Two dogs... a short story

When Atterman was young, he lived in a small house with a front porch. This was before the innovation of patios, back decks, and balconies 10 floors up. Before whole towns and cities moved out of the public eye and into the anonymity of something loosely defined as privacy.

Blackie, a mongrel, long haired dog, slept in the sun at the front of the porch, despite of the regulations demanding that all dogs be leashed at all times.

Behind Blackie, but before the front door, were assorted Dinky Toys and dead, home built, kites. Atterman’s.

Behind the porch were two rooms. The front door opened into the Living Room, and, to the right, the Dining Room. The Dining Room was seldom used, and in Atterman’s memory, only once to serve dinner. The Living Room, cluttered with a variety of used furniture, a cabinet radio, and a disused fireplace and mantle, was almost an extension of the porch. In the days that Blackie sunned on the porch, the mantle was bare. But, a few years later, Atterman’s old man came home, tore open a pack of Sportsman plain cigarettes, dropped the cellophane on the lawn and lit up. Atterman watched as the old man finished it, ground it out on the sidewalk, crossed the porch into the Living Room and set the Sportsman cigarettes on the mantle. And, as long as Atterman lived in that house, they remained, untouched.

At first, Elmer was a boarder, a kid just out of the Army, just back from the Korean War. Later he moved to a suite in a garage nearby. But Elmer was always a fixture at Atterman’s house. Every payday, Atterman’s mother took most of Elmer’s pay and saved it, just so he wouldn’t blow it all on one giant binge. In an age where phone calls were rare, and seldom good news, Elmer often called in the middle of the night, long distance, collect, and mostly from jail. Atterman’s old man had to clamour, swearing non-stop, into the car and drive 50 or 100 miles to one of the nearest towns to bail Elmer out of jail. Elmer was the most cheerful man Atterman ever met.

Atterman’s old man inherited Blackie. Jack was a Park Warden whose sole companion was his dog. One winter Jack and the Atterman’s old man went prospecting for gold. They found a couple of decent nuggets but Jack had a heart attack. Atterman’s old man brought the body back to town thee days later. He built a doghouse for Blackie. He couldn’t bear to cage or tie up anything so Blackie was often seen sunning on the front porch, in spite of the leash laws. Blackie never spent a single night in the doghouse. He moved in under the side porch, off the Kitchen, peering balefully out. He had the saddest eyes in town.

Wardens drove khaki green pickup trucks. Blackie seldom wandered but when he did, he generally ended up in the pound because once he sighted a Warden’s truck he was off and running. He would chase the truck until it slowed somewhat, and then leap into the bed of the truck. The Warden then drove directly to the pound. Once, Atterman’s old man had to bail out Blackie in the morning and Elmer at night.

Only once, in Atterman’s recollection, was his old man both frightened and mocked. And Blackie was at the heart of the fear and hilarity. It was only weeks before she died.

It was dusk on a summer day. Atterman lurked at the edges of the kitchen, quiet, avoiding attention, watching the grown-ups play. His old man, Elmer, and three or four others sat round the kitchen table. They all wore battered fedoras, tilted back on their heads. A bottle of rum was at the center of the table, joined by a chunk of blue cheese, a couple of open tins of sardines, and a pile of dry toast. Three cases of Lethbridge Pilsner were open beside the sink. All the men had calloused, working, hands that seemed to envelop the cards they held. And Blackie started to bark.

They seemed to rotate the job of standing at the open porch door. Yelling,:

“Jesus H. Christ, dog, shut Goddamn up!”

When Elmer finished yelling, he handed Atterman a tumbler of flat Ginger Ale and tipped the rum bottle into it.

“Just stay back in the corner, kid. I’ll look after any trouble with your old man.”

And Blackie kept barking. Finally, Atterman’s old man had had enough. He threw his cards down and stood. He was a small man, but imposing. His fedora had a small blue and red feather tucked into the hatband and he wore a doeskin, fringed, jacket, beaded with Blackfoot designs. He pushed through the door and down the stairs, fast. Furious.

“Goddamn You Dog!”

In the dim light, he could just make out the dog, hard against the back fence, behind the vegetable garden. He ran through the carrots, beets, and lettuce, and gave the dog a good kick in the ass.

The barking stopped abruptly. The dog stood up on its hind legs and Atterman’s old man suddenly knew: dogs can’t stand. But bears can. And he ran.

“Get to Hell in the house!”

Blackie and Atterman’s old man came through the door in the same instant, not two seconds before the bear reached the porch steps. With the door slammed shut, Atterman could see that his old man was white, and shaking badly. Elmer and the others filled the kitchen with oaths, jeers, and laughter. That was the only night Blackie slept indoors.

Once Blackie was gone, Atterman’s old man refused to have another dog. But, on a winter night, when the dark slides down the mountains early, the phone rang.

Atterman heard only one side of the conversation.

“Elmer?”

“Goddamn it Elmer! The Wife’s in the city and I’ve got to put the kids to bed. I work graveyard shift tonight!”

“How important can it be?”

“It’s snowing, for Christ’s sake!”

“Jesus.”

“OK, I’ll meet you halfway, Jasper Lake, just this side of the East Park Gate.”

Slamming the phone back onto the cradle, he rounded on Atterman and his brother:

“ Put on your parkas, wear wool socks and moccasins, and bring some blankets. Wait in the car, I’ll be right there.”

An hour and a half later, they saw a pair of dim headlights off to the side of the road; Jasper Lake lay on the left, frozen over, and, in the darkness, endless. Elmer, wearing a greatcoat that had seen cold nights at the Battle of the Chosin Reservoir, carrying a bottle of Crown Royal Whiskey, walked across the road to where Atterman’s old man parked.

“John, thanks for coming.”

“ Elmer, what the hell is so important?”

“First of, that car of mine is dead. Didn’t know if it would get this far. Need a ride to town, here, have a drink.”

And he pushed the bottle through the open window.

Atterman’s old man tilted the bottle back briefly and said;

“ And…?”

“Well second is, your boys need a dog. And if you won’t get them one, I figured it was up to me.”

From somewhere inside the greatcoat he produced a small pup and pushed it through the window. A ball of fur with a curled tail, circumnavigated the interior of the car twice before bolting out, through the window, across the road and onto the frozen surface of the lake.

Elmer took off in pursuit, his greatcoat flapping behind, like a sail torn loose in a storm. Atterman’s old man followed. All three disappeared in the darkness only a snowstorm can produce.

Atterman and his brother sat on the rear seat, covered by blankets, silent, for what seemed ages. Likely, it was only minutes. Finally, out of the dark, Elmer and Atterman’s old man emerged into the blowing snow. Elmer was laughing, Atterman’s old man was smiling, the pup in his arms, sheltering it from the cold.

By now, the headlights of Elmer’s car were very dim, the battery dieing. Elmer ran to the car and returned with two beer glasses. In the front seat, beside Atterman’s old man, he poured a measure of Whiskey into each. Handing one to Atterman’s old man he said;

“ Let’s go’ John, I want to be in town before the bar closes and you’ve got to work.”

Handing the pup over the front seat to Atterman, he added;

“His name is Whiskey.”

Atterman Slipped

Auhtor's note: This is an introduction to a novella / novel in progress. It has been casually edited but is not complete. Copyright © C.O. Kabesh, 2009.

At first Atterman thought the panic attacks were back. Sudden clamping of muscles, blood draining the way oil drains from a litre bottle, and primal fear. He was experiencing lapses, spatial disconnects, and they scared the shit out of him. They began with darkness, indescribable darkness, and then complete dislocation of time and place. Not panic attacks, something new, new and unfathomable.

________________

In his own defense Atterman would say, “ The cat wasn’t my idea.”

But he always followed with “He isn’t so bad. Just stay away and you won’t bleed.”

The cat wasn’t his idea but it took a long time to get to the not to bad part.

The cat happened when they bought the condo on the Quay in New Westminster. But Julie was gone now and the cat wasn’t. He had started out as a stray from the pound, maybe a year old, scared and loud. The staff at the pound was stereotypical. Atterman put them down as the concerned types. Running between thirty-ish and forty-ish, all slightly rumpled, projecting an aura that bespoke their mutual care for the forgotten and abandoned pets that litter the city streets. One, a Charlene or something similar, showed Julie and Atterman into a windowless concrete vault lined with metal cages stacked several feet high on three walls. Each with a single cat, some very young, others whose age virtually guaranteed that this room would be the last they saw. Every imaginable cat colour seemed to be on display, mostly long hairs. Some mewed, others cowered, most had seen it all before and did little but stretch occasionally. One caught Atterman’s eye. A black, or grey-black, short hair snarled at them as they approached and thrust a paw through the grid to take a swipe. Atterman swore that he, as Charlotte confirmed later, never hit the floor when the cage door opened and he burst free, circling the room in a blur.

“ We’ll take that one.”

And $350.00 dollars later (tax, license, dealer prep, litter box and litter, scratching post, catnip, toy mice, and grave misgiving from Charlotte) they turned the freshly named Lego loose in the condo.

For a year, he started to yell as soon as they got into bed. Just far enough out of reach that reprisals were impossible. If Atterman did manage to drift off the damn cat would get close enough for one quick and bloody rake and then… gone. He’d stand next to the bathroom sink, tail and back hair straight up, in full voice against the strange cat opposite. Nights were impossibly long, filled with terror for Lego and, for Atterman, rage.

On the odd occasion that company arrived with children, Atterman was instantly nervous. “Tell your kids that if they see the cat, for the love of God back off. That bastard is faster than hell and he is no pet. More a sign that someone’s God has blamed me for the fate of the Bengal Tiger.”

In time, Lego calmed somewhat, never fully accepting the role of a domesticated cat but an uneasy truce was established

________________

Panic attacks are as various as the flowers of an alpine meadow. Imagine standing, on a spring day, surrounded by every colour on earth. Now take away the whispering breeze, take away the fragrance, and it becomes foreboding, dangerous, a shadow on a wall in a horror movie. Panic attacks are just that, immense forebodings that root you to the ground. Atterman hadn’t had one, at least a full blown, attack in many years, before Julie, before even his family’s death but he remembered each one vividly. Even now, he avoided buffets and cafeterias. One afternoon, at work, he’d had an attack in the company cafeteria. He never returned. Nor did he ever discuss them with anybody. For reasons he could not comprehend these attacks triggered a primal shame which, of course, is a self fulfilling dread.

Over time they subsided but he avoided social circumstances, tried to enter gatherings from the edges, never head on.

He hadn’t even noticed this new thing. Until Julie started asking if he was all right, if she could help. That he seemed to suddenly disassociate. How after a time he even started to fade, somehow losing definition. She wanted to know what the hell was happening. He had no answers. Hoped it, whatever it was, would pass.

But one night at the Pub, Frank, in his Red Wings ball cap, said the same damn thing. This was during game 4 of the Stanley Cup finals and the Wings looked to win it, the first time since the ’54 –’55 season. Forty-some years ago and if old Frank bought a new Red Wings ball cap for every season he’d been a fan, well, he must have a closet full. Frank took the time away from the 3rd period of what, miraculously, turned out to be a four game sweep, to say virtually the same as Julie had. And that got Atterman’s attention.

Atterman started to notice small things. Small disconnects in conversation. Odd lapses. Like paying for a pack of cigarettes then realizing, from the strange look on the clerk’s face, that this sale thing was finished and he could leave. How long had he been there, or more to the point, how long had he not been here?

By the time he started to find himself, fleetingly, in a bar in Erie, Pennsylvania, at a table in Tivoli Gardens in Copenhagen, or in the middle of the main street of Viking, Alberta, he was getting worried. Every time, a place he’d been before, a piece of his past. Nothing special, just a phrase spoken, or maybe the way a woman pulled her hair into a tight bun, sparked a memory. And, as if a bookmark slipped between the pages of a forgotten novel, he was there The years had altered his perspective. The man, or boy, who had left the bookmark had grown, sometimes wiser, sometimes not, but grown, at least, older.

At first, each shift left him shocked beyond any reaction and, as seamlessly as he had slipped in, he slipped back. So shocking was the experience that it took a few slips to realize that there was warning. An instant of instability, then total absence of light. Not darkness but absolutely no light. And, if he reacted instantly, he could will himself back to stability. It came to him that if he could stop the slip, he could control it, maybe. And that odd mix of curiosity and lust that has always driven mankind to unimaginable highs and lows drove him to, not just understand but, to use whatever this thing was.

For a year, he experimented and he read.

________________

Albert Einstein published his General theory of Relativity in 1915. Atterman, and, conceivably, every literate, and most illiterate, people knew of it. Knew it heralded something new, something important, but what it was, specifically, completely bypassed all but a few. Trying to get a grip on the concept, Atterman found an explanation that, if incomplete and possibly misleading, helped him understand a basic tenet: the speed of light is constant and all else is relative to that constant.

Consider an object traveling at 60 KPH. Now consider two observers, one stationary, the other moving at 30 KPH, in the same direction as the object. As the object passes the first observer, it appears to be traveling at 60 KPH. The second observer, however, measures the object passing him at 30 KPH, relative to his own speed.

A central tenet of physics is that the speed of light is constant, relative to nothing. Now consider an object moving at the speed of light. Again two observers, the first stationary, the second traveling, as before, at a speed approaching the speed of light. Because the speed of light is constant irregardless of anything, both observers measure the speed of the object as 299,792,458 meters / second. Since speed is a function of distance and time, and the distance used to measure the speed is fixed, time must be variable. As an object approaches the speed of light time stretches: time elapses slower. Time is relative.

In 1907, Ernest Rutherford took the Chair of Physics at Manchester University, England. His work at Manchester resulted in the Rutherford Model of the atom. A nucleus of protons and neutrons orbited by electrons, now one of the most recognizable models on the planet.

Niels Bohr, after working with Rutherford at Manchester, continued his study of atomic structure. In 1922, he won the Nobel Prize for Physics for his work on atoms and radiation emitted by them. A French scientist, Louis de Broglie, had theorized that electrons had the properties of a wave. Bohr developed the idea that electrons have stable orbits, that is, if the circumference of the orbit is equally divisible by the wavelength of the electron then it is a stable orbit. If not, interference destroys the orbit. An electron can only orbit the nucleus at fixed distances. The greater the frequency, the longer the orbit.

Bohr also discovered that electrons can move from a high frequency orbit to a lower frequency orbit. When this happens energy is released as a photon of light. But the question that had to be asked was, how? At any point in time, the high orbit is a point in space and the low orbit is a point in space. They are both stable orbits and they are separated by destructive orbits. They move from point C to point A without passing through point B and do it instantaneously. Quantum physics had arrived.

Apparently, Bohr wrote Rutherford with his theories. In reply, Rutherford wrote, in essence, that releasing a photon and moving to another orbit was all well and good, but the electron would have to know where it was going.

At the sub-atomic level, the science is completely different than in the observable world. Light, photons, act as both particles and waves. A particle can coexist at different points. A particle’s position may be measured, or, a particle’s momentum may be measured. But not both. Every thing is uncertain.

________________

The Pub sat on the boardwalk at the New Westminster Quay, part of the public market and just about a block or so from his third storey, two bedroom condo overlooking the Fraser River. The bar was shaped like a shepherd’s crook, a long straight length that starched toward the floor to ceiling windows before turning on itself to form a half circle. A place to laugh, tell lies, drink, and generally enjoy the company of strangers as easily as friends.

A Saturday afternoon, a curried shrimp lunch behind him and one more Rum and Ginger Ale ahead, the bar talk was of dentistry horror stories. Atterman recounting in vivid detail growing up under the sporadic care of itinerant dentists in the small Rocky Mountain town of his youth. Old men with Rye Whiskey breathe ending pathetic careers. Tentative kids, learning the profession, always with an eye to finding a place in the city. All working a circuit through small town Alberta, rarely seen twice in a row, working for cash in small offices the town must have owned.

He squeezed a lime slice into the drink, took a hit, swiveled off his stool and announced that it was time for a smoke. Out the door and down three steps to the boardwalk, lighting the cigarette as he moved. And into darkness so complete even up and down evaporated.

________________

Julie had gone, ostensibly just to see her mother, ill in Chicago, but a woman, especially Julie, doesn’t ship all of her belongings to visit anything. Atterman, by this time, quite numb with fear and horror at what was happening to him managed to register this: she did not believe she was coming back. She didn’t believe her mother would survive this cancer and unless Atterman managed to ground himself, she wouldn’t be back. So that is where it ended, Julie standing by the open Royal City Cabs taxi, angry and betrayed by this moron who was allowing something as deadly as had possessed her own mother to infest him, Atterman, destitute on the curb, trying to speak but managing only small short mews of anguish. The driver slammed the trunk closed, said “Airport, Lady?”, and they were gone. Julie was gone.

It was about a month before Atterman noticed she hadn’t completely left. He noticed them entering his Condo one evening. Shoes, a single pair. Women’s size eights with three inch heels, black, a fabric of some kind, and gauzy in an expensive way. They were on the carpet, just beyond the Birchwood entryway, out of the way but clearly visible. One was upright just off perpendicular to the wall, beside it, at a slight angle, the other lay on its side.

Julie liked shoes; more than one box full were part of the shipment to Chicago. She bought shoes regularly and took great care of them. Even though she trashed them as soon as they started to show signs of wear the number of shoes at the bottom of three closets continued to grow. This pair was relatively new, but looked loved and lived-in, like a perfect little house with a groomed lawn and a white picket fence in front. Someone had slipped them off, intending to get right back, but something had happened and so they waited. Waited for a chance to click down white tile corridors, or slide under tables in good restaurants.

Atterman stopped when he saw them. And when he realized there were tears streaming down his face, he went to the kitchen counter for his camera. He took 23 pictures of them, considered nine suitable, and had them blown up to various sizes, framed, and matted. Five now hung over the fireplace, three in the master bedroom and one in the guest bathroom. The shoes stayed where they were. For the woman he hired to clean once a week there were only two rules. Don’t screw with the way the kitchen is arranged and the shoes stay put. Atterman’s rules moved to the top of the list of stories she told anyone who asked about her business.

________________

Quantum theory that made him believe it could be real. Slipping from one time to another is not believable. Nor is quantum theory. Einstein and Bohr spent the rest of their lives trying to disprove it. They failed.

The experiments went through three phases. First he was terrified, terrified of its physical aspect. The immense blackness. The heart stopping dislocation of appearing in a different place and time without any sensation. Then came a new terror. The terror of the self. Was he completely insane? If this wasn’t real, what was? Finally, he accepted a completely irrational quantum crock of shit. It was a crock and is rational mind knew that but, well, whatever it takes.

Experimenting he found that when he slipped from the present, he didn’t completely leave. He couldn’t remember the present but friends told him things he did, bets he lost, jokes he had told. It was said that he behaved oddly, tired, unfocused maybe. After a slide, he fully focused on his new present. Clothes and money was a problem but insurmountable? Hell no!

So, he cobbled up a crock of shit from Einstein’s relativity of time, the Bohr model of quantized orbits, and scores of other sources. In his mind, he referred to it as QCS, Quantum Crock of Shit. And he thought that, just maybe; Einstein and Bohr might have said the same but in Danish or German.

Quantum entanglement makes an appearance in QCS. When two particles are created simultaneously, any action on one causes a reaction in both, no matter if they are separated by light years. And since the Big Bang instantaneously created all matter in the universe, all particles are entangled.

Atterman thought, ”What if we have stable orbits in the universe from birth to death?”

And, “What if time is more relative than Einstein imagined?”

And, “What if all those orbits are entangled?”

Atterman never fully thought out QCS, it was, and is, a mash-up of what-ifs and maybes. But it was enough to take his mind from the terror of the alternatives. He existed in countless, entangled, times and places. His current form could exist in all orbits. His conscious mind, the part that remembered, worked only in one orbit and he could control which orbit he experienced. It slid from one orbit to another without touching any orbit between them. QCS, Quantum Crock of Shit.

The only issue was stable orbits. Rutherford seemed to believe that Quantum leaps relied on the photon knowing where it was going. But what if he allowed a slip without being certain? He could arrive at an unstable orbit. God knows what happens then. But it was sure to be unpleasant. It was tough being Atterman.

________________

The Dining Hall

Sometimes I worked in the kitchen. Other times I bused tables. For a time I ran a lathe in the water meter factory. That came easily. My father was a blacksmith and I grew up secondary to lathes and anvils, forges and hammers. But mostly I worked in the Pardes, picking oranges. But the kitchen and the Dining Hall is where I learned of the holocaust. I had read of it, even ridden the S-Bahn to Dachau from Munchen, ten days after Black September slaughtered the Israeli athletes, and stood, stunned, in the camp, overwhelmed by the simple utility of that place. Where we had been young and boisterous on the trip out, our return, six hours later was a complete contrast. There was no longer any humor in taking the train to Dachau. But it wasn’t until the Kitchen and the Dining Hall that I began to understand, just a little, what the holocaust was.

Jakob was a most unloved man. He ran his kitchen for sixteen hours a day, every day, and refused to speak socially with anyone. He had no family, no friends. They were still at the killing grounds. Lost among the utility of those places. I pulled dishes out of plastic tubs and stacked them in a massive dishwasher. The Dining Hall served at least three meals a day for six to seven hundred people. That takes a big dishwasher. Since Jakob never spoke, I sang.


"Would you like to swing on a star
Carry moonbeams home in a jar…"

"The moon comes up from Africa
Last night I couldn’t sleep..."

"I got a big black cloud hangin’ over my head
It follows where ever I go…"

"Winter, spring, summer, or fall
All you gotta do is call…"

On a Monday, after hours of this, I realized that he was yelling at me.

“You. What is your name?”

“Why you sing always?”

I told him my name but could not explain the singing. He glared at me, close. His brow knitted into one continuous, bushy, scrawl. His face was lined and leathery like an orange left on the counter of an abandoned kitchen.

He said, “No one has sung with me since they sealed the Ghetto.”

Then he spun away and I watched as his shoulders hunched, then started to shake, and his fists bunched. When I noticed he was going to turn back to me, I pivoted away to my tub of greasy water and dirty dishes. I did not want to be the one to witness his tears.

But I heard him, “Chuck, you sing. It is the right thing.”

Jakob, I learned, was from Warsaw. The Ghetto was established on October 16, 1940. He had played in a Symphony Orchestra.

One evening a few of us, volunteers from around the world, were in the bomb shelter, drinking Goldstar beer and listening to Cat Stevens on a battered tape deck when Sonia, The kibbutznik I lived, came down. She said Jakob wanted me. I popped a fresh Goldstar and we walked hand in hand across the battered ground to the Dining Hall. Jakob didn’t so much as acknowledge Sonia.

All he said was, “ You go sit with those old men.” And returned to the kitchen.

Sonia said, “They are all seventy or eighty. Every year they sit together on this date. Chuck you should do as Jakob demands.” She had emigrated from Turkey and the ‘Chuck’ came out halfway between Chick and Check. It was January 30, 1973. Forty years earlier Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of the Reich. To the day.

How should a young man approach a table of six old men reliving an event that happened so long ago? Well he shouldn’t worry to much about it. As I moved towards their table, still with the Goldstar, One of them rose and said, “We are one less than last year. There is room for you.”

They took turns. Telling their story from January 30, 1933, to the day they arrived in Israel. They spoke English for my benefit. They were all Germans, all university educated, and had, between them, several hundred friends and relatives dispersed into the blood-sodden ground of Europe. They spoke of a mother, a sister, a fiancée as if they had stepped away to the toilet. They spoke of Treblinka, of Dachau, of beatings and suicides. They spoke of partisan bands in forests and tattooed wrists. Their stories took four hours to tell. I stood, asked that they wait for a minute, walked to the bomb shelter and took four bottles of someone else’s wine, and returned. I poured wine for all and proposed a toast.

“To all of them”, I said.

Jakob, I noticed, had drunk the wine I left for him on the pass through to the kitchen but he never came out. His own story was to much to bear, let alone theirs.

We talked of many things until the wine was gone. I slipped into bed beside Sonia an hour and a half before the truck left for the pardes. Picking oranges is particularly good for a hangover.


One evening I was assigned to bussing tables after dinner. I had a stainless steel cart. Endlessly I circumnavigated this room for seven hundred diners with a book propped between the handle and a plastic tub. The book was James Joyce’s Ulysses. It was probably my third reading of the book. I was just getting the hang of it. Slowly people started to slip away, in groups or singly, until there was just one elderly couple left. As I pushed my cart past their table, the man asked what I was reading. I showed him the book.

“What edition is it?”

I flipped to the title page and read the edition to him.

“What page are you reading?”

I told him.

And he recited the first complete sentence on that page.

Now he had my attention. Completely. He was from a large German University city. In 1933 he was the head of the Department of English Literature at the University. He decided to flee when they striped him of his job. He tried to convince his family to come with him. They refused to believe that the Reich would do any more to them. They stayed. He went to the home of his fiancée and argued that if they would not go with him they should, at least, allow their daughter to go with him. They refused. He walked and hitchhiked to all the major ports in Europe. He contacted every University and every foreign colleague he could reach. No country would accept him. No Universities supported him. Some colleague tried to help but to no avail. So he started walking east. Into the Soviet Union. He turned south and walked through Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Jordan. And by the end of the war he reached Palistine. He fought in the 1949 War of Independence and settled in the Kibbutz. Since the mid-fifties one of his jobs was to travel to Haifa to meet immigrant ships looking for suitable candidates for the Kibbutz. Everyone he had known was gone. As far as he could learn, his family and fiancée had managed to survive into 1942. But after January 20, 1942, there was no question of survival. The Wannsee Conference, held on that date, codified, in Adolf Hitler’s words, “the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe.”

He married, had two sons, lost one in Sinai in the 1967 six day war, and ultimately lost his wife to cancer the following year. And every time a ship docked in Haifa he was there to meet it. When he was 88 years old he made his last trip to meet a ship. And met the woman holding his arm as he told me the story, his wife, and in the late 1930’s, his fiancée.

In 1972, they were both 90 years old and that remains the only happy ending I heard in the Dining Hall or the Kitchen.

Robert Dziekanski... the issue

This is a story most, here, are familiar with. Robert Dzielanski was a Polish immigrant to Canada who became disoriented upon arrival at Vancouver International Airport, spent hours trying to connect with his mother, and was finally tasered, five times, until he was dead by four RCMP officers. If not for amateur video of the events the whole thing would have ended within a couple of days.

The RCMP reacted, as they did during the events themselves, badly. They resisted returning the video to the photographer (who later sold it to the press), they sent officers to Poland to investigate the victim, and they refused to allow any effective inquiry to proceed while any legal proceeding were contemplated. Eventually the Attorney General's office announced that there would be no legal charges brought against the four officers and a series of inquires began.

The RCMP spin has always been that its officers restrained an aggressive, possibly drunk, armed male by using Tasers on him. And that sudden death occurred shortly thereafter. Mr. Dziekanski had no drugs or alcohol in his system and he was armed with a stapler. His aggression and appearance were undoubtedly a result of having spent 10 hours in the airport's immigration area, unable to communicate with anyone because he spoke no english and he received no assistance from Airport personnel, Canadian Border Services, or, the final arbiter, the RCMP. 

From the time the RCMP arrived until Mr. Dziekanski died was about 25 seconds.

Much has been made of the stapler. I did some searching and couldn't get any definite facts but I'd guess that there are a hell of a lot more staplers per capita than there are handguns. Given the recent testimony of one of the RCMP officers that they are taught that anything can be a weapon, I would have thought that they would have been better prepared to counter a stapler threat. But the stapler is not the issue. My searches were a mere amusement. But they did turn up this nifty site, apropos of nothing. And saved myself the time I would taken to photograph our stapler, shown at the right. It's a Swingline and can be plugged in or run on four AA cells. I know it works because I've seen Sam use it but I can't seem figure it out. I also learned, courtesy of the folks behind Gullibleinfo, that the part of a stapler that holds the staples is called the "channel" and the average stapler has 52 staples remaining in its channel.

Christie Blachford argues in her February 28, 2009 Globe and Mail article that she doesn't think the stapler is the issue either. She believes the issue is the use of Tasers. Her argument is that while the Taser may sometimes (rarely) be fatal, it is an effective weapon that essentially mitigates the danger of harm to the public when officers are forced to escalate from batons to more powerful weapons. She ends with this "But a gun, well, it's almost always deadly."

True, but that is still not the issue. Only the feeble minded and Chiefs of Police truly believe that Tasers have been consistently and safely used in the past. The issue is enormous in its impact. It is trust. Specifically trust of the RCMP.

I grew up in Jasper Alberta. This crest on the right, the fur hats in winter, and the stetsons and Red Serge in summer were everyday sights. Usually there was only a Corporal and two Constables in town but they were visible and trusted. Trusted above all else. I did not have the misfortune to grow to adulthood in a world crumpled, spindled, and stapled by the cluster bomb of Viet Nam and the Middle East. I was born in an aerie in the Rockies and the Force's motto, Maintiens le Droit, was an anchor point.

We've all seen it on TV, the officer, at the witness stand, asking if he can consult his notes. He flips through them, clears his throat, and, memory refreshed, gives a precise account of the events that occurred, God knows how long ago. And, in the jury box, subtle facial tics telegraphs the essence of the drama, if it's in the officers notes, it's as good as DNA.

But at least one RCMP officer has given testimony that the events that led to Mr. Dziekanski's death were not reflected in his notes. His notes were lies. He had little choice but to give such damning testimony. Once the video was released the jig was up. So here is the issue. Why was the decision taken not to proceed with criminal charges against the Members that killed Robert Dziekanski?

It was also reported that Polish officials have accused Canada of not cooperating with their own investigation and that under Polish law they can lay charges in the death of Mr. DZiekanski. I can only hope they do, and that they request extradition, and that Canada complies. Because these Officers have betrayed a near sacred trust and undermined an icon of this country. Maintain the Right indeed.

The Joy of Writing

Calling yourself a writer is a conceit that should, most likely, be left to those who can say, honestly, that they have a publisher. But that would seriously diminish the ranks of writers. And that would diminish the world. That's why I sometimes ignore the conceit and whisper "I am a writer". Generally that happens only in the dark, pre-dawn hours, when I alone am awake and I've just deleted all of the drivel I've written over the last few hours. Only once I've said it aloud can I start anew. To call yourself a writer, even if only to yourself, requires only reading and writing. Reading is the important part, writing is the hard part. Being a writer is a lot like being a chicken. Likely most of us can conjure up an image of a chicken in a barnyard constantly pecking at the ground, ingesting pebbles, sand, dust, straw, and, every so often, a seed. At some point the slow accumulation of those rare seeds results in Chicken Cordon Bleu. And sometimes a dry, tasteless, mass that makes your throat constrict and your face to twist uncontrollably. Writing is like that for me. Nothing that resembles a sentence goes unread. Sometimes I read back the last few hours work and kind of nod a little bit. It will need to be polished, re-jigged, and sharpened, but it will work. And then there are times when the delete key is the only way forward.

When it come to that I sometimes hop over to Wordle to get an inkling how what I've written is progressing. So the image represents  the progress to date of my most recent novella-in-progress. And now to work. Again.