Last weekend Rachelle and I took our nearly three year-old son Jones to soccer.
He’s too young for soccer, as are all the other toddlers in the class, but it still felt like a virtuous way to spend the morning. And so all the parents sat on the picnic tables scattered about the unmowed patch of green that was the field, while rosy-cheeked Coach Nancy, all of 13 years-old, benevolently led our children through their “drills.” This, a summer job she would surely look back upon as amongst the best of her life.
Above us turrets set against an easy, deep blue, and in front of us about a dozen children either ignoring or doing some improbable variant of the stretching exercises Coach Nancy was encouraging them to follow. Jones was in the totally ignoring her camp. Putting the tiny, orange pylons on each of his arms he declared himself Iron Man, and after acting like a robot for a minute or two, carefully placed one of the pylons on my head.
And then he ran away and across the field to the perimeter where beds of stones lay waiting for his curiosity. He marvelled at them like the precious jewels they were.
He then climbed a tree. Saw a bear. Heard a plane. Did a somersault. And as he was riding a horse back across the field to the rest of the Little Kickers, he stopped very suddenly and pointed up at the sky shouting, “The moon!” And there it was, a barely visible silver edge up there in the morning sky–classical music drifting over from a nearby estate that just sort of hung there, as if a cloud, as if the most natural thing in the world.
Jones then found another bed of rocks, this one directly in front of a fenced gate. He started to throw the rocks, playing a game in which the point was to hit one of the metal bars of the fence and make a “ping” sound.
Unknown to him, a small crowd of Asian tourists walking down the street to Casa Loma had stopped and were watching him as he went about his joyful labour. When he came close, they would all lean to the side, softly exhaling an “Ooooh,” and then when he made the “ping,” they all shouted and applauded, and Jones spun around, utterly amazed at this encouraging surprise, and so happy– happy, like this was and always would be the world.
]]>“Do you have air conditioning?” I asked.
“Dah,” he responded in a blunt, unfriendly East European accent.
“Would you mind turning it on, please?”
“It is expensive for me to run AC, it take more energy, you know? So I keep windows open for breeze, OK?”
“Look, I’m sorry, but I’m dying in this heat, and the regulations say that you have to turn it on if the customer asks for it, right?”
The driver, irritated, snorted.
“What?” I asked, also irritated.
“You are weak, little man who can’t take sunshine?”
“Yes, that’s right. I am a weak, little man who can’t take the sunshine,” I sighed.
The driver pretended to laugh, shook his head and said something in a language that I presumed to be Russian.
“Have it your way, little mister boss.”
He then powered up the windows and contemptuously snapped on the AC.
We drove in black silence for the next five minutes.
I hated his fucking guts.
I hoped his native country got obliterated at the Olympics.
Food poisoning.
Nightmares with toys.
No Internet.
Being dunked-on while playing pick-up.
All these pestilences I wished upon him.
As I sat there concentrating my hatred, I began to pick at my fingernails. This is a habit that manifests when I’m angry, and in this case I managed to peel off several crescents of nails, which I then stored in my pocket. This detritus felt disgusting so I opened the window and tried to throw them out of the car.
The driver, his furious eyes staring at me from the rear-view mirror, shouted, “You demand AC like little dictator and now you put window down! You have no manners in my home! You waste my money, it is now five dollars extra!”
“C’mon, don’t be such a prick, I was just throwing a piece of fingernail out the window. Would you rather I left if on the seat?”
“You are disgusting man.”
“Like you’ve never picked at your fingernails.”
“You know who you are? You are like Gollum from The Hobbit. That is you.”
“That tattoo of a bear you have on the back of your neck looks gay.”
The driver slammed on the brakes.
“Gollum throw body waste out of my car, I throw Gollum out of my car. Get out now or I break you into pieces.”
“Really, are you serious?”
The driver looked at me, his eyes softening.
“Maybe I am not myself. My boy is sick and the doctors say he might lose hearing. It is awful and I cannot sleep, imaging his world without music, and then people like you come in and complain about small, small thing and I blow top. You be quiet and sit still, say nothing and I will take you home, but remember, say nothing!”
