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Rachelle: Are you still on for the Textile Museum at 2:00?
Rachelle: Tetanus?
Rachelle: No
Rachelle: No, I am certain there’s no such thing as a “Tetanus Museum.”
Rachelle: Well, I’m sorry you misunderstood.
Rachelle: But we have passes for the Textile Museum and we agreed to meet there in 30 minutes.
Rachelle: But you were so keen on seeing the Kimono of Itchiku Kobuta! You said that’s what you were going to name your Fantasy baseball team! What happened?
Rachelle: Really, Pickle?
Rachelle: You think it’s cultural appropriation?
Rachelle: And you don’t want to exercise your white privilege by exploiting something that was not created for the white, male gaze?
Rachelle: And in order to achieve that goal you’ve gone to The Keg Mansion, the place where everything is specially made for you, is that right?
Rachelle: Yes, yes, I know you have a gift card.
Rachelle: And yes, I know The Keg is your safe space.
Rachelle: You’ve said it many times.
Rachelle: Will you do me a favour? Just have a look around.
Rachelle: Do you see a bunch of men who more or less look like you, all eating steak and drinking wine?
Rachelle: Yes, or drinking Caesars.
Rachelle: And are they all being served by hot, young women laughing at all the jokes they’re being told through gritted, shoot-me-now teeth?
Rachelle: In the exploitation Olympics, I think that beats going to a fabric museum, don’t you?
Rachelle: Look, do you even know what false equivalency means?.
Rachelle: I thought not.
Rachelle: Oh, I see.
Rachelle: I was all wrong about Madison the server.
Rachelle: She’s different, is she?
Rachelle: Well maybe when she said that she didn’t mean funny ha-ha?
Rachelle: Okay, let’s just never mind.
Rachelle: Are you going to meet me or not?
Rachelle: Oh, your wedge salad just arrived!
Rachelle: Well obviously your hands are tied.
Rachelle: Yes.
Rachelle: That was sarcasm.
Rachelle: Because you’re being a jerk.
Rachelle: Sweet Jesus.
Rachelle: In no way am I discriminating against you for eating meat.
Rachelle: I’m a Social Justice Warrior? I’m not even sure I know what one is.
Rachelle: You’re drunk.
Rachelle: You Keg-Sized your Caesar, didn’t you?
Rachelle: Yes, I am psychic.
Rachelle: I can also detect something slurry and aggressive in all your texts.
Rachelle: It’s like you’re campaigning for something.
Rachelle: Shouting from the podium!
Rachelle: Throwing emoticons everywhere!
Rachelle: Like angry confetti.
Rachelle: Whatever.
Rachelle: Just remember that the doctor said you could only have one drink a day, okay?
Rachelle: No, don’t worry about it. It’s fine.
Rachelle: I’m going to go to the museum then have a power skating session with Pierre.
Rachelle: No, he wasn’t deported.
Rachelle: He was in Costa Rica on a spiritual retreat.
Rachelle: Very tan. And he shaved off his moustache.
Rachelle: I know it’s a dream of yours to one day grow a full beard like Pierre does so effortlessly, but it’s just not your path, Pickle.
Rachelle: Yes, yours is the path of low testosterone and patchy facial hair.
Rachelle: We all have our crosses to bear, dear.
]]>She lives in the same part of Toronto as I do, and occasionally we bump into one another as we did yesterday when Rachelle and I were at the local park with our two-year old son Jones:
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Me: Oh, shit.
Rachelle: What?
Me: Two o’clock.
Rachelle: The woman in the cloak?
Me: I thought it was a cape.
Rachelle: No, that’s a cloak.
Me: Ok, whatever. Either way, it’s Margaret fucking Atwood.
Rachelle: I think she’s coming over. I’m going to take Jones to the swings! You two talk on your own!!
( Rachelle and Jones run off as Atwood approaches)
Atwood: Forgive me, but I have to ask, do the police get called very often?
Me: I’m not sure I understand what you mean.
Atwood: You, a middle-aged loner who will never be accepted by his neighbouring, wealthy peers.
Never-quite wearing the right brand and always on the periphery, just shy of conversation, always staring at the children and their pretty young mothers, staring so hard it seems as if you’re trying to fill some interior void that can never stop hungering. I’d think that might make many of the parents nervous.
Me: I think I’m seen more as a kind of guardian, like Batman.
Atwood: Yes, Batman, or perhaps a guardian, like a hollowed-out and mother-dominated crossing guard still living with his deceased parents. Maybe like that, too.
Me: Did you make it to the corn boil here the other day? Blue grass band and everything.
Atwood: Here at Sibelius park?
Me: Yes.
Atwood: No, I was in LA at the Emmy’s.
Me: Funny how the city of Toronto would name a park Sibelius, after a Finnish composer of classical music, before naming one after you, a Canadian writer of impenetrable, mostly hated books. Wonder why that is?
Atwood: I am astonished. You must have been reading your Wikipedia in order to find out who Jean Sibelius was, for surely you thought he was some old Toronto Maple Leaf who died in car crash, no?
Me: JONES!!! NO KICKING!!!! I’M SERIOUS!! I WILL TAKE THAT DIGGER AWAY!!! DON’T THINK I WON’T!!
Atwood: They’re so beautiful at that age. It’s wonderful to see such attentive nurturing, too. With all the advantages you’re giving your son, I am sure he will go far in this world, maybe all the way to The Keg.
Me: I heard you were wearing your housecoat on stage when that thing you wrote so long ago, The Handmaiden’s Tale, won some Emmy for best red outfit worn by a supporting actress, or something.
Atwood: Handmaid’s Tale, and it was awarded Best Drama, amongst several other awards, for being considered a prescient and uncanny representation of Trump’s America.
Me: It’s no Game of Thrones, is all I can say.
Atwood: “Perlen vor Schweinen geworfen,” as they say.
Me: Yeah, whatever.
Atwood: I saw that the *Giller Prize nominees were announced.
Me: JONES!!! I’M NOT TELLING YOU AGAIN!!
Atwood: I couldn’t help but notice you weren’t nominated.
Not even on the long list.
Again.
How does that make you feel, Marcel?
Me: It’s Michael.
Atwood: Right, so sorry.
* The prize awards $100,000 annually to the author of the best Canadian novel or short story collection published in English, and $10,000 to each of the finalists.
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The Ottawa that I remember is a sincerely, and wonderfully decent place. The average person, somebody who might work modestly within a cautious and secure bureaucracy, was friendly, wholesome and responsible– the kind of person you hoped might live beside you.
There’s a lot of planning in Ottawa. Nothing happens without forethought in the city, and sometimes it feels as if life doesn’t happen in real time, exactly, but in a kind of cushioned, protected time. Parliament, in spite of being perched on a cliff and its jagged Gothic flourishes has always felt about as accessible and threatening as a Keg restaurant. There was just nothing menacing or intimidating about the place. It was like the Block Parent on the street, the home of a kindly couple that never had children and would always protect you when the local bully tried to steal your toque.
You felt safe, even welcomed there, like you might even get fed some Kraft Dinner before heading on your way. In fact, Parliament was so homey that a colony of cats actually lived there for years.
And to watch the city experience something as merciless and bloody-minded as the shootings, something that existed at such a terrifying remove from our comprehension and control, was unbearably sad. The rules by which Ottawa lived, that had come to subconsciously frame my psychological landscape, did not apply. The world that I imagined existing when I grew up likely never really did, and now, from the distance of middle age, I can see it receding quickly.
The eruption of violence, in a city that had always seemed frozen in time and almost magically apart from the real world, was a blunt and pitiless assault on the myths that have sheltered and nourished me over the years. It was like watching somebody whom had always protected me and I loved, getting beaten up and being powerless to intercede. A kind of chaos, emerging from a vast and dark pool, had descended on the ordered and good, and the sadness I felt about watching that was deep and heavy in the bones—the echoing gunfire amidst Gothic arches and limestone columns, a sound not soon to be forgotten.
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