The Fart

            It came to my attention late last night that a fart which is somewhat of a legend in our family is being falsely accredited to me.

            Now, I’m sorry to you people who have found me through the expat blog site and came here expecting some useful information on Lebanon. I’ll be back in Beirut in a few days and promise to share more examples of my inability to adjust to Lebanese life. Today’s blog is about clearing my good name.

            It started last night when Theo made a Thai stir-fry and the smell of it settled in the bedroom Theo and I share (she has been with us here in Newfoundland since M and Dude and my in-laws left).  We opened all the windows in the house while she was cooking but the smell of fried onions and peanut sauce, instead of blowing out into the brisk, fishy air of Conception Bay, collected in our bedroom with a kind of solid resolution and plans to spend the night.

            The windows in the bedroom were wide open so there’s no reason why the stir-fry air should have pooled there.  I can’t explain the phenomenon scientifically.  Maybe there was some kind of thermal inversion going on.  All I know is that when I went in to get ready for bed I was surprised by how strong the smell was and called out a comment about it to Theo, who was in the bathroom washing her face.

            Hardly were the words out of my mouth when I heard a thundering in the hall and there was Theo, nostrils twitching and an expression of alarm on her face.

            “Good god,” she cried, “you weren’t kidding. It stinks to high heaven.  Are those windows open as far as they’ll go?”

            Without waiting for an answer she fell on the nearest one and cranked it, rocking wildly, to the limits of its range.  Then she grabbed her pyjama top which had been hanging by a hook in the wall and began fanning the air furiously with it. “Quick, get the hall door open, it might create a cross breeze.”

            “Geez, it’s not that bad,” I said, standing in the middle of the room idly scratching a black-fly bite. “We probably won’t even notice the smell once we’ve been in our beds a few minutes.”

            She shot me a withering look.  “Says the person with no nose.”

            “No nose! Hey, now, I happen to have a very sensitive nose.  It’s just that compared to yours it’s nothing more than a fleshy out-pouching on my face.  You don’t have a human nose.  What you’ve got is the olfactory super sponge of a sniffer dog.”

            “I can’t help it.  I just experience smells very strongly.”

            “I know.  I vaguely recall the eight thousand times this sort of thing has happened before.”

            “It’s not just that I experience smells more strongly -- they can actually make me feel sick. You want to help me fan or what?”

            “You should get a job in the airport.”

            “I think this fanning is helping.”

            “Or in a perfume factory.”

            “At least, I hope it’s helping.  There’s no way I’m sleeping in a peanut sauce cloud all night.”

            I sat down on the bed. “Say, it has never occurred to me before to ask you if you experience fart smells more strongly than a normal person. A packed elevator must be hell for you.”

            She eyed me wildly. “Of course.  You have no idea.  I don’t even take elevators if I can help it for that reason.”

            “Hmm.” I mused. “Have you ever tried customizing some  sort of charcoal air filters to fit up your nose? Though you wouldn’t want to be smell-impaired all the time.  Like if there was a gas leak in the house or something.”

            Theo stopped fanning and took a rest in the chair. “That reminds me.  Remember the story of the Gas Leak Fart?”

            “Remember it? It’s only the most famous fart in our family history.”

            “Yeah, well, when we had the family get-together at my place last month I overheard it being retold.”

            “Oh yeah?  Well, I certainly never get tired of hearing it.”

            “Well, me too, but the thing is, this time the story had changed a little.”

            “Well, stories do that over time.  As long as the essence of the story remains intact I guess it doesn’t matter.”

            Theo hesitated. “Maybe, but in this case the starring role had, er, undergone a replacement.”

            “The starring role . . . now wait just a minute, what are you getting at and why are you looking at me with that weird expression?”

            “Oh dear. What I'm trying to say is the latest version of the story has you in the starring role.”

           

            I think I may have fainted a little.  Theo kept talking for a few minutes but I only heard a rushing in my ears.  When I came to my senses I was able to question her precisely regarding the identity of the orator of the story and, most critically, who was in the audience.  I demanded to know why Theo hadn’t stepped in and set the record straight on my behalf (she only shrugged and said that everyone seemed to be enjoying it so much that she hated to interrupt).

         When I learned that the audience included our brother’s fairly-new-to-our-family wife I jerked straight up in bed, demanding my lap top be brought so that an email to my sister-in-law could be dispatched immediately.

            “On second thought,” I said, “I don’t need to write an email.  I’ve decided to do one better.  I’ll write a blog about it; it’ll reach more people that way.  Who knows how long that story has been circulating in its present format?”

            So here is the story of The Gas Leak Fart. Some details have been changed to protect the identity of the farter, though I would like him/her to know that allowing the story to be spread at my expense when they might have stepped up and set the record straight is not something I’m prepared to forgive in a hurry.

            On a cold December evening some years ago a group of people met as they did every Tuesday in a community hall off a lonely country road in Alberta.  They had come to learn French and the instructor was an elegant little Frenchwoman named Cecile.

            My dear blood relation, whom for the purposes of this story I shall call Gassy, was in attendance that night and eager to learn more of the romantic language he admired so much.  He was keen to better himself and had enrolled in the class with the belief that a little French would add poise and a certain je ne sais quoi to his character.

            It was – 25 degrees Celsius that night and the old, wood-floor community hall billowed heat through vents from the forced air furnace in the basement.

            It was cosy inside and the students chatted and laughed to each other as they took their seats and waited for Madame Cecile to begin the lesson.

            But poor Gassy was distracted by a faint rumbling and gurgling in his abdominal region. A spasm of pain caused him to wince and for his friend to ask if everything was all right.

            “Oh, I’m fine,” Gassy said, “I think I just ate too much at dinner.”

            He had eaten too much, that was true, but what he didn’t tell his friend was that he’d devoured half a bag of assorted dried fruit after dinner. 

            Madame Cecile began the lesson and Gassy focused his attention on learning how to ask for cheese in a shop.

            The shifting movements in his gut increased alarmingly and Gassy bitterly reflected that it was all his mother’s fault: she never allowed candy in the house and so an after-dinner sweet craving had led him in desperation to the bag of dried fruit.

            He began to feel hot and looked around the room to see if anyone else looked hot, too.  He might ask Madame Cecile if they could turn the heat down.

            He felt he had to get up and move around to settle his abdomen and had just decided to excuse himself when Madame Cecile announced that she had a nice treat for them all. They were going to try some traditional French folk dancing in the empty side of the hall where she had a stereo set up.

            Gassy was enormously relieved.  A little moving around was just what his tempestuous belly needed to sort itself out.  Sitting still in a hard chair was no good when one was trying to accommodate rapidly re-hydrating fruit. 

            The students assembled in front of the little stereo and Madame Cecile, very straight and correct in her posture, demonstrated the first steps of the dance. She turned on the music and the students began, clumsily, to try the steps.

            Gassy flinched as another cramp seized his abdomen.  He imagined the prunes and apricots swelling and pushing against his intestinal wall and knew that something was going to have to give soon. 

         And a few moments later he felt movement in the lowest portions of his interior, warning him that the gas build up was getting close to blowing the pressure relief valve.

            An evening French class wasn’t the ideal place to expel excess gas but at least the hall was very big and had a high ceiling.  The odor was sure to be lost in the voluminous interior of the building.

            He decided to hold it in until he could move to the fringes of the group and inconspicuously point himself away from the others. Of course, this was the sort of reasoning that had got Gassy into trouble before.  Anyone with dried fruit experience should know that you don’t waste time once the pressure gauge needle is in the red zone. 

            Just then Madame Cecile called the class to a halt while she demonstrated the dance again, adding a few more steps this time.  One of the students kept asking Madame Cecile questions while Gassy shifted his weight from foot and foot and groaned, “Come on, oh come on.”  

            At last the students were on the move again, shuffling in lines from left to right and Gassy found a perfect opportunity to ‘crop-dust’ -- releasing gas in a swathe across the back of the hall as the music and clattering of feet safely covered any noises.  Not that there was any appreciable noise; Gassy could tell that this flatulence was of the silent but deadly variety. 

            Gassy felt immediately better after the release and hopped nimbly over the wooden floor, putting maximum distance between himself and the drop zone.  He doubted the others would even notice the smell but he was a firm believer that discretion is the better part of valour.

            He had just reached the other side of the group and was preparing to concentrate on the dance steps when the smell hit him.  It was an eye-watering, sulphurous stench of singular robustness.  For a few seconds he was genuinely confused.  The potency of the odour at such a distance from the drop zone was incredible.  Maybe it wasn’t his fart.  Maybe it was a tragic coincidence and someone on the ‘safe’ side of the room had slipped a juicy one out just as Gassy crossed over.  But tempting as it was to hope, Gassy knew it wasn’t true.  He recognised his own flatus as surely as a mother recognises her own child.

            It didn’t take long for the rest of the group to react to the smell.  One by one they drew to a standstill and turned their heads this way and that, some in confusion, others voicing immediate accusations to their friends beside them.  

            Gassy noticed that Madame Cecile had stopped dancing, too, and was sniffing the air with an expression of concern on her face.  He watched in horror as she marched over to  the tape player and turned it off, clapping her hands to silence the chattering students.

            “Class,” she said, “I don’t want anyone to panic but I suspect there is a gas leak in this building. I may need to call the gas company.”

            There was an excited babble of voices.  Gassy heard a man say they’d better not dance anymore because he’d heard of gas explosions being caused by the friction under a person’s shoe.

            Then a girl said, “Um, not to be rude or anything but it kind of smells like a fart to me.”

            “Me too,” said someone else.

            “No way,” said a young woman who was always showing up late to class. “No fart smells that strong and I ought to know.”

            “It smells more like sulphur than flatulence to me,” said Madame Cecile, “and I’m really not comfortable carrying on here until I’ve spoken to the gas company.  Please return quietly to the tables and wait there while I go into the back room to use the telephone.”

            The students did as they were told, Gassy’s emotions in a ragged state.  He knew that the right thing to do would be to follow Madame Cecile to the back room and once there, quietly explain the situation.  But as his eyes followed her trim little figure and perfectly coiffed hair moving away down the hall he knew he could never do it.

            It seemed to take a long time.  Gassy tried to join in the debate going on around him about whether it was a fart or a natural gas leak but couldn’t seem to drag his attention away from the back room where Madame Cecile was speaking to the gas company.

            At last she appeared in the doorway and stood quite still a moment before lifting her chin and walking purposefully back to her students. Everyone stopped speaking and looked at her expectantly.

            “Class, I have spoken to the gas company and they have assured me that there cannot possibly be a gas leak in this building.” she said.

            “How can they know that just over the phone?” someone asked.

            “Because,” Madame Cecile said with an almost imperceptible shudder, “they have informed me that there is no natural gas service in this area.”

           

                       

           

            

From Newfoundland

This from last week:

I’ve been in Canada with the kids for six weeks now, holidaying with assorted family on both coasts, and there’s so much blog-worthy material going on that I say to M almost every night: “You know, somewhere in Hollywood there’s a sit-com producer who would pay top dollar for a script of what’s just gone on around our house today.”

“Put it in your blog,” M says, never abandoning the hope that I’ll write a best-selling book one day which will facilitate his prompt and permanent retirement from work.

“But that’s just it,” I say. “I can’t.  Not really.  The funny things always have to do with someone’s particular way of being tiresome.  Or a bodily-function mishap.  These are family members I’m writing about.  Some of them read the blog and they may not like to find a story posted on the internet describing their epic, toilet-plugging log which even the plunger couldn’t shift. Not everyone is as enlightened and self-sacrificing as me, you know.  I consider it a moral obligation to share humour with others no matter what the damage to one’s own pride.  Remember when I blew out the zipper of my jeans while bending down to get a can of tomato soup in Superstore?  They were jeans that hadn’t fit me for months and I had no business wearing them.  Blowing out the zipper was pretty embarrassing and I would rather have not told anyone about it but I came straight home and told you, and I told Theo the next time I saw her, too. For the laugh, you see.”

“You might try blogging more than once every three months,” M says, “if you’re really so committed to sharing the humour.”

            "Well," I say,  “it’s not easy being green,"  my motto being it's always better to say something than nothing.  M sighs and goes back to his laptop while I turn to a nearby lamp and mutter, “Well, he may have a point.  I guess I’ll do what I always end up doing.  I’ll write what I think I can get away with.”

                                    *            *            *            *

I told my parents-in-law it would be cold when they first got here to Newfoundland.  Every year we've come it’s been strictly jacket-weather through to the end of June.  After that it generally warms, but only a little.  And it rains more days than not.  But this year Newfoundland has been having some kind of freakishly cold summer and my mother-in-law is convinced that I misled her about what weather to expect. 

While packing to come she asked me repeatedly how warm it would be.  Well, as any Canadian knows, even in a so-called ‘normal’ season you can’t predict what the weather is going to be like.  I once believed that Alberta weather was the most spastically unpredictable I would ever encounter but then I came to Newfoundland. 

All I could tell my mother-in-law was to come prepared for any weather, warm or cool. She found that answer unsatisfactory in the extreme, and packed my suggested selection of clothing items with evident reluctance .  When she and my father-in-law arrived to blowing rain and temperatures in the single digits, my ill-informed packing recommendations took the brunt of her dismay.  

“Why did you tell me to pack t-shirts?” she asks me at least once a day.  “It’s been far too cold for t-shirts the whole time we've been here.  You told us that Newfoundland is warm in the summer.”

“I didn’t know it was going to be this cold,” I explain with a little less patience each day.  “Didn’t you hear the people up the road talking about what an unusually cold summer this is? Everyone is talking about.  The girl at the library was just saying it when we were in there an hour ago.  They’re talking about it on the news.”

“But you told me it would be quite warm much of the time,” my mother-in-law says.  “It’s a good thing we packed those extra sweaters at the last minute.”

“But I didn’t know.” I say, gritting my teeth. “No one did.”

“It would have been nice to know ahead of time,” she continues.  “I would have packed more warm things.  But never mind, I enjoy the cool weather.”

"But -- oh, for crying out loud," I say, and go bang my forehead on a frying pan for a few refreshing minutes.

She does enjoy the cool weather, too.  It’s been around 35 or 40 degrees in Beirut this week so nobody in this house is shedding tears of grief about missing out on that. 

Still, M could use with a bit more of the sun’s warming rays, I think.  As a Stephen King-like fog enveloped our house again last night he was showing signs of strain.  When he discovered that I’d set the living room thermostat to 11 degrees he announced testily that it was “like living under a dictatorship”.  

I had the thermostat set so low for a reason.  I didn’t want the house to catch fire.  A few nights ago Dude, who sleeps on a day-bed in the living room, was kept awake half the night by a couple of beetles that lurk in the baseboard heaters by day and lurch out at night to fly drunkenly around the room, smacking into walls and blundering onto Dude’s bed. Having no bug killer of any kind in the house, Dude and I had experimentally doused the baseboard heaters with OFF Deep Woods and then covered them up with spare blankets.  The idea was that the OFF would either kill the bugs or at the very least put them in a bad mood so they wouldn’t feel like firing up the propellers for a few days.  The blankets were added to make it challenging for them to find their way out through the slits in the baseboards, should the effects of the OFF prove negligible.

It seemed to work. The next day Dude reported zero airspace activity during the night.  I said that we may as well leave the blankets in place for the time being, since we’d been having a relatively warm spell of weather for those couple of days and didn’t need the heaters on.  We would need to be sure to remove the blankets, I noted to myself, before ever turning the heaters on.  The blankets were made of acrylic and though I know a baseboard heater doesn’t get as hot as, say, molten lava, I didn’t think it was a good idea to turn the heat on underneath them.

But while I was off on a walk this afternoon M turned the living room thermostat way up and sat down to watch some tv.  When I got back from the walk I came in the door and reeled from the dry, stuffy wall of heat.  I found M lying glassy-eyed on the couch.  The thermometer read 27 degrees and the air held a familiar, astringent smell. 

“What’s going on?” I said. “Why is it so hot in here and what’s that smell?”

“Is it hot in here?” M replied drowsily.  “I don’t know.  It feels fine to me.”

“What’s wrong with you and what is that smell?”

“Smell?”  M looked mystified and stared thoughtfully into space.  “Oh, that would be the OFF Deep Woods.  Once the baseboards heated up it started to permeate the room in a pretty serious way.  It was overpowering at first but you get used to it.”

“Used to it?  I think it’s addled your brains. And do you realize it’s 27 degrees in here?”

“Isn’t it great?” M said happily. “I feel so nice and warm.”

It was then I noticed that the blankets hadn’t been removed from the baseboard heaters. I went over to one and bent down: the blanket was roasting hot.  I looked over at M in consternation. “Why didn’t you take the blankets off?”

He glanced over, shrugged, and turned back to the tv.

“I had been rather hoping to avoid burning the place down,” I said.

There was no response from M.

I stepped in front of him. “You could have started a fire.”

“Hmm?” He dragged his gaze up to my face.

“I said--” I began, but then looked at him lying there with flushed cheeks, feet jammed cosily between the couch cushions, sedated – possibly permanently -- from the OFF fumes.

“Any room on that couch for me?”

                                    *            *            *

Newfoundlanders have a unique and charming accent. I came here prepared to enjoy the sweet lilt and endearing expressions which discombobulate the new arrival but I didn’t expect to sometimes find myself having a conversation with a person I couldn't understand.  I mean, not understand at all.  Newfoundland accents come in all sizes and strengths: some people seem to have almost no accent, most have a lovely old-world accent, and a few just make sounds like a fitful hand blender. And I can never just say, 'Look, I'm awfully sorry but I don't speak Hand Blender', because although there must be some disagreeable Newfoundlanders, I haven't met one yet.  They are all lovely. So I nod and I smile and and say 'Oh, mmm, yeah.' And I’m pretty sure there have been times when what the smiling person behind the counter has asked me is how I’m enjoying Newfoundland and I've replied that I never mix mustard and mayo but will take some of those black olives.

One summer two local men came to fix a leak in our roof.  They were related to each other – cousins or something – and from the same little village up the road.  They had never lived or worked outside of the area.  And yet one of them had a much stronger accent than the other.  His accent was so strong, in fact, that I couldn’t understand much of what he said.  Yet I could understand his cousin almost perfectly. 

It was wretchedly embarrassing.  They were two of the nicest fellows you could meet and they whistled and sang most of the time they worked, which was starkly different from the way people in Alberta work.  I kept waiting for the blasts of frustrated swearing, the sullen silences which follow, the bitter whining.  But these two men were soft-spoken, patient and cheerful every minute they spent at our house. 

The only hitch was that most of our exchanges were painful ones, with the one man saying something like, “Urt rit hosey sides, see?” and me goggling at him with a desperate expression and having no choice but to say, “I’m sorry, I didn’t quite catch that.”  Then both men would laugh good-naturedly, reassure me that it wasn’t my fault because he 'speaks too quickly, everybody says so', and the other one would translate for me.

Funnily enough the man with the stronger accent was perfectly clear when he sang. He liked to sing and had a nice voice but lyrics weren’t his strong suit and he’d generally run out of words after a single line and have to start at the top again.  He particularly liked The Sound of Silence.  Several times a day I could hear him singing, “Hello darkness, my old friend,” while cheerfully banging away with the hammer.  There would be a short interval and then, “Hello darkness, my old friend,” again, and I would fight a silent, inner battle against the urge to swing open the door, stick my head through, and bray out, “I've come to talk to you again.”

*****

More days have passed.

Yesterday Noonie and I stopped off to look at a very old graveyard which had recently been cleared of years’ worth of  overgrown foliage.  Bushes and trees had all but obliterated the area and very few of the headstones still stood but I had heard there was a pirates’ graveyard near here and wondered if this could be it.  The improbability of a pirate being given a headstone made from solid granite and for the words on that headstone to survive four hundred years in the rain and wind of coastal Newfoundland didn’t occur to me.

It soon did.  As we stumbled over thousands of hacked-off stumps of bushes to the closest group of headstones I saw that very few of them bore legible writing.  And the ones which did were dated within the last one hundred or so years.  To look at them leaning at crazy angles, mouldy-looking faces worn almost smooth, you’d think they’d been standing half a millennium. 

We stood reading the better-preserved headstones, thinking like you always do at these times how unbelievably lucky we are to live when and where we do, trying to imagine what people suffered burying all three of their children within the space of a few years.

And then, selfishly, shallowly, your thoughts settle back on yourself  and you think:  Geez, I’d be considered, like, old, back then.

I heard a voice at my side and started from my thoughts.  A man stood a few feet away, apparently having materialized from thin air, and worse, having spoken in an accent I couldn't understand.

“Uh.” I said, nodding, wondering what he wanted and if he had an axe hidden behind his back.  We were the only people there and it was a little creepy the way he had just crept up on me.  The cemetery was hemmed in on three sides by impenetrable, stubby spruce forest and only the little-used road on the open side.

He spoke again, and with a nearly imperceptible flick of his chin indicated the grave in front of me.  After half a moment I realised with relief that I understood what he had said, at least the essence of it.  He’d said that the man whose name appeared faintly on the dark-stained headstone before us had had four wives. 

I thought, that’s all very well, but you can’t just sneak up on women you’ve never met before in deserted, half-hidden graveyards and announce that some dead guy had four wives.

I glanced nervously around for Noonie but she was a good distance away, looking at some graves near the forest’s edge. 

The man said something else.  I didn’t understand a word of it and shot him a look which was meant to convey the ‘I don’t wish to be impolite but could you kindly shove off?’ sentiment.  Whilst shooting the look I raked him up and down and harvested everything I could from the 2-second visual pan: another look at his face, what kind of clothes he was wearing, his physical condition and whether or not I could take him in a butt-kicking contest if it came to it.

He was older than I first thought, in clean and well-pressed clothes.  Definitely married, I thought, beginning to relax.  But a glimpse of his open mouth revealed a sinister blackness where teeth ought to have been.

He said some more things, most of which I didn’t understand.  It quickly became apparent that he knew the graveyard forwards and backwards and was proud of his knowledge.  He pointed out all the headstones, told me their names and a detail or two which I usually couldn't catch, and I realised that what I had here was a nice, older man with a lot of time on his hands and an innocent wish to be admired in however small a way.

I tried to enter into the conversation but since I couldn’t grasp much of what he said it was difficult.  It was unfortunate because I really wanted to know if the multi-wife man had been married to all four simultaneously or one after another.   

A few minutes later when I glanced again at my companion I saw a full set of teeth in his mouth.  I tried not to stare.  How and when had they got there?  Where were they when I looked at him the first time?

Eventually I ambled off when it was polite to do so, darting glances back at the man now and again to see if he was following me.  Well no, not really to see if he was following me.  I could tell he was harmless.  It's just that grave-spotting seemed a strange way to fill one's golden years.

As we were getting into our car a truck passed by on the road and the man and woman inside — total strangers to us — smiled and waved. And I can tell you that there is nothing unusual about that around here.  It warmed my heart and I didn't even feel annoyed to find a huge, indigo-coloured (what the heck do they eat?) gull poo on my windshield.