The first walk of the day usually sees Heidi and I heading down Bloor. The territory that we cover, between Spadina and Bathurst, is pretty dog friendly, with all sorts of places habitually having a store of dog treats. This is less a native generosity toward canines than it is a savvy business plan, because once a dog knows where a treat lives, it will never forget it.
For instance, at Queen Video, they’ll present your dog with a treat if you rent a movie, but if you don’t, if you’re just browsing or returning a movie, they’ll refuse to give one out, regardless of how desperate and cute the animal might be acting. They condition the animal, and then deny them the reward unless their owner rents Leatherheads or whatever other lame movie they might actually have in stock.
I can’t quite express how angry this makes me, and I’ve been having a cold war with one clerk—always in pigtails, not-quite fashionable frames and an ironic heavy metal t-shirt—for about six months now. She positively delights in not giving Heidi a treat unless I follow their rigid protocols. One day I called her a “Dog Treat Nazi,” but she was too young to get the Seinfeld reference, which just added another layer of frustration and humiliation to the experience for me.
No matter, they’re not all like that. Today, as we passed by Weiner’s Hardware, Heidi began to pull violently toward the store, having received a treat there before. I yanked her away, and continued down the street, when one of the employees threw the door open and called us in, assuring me that I didn’t have to buy anything and that he just wanted to give my dog a treat.
I recognized the man, and told him that he’d been a great help to us one day back in the spring, how in fact, the entire staff of the store had.
It was an absolutely brilliant Saturday, and Rachelle and I and the dog were running errands. Rachelle popped into the hardware store to pick something up, and I sat with the dog on a bench in front of the mysterious Annex Billiards Club. It struck me at that moment that I was an extraordinarily lucky person.
I couldn’t have been happier. Through oceans of circumstance and desire, Rachelle and I had somehow managed to find one another, and to be alive, in the sun, in a world of limitless hope and possibility. I was actually consumed with gratitude, when I noticed that Heidi’s leash had gone completely slack. I looked down and saw that it was no longer attached to the dog, and that my little blood hound, nose to the ground, had wandered onto Bloor, one of the busiest streets in the country.
Pandemonium ensued. Instinctively, I thoughtlessly ran out into the street. Cars and trucks screeched to a halt, pedestrians screamed and the dog, panicked, ran back and forth with terror in her eyes. Eventually, I dove at the dog, corralling her at the curb just in front of Weiner’s hardware store. At this point, there was a mass of pedestrians, and all the red-shirted employees of the store were out there, like firemen, helping to look after both the traumatized dog, and the traumatized man. I was touched by their simple, unaffected goodness.
Five or ten minutes later, Rachelle came out of the store, completely unaware of what had happened. I imagined how things could have turned out. How both of us, the dog and I, could have easily been hit by a car, and in a completely unanticipated flash, Rachelle would have returned from the store to find her life tragically altered.
I recently found out that Julien Batts, the brother of my friend Rachel Davenport, just passed away. He was healthy and happy, living life in the streaming arteries, and then he was stricken by Meningitis, and he was gone in a matter of days, before anybody had a chance to say what needed to be felt and known in the bones.
As a dedication to Julien, I’d like to share the beautiful poem “Poise” by David O’Meara
Poise
—for Andrea Skillen (1968-2002)
I see that steady beauty mark
and hear your clear dissenting voice say
oh c’mon, as I scratch this note to you
on a low, wet day in summer.
You wouldn’t want the fuss, I know, nor
trust the souped-up sentiment—it’s just
I’m trying to arrange a parting batch
of verse before we all get too disorganized, stray
far apart, forget the dates of birthdays
you’d have marked inside your calendar. (Strange
that in a certain numbered space
you’ve stopped, and we keep going on.)
If it scares me in the future that
things we did might blur, get lost, as if you’d
slipped off to a back room in a badly-lighted
bar with greying carpets, I equally know
your footwork on the dance floor
or that purple grin of lipstick will not
escape remembering. Just as we won’t soon
forget that hospital bed, the undying
laughter there, and you and Claire grown
more beautiful with courage.
The word I’m thinking of is poise, why
we’ll miss you greatly in the years
that come, and wonder what you’d say, each
semblance of your remembered wit reminding us how
whole years pass by without telling
our friends how much we love them,
so I’m telling them now.