One evening, well into my third marriage, I wrote this poem. It is about men, women and what I had learned from my experience up to that point about romantic love versus reality. I hadn't expressed myself in the poetry medium since my late teens and I was surprised to see the piece once it was done. The words had come easily off the pen to the page like a flock of birds leaving a telephone wire to land on a rice field.
Many men compare
Love to a flower
With youthful passion
Notice her colour
Or her fragrance
With ignorant greed
Taken from the earth
Placed in a vase
Easier to adore
Condemned to wither
Few men cherish
The entire flower
Petals, stem, roots
Her garden
Things that nourish her
Respect
Her thorns
And duty
Guard her roots
Sustain her beauty
Know
Her desire
To be fulfilled
Her needs
Family and security
Stay with her
In all seasons
She will reward you
With her splendour
Today and forever
Many women compare
Love to a hero
With girlish fantasy
Notice his horse
Or his medals
With selfish fear
Taken from the field
Put in a cage
Easier to adore
Condemned to leisure
Few women learn
The entire warrior
Motto, shield, weapon
His philosophy
His reasons for fighting
Respect
His sword
And duty
Uphold his creed
Give him courage
Know
His desire
To be free
His needs
Loyalty and justice
Stay with him
In all battles
He will protect you
With his life
Today and forever
I stored it away, not really sure what to do with it. Once in a while, I would read it for my own edification during my rough patches. It lay on my desk for years as I raised my children and lived peaceably with my wife. I was two decades away from my retirement from as a letter-carrier for Canada Post.
Like a glacier giving up the bones of a climber who fell half a century before and kilometres away from a summer scree-field, the day came when I began my last postal route. It was in a neighbourhood that had escaped me over the past thirty years and there were not many in the Lower Mainland that had. It was old, funky but well kept with an eye to thriftiness. That is to say, rather than make-overs, each dwelling had been repaired only as needed and the work done was always top-quality. I admired it and found the people living there to be very intelligent, outgoing, opinionated and generally philosophical.
It turned out to be one of the older Jewish neighbourhoods of Vancouver and was now ensconced behind the massive Children's Hospital and Red Cross Blood Donation Clinic complex, which it predated. My territory was from 37th Avenue at Cambie St. over to Oak St. and down to 26th Ave. It had over five thousand stairs, a park, a Synagogue, a Torah School, multiple Rabbi residences, an old fashioned strip-mall, a gas station and a Starbucks.
My youngest son had found lodgings across the street from one of my calls and I would be pleasantly surprised to meet him at a coffee bar once in a while at random. There was a deli in the supermarket and it sold world-class spanakopita at ridiculously low prices. There were pastrami sandwiches on rye breads sturdy enough to take the weight of a sandwich designed for a field-hand.
I was soon enjoying that daily run. I chose a house near the park, where I would sit on the steps for my sandwiches and coffee. An old couple inside came out on the first day and invited me in to sit at their table. I declined, due to my muddy gear and on the second day, the old man donned a toque and jacket and began sat with me on his steps to chat while I had lunch. He told me the history of the environs and described the view as it had been before being blocked by the never-ending hospital construction and the growing lines of Cars2Go.
The man’s name was Goldberg and we became friends. I usually had a parcel of books in my pouch for him. Eventually, when the old fellow stopped coming outside due to the colder weather, I had a few words at the door with him several times a week. Once, when I thanked Mrs. Goldberg for being so nice about letting me use her steps as a lunch platform, she told me that we all might as well be good to each other.
“After all,” she said, “We are only alive for a short few days, but when we die, we are dead for a long, long time.”
The neighbourhood was the kind of place where you could be buying a Baby Ruth candy bar at the grocery store and have a spirited discussion about Quantum mechanics with the twenty-something female cashier, followed by a thumbnail lesson on orchestral composition outside on the sidewalk with a random passer by. I loved it.
There was one house, three calls from the park with a very long set of wooden steps. Almost every day, I was greeted by a handsome elderly gentleman at the bottom of those stairs. He was tall, slim, evenly grey and well muscled for his medium-sized frame. He carried himself nobly, without appearing haughty or proud. He dressed in modest but top-quality wool slacks, a well-fitting shirt, a sweater-vest, a jacket and always wore a wool scarf.
His speech was accented in such a way that I placed it somewhere on the plains of Hungary near Lake Balaton, though I never asked. I assured him that I did not mind carrying his correspondence up the steps but he always insisted that I give it to him instead. We had many small talks, there in his yard and I used to watch him pacing back and forth in his yard as I ate my lunch across the street at the Goldberg’s.
One day I handed him his usual large stack of mail and remarked that I could always tell which letters were his when I was sorting. Ninety percent of them were odd square-shaped envelopes with thick black borders. There had been scores of these over the first several weeks on the route. Because they were not post-marked from Germany, I had overlooked the significance of those dark borders. In German sourced mail, it was a sign of death. The man looked at me square in the eye and asked me if I knew why those particular envelopes were arriving everyday. I answered that I did not.
“They are condolences, Michael. My wife passed away three weeks ago. We have many friends. We married when we were very young and were together constantly for fifty years. It's hard now. That is why I am outside the house all the time these days. I have been many places and have done many things. Her passing makes it hard for me to get excited about life any more. Believe me, life hold no surprises for you, when you get to my stage. We have one grown son. She was a wonderful woman, a devoted wife and loving capable mother.”
I gripped his arm and expressed my condolences. We spoke awhile longer and I told him briefly of my three marriages and how I had managed to find a woman like his late wife on my third try. We discovered that he and I had both gotten married at the same age. I was twenty-three years into my current marriage. He told me that the important thing was that I'd managed to find the right woman eventually.
With each passing Autumn day, I delivered sad stacks of ominous black-edged cards from all over Vancouver and many places overseas. Something powerful began gnawing at my heart during those days and would not relent. I knew the feeling and I also knew to wait until the cause made itself known. The old man stopped coming outside to collect his mail and chat and I truly missed seeing him.
One day as I was eating lunch on the Goldberg's steps, I had an epiphany to do with the strange sombre urgency I’d been experiencing in connection with the old widower. I rushed through my route and rode home on the train as quickly as I could. I dug out my poem about love, written decades earlier. I printed it and wrote a small note at the bottom, in my own hand. I put it in the longest rectangular envelope I could find and addressed it to the man who always wore a wool scarf.
My idea was to bypass the politically correct format of expressing condolences and rather, to recognize and celebrate that man's extraordinary simple life of love, fidelity, family and companionship. What he and his late wife had just lived through, was becoming increasingly rare in the world we inhabit today; to whit, fifty years together with a faithful woman and the raising of a well-educated son.
Somehow, those black-edged expressions of sorrow by the man's friends at his recent loss seemed to lack recognition of the five decades of heaven and hell that he and his beloved had enjoyed and endured, due to their own good character, perseverance and dedication. At least it seemed that way to me at the time. I was profoundly affected at a deep level by being forced to think of the inevitable passing of my own dear wife.
In my opinion, if he had followed his wife to the other side of the curtain on the next day, theirs had been an exemplary life, well-lived and containing its own rewards, spiritual and temporal. I was sure of it, down to my bones. I delivered the long envelope together with a hefty stack of the square black bordered condolence cards and a few bills.
I hadn't seen the man with the scarf for quite some time prior to depositing my envelope. The following day, he was still absent from his yard. A week went by. Like all heart-led decisions, I began to doubt myself and to actually worry that I had over-stepped some social boundary, possibly offending or even angering the gentleman. That feeling grew relentlessly more intense as the days grew colder, greyer, windier and wetter.
In two weeks time, I had a registered parcel for the widower. With much trepidation, I mounted the stairs and knocked crisply on his door. Presently, he appeared in the bevelled-glass pane, attired as usual. He gently swung open the heavy wooden door and signed for his parcel. When he handed me back my digital signature capturing device, he straightened his body and drilled me with his eyes. He looked at me the way a man does when he is working out if he can defeat you in a wrestling match and the jury is still cloistered.
I trembled visibly, such was my angst at possibly having offended that wonderful man in any way. I heard a crazy babble of fabricated explanations in my turbulent mind. Another, deeper part of me was serene and sure. That part was my heart. I waited like a man tied to a post, anticipating the report of a firing squad's volley.
“Wait here a moment,” he said sternly.
He disappeared into his house, walked past a beautiful dark-stained oak table that was set for six people. He returned a minute later with my poem in his hand.
“Did you write this?”
“Yes, Sir. I am sorry. I just wanted to tell you, that you are an example of the kind of man I strive to be. When it comes to a long full marriage, I know that luck has nothing to do with it and I wanted to acknowledge your part in making that happen in your life. I wrote that poem many years ago and I didn't know why at the time nor who it was really intended for. When you told me about your wife and your marriage, I knew in my heart that it had been written for you.”
“Michael, it made me feel good. I showed it to my son. It made him feel good. We both thank-you very much, Sir.” He bowed low, the way an orchestra conductor does. I felt like I was in Eighteenth Century Vienna.
My heart felt like I had just shot myself up with some Adolph's Meat Tenderizer. We shook hands. The next day, I saw the red scarf from down the block and knew the old man was again out in his yard. He thanked me again for the poem and said that his friends had liked it. He said his Rabbi had also liked it.
He told me that he came from a land of many trains and that he had developed an analogy of life based upon them. You got born on the train and found that there were some people on-board that you liked and some that you didn't. You couldn't ever get off and when it arrived at the final station you were done. I told him about one of my stories called, Train To Heaven. He smiled and stroked his chin.
Not long after, I encountered him on the pavement outside a Starbucks. He had been chatting animatedly with a beautiful young woman who was pushing a baby carriage loaded with grocery bags. It was cold but the sky had cleared to a beautiful cobalt blue. When the young lady went her way, the old man approached me and shook my hand. He thanked me again for the poem and we began to chat. I rolled a smoke and sipped my coffee.
Like a father, he put his arm across my shoulders and looked at me the way someone does when they are about to impart a great trade secret. His expression was such that as orator he had already determined that his listener was ready to receive the forthcoming information. There was no vestige of doubt on his face.
“Michael, do you want to live a long time?” he asked me.
“As long as my creator deems fit,” I truthfully replied with no hesitation.
“Of course, of course you do. I am a doctor, Michael. That was my profession. A medical doctor. I retired only recently and I have practised medicine for over forty years. Here then, is my gift to you. Don't go to doctors. Period. Stay away. Believe me, I know. My mother smoked like you and lived to be well over one hundred years old. Do you want to know why? It was because she absolutely and categorically refused to ever see a doctor for any reason whatsoever.”
He looked around the parking lot to see if our exchange had been monitored or overheard and then looked back at me and smiled warmly. He patted me twice on the shoulder and walked away. I never saw him again.
After seven years of retirement in Lillooet, in 2021, I was again in the neighbourhood and staying at the Easter Seal House on King Edward and Oak St. with my wife who was receiving treatment for leukemia. We were there for over half a year. When Nisa was well enough from her bone marrow transplant to walk, we used to circumnavigate the park across from the old doctor's residence for exercise.
Just a week or so prior to our being allowed to go home, I spotted a young mother coming from the back yard of the doctor's house with a baby stroller. We spoke and she told me that her landlord was a retired psychiatrist and that she was a tenant in the basement along with her husband and son.
A couple of days later, I spotted the retired doctor, now wearing a flannel work shirt and a big smile, striding across his lawn. If he recognized me, he didn't show it, so we passed within a few feet of each other. Luckily, I hadn't taken his advice about not seeing doctors and in the ensuing time since, I have been treated for blood clots and depression. I also ceased smoking after forty-five years.
fin