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.