SO MANY TOMORROWS -- TEN YEARS ON

Arriving in the mail here in the Philippines -- alongside my brand-spanking new Ontario driver's license -- was a short story my mom found stuck in some box in the basement, a story I wrote around ten years ago and published, apparently, in a York University Fine Arts fanzine.

I say 'apparently' because I don't remember even writing this story, and I certainly don't recognize the rather strange illustrations that accompany the text. (I sure as hell didn't draw them, and whoever did was probably smoking crack. The bad crack, not the good crack.) It could have been for MyTake, the film department's magazine started up by my friend Eric and a few others, but why would they have stuck a short story in a cinema journal? There's no other pieces alongside my photocopied story, no masthead, no contributors list. As if it emerged in that box, whole and complete, waiting to be found.

Irregardless, here it is, my blast from the past.

I remember writing stuff back then and thinking: This will be interesting to read ten, twenty years from now -- a snapshot of who I was and what I was thinking. (Come to think of it, I still think like that.

It's not even really a narrative, actually; more of a character piece. About an old man who is going through his voluminous stack of diaries that he has faithfully recorded for the past fifty years. He finds an entry from his wedding night, at the age of twenty-two (older than I was when I wrote it). He is ecstatic. His life is all ahead of him. It can't get better than this, he thinks. And the old man, looking back at his younger self's words, agrees -- it didn't get better. That was the peak. After that, at some point in time, the old man's wife got sick, got cancer, died. And now he has all these empty days to look forward to. (The piece is called So Many Tomorrows, a title that literally makes me cringe -- but what the hell. If you can't be sophomoric when one is a sophomore, when can you, right?)

My younger self was right, too -- it is a snapshot of who I was and what I was thinking about.

Trying to turn my own rather mundane, ordinary Ontario upbringing into something simultaneously larger and smaller than itself. Remembering the details of who I was and where I came from and trying to elevate such observations into something universal. The story is set in Freemont, Ontario, a fictional town that later served as the centrepiece of a series of linked short-stories I wrote. (I even sent them out to a few publishers, receiving a few letters that said, essentially: "Um, no.") Based on St.Catharines, Fort Erie, and Manotick, all Ontario towns and cities, it was my own attempt to fuse various writers' styles -- namely, Ross Lockridge, Jr., Don Robertson, Alice Munro, and, especially, Sherwood Anderson -- with my own clumsy attempts at encapsulating all that I knew and thought and believed about small-town life. Various St.Catharines stores and street names pop up. I can see which authors' styles I was swiping from. I can sense what I was trying to do, even if I don't think I pulled it off.

Looking at it objectively, the piece is pretty terrible: overdone, maudlin, emotional. I like the writing itself -- the pacing, the rhythm -- but nothing happens, and what does happen dwells in its own moroseness.

But I have to say.

It feels like it was written by an old soul. What was a twenty-one year old kid doing writing about an old man who's looking back, dejected and defeated, at the best years of his life? What did I know about sickness, or disease, or death?

As I said, I have no recollection of writing it, so reading that his wife died of cancer, that he kissed her 'shaved head', kind of threw me for a loop.

I've had plenty of experience with cancer in the last year-and-a-half, something I'm sure I never, ever would have imagined back in 1996. (Where I did get the idea that people with cancer shaved their heads? Was I that naive? Didn't I know that the hair fell out from the chemo? Maybe not. Disease was a story-tool, not a reality.)

Eerie, a little bit. Reading that piece. An old man looks back on his life and his wife with cancer, realizing, now, that there's nothing left for him anymore. And here I am, having now actually experienced what that twenty-one year old kid was simply using as ingredients for what he thought would make an interesting, emotional story.

I can see now that I was trying to write about that which I did not know. Aging, grief, the remembrance of youth past. I had experienced none of that. I was trying to be a fiction writer. I was trying to imagine everything. I couldn't have imagined that even life sometimes outdoes and one-ups one's own imagination.

And here, in this story, the old man is wondering what he would tell his younger self. And here I am -- not old, no, but older -- wondering what I would say to my younger self, the one who wrote the story about the older man talking to the younger man.

Weird, weird, weird.

Boxes within boxes. Characters within characters. Myself, inhabiting each.

Writing is a window into another world, but, for the writer, reading one's own work is also a glimpse into one's self -- another self, a younger self. "Oh, that's what I was thinking about," we say. On one level we're looking at the technical craft of what we were trying to accomplish; on another level, a deeper level, the place where the writing begins, where the emotion orginates, we're recollecting all that was inside of us, and what we were trying to say, and why.

Strange.

Reading is all about and always about getting inside somebody else's head in the hope of understanding what's going on inside of your own. Reading one's own writing is akin to delving inside of your own head, refracted and removed by distance, time, maturity.

I actually haven't read the whole piece straight through. I've looked at bits and pieces, in and out of order. Read some passages here and there. It's only four, five pages long, but there's a lot of stuff lurking between those lines, and I'll save them for another tomorrow.

WHY PROFESSIONAL PING-PONG PLAYERS GET NO, I MEAN NO, RESPECT, AND WHAT WE, AS A PEOPLE, CAN DO ABOUT IT

I'm not saying that I'm a fanatical follower of ping pong, but if I happen to catch a match on TV I'll watch it for a moment or two, and because it's on TV in Asia a hell of a lot more often than it's on the air back home, I've noticed something important over the past few years: the players get no, I mean no respect.

Here's what I mean.

In the west, table tennis has mostly been relegated to the rec-room of middle-class suburbanites, Friday night fodder for the almost-tween-and-under set. (If you were a Canadian in your mid-twenties who was freakishly adept at ping-pong I'd be slightly worried.) In the east, however, for some reason, at some point in the dark and distant past (because of the famous Nixon ping-pong diplomacy of the seventies, perhaps?), table tennis has taken off as a genuine, unabashedly intense, fiercely competitive,well, sport.

But here's the thing.

The sad thing.

The almost almost pathetic thing.

So unbearable that it hurts to write about it.

These professional athletes, competing at the highest levels of their chosen craft, have to go and pick up their own ping-pong balls when they fly off the table.

Which they do after each and every point, because have you ever seen the way pros play ping-pong? Forrest Gump's got nothing on these guys, let me tell you. Balls are flying everywhere all the time, in all possible directions. The rallies in table tennis are unbelievably short compared to tennis, two or three back-and-forths between the players at the most, whereas a good volley in tennis can sometimes go on for twelve, fifteen whacks before the ball finally hits the net.

And what happens when that happens, the ball hitting the net?

Well, in country-club tennis, a young boy or girl races from the sidelines and grabs the ball and gets it out of the way, or throws it back to the players, or hands them a towel, a wet one. They might even fetch a double-latte from Starbucks for Serena for all I know, or a muffin for Mcenroe. A coffee for Conners, perhaps.

In ping-pong?

Uh-uh.

The ball flys off the table.

And the player himself has to chase it around the court, waiting for it to stop bobbing.

Think about it.

The, I don't know, indignity of it all.

Remember how often John Mcenroe (my favorite tennis player) used to flip out and go berserk? Imagine how often it would have happened had he had to chase the freaking ball around the court after every, single, point.

Or Roger Federer. Look at his graceful rhythm, his improbable, unstoppable dominance of the game. Would he be so cool, so calm, so collected, so Swiss, if he had to worry about wasting valuable energy scrambling after the freakin' ball three hundred times a match.

You may laugh.

You may scorn.

But somebody has to stand up for the rights of professional ping-pong players, goddamnit.

Get them a ball-boy, I say. (Or a ball-girl.) There's a lot of spectators in the audience. Couldn't they pass around a baseball cap, collect some coins, and give the cash to some little tyke for an hour or two's worth of work?

Then the table-tennis titans would be able to focus on the majesty of their sport. The strategy of their technique. The intensity of their ferocity.

Soccer is known as 'the beautiful game'.

But get some ball-boys to work in table-tennis, and within five, ten years, tops, ping-pong would be a serious rival for the sporting world's affection.

I'm telling you.

There would be parades, riots, hooligans. The whole deal.

If we write to our governments. If we unite as one. If we maintain solidarity.

Change can come. Change will come.

Am I asking for too much?

THE PARADOXICAL COMMANDMENTS BY DR.KENT M.KEITH

People are illogical, unreasonable and self-centred.
Love them anyway.

If you do good, people will accuse you of selfish, ulterior motives.
Do good anyway.

If you are successful, you will win false friends and true enemies.
Succeed anyway.

The good you do today will be forgotten tomorrow.
Do good anyway.

Honesty and frankness make you vulnerable.
Be honest and frank anyway.

The biggest men and women with the biggest ideas can be shot down by the smallest men and women with the smallest minds.
Think big anyway.

People favor underdogs but follow only top dogs.
Fight for a few underdogs anyway.

What you spend years building may be destroyed overnight.
Build anyway.

People really need help but may attack you if you do help them.
Help people anyway.

Give the world the best you have and you'll get kicked in the teeth.
Give the world the best you have anyway.

SOME RATHER HIGHBROW INTELLECTUAL ARGUMENTS

Here's a thought. What would happen if everybody in the entire world sneezed at one and the same time? One giant, hacking honk of a sneeze. Everyone. At once. Would the sound be deafening? Would the velocity and volume of such a sneeze shatter our eardrums, or would we only hear the sneezes that were in our direct vicinity? ("Sneeze globally, hear locally.")

This is something I've been wondering about since I was a kid. Does sound travel like light travels? Would it not matter one little bit if everybody sneezed in unison? Would it be the same as me sneezing in one room and somebody else sneezing in another?

Oh, and one other thing. There was something in the news recently about a little girl who couldn't stop hiccuping for a good three or four weeks. Sixty times a minute. All day long. The only rest she had was when she slept. Until finally, one day, for no reason, zilch. Nada. Not a hiccup to be heard.

But hiccups don't actually produce anything, right?

Sneezing, however, usually results in at least a little bit of snot. Nose mucus. Whatever you want to call it.

So what would happen if you sneezed, constantly, every minute, every hour? Would your body run out of snot? Think about it. There's got to be like a finite supply of the green stuff in our bodies. Would we end up sneezing blood? Could you literally sneeze all the blood right out of your body?

University educated. UN experience. Lived in four different countries.

And this is what keeps me up at night.

VANILLA MORE THAN CHOCOLATE (OR VICE VERSA)

Why do we always have to be right?

There's something inside of us, each of us, that tells us that this is right and that is wrong. I'm not only talking about political beliefs, or ideological beliefs; I'm talking about a sense, a certainty, that what works for me, well, works, and everything else is alien, uncertain, unstable. A faulty machine just waiting to break down.

It's long been my belief that we really don't know anything about anything. Meaning, our most fundamental beliefs are all based on kind of vague sensations that whirl around our subconscious selves like helicopters looking for, but never finding, a landing point.

Take ice cream.

What's your favorite flavor?

You may like vanilla best because you don't like all that extra added sweetness of chocolate or strawberry.

But why don't you like that extra added sweetness?

Because it doesn't taste as good to you.

But why is that?

Perhaps we could trace it back to what your mother fed you in the high chair, and how that devoped your taste buds in a particular pattern, but I don't know if that kind of pseudo-scientific reasoning would really satisfy my question.

The same principles could be applied to books, or movies, or music. Some people will watch a certain perfomance, a certain actor, and say: "Magnificent." Others will watch the exact same images and say: "Pretentious, overblown junk."

What's going on here?

The things we watch, respond to, indulge in, strike something within us. They ring bells. And we listen to those bells. If the bells ring loud and clear, we judge it good. If the bells are faint and distant, we judge it bad.

And at the bottom of these beliefs, these feelings, these I-like-vanilla-more-than-chocolate stirrings lies a certain certainty. The kind of certainty that forms the bedrock of patriotism, which is nothing more than the underbelly of nationalism.

The more time I've lived abroad, the less patience I have for nationalism. Not to say that I'm not proud of my country, or love my country, but you know what? Everybody's proud of their country. Everybody secretly believes that their country is the best country. Patriotism and nationalism are linked to those feelings at the base of our most secret selves, those inklings and nerve endings that whisper: "We are right and they are wrong."

The intensity, verging on animosity, with which the American presidential elections engender such stirrings is symptomatic of this, I think. Both sides, Democrats and Republicans, sincerely, unequivocally believe that they are right. Empirically so, almost. As if it were a scientific equation. (Not that Canadian political parties are excluded from this kind of thinking. We're just not as, well, neon about the whole thing.)

So when we have political parties that believe they are right, filled with people who sincerely believe that their religion is the right religion, the result is a polarized environment where the only solution is a fight-to-the-death for all involved. The victor will stand. The fallen will regroup and prepare for the next battle. (Because, even though they lost, they're still right. Right?)

I guess this is the way that things have to be.

Humans, as a species, tend to gravitate towards that which confirms their own perceptions about themselves. That validates their own sense of the world. Were we to acknowledge that others' points of view have equal weight, then, in a sense, we're stating that our views are flexible, malleable, bendable. That we may not be right after all. And to admit this would be to reduce us, in a sense, to the levels of animals, who don't worry about such distinctions, who just do their own thing, who live their lives, who feed and fall and kill and nurture.

Maybe we need this feeling of rightness.

If we didn't have it, then we would be forced to live our lives in a sort of pseudo-limbo, where everything shifts and sways with the frequency of waves coming towards and away from the shore. We would have nothing to grasp on to. We would have no sense of self. We would be forced to collide and connect with others in a manner both frightening and intimate. We would have to abandon what we know for a present and a future that hints at only possibilities.

And that would be too, too much to ask of ourselves.

After all, we're only human.

Right?

FIFTY MILES FROM HOME

This was in Skuon. In Cambodia. Where the ladies wait for the vans to stop, the buses to stop, the tourists and workers to stop, so that when legs are stretched, and knees are popped, and ligaments are creaked and cracked after hours of immobility, they, the ladies, can offer their wares. Their sizzling, steaming plates of tarantulas for the hungry, noon-time lunch-time dinner-time horde. Clumps of black, crispy, multi-legged tarantulas. Come one, come all. Sample the local delicacies. Go on. Have a spider. The big one, there, in the middle. Open wide. Bet you can't eat just one!

Ah.

Travel.

While looking for a place to stay, we wandered around the dusty brown town, wondering where a good, cheap guesthouse might be found. I chatted with a local, in that aimless, amiable nontalk that strangers in a foreign land feel obligated to babble.

"You're from here?" I asked.

"Yes, yes," he said. Smiling. That Camobodian smile. Warm, gentle, reflexive.

"You've lived here your whole life?"

"Yes, yes," he said. Laughing now. Of course he'd been here his whole life. Where else would he go? Where else COULD he have gone? Madrid? Manchester?

Another village, another time. This one an hour from Phnom Penh. On the way back our car would break down in the heat of a Cambodian afternoon, but that was later. The next day.

This was the previous day. Things were steady in the heat. Full of Cambodian life. I would break the haze by swimming with village children in the brown and murky water, forgetting about potential, waterborn amoebas waiting to annhilate my immune system. After, blindfolded, I would try to smack a makeshift pinata with a long, wobbly wooden pole. Three times, I would swing. Three times, I would miss. Then, sheepishly, I would tug off my blindfold, and smile, and the dozens of villagers would howl with glee at the silly foreigner. And, later still, the old ladies of the village would would sit next to one other, waiting to be doused with ice cold water. Some kind of ritual. Alien to me.

A Cambodian afternoon.

The university student who invited us would introduce his cousin, sixteen, seventeen, pretty and shy in that gentle manner patented by the Khmers.

"Her English, very good," he said. "She study very hard. But university, far. Cost, very much. So." He shrugged. Smiled. Offered us a Coke.

Very far.

An hour, tops, by car.

Very expensive.

A few hundred bucks.

This young girl, like most of the villagers, young and old, weak and strong, had never been to Phnom Penh.

Probably never would, either.

And I thought of a visiting professor, American, lecturing at the university. Telling us that most of the world's inhabitants never ventured more than fifty miles from their birthplace in their entire lives.

Absurd! I thought. (My tendency being to scoff at practically anything that anybody standing at a front of a room tells me.)

Then I thought.

Me, more than middle-class, Canadian, from the country the UN had judged the best place in the world to live a few years back. Who, aside from yearly jaunts to the cottage a few hours north, and Myrtle Beach here and there, rarely travelled more than fifty klicks from St.Kitts in the nineteen years I lived there.

Almost never, really, aside from vacations.

I mean, shit, Toronto, whose skyline shimmered across the lake from my bedroom window, beckoning, was exotic. Distant.

An hour away.

If memory serves, I ventured there twice during high school: once with my friend Eric to watch Spike Lee speak at my brother's school, the University of Toronto, and once again as graduation loomed, to watch a triple bill of cinema in the big city. (Before heading back the next day to write my entrance exam for the film program at York.)

And Fort Erie, my parents' hometown, thirty, forty minutes from St.Catharines. Hundreds of times, I went there, but it was another world. A different culture. Small-town: intimitate, enclosed, insular and warm.

And in high school, meeting new classmates who actually lived by the Pen Centre. I mean, fuck, that was, what, a good fifteen minute bus-ride across town. No man's land, practically.

And now, thinking of my family, my classmates, my old friends. With the exception of my friend Eric, teaching high school Drama and English in Australia, everybody I grew up with lives, if not in my hometown, only an hour's drive away.

Back to the spiders.

In Skuon.

Nasty-looking mothers.

("I'll pass, thanks. I had a black widow for breakfast, actually, so...")

Held aloft by poor and smiling ladies in that little town. Under that hot, blinding sun. Watching pasty-white 'barang', foreigners, come and go, day by day. By van and by bus. Big-bellied and cooked pink.

Did they wonder, these ladies, where we were from, or where we were going? Could they have guessed that we were a little more than fifty miles from home?

But maybe only physically. Maybe, inside, we were still wandering the streets of our hometowns, wondering how we got from here to there, and if we could get back again before day turned to dusk, and dusk fell to night.

Not that any numerical distance would have mattered much to them, I suppose. The ladies, that is. Or us, I suppose. Once you're away from home -- whether it's out by the Pen Centre, or all the way to Fort Erie, or living in freakin' Asia -- away is away. Miles are miles, and distance is distance. You are not home? You are here? Oh, you must miss your country. Your family. Your place.

They held up their plates. Fresh, sizzling. Their currency for the day. They smiled. Hoping for money for the baby. For their nighttime meals. Chicken and rice that will be eaten, enjoyed, forgotten. A day's work, a day's wages. Well spent. Today was today and tomorrow was tomorrow and never the twain shall meet. Best to enjoy this day, now. This night, here.

They were there, in Skuon. At home. The dark would come and the air would cool. The travellers would leave and they would stay. We were far and they were near. They knew that. They understood that.

This was their place.

THE VATICAN AND ME; 10 DOWNING STREET AND THAT RATHER ORDINARY DOOR; STONE'S WISDOM

How cool would it be to have a Vatican passport?

Not that I have an abiding interest in the Catholic church or anything. I'm just saying. Imagine the possibilities.

Besides the fact that it's the world's smallest country, the Vatican also has the distinction of being virtually impregnable. Nobody really knows what goes on behind those doors. (I'm not sure which doors, exactly, but there must be some doors there.)

So this means you could sit on a plane on some trans-atlantic flight and casually whip out that Vatican passport and let the good times roll. The person sitting next to you is bound to say something, right? I mean, shit, how many people have actually ever even seen a Vatican passport? So you can sit there, pretending to be checking your pages, your stamps, your expiry date, whatever, and the person sitting next to you might say:

"Wow, I've never seen one of those before."

"Yeah, not many people have," you can say. Smiling patiently.

"Do you live there, or work there, or..."

Then you pause. You nod deeply. You look out the window (if you have a window seat), or stare vaguely towards the front of the cabin (if you have an aisle seat), and you say: "I can't really say..."

Then you pause, slightly, before stating:

"I'm sorry. My head's, well, in the clouds, so to speak. Things just haven't been the same there since dad passed away a few years back..."

Then you head off for the bathroom, excusing yourself profusely, leaving your seatmate to wonder if you are, in fact, what he suspects you are -- the illilegitmate son (or daughter) of John Paul II.

These are the kinds of things I think about at night. Others count sheep; I imagine being the pope John Paul's bastard son, and flaunting my passport in the process. Sue me.

I also wonder:

Can you order a pizza from the Vatican? Would they deliver it up to your room?

These are the important questions in life.

************************************************************************************

Whenever a reporter on CNN is reporting live, from the White House, it's always late at night, and they're always a good, I don't know, forty, fifty, a hundred feet from the front entrance. If not further. (I've never been good with distances.)

But I watched Robin Oakely (the European Editor on CNN) the other day, and he was reporting from 10 Downing Street, in England, the home of the British P.M., Tony Blair, and I swear he was not more than five, ten feet from the front of the main door.

And here's the thing.

It is a door.

A black door marked with a gold 10 on the front.

The type of door that looks as if you could just wander in off the street, knock politely, and wait for the maid to answer. The type of door that looks ready-built for visitors strolling by for a cuppa tea with the big guy.

I'm sure that's not the case. There must be a shitload of security, fences, or landmines that lead to that door. But I'm calling it as I see it. And I swear, the other day Mr.Oakley was saying Blair-is-pulling-the-troops-out-of-Iraq-bla-bla-bla, and the door opened, and this yuppiesh-thirtyish-stockbrokerish dude came trotting out carrying his briefcase, waving a hand good-bye and laughing as if he just let off the biggest whoopee-cushion joke of his career. And the door slowly swung shut. And, get this, there was a single, solitary, bored-looking bobby standing, almost slouching, by the door. Yawning.

Somebody get them Brits another alarm system, is what I'm thinking.


*************************************************************************************

Oliver Stone ends his brilliant film J.F.K. with this epigraph: "To the young, in whose spirit the search for truth marches on."

I saw the film when I was young -- younger than young, in fact, just-turned sixteen, but I never quite got what he was saying.

To a gent of eighty-five, me, at thirty-one, might still be considered young, I suppose, but most of my co-workers are much younger than me, and my students are often born in years that I swear just clicked by a day or two ago. I'll ask students when they were born, and they'll say "1993" or "1995" and I'm like: "Are you on crack? That's impossible! That was only --" And then I stop, and do the math -- which takes a while, me being mathematically dyslexic -- and I'll realize that they're right. They're young.

So what was Stone getting at, with that rather odd, generic dedication?

I'm starting to realize that Stone was right in another case as well, in his introduction to his novel A Child's Night Dream, which he wrote at nineteen and revised, then published, thirty years later. So much about aging is maintenance, he says. Now I kind of-sort-of get it. The daily grind of living often leaves our adolsecent dreams and ideals somewhere tucked away in the basement of our souls. We forget what we once stood for, hoped for, lived for. We have to fight for the audacity of our younger selves, and hope that it can emerge once again.

Watching my students, I see a lot of hope, and curiosity, and integrity, and intent. They want to know things. They want to be things. They believe that that's possible. They haven't been scorched by the ugliness of unwarranted, unjustified cynicism.

Maybe that's what Stone was getting at.

I'm not sure.

But it's a hell of an idealistic movie, J.F.K. is.

"Let justice be done though the heavens fall!" Costner yells from courthouse steps at one point.

I loved that line at sixteen.

I love it now, almost sixteen years later.

I hope that means something.