Alas, there came a day at the Canadian Post Office when the lunchroom of the letter-carriers was moved back to the great outdoors from whence it came over the long road of collective bargaining. Hard won and easily lost had been the right to wash ones paws and warm up some proper victuals from ones own kitchen. It was back to tepid or frozen sandwiches again.
We were given a choice, nay, a provision for awaiting a “buddy” to pick us up on the route and deliver the two of us to a nearby negotiated place of refuge in which to eat. There was a nebulous array of Recreation Centres, ice rinks, odd cafés and mall spaces designated for each route. I'm still waiting to meet the first man or woman whoever used one.
This predicament necessitated the ability to adapt to changing circumstances. After swearing in seven languages for seven months, I decided to embrace the change. I procured a sturdy, compact, washable container and a small green mesh bag with a drawstring. The bag could just accommodate the container with a large sandwich and two pieces of fruit. I began to scout a suitable place of peaceful ambience on my route where I might take my lunch with some sense of dignity.
I found refuge nearly immediately at a large Catholic Church property. The massive front entrance had clean smooth river rock gardens with flowering trees on either side. The first thing I noticed was that when people came out of a Mass, they were focused on the street and the traffic out front on Cambie St. in anticipation of the drive home. Oddly, they never looked right nor left into the rock havens.
The flanking trees were big and had clean shiny leaves which afforded protection from the rain, sun and wind. The traffic on the street was unable to see through their foliage. The ground was one of smooth oval rocks like you find on a big sand-bar of a big river in mountainous country. Even during a wind-driven rain storm, it was snug and dry. If any person coming out of the Main Chapel had glanced to either side after exiting the doors, they would have had a clear unobstructed view, for the trees were planted five feet away from the building.
The roof swept down to within two feet of the earth in an elaborate gull-wing style. This provided extra cover from the side streets, kept the space absolutely dry and lent an air of spirituality to the structure. Thus I had a choice of two such spaces: one lying North and one lying South of either side of the Church doors, which would serve me in different seasons of the year
In the exact centre of this consecrated space of some one hundred and twenty square feet and towering high above it, was a massive crucifix wrought in a Spanish style. A sign on the front lawn bore the ancient Basque sun insignia, eguzki jainkoaren begi that dates from the First Century BC and was chosen by Iñigo López de Oñaz y Loyola, the Guipúzcoan Basque who is better known as Saint Ignatius the founder in 1534 of the Society of Jesus or the Jesuits.
I soon cooled my initial anger at having to eat outside after many years of enjoying my wife's good pancit at a proper table with clean hands. My new arbour was as delightful a spot as I have ever dined in on any of the five continents I have visited. The feeling of silently munching Hungarian salami with Swedish senaps on stout rye bread while regarding a crispy Gala apple lying alongside a steel thermos of strong coffee propped on a clean rock as murmuring people filed out of the big doors contemplating the Mass and oblivious to my presence; was ineffable.
Handy to my right arm from where I was hunkered down against the foundations was a great black ashtray filled with clean white sand. A church that acknowledges that many people use tobacco is more apt to remain viable in my considered opinion. In time I began to recognize many of the people attending. There was a caretaker of the grounds and he frustrated himself for three months trying to locate my blind.
I never moved from my chosen spot but the old man could smell the slightest trace of Landjaeger and also the fragrant smoke of my Drum tobacco. He was zeroing in and I decided to speak to the boss. I knocked on the office door one day and the secretary to whom I always handed the mail let me in to see the Priest.
He was an affable Dutchman, as tall as he was grey and carried much personal gravity. I told him that we mailmen were no longer allowed to take our lunch at the Post Office and that I had noticed a park bench on the South side of his chapel under cover of the roof. I asked if it would be acceptable to him if I used that bench for my half-hour lunch.
He replied, “By all means. But what in the hell is wrong with your union?”
My newly authorized and consecrated spot also had a big ashtray and was near some side doors that the choristers used. They were all beautiful young Korean housewives and they always laughed, joked and smiled. On the second day of using the bench, the old caretaker approached me as I was slicing a hundred grams of Gypsy salami with a folding knife.
”So. It vas you! I kinnot findit vair you ver khi-dink for long time. So, now I findit. Do you vant a beer, my friend? Havit with your salam.”
I thanked him and said I was a coffee drinker. We learned each others stories over the ensuing five years. He grew so enamoured of my Postal issue hat, I secured another one, removed the logo and all traces corporate. I entered a prearranged unlocked side door after the Korean ladies had left for the day. Up a short flight of groaning stairs was my friend's room. He insisted in giving a token fee for his new piece of haberdashery.
He proudly wore that hat on the blustery days while trimming and pruning things. During the most snowy Winter on that route, he came out with a camera one morning to snap a picture. The next day he gave me a nice copy.
He said, " I vant sho them ol country howit Canada mailman vairink short pant in vinter."
When the third Summer came, I sought to change lunch camp for this warm period.
I found a grove of ten massive white oaks behind the Grace Hospital further down the route. It had lots of sun and also much shade. It was situated near a psychiatric facility and on certain days the tragic noise coming from behind its walls would turn the blood in your veins to aspic. There were woodpeckers, sap-suckers, robins, gulls, Cooper's hawks, pigeons, grey squirrels, black squirrels, blue jays, red-winged blackbirds, skunks, coyotes and raccoons.
Cherokees have seven sacred trees that they love. Oaks are one of these and it was very powerful medicine to set ones spine alongside an elder entity of such calibre. Especially when taking sustenance. There was a pretty Cree woman who worked at the hospital. I got to know her husband because he used to wait to pick her up in her truck. He instinctively came straight to the trees to pass water and to pass the time. I surprised him the first time and this sparked a conversation on spatial awareness.
His woman's coming was always presaged by a dozen or so crows. She called them her 'black babies' and she fed them peanuts after every one of her shifts. The birds flew in an incredible symmetrical formation before, around and behind her as she crossed the hundred yards to where her husband and I always sat. She looked like a sexy saint in her pale green scrubs and walked with the easy confidence that only comes from spiritual power. We three had some nice chats on the warm days. Odin himself only had two crows, Hugen and Munen. Thought and Memory. Cree Nurse's corvids escorted her rusty red pick-up truck down the road when she returned home like a squadron sent by Gitchi Manitou.
The husbandman was an interesting fellow. He had a best friend in California in the Sixties, when he was in his late teens. The friend received a draft notice and was terrified. He loathed his fate to such a degree that the Canadian travelled down to talk to him about it in person. There was only one remedy they figured after much debate.
The California man swapped all his ID papers with his friend and the Canadian went to boot camp in his staid. By the time I met the man, he had survived four tours of duty in Vietnam. More incredibly to me than this, he had remained in possession of his sanity and retained his humanity. He was one of the most gentle souls I have ever met. He was a wary man though and he would notice a squirrel acting out of character seventy-five yards away. He passed what knowledge he could on to me during our chats.
One week, his wife got a different job and I saw them no more. The crows were in an awful state of agitation while trying to figure out why their lady had gone. I reasoned that they could have easily followed the truck to her new workplace but maybe had invested to much in nest building at the hospital location.
I felt sorry for the them and started throwing them bits of rye bread and salami in the Winter. It took some time for them to come off their peanut addiction. I began to notice some things that had changed in the passage of years. Many years prior I could remember chucking an apple core, for example, to a bird for a snack. The core would be already oxidized by the time I would throw it. A gull or crow would take it every time.
Usually a gull would swallow it whole to join the full length chicken bone already in his crop. A crow would crab-walk up to it sideways while watching you for any sign of treachery. At precisely the proper instant, he would grab it and fly up to a distance of thirty feet or so and begin to peck and tear at it. In the late Summer and Fall he would bury bits under leaves to munch on during unlucky days. The black squirrels figured that habit out quickly and exploited it to their great profit.
What had changed was that the apple cores no longer oxidized! I once hid one from the animals and checked it daily for several weeks. It remained pure white and only became slightly desiccated. Reader, that ain't natural. During the time I am writing of in this story, neither crows nor gulls would take certain apple leavings. They would use their tongues to test the food and reject immediately that which didn't oxidize.
Using my own adaptive abilities I began to learn which fruit available to me was non-genetically altered. I learned that GMO fruit had been on the market for a full ten years before it became common knowledge and was subsequently acknowledged by the Canadian Government. The way that came about was during a debate in the British Parliament, a Member in support of a Bill to introduce modified food to Albion, cited the example of Canada's decade long consumption of this poison. The fact that the consumers were used as unwitting guinea pigs was moot. Any data concerning new types of cancer in the Dominion was not discussed. British crows won that round of voting.
One afternoon, on my next route, I was lunching on Lyonnaise, rye bread and coffee in a back alley off Forty-ninth Ave. and I threw a crust of rye to a nearby crow. He had been watching me for some time and did not react when I proffered the morsel. I was halfway through a modified pear when he swooped and took the bread. He hopped about twenty feet away and carefully laid it beside a shallow clear puddle on the asphalt.
Then he flew due West. He was gone about seven minutes or the duration of one smoke. When he reappeared he was toting a small white plastic cup. He landed, rather gracefully considering his cargo, right in the middle of that puddle. Eye-balling me the entire time, he tipped the container over to draw in some water. He next inserted his obsidian beak and stirred vigorously, the way an old man stirs his coffee when he's at a pretty young woman's kitchen table.
This done, he tore a strip of bread, dipped it into the container, swirled it around like you might do with a French fry in a small paper thimble of ketchup. The bird then tossed the coated treat up in the air and swallowed heartily on its way down. He ate about five such bocadillos and yet never took his eyes off me. At the end he thoroughly washed his smeared beak with puddle water and dried it thoroughly on some nearby long grass. He flew away to the Southwest. I walked over to the puddle to investigate. There in the pool of rainwater was a Roasted Garlic Pizza Dipping Sauce container from a popular restaurant about ten blocks West of my location. I figured, if I could adapt half as well, we'd both survive to have future luncheons.
fin