so right.”

1. Leaving for the Airport

We suggested that it made sense for us to take a taxi to the airport in the morning. Our flight was to leave at 6:00am, and (doing the math) that meant leaving for the airport at 3:30am. Why get up and drive us, when we can just call a taxi?

They would hear none of it.

So at 2:45 on our last morning in Ottawa, my father’s alarm clock went off, giving him enough time to dress and heat some water for tea before he promised to knock on our bedroom door.

Trudy had taken a shower the night before, so the only threat to our on-time departure was me. But thanks to a blanket slipping off the bed and a resulting dream about sleeping in a tent with ice falling in thru the ceiling, I was up even earlier and took my shower in a flash.

We left for the airport on time.

2. Waving Goodbye

Not only would they have nothing to do with us calling a taxi that morning, but they also refused to drop us off at the curb. They wanted to walk in with us.

So after a bit of driving around, we found a parking spot in the garage. It was far in the back—perhaps as far from the terminal as you can get in that place. We had plenty of time.

We all got out of the car and walked in. They showed us the way to the international check-in counter, a path they evidently know well.

They worried about the line moving slowly, although we had plenty of time. And they tried to give us some (Canadian) cash for snacks. And they stood by patiently on the far side of the barricades as we filled out paperwork and waited in line.

They stood there watching us, smiling and waving. We smiled and waved back just before we disappeared around the corner.

Goodbye, Dad. Goodbye, Khadija. Thanks for the wonderful time.

We had the whole day to kill.

Ok, we got our start around noon, and the sun goes down early in Ottawa in winter. So we didn’t really have the whole day, more like several hours.

So… we had several hours to kill. We planned to spend the time skating on the Rideau Canal, on the world’s longest skating rink.

“Only two hours?” Trudy asked. “Should we rent the skates for four hours, instead?”

“I think that’ll be plenty,” I said.

Skates on, we inched our way along the canal from distance marker to distance marker. As Canadians came whizzing by, we plodded our way like a couple of … Texans on ice skates.

Trudy hung on to my arm. I pulled us along so that we might make it to Fifth Street for beaver tails, hot drinks and a place to sit next to a fire. But our going was slow, and our feet got sore quickly. We stopped for frequent breaks.

“I’ll rest here,” Trudy would say, leaning against the wall of the canal. “You go skate by yourself for a while.”

So I would skate up the canal, always just at the edge of spectacular catastrophe (and once arriving there). And then I’d skate back to where Trudy was still leaning against the wall in her green coat and blue hat with a smile on her face. And then we’d continue upstream.

It went on this way for what seemed a long distance, but after an hour we turned around and could easily see the bridge where we had rented our skates. In that hour, we had not come very far. We certainly didn’t make it to Fifth Street. And now it was time to head back.

So we turned around and headed back. Skate. Rest. Skate. Rest.

When we finally returned to the bridge, it seemed as if we had been at it for a very long time. Our feet were sore. Our shirts were wet with sweat. And it was starting to get cold, because the sun was going down.

We stood in line to return our skates. We put our boots back on. And we walked across the frozen canal to the stairs leading up to Confederation Park.

Trudy turned to me and said, “I feel so stable, now!”

We had the whole day to kill. We spent just over two hours on the ice. And with that, our day was pretty much done.

He walked down the aisle from the front of the OC Transpo bus. He had long, curly grey hair that fell around his shoulders. He had two scarves—a black and yellow one hanging down his front and a white one tied tightly around his neck.

When he got to the middle of the bus, he stopped. The bus started moving, and he grabbed onto the handrails. After a few minutes, he was talking to two teenagers whom he clearly didn’t know.

They were standing near the back exit door, and one of them started talking about art.

Talking about art! This old guy with the long, gray hair was standing there in the middle of a city bus talking to these two kids about art.

They talked about oil paint. They talked about watercolors. They talked about technique, about laying down a base layer of white. They talked about the kinds of canvases they use.

The kid doing most of the talking was particularly interested in talking about canvas.

“I got arrested,” he said. “The police caught me, and so now I do all my painting on canvas.”