The Truth About Luck: What I Learned on My Road Trip with Grandma (14 page)

Sometimes the passing of days, months, and years feels illusory. Certain places make it feel like we've stepped into wet, sticky cultural mud, like our feet have been stuck for twenty-odd years. I feel this at fairs, strolling among couples with stuffed pink bears and teenagers nibbling on candy floss and hot dogs.

I think the opposite is probably the case for Grandma in a café. She probably feels as if, by stepping through the doors, she's leaped directly into a year or era she's not even part of, like she's just visiting.

“You're right,” I say. “Lots of computers.”

In this café Grandma has virtually been reduced to an infant. There's lots for her to look at, but most of it doesn't make a lot of sense to her, and she needs help ordering her drink. Her eyes wander as she fiddles with her mug.

The café relies disproportionately on the natural light flooding in from the windows. There's very little today, which renders all the computer screens brighter; they light up the faces of their owners like personal tanning beds.

Grandma's enthralled by all the machines. She's looking from one to the next and the next. For me it's the people
without
a computer who are intriguing. I've brought a clementine with me and have peeled it. I'm not quite ready to eat it yet, so I use the peel as a biodegradable plate where it can rest.

There's a woman about my age. She's one of the few without a laptop. Instead she has a child, a (real) baby. She also has a friend at the table. The baby looks only a few months old. He keeps reaching up to her from his plastic carrying-crib thingy. With every third or fourth swipe she glances down and makes an extremely silly face. She contorts her face like a pro, like she's been doing it for years. She does it not unaffectionately, without interrupting her discussion. She's so casual and unworried. Yet this child, like all of them, is nightmarishly dependent.

I wonder if she would ever leave this child out in the rain?

“Do you ever bring your computer here?” wonders Grandma.

“Sometimes, yeah. But my battery doesn't seem to last too long.”

“I probably should have learned about computers and email and all that. But I just never thought I'd be around long enough to use it. That's a whole world I know very little about.”

We sip from our mugs. I eat my first two sections of clementine and offer some to Grandma. She accepts two of her own.

There's an elderly, but not old, man sitting at what I consider to be the worst table. It's closest to the bathroom, within earshot. Not the ideal vicinity in a store that slings highly caffeinated products. I've seen this same man at that table before. He looks like he's part of the chair he's sitting on, like his limbs are made of wood and his skin fabric. He's petrifying at the table before our eyes.

“Such nice windows they have here. Is that a bakery across the street?”

“Yup, they have brilliant bread and monstrous cinnamon rolls.”

Grandma usurps my host role and refills her cup from the silver pot. We've spent the morning talking, rehashing memories. Both of us now seem more content to sit quietly. I ask Grandma if she wants a section of the paper. She says no, it's okay. She's probably already read it, this morning before I woke up.

So we just sit and sip and watch and sip and think. We sip perpetually.

Another man to our left, alone, is reading a copy of the
National Post
. He has a slender build and looks to be about fifty. He's a fairly standard-issue middle-aged white fellow. But what's most curious is his choice of eyewear. He's sporting squash goggles.

I want to turn my chair and just stare at him, observe this creature reading his paper. I'd like to follow him around for a day, seriously, just to see what his story is. But I have to show restraint. So I try to be discreet.

My theory: these particular goggles are prescription. He probably lost or broke his regular glasses. He's a professor, the absent-minded sort, and his glasses are probably imbedded in a stack of papers waiting to be marked. He almost certainly spent the morning yelling at his wife for picking up his glasses and putting them down somewhere. I bet he really let her have it. Left without any other options, he went to his gym bag, fished out his sweaty old protective specs, left his house without saying goodbye, and is now trying them out at the café before class. He's also feeling bad that he hasn't been playing squash in a while; it's been months. He feels out of shape and is now likely regretting the generous splash of cream he put in his coffee.

I eat the rest of my orange and peer around the café. No one else seems to care. Maybe it's because they're all focused on their screens. Even Grandma, who is now consulting her watch wearily.

I'm trying not to listen to two women three tables over. One must be a manager here. I believe the other is vying for casual employment. The younger one is wearing a lined coat. I wish she would take it off. I feel hot just looking at her.

The managerish one is conducting a spontaneous yet weirdly formal interview that switches between friendly dialogue and scripted questions concerning the younger's best and worst personality traits. She's referencing some papers, perhaps a resumé. If I hear the questions I won't be able to help myself from answering. I'm disturbingly aware that this twenty-year-old redhead with fake fingernails would be a more suitable staff member than I'd be. She was just asked what makes her a good team player. Best to ignore. Interviews are always such an artificial, misrepresentative dynamic. What can anyone really glean from such broad, depthless, slogany questions?

I look down into my mug. The cream has separated. I hope this doesn't mean it's gone off. Did I just consume spoiled cream? The whitest part of the cream has formed a map of Iceland, including striking detail of the western fjords. I try to locate the places I visited last time I was there. And with a few clockwise swirls of the cup, a new map is formed, or an animal, or a polygonal shape I don't recognize.

Norman (what I'm now calling the goggled prof) is blowing his nose. I mean really blowing it, for all he's worth. It's absolutely revolting. I didn't mind him when he was just the brilliant but misunderstood experimental physics genius prone to losing his temper. Now that he's content to spread his germs to everyone else, I find him unsightly. You'd think he was trying to loosen and liquify part of his left hemisphere and banish it through his nostrils.

A comment from Grandma turns my head. “Great phone,” she says. “I like how it flips open and shut like that. It's amazing.”

I've been flipping my phone open and shut subconsciously, neurotically. “Yeah, that's what it's called, Grandma, a flip phone. If you can believe it, they were actually somewhat cool in 2005.”

“I
can
believe it. It's quite stylish.”

“Yeah, it's okay,” I say, looking closely at the phone for the first time in months.

“What can it do? I keep reading about phones nowadays and all the stuff they can do.”

“Yeah, I guess it's pretty crazy now what phones can do.” I pause. “But yeah, mine can't do a whole lot. I mean, it can call. It can send and receive text messages. It can tell time.” And it flips!

“Ah, I see.”

The baby in the plastic mini-perambulator yawns. I'm looking at him but still can't believe he's that small. The yawn engulfs his face. Grandma brings her hands together. “Have I ever told you about Marge and Molly?”

“No, I don't think so.”

“They were my friends. It was the three of us who signed up together.”

“Signed up? For what?”

“The war,” she says. “I'm not sure about the other two, but I guess it wasn't really a decision for me. It was inevitable and necessary. It was what I wanted to do.”

“How come?”

“My younger brother, Donald, had gone, so I would, too — that was my thinking. He'd lied and enlisted in the air force at sixteen. I hadn't seen him in years. I didn't know where he was. He was so young when he left. I thought about him every day.”

I've stopped playing with my phone. I set it down on the table beside the orange peel.

“And to be honest, I wanted to see things. I thought the whole thing would just be an adventure. I guess I was still looking for adventures back then.”

My feeling is that Grandma will leave it here if I don't encourage her. But I want to know more. This is a cable of memory that's been buried but from the sound of it is mostly intact. I ask about the days before she left. She tells me they didn't know what to expect. All they knew was that they would be trading relative inaction for action. Winnipeg to Europe. She'd grown up in Winnipeg. It was all she'd known. They didn't know where they were going, or for how long, or what they would find.

“The way they enforced the age for soldiers was pretty lax,” she says. “Whereas nurses were held to a strict standard. Nurses had to be twenty-five before they could go.”

In the context of soldiers and that war, twenty-five was mature. It was old.

“First we were sent to a staging area. I was asked if I had a preference. Was there somewhere specific I wanted to go? I'd heard of No. 5 hospital. No. 5 was made up almost entirely of nurses and doctors from Winnipeg — I figured I might know some of them. It was the only hospital I knew anything about. My two chums had been unsure where to go. I told them about No. 5 over tea one afternoon.”

“Where was No. 5?”

“It had been set up just outside London. So that's where the three of us decided to go.”

“And then you were gone?”

“Yup, it felt like it all happened quite quickly. My family left our tiny fishing village in Scotland and moved to Canada when I was two. I'd never been back to Scotland, or Europe, since. I hadn't done any travelling. That first trip to Canada was the only time I'd ever sailed the Atlantic or been on a boat. I was too young to form any conscious memories of that trip. But from what my mother used to tell me, it was a gentle trip aboard a typical commuter ship.”

“So this was your second transatlantic journey, but it felt like your first.”

“We were just thrilled to be moving. I also found it wasn't only nurses travelling but soldiers, too. The ship was smaller than I'd expected. It was a cruise ship in peacetime and had been commandeered for the war.

“Our cabin was more than adequate: two sets of bunks and some drawers to share. I didn't find sea life all that bad.

Marge and Molly weren't so lucky. They were pretty seasick. Most of the nurses and soldiers were pretty sick.”

“Yeah, that makes sense. You guys weren't sailors.”

“Just shows how lucky I was. I never even lost my appetite. I loved my time on the decks, watching the sea in front and the foamy salt water we'd cut through and left behind. We were finally sailing. I was among friends. I was around strangers. We were heading to London.”

Grandma tells me her evenings on the ship were generally absorbed at the ship's bar. Even at night, she liked the decks best. She liked the air. Some nights she would walk outside alone. More typically she was joined by others.

Those seasick souls were also seeking the fresh air. Others just couldn't sleep. Some were “feeling their drink.” Some just wanted to sit and talk.

As Grandma recounts her time on the ship, it sounds to me like it had the mood of a migrating slumber party, not a war-bound crusade. They talked of nothing in particular. No one knew what was to come, and they probably talked more about what they were leaving than where they were going. Grandma was comfortable and content spending time alone, but solitude would be rare in the months to come.

“When we finally reached the continent, staging began at Taplow, a village on the east bank of the River Thames. We were billeted in rooms in a small house on the grounds of a stately manor. The doctors and surgeons of the hospital were close by, but in different buildings. I can still remember how lovely the estate grounds were. But luckily for the three of us, we didn't need to spend every day at the estate. We were so close to London. And we went into the city every chance we got. We'd all heard so much about London.”

“What was London like in those days?” I'm trying to keep my questions brief. Grandma has been ignoring her tea, and I'm sensing she is on a roll.

“Well, we were never alone, but always in groups. Soldiers, mostly American and British, were everywhere. Children on the street weren't unheard of, but it was rare. Mostly I remember a city of young people. We'd go to shows and pubs amidst the buzz-bomb warnings and sirens. Once we were stranded in a theatre while watching a movie. A bomb had struck nearby and we were forced to wait inside the theatre until the all-clear was given. When it finally came, instead of leaving, we kept watching the movie; we had to know how it was going to end.”

I look around me, at the other tables and people in the café. Everyone is busy with their computers and books, their music and papers. I have the urge to tell everyone to shut up, to gather around, to listen. But I don't.

Grandma continues. It was a few months post-arrival that she was granted her first leave. She put in her request, assuming, like her friends, it would be accepted. It wasn't. She was called to see the colonel in his office. He was perplexed. Why did she want to spend her very first leave in the north of Scotland? He told her it wouldn't be possible. There was a large naval base in the area. Access was restricted.

“I stayed in his office listening to his ruling, but I was disappointed. I decided to tell him why I wanted to go. I was
from
Wick. I still had family there, family I hadn't seen in years. I'd never been back and had never been this close. When he heard the whole story, he immediately agreed. He granted me permission to go back to my hometown.