Gow

I’m under strict orders to lighten up, so here goes.

I used to work for a strange fellow who loved me very much. I’m not sure that he’d like me writing about him, so I’ll just call him Gaul. Gaul Putensohn.

I used to play with his son when I was a kid, he was strange too, unlike me, the kid who folded himself into a hide-a-bed. I wasn’t quite sure what to think of Gaul back then, back when I learned what the words stern and strict meant, but he did scare me a little. He was never mean to me or anything, not ever, but he was a big man with a black beard, and grey-blue eyes that looked like they wanted to be kind, and a soft voice that sounded like it wanted to tell jokes and stories, but they hadn’t figured that part out yet, not for little boys.

I learned the word verandah shortly after standing under his one day. It was a beautiful house, new, crisp, and had fancy stuff where the standing up wood held up the going across wood. Some people call that stuff gingerbread, but I don’t like that.

He built the house himself, and while I knew that people built houses, and I knew people that built houses, this was the first time that I recall meeting someone who had built his own house to live in. I don’t remember the inside of that house very well. I think there was pink carpet in one of the rooms-that would make sense later-and I got severe rug burn in that house, but not from the pink carpet.

Gaul Putensohn was a school teacher, for a time, as well as many other things that even I never learned about in his lifetime. Yes, he’s gone, in a way, but he was important to me, so I kept him; I kept what I could.

I never went to his classroom, I think he taught grade four, and I was home schooling by then because there was something wrong with evolution, or something. Gaul liked obedience in his classroom, as I understand, and that makes sense, because teachers, after all, gotta teach, and year after year, many persistently rascally young boys had to write the set of lines named “The Importance of Being Quiet.” many, many times. I’m sure girls had to as well, on occasion, but Gaul had a soft spot for the brightness of young girls-in the noblest of ways-on account of his daughter, who was named after a month, which I thought was odd. I’m not totally sure, but I’m pretty sure that Gaul was so completely wrapped around that girl’s finger, that he was helpless against her, and, by extension, her friends. She was nice, though. Kinda weird. My sister and her were besties.

Mr. Putensohn came to church, but I never heard him sing. I never heard him even mention himself singing, not once, not ever, and I never saw him hang around after for the coffee my Dad described as battery acid, whatever that was.

He liked my Dad well enough, but my Dad’s kind of....bouncy, and that wasn’t Gaul’s jam at all. He’d shake his head in mock(and actual) despair at my Dad’s 85-90% solutions to many practical matters, but he’d still ask him for advice and help because my Dad’s smart, and likes to help everybody, a lot.

He was always such a gentleman to my Mother, was Mr. Gaul Putensohn, and it was apparent that he thought very highly of her. He often mentioned how incredible it was that such a nice lady was the product of such an awful mother. He thought his mother was awful, too, but I never learned what Gaul thought of himself, not really, because he never talked about himself. Almost never. I heard one story of little Gaul once, but that one stays with me. He didn’t have a father. Not ever.

I found out so many things about Gaul Putensohn at his funeral that I had never heard before, but they were true, every one, and I was left wondering how that was possible. How could I work 40-ish hours a week with a man, for ten years, and still know so little of him? I was a bit peeved, if I’m honest, and when I got up to speak, I openly admitted that I didn’t give a shit about one of the loves of his life, cars, and it was half true. I never told Gaul that, though. That would be like the time I told Juan Wallan that I didn’t like the Rolling Stones and almost got fired, and even I can keep my mouth shut, if I have to, 50% of the time.

Some people are deep, and having a relationship with them is tricky because it’s hard for them to be loved at close range. Their love is enveloped in enigma, and is revealed in every other way than the word itself, because the word itself, to them, is nothing. Ahem...
I re-met Mr. Putensohn when I was 19, and just back from my first tour in the punk rock scene of the city of Victoria, BC. I was a ‘singer’, and quite enthusiastic about it. I was also, of course, completely broke, so I asked Gaul for a job while he was backing out of his driveway one day, the driveway of the house that would eventually, and finally, completely baffle everyone when he painted it seven shades of pink, which is something that I think he always wanted. He replied to my query with something polite, noncommittal, and bordering on awkward, then drove away.

After probably shopping for the boring food he always ate, he drove down to talk to my Dad about the encounter. I had severely exasperated my poor Dad by this point by leaving town before finishing school to go join a punk band with some other kids who also spit a lot, only to return sporting earrings, tattoos, and my hat on backwards, which is exactly what Gaul wanted to speak to him about. I had a mohawk, too-which would become a habit-but that’s what the hat was for. I didn’t really want the job anyway.

I got the job anyway. No doubt it was a favour to my Dad, and with my Dad’s dearest hopes that Gaul could make something out of the calamity that I had become. He wasn’t wrong, by the way; I was a calamity. I don’t think Gaul had very high hopes for my career as a carpenter, or even a labourer, and he offered me up to the ultimate test of mettle in the trade, Trial by Form. We were stripping the forms of the first red-roofed building in Ucluelet, the place owned by Han Surley, who Gaul worked for quite a lot. Stripping concrete forms is brutal, ugly work. It’s heavy, gritty, pokey, and usually bloody, and of course, I loved it, and Gaul loved that.

Sir and I-lots of people called him Sir from The Importance of Being Quiet days, but not me-worked with almost no one else for 10 straight years. We built a bunch, or, as he would say and think was the funniest thing, a bushel of houses, and when the economy collapsed for a while, we did renos.

We had no nail guns, we had no cell phones, and we usually didn’t have a HIAB. We just worked hard and smart; usually smart. He’d take on jobs that he shouldn’t have, sometimes, just to be nice, and because he couldn’t say no unless you were a British lady like my grandma, and then he’d wind up taking a bath on it because it was a silly idea to begin with, like sanding the wax from the entire interior of a pan-abode house. Who does that? Well, it was me, that’s who.

We did some pretty ugly work, working on forms in storms and the like, because sometimes work’s ugly, but I never complained because he was always in it at least as deep as I was, and he didn’t like wearing rain pants, so he always called it a day first, and one time, when I slashed my thigh wide open with an Olfa knife while working on a roof, he picked me up like a child, and carried me down the ladder, and took me to get stitched up, and then paid me full wages until I was healed up enough to work again because he paid me under the table, and didn’t want to get in trouble with the law. He also did that because I was his apprentice, and he was an honourable man.

He always thought out loud for me, so that I could learn.

He was an accomplished piano player, somehow, with those beat up hands. I heard that from Mr. Hattimer, and Gaul never mentioned it again. It seemed...embarrassing, somehow, but I wrote it off to the fact that he liked country music, and that explained a lot for me at the time.

He taught me how to lift weights. We’d lift at exactly one hour after work, three days a week. We did this for a year or two, and lifting weights came to be a skill that I have used to injure myself with more times than I can count, but that wasn’t Gaul’s fault.

Another thing I learned from him was as a result of a quiet protest, as he was quite the gossip, and said lots of things about people that I liked that I didn’t like, so I started countering him by saying something good about his target because it made me feel less icky, and I thought it might turn him around a bit, but he was pretty set in his ways, so it didn’t really work. I sometimes wondered what he thought about that, but he ate his burgers open faced, and with a knife and fork, and thought creamed corn was a delicacy, so who knows what he thought about anything.

God, I was so young. I got really drunk once and was too hungover to go to work, so I avoided him for two days, and didn’t even return his calls. When he finally caught me on the street he pulled over and asked me if I was ok. That was it. He said I should come back to work on Monday, and drove away.

And I went back to work on Monday.

Ten years is a long time. I got married and had kids while working for Gaul Putensohn, and he adored my little family because they were mine, and because they were girls, and because he was, all in all, a nice man, and a good man that aged well, possibly due to his inexplicable desires to order exactly 12 fries with his burger, or to have his jello desert warmed up for 8-10 seconds at the Chinese joint,-he loved those gags so much-or that egregious comb-over that he was so terribly vain about, and that I never mentioned once. Not ever. In some ways, he was like a child, and it was sad, and so endearing, to me.

He never had a father, as far as I knew, but I did, and that makes me a lucky one. There is no question as to who had the greatest influence on me, and I’m not just saying this to mollify my Dad, because he already knows. I’m not saying this to impune him because I’m a train wreck sometimes a lot, either. No, some people are deep, and having a relationship with them is tricky. I’m one of those people, tricky to love at close range.

Like anything else, how love is given is not how it is received, and there’s nothing you can do about that except keep trying to get it right, to give it right. In my own failings as a father and otherwise, I’ve come to understand how scared one can be that they’ve broken something that can never be put back together. But I know that they can. I know that for fact, because I have also succeeded.

I’ve got to lighten up, don’t I?

Patience.

Gaul Putensohn loved me in his own way, and I was happy to receive that love, because it’s hard to do that sometimes, and sometimes it’s not. It was a wonderful way to learn a trade, from someone nurturing who never got mad, and who blushed crimson every time he had to swear to tell a joke right, and I never experienced that again, nor will I, but I tried to emulate it on occasion; results were varied.

People are deep, aren’t they? Complicated. Fascinating, and yet, so simple, too. No matter what anyone says, people just want to be around each other and not get hurt too bad, not get their mysteries all tied up in knots that bind them, immobile, and afraid, waiting for injury. We just want to be loved, to be reached into and held with gentle hands, and seen with kind eyes, and to hear a soft voice

say nothing.