Epicanthic

Little asian kids are cute as heck, unlike cyclists.

The kid was about two years old, and playing toddler chicken with a typically humourless cyclist on the gravel path that constitutes park of my daily walks. There was lots of room and no real danger, and the cyclist did have enough sense to not break the umbilical between the beckoning arm of the young father and the ‘I’m gonna stop you!’ arms of the child, so the unlikely mishap remains unlikely, leaving only the shared amusement of myself and the little boy who had his mouth full of treats so that his mischievous mirth was spread on his smooth little face by a tightening of his lips in effort to contain all mastication and a squeezing of epicanthic eyelids to almost completely obscure the twinkling gleam of eye exclusive to the unjaded innocents who know they are being just a little naughty, and loving it. I was squinting too, on account of it being a high-overcast-almost-fall-day, and I had forgotten my sunglasses. I also wasn’t chewing so I didn’t have to worry about holding anything in, so I was laughing out loud. I tried to get his dad on the mirth train with a quick side-eye, but he seemed a little taken aback by a squinty, tattooed, rucksack-wearing, stiff-necked honkey laughing at his kid’s antics while, unbeknownst to him, lovingly and intently hoping that I was encouraging the tyke to never lose that sense of exasperating civil disobedience that made him so fascinating and beautiful to me. That adorable little face is now filed away in the section of my mind where I hold things that I use to save my life from time to time.

In The Prophet, Khalil Gibran speaks of a seasonless world where one abides if they are afraid to love fully; the place where you will laugh, but not all of your laughter, and you will cry, but not all of your tears....Hold on....I add things like this because I sometimes feel like I need to use some great someone’s words to back up my own, but I just realized that I’m wrong about that need, because I’m as good as anybody at talking to myself, which is all this really is. You don’t have to read it, but I do have to write it.

You can’t get very far without joy and beauty, which is to say meaning, before it begins to break you. I’ve been finding my daily walks boring on account of this particular lack of interest that so quickly leads to a lack of enjoyment which inevitably places you at the top of a long, steel playground slide that is somehow coincidentally scorching hot, high friction, and drops you, splayed, into a great slurpy puddle of sadness. I’ve been in that puddle enough times to realize that wallowing comes next unless I change trajectory, so this week I’ve been walking through new doors and trying out new rides (as opposed to slides). I didn’t forget my sunglasses, I just left my filters, my barriers to entry, at home so I could observe, and be observed, differently, and then just pretended that it wasn’t an accident, and into the borrowed rabbit hole I went.

I’ve been getting coffee at this place for years, long enough that I have a ‘usual’, finally have all the names of the staff remembered, and the trans person, who is not as regular as I, has gotten as far along in the process as a nose job, and I touch the melting scar on my throat in post-operative sympathy. There is some pretty, shiny science equipment on the counter that I have never seen used, so I interrupt the process of ‘the usual’ to ask what it does. Yes, I realize that it makes coffee, but I would like to pay you twenty-five percent more for a coffee made in that fancy siphon apparatus just so I can watch several of the laws of nature being systematically wrangled, and enjoy the added bonus of using the wonderful words ‘siphon’ and ‘wrangle’ and ‘exudation’ as I enjoy the mediocre, and caffeinated exudation of the process not nearly as much as I would have my usual decaffeinated flat white while laughing into the pages of my current read about computer operating systems(please ask) before leaving somewhat bug-eyed and jacked, to find the next door.

I tell the lady inside that I have walked past this shop hundreds of times, probably over a thousand, and I have denied myself the pleasure of satisfying my curiosity for the last time. Her name is Lina, and she sports what I would call a short-ish 80’s style cut-and-dye, and a -to me-charming Eastern European accent. I have learned, by way of some rather eye-opening tirades, that, unless you are certain, it is best to generalize the guess at the country of that accent’s origin to a region vast enough to not piss off the Serbs, Romanians, Norwegians, Ukrainians, or especially, Gypsies. It is safer and more fun to glean the information without placing your curious, benignly ignorant head, without circumspection, into the vice of generational border dispute resentment. Place the accent guessing in the same file as asking a woman if she’s pregnant if her Mother, not her husband, hasn’t told you yet. Trust me, sometimes it’s better to appear dumb.

It’s a jewellery shop jewellery shop, and the conversation has the flavour of that time I went to the fire hall to ask the Chief if I could use his gym and he said no, so I signed up for three years so he’d change his mind, and what I meant by the first part of this statement is that jewellery is made in the fascinating looking shop attached to the store, and they run regular jewellery-making classes there. The pamphlet is with the books in my pack. And I’ll get to it.

Feigning interest in a boring super shrub, I observed an interaction that struck me as so meaningful and poignant in its pedestrian banality. Unbeknownst to the large black man with the mien of a retired dockworker and loyal friend clad in a weathered Carhartt jacket that allowed the exposure of thick hands, the drool rag had fallen from the arm of the wheelchair he was navigating, and was laying on the path behind him. The (assumed) yuppy (definitely) asian couple who had witnessed the involuntary abandonment called to the man as they retrieved the cloth for him, and jogged it back to him, shaking the dust and grit out of it. They all smiled and exchanged pleasantries as the social deal was done, all except the broken white man in the wheelchair, hidden beneath the beak of his hat and a severe, multi-axis hunch, the man who was in such good hands, under such good care, and unabandoned. Heart breaking and bursting at the tragedy, and the beauty, and the pure humanity, pure humaneness to which I had borne witness, and I went looking for a more private place to pee.

There’s really only one place in Garry Point Park that is socially acceptable to pee at if you don’t want to backtrack to the concession and public relief station, and that’s where I was, on the blackberry-picking trail, when I heard an unaccented woman’s voice as she made her best guess as to the function of the big red ship out at the mouth of the South Arm of the Fraser. Her position was that is was one of those large factory ships that smaller fishing vessels delivered to. She was incorrect, but I admired the exchange she was having with her husband, and the fact that it was really a well thought out guess given the ship’s size et alia. I peed as stealthily as I could (guys know), and after making myself presentable, I emerged from the secret trail as naturally as I could about 15 feet away from them and stated that I had been eavesdropping, and that I had information about the truth of the big red ship if they wanted to hear it. I told them more information than they needed because I am a slave to the exposition of context as well as to appear natural and somewhat dorky (which is the reality) instead of a supposed berry-picker and creepy (there’s no berries left), and I walked on, hopeful that I had left them with the understanding, and possibly several additional questions, that is the optimal result of the pleasant, if possibly one-sided, exchange of almost (way) too much information. They were a very sweet couple, possibly Egyptian. Not everyone feels confident or safe enough to make a guess out loud.

Shortly thereafter, about 100 mosey strides or so, I passed a woman who was standing on the side of the trail facing Scotch Pond taking pictures of yellow legged sandpipers running around on the muck and eating gross things. I stepped off the path a few fathoms down the way and watched the birds since she was standing in my spot. She was short, looked fit and in her seventies, her white hair under a hand-made toque, and wearing a well-worn backpack, as was I.

When she was done taking pictures I said, “They’re cute aren’t they?” She agreed that they were, though they weren’t the bird she had travelled across the city on the recommendation of the birder app-that I could google (just type it into the search bar) if I wanted to-to see. I hit her with the ol’ “Yellow legs are cute, but have you ever seen Oyster Catchers?” About forty minutes later I bid fair well to Josephine and told her that I would google up the bird app (I already have it), take my girlfriend to Van Dusen gardens, and maybe I’d see her if she came to take pictures of the Snow Geese when they arrive in their thousands. She said, at some point, “I’m not a photographer. I just like to take pictures.” I think she’s probably got some good ones. I like to take pictures too, and I’m not a photographer either, but I had to go pee again, and it’s ok to keep some secrets in the amateur photographer-amateur birder circles.

I petted several dogs and learned their names from their two-legged ambassadors, then forgot them utterly. By this time I’m nearly staggering under a weird emotionophysical imbalance. I feel as if one side of my body is flooded and heavy, and the other side is empty and buoyed, like that big red ship could be, sporting some serious yaw, if a green hand filled the tanks all whackily (IF that’s what they do), and I was ruminating about how it would be so much less disconcerting if this hyper-emotional pseudo-phenomenon were to manifest laterally, as with a hot air balloon instead of medially, like literally nothing normal ever, when I had to step back from crossing the bike path after encountering the energy and the hard, dark eyes of a white guy with a scarred face and a silver goatee as he slowly pedaled past me, followed by yet another cute asian kid, pedaling like mad. He kept checking on the kid, who I assumed was his grandkid, and speaking encouraging words as they made their way. “You’re doing great.”, and “Don’t run into the dog.” I could feel the masculine aura of protection radiating from the guy, and I thought that it was right and good that all that kid had to think about was riding his bike, because he was safe.

The asian seniors moving with the seemingly random but well-rehearsed body movement fade from my peripheral view, and the newly retired white couples that always seem to agree that “Fancy meeting you here!” and “Oh! Was I talking with my hands again?!” are the funniest, and most comforting, things ever said, fade into silence as I stare at the corpse at my feet. I am standing on the recycled plastic planked walkway that runs between the bookmatched buildings where I live. There are lawns and gardens on each side of the boardwalk. The boardwalk is ten feet wide. I kept telling him not to cross. I remember back to the night before, and I realize that I knew exactly when this tragedy had occurred. I remember, because it had been me that killed him, had crushed him under foot as if he were nothing more than a......well..a snail. “Stay on the grass.” I’d say, “I’ll put you on whatever side you’re pointed towards, but just stay there. If you keep trying to cross, you’re going to get crushed.” Shit. I feel kinda bad, but he’s already kinda sun-baked onto the plank so I figure I’ll just leave him to the sharp-eyed crow standing on the fourth floor gutter. The one right above my own bedroom window from whence I would watch for the stupid snail, then go for a walk just to save his dumb ass.

It’s a small world, maybe, about five foot nine-and-a-half inches tall now that I’ve had neck surgery to install the shims, and as wide as I can make my shoulders without looking like an force-idiot that wants to fight everybody when I’m walking and watching. When I’m looking out into other worlds and seeing what I see. It crossed my mind that it might be difficult to tell this simple story about unfathomable things like loyalty, and loneliness, and being cheeky, and being broken, and being redeemed, and feeling safe, and being brave, and having pride, and caring about stupid little snails, and being beyond hope, one way or another, and it occurred to me that the only way toe screw this up would be to remove all the faces, all the differences, all the pain, all the wrinkles, all the scars, to pare it all down to nothing, until there was no fault, no blame, no truth, no lessons. No value.

Can I really live in a world where there is no twinkle behind epicanthic eyelids, no grim grandpa who is a bulwark against hard truths because he understands them, no home-educated guesses, no assumptions by the observer, no agency, no progression, no trial by ordeal, no faith, no culture, no race, no stories, no history, no vulnerability, no forgiveness, no compassion.

No. Fuck that.

I’ll take one order of everything and keep ‘em coming.

I brought the relish.