A Maltese Black Umbrella

Where I grew up in the gentle South there was a lot of heroin addiction. The problem was greatly exacerbated by the war in South-east Asia. One of the wars behind that war was due to a restructuring of the Golden Triangle and the conduits for the product's refinement, export and distribution. I was armed with the sad facts of heroin addiction by a now deceased friend in Texas when I was young and very vulnerable; thus I was not smothered by the black wings of that particular angel of oblivion. I saw and felt its ancient path of destruction everywhere I looked.

There wasn't much unemployment in America during the decades of the Fifties and Sixties. If a person wanted to work, they could always find something. So there wasn't much more than petty theft being perpetrated by drug addicts at that time in the various neighbourhoods I lived in. In my two states of residence, Louisiana and Texas, the prevalence of gun ownership deterred more crime than will ever be measured to accurately inform analyses and statistics.

Criminals always have access to firearms and the response times for 911 calls in many major urban centres in North America easily compound the problem. A study of the deeds of Mao and Stalin can easily show the interested student what happens after a population is disarmed. It is ironic that Mao is often quoted as having feared a man with an idea far more than a man with a gun, yet he scooped up all firearms before chucking people in prison on account of their ideas.

One of the ways in which junkies used to scrape enough cash together to score a hit was to donate their blood. In the USA, it used to be the practice to pay blood donors ten dollars for a pint. Ten dollars stretched real far in those days. Thus, addicts and blood donors became associated in my young mind, leading to a false notion that only junkies donated blood. That subconscious connection existed well into my forties. Until I met a Maltese lady.

Working as a letter-carrier in Vancouver, I found my desk between a vivacious, raven-haired lady and a heather-honey, sweet single mum from the Welsh borderlands, after a restructuring of our Station. The first lady was intense and composed of mostly fire, while her counterpart was akin to a pair of warm slippers, a turf fire, a mug of chamomile tea and a briar pipeful of Burley.

Many years before that time I had worked in a bank. It was the first and last time I had been in a situation where I was the only man in a workplace. Within the first year, many false stereotypes and fantasy notions I had carried from childhood about women were blown away like bits of eraser from a page of foolscap. As the falsehoods were put to rout, much of what remained true, I had suspected all along.

Another thing I learned first-hand was something my Swedish grandpa had tried to teach me early on. It was a lesson about the magic created by men and women in relatively equal numbers. Put simply, they compliment each other's innate natures and together are far stronger than any other possible combination. They compensate for each others weaknesses and inspire each other to do their best without a word being spoken.

Grandpa was a ship's engineer for fifty years and towards the end of his career he witnessed the veracity of his convictions at first hand when the first women officers and crew were starting to appear aboard ships. I witnessed it during my employ with the Post Office. When the numbers are weighted far to one side or the other, the effect is quite different. This can be proved in many ways and one handy way would be to watch the Bachelor Show.

Men are men and women are women and both have been thoroughly studied. If you watch nature shows on TV you may have noticed, in the name of saving the animals, arrogant folks working with grant money travel the world tranquilizing everything that crawls, flies, swims or walks with ketamine and while it's K-holing, measure it, weigh it, insert a transponder, strap on a collar or even mount a camera.

Data is collected, DNA is taken, maps are created and yet the world keeps getting worse for all animals, including most humans. Areas are set aside as precious global reserves in the name of some creature or other but are certainly also surveyed for timber, minerals and other exploitable resources. You can tell a lot about a person by the way they treat their pet. You can tell a lot about our social and political systems by the way they treat their humans.

One day, the dark and fiery lady working beside me at the Post Office, asked me to guess where she was born. My only clue was to be her surname. She said that no one had ever guessed correctly. I was told the name and the spelling and saw that it was an altogether strange name. One I had never heard of nor had ever seen in print. I studied her mixed Mediterranean features and pondered for a long moment. I said (as my only possible guess) just before giving up, that surely she must be from Malta. Her jaw dropped, then she smiled and we became very cordial after that.

One morning she was telling me about her favourite sport. That of Canadian bicycle racing. She sprinkled this talk with random memories of Malta. She mentioned that on her island, if a man was unable to impregnate his wife, the priest was authorized to accomplish this for him. In order to avoid uncomfortable confrontations, the priest would carry a black umbrella and leave it open on the porch if he was attending to a parishioner in this fashion. When thinking about the falling birth-rates in our developed world, one must respect any culture that recognizes the human importance of having babies, raising them and demanding the means with which to feed, house, clothe and educate them.

On another day, and just after I had just bought my wife Nisa a big pink umbrella, Malta mentioned that she had been a regular blood donor for some time and that she still volunteered by handing out refreshments at the blood clinic. She asked if I had ever donated. I told her no and added that I hadn't seen the logic in taking out of my body that which I strive daily to keep in. Her eyes sparked with a challenge in a manner that only could only have issued from feminine energy. She effortlessly saw through all my layers of rhetoric as I stood in my fear naked as the day I was born. I changed the subject and stayed after my sort to speak about it with the Welsh lady. Her kindness and sympathy only hardened my resolve to get to the bottom of my feelings.

All that day on my route, I felt something terrible creeping up from my depths and forcing its way into my conscious mind. By noon, I was flat-out terrified of giving up a drop of my blood, although I am not usually frightened by the sight of blood. This perplexed me. As I thought about this conundrum, it occurred to me that the root of my very real fear and aversion, was a memory of seeing the hollowed-out husks of junkies selling their blood to buy the next hit. I have always likened pushers to vampires and their victims to the undead. All this imagery was in turn fed by all the horror movies I had seen as a child. It was perfectly logical.

After my route, I walked several miles over to the Red Cross Clinic on Oak Street. I asked the lady if it would damage me in any real way to purposely take blood out of my body. She taught me all the medical facts about the procedure and the bodily response. Evidently, one could give up a pint every forty days or so with no ill effects and some beneficial effects, especially for men. I answered all the embarrassing sex questions, had my blood pressure taken and rolled up my sleeve. I was white as a sheet. I told the nurse about the negative associations I harboured.

She had purple hair, tattoos, black nail polish and many piercings. She laughingly told me not to worry, that she wasn't a vampire. After awhile in the most comfortable chair I had ever reclined in, my pint bag was full and I was disconnected. I was led to a table and treated to a basket of cookies and given raspberry juice by a silver-haired volunteer.

She told me that each pint donated would be used to help six people. That my blood type was universal and the fact that I ate no aspirins or other medicines made my blood the first choice for giving to infants. I went home to eat and drink like a farm hand. I felt blessed to be married to a wonderful cook and decided that donating blood was a great way to share the bounty of our table.

I always went on foot to donate after walking my route according to the Red Cross recommended schedule. When I reached my fifty-second birthday, it happened that I had donated exactly fifty-two pints of my Cherokee-Swede Sweet Light Crude. I felt that this was a good juncture at which to stop before the habit of giving my blood tried to insert itself further into my ego. I imagined three hundred and twelve babies out there biologically grooving on my wife's adobo, tingling from the chili peppers I eat and growing up to realize that they love the sound of a pedal-steel guitar. I doubt that I would have ever have been moved to give my blood gift to Canada had I not been stirred out of inertia by the Mediterranean sparks showered upon me by my Maltese Canadian workmate.

Regardless of how it appears, the world is still largely run by men; but not by ordinary men. Under their corporate sway and the drag of newly legitimized bible thumping multi-generational drug smuggling old money are many willing political jesters who cannot save us from many perils we face. We shall have to save ourselves. We will need to work together, us men and women. My guess is that a few brave women will eventually ignite the best in many menfolk. I would encourage all women reading this to take up the task of their own education and to spread their knowledge and their encouragement.

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