Next: Swimming Uphill
“So how was your wilderness stint?”
“We had a good time. Harry and Bernice really enjoyed themselves.”
“And you?”
He had to think about that for a second. “Me too. The looks on their faces, Andy, when we rolled into Nixon Creek. You should have seen it! They were like a couple of kids on Christmas morning.”
“Betcha you were smiling, too.”
“Yup. They’ve become like parents to me. I’m feeling all warm and fuzzy inside, having this chance to make them happy.”
She laughed. “Warm and fuzzy? Sounds like you swallowed a cat or something.”
He laughed obligingly.
“Parents?” she mused. “What were yours like?”
Buddy frowned, like you would if you’d taken a wrong turn and found yourself in a foreign neighbourhood. He scanned the Walmart parking lot, as if there might be something out there to fix his bearings on.
“Buddy?” Her voice reached out to him through the phone, distraught, like a mother, whose kid has disappeared in the playground.
“Yeah. Sorry. Bad connection.”
“No kidding!” she joked. “Mention the word ‘parents’ and the signal drops.”
“Teenagers talk about their parents, Andy; adults tend to forget them, then feel guilty for being such lousy offspring… Really guilty when it’s too late to make amends.”
“Ah,” she paused. “That a sore point for you?”
“A little, I suppose. I could have done better.” He summoned the ghosts of his mum and dad into memory. Honoured them in absentia.
“One thing I can tell you for certain: I’m not going to let Gloria and Robbie feel the same way about me. I’m gonna be reminding them just about every day how much I love them and how much they should be loving me in my old age. I’m gonna be the ghost in their mobile networks.”
“Old age!” she hooted. “You’ve got the body of a man nine-tenths your age, Buddy, and the mind of a juvenile delinquent.”
He suppressed the lithe, laughing image of Andrea. Her emotional gravitas.
“And your parents?” he asked.
“Mum lives in Toronto. I call her just about every week, visit every year.”
He waited.
“She doesn’t like flying, so won’t come out to see me. Which is okay, because I like to drop in on the old neighbourhood and catch up with friends from time to time.”
He waited.
“She’s just about ready to retire. Been teaching snotty-nosed teenagers going on forty years.”
He waited.
“You ever look into your ancestry, Buddy?”
“Like on Ancestry.com, you mean?”
“Yeah.”
“I know my dad grew up in Cape Breton—he met my mum in London during the war. And that my grandparents trace back to Scotland and England. That’s about as far back as it goes for me.”
“We figure my great-great-grandparents immigrated to Upper Canada during the American Civil War—probably from Illinois.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah, there’s genetic clusters near Chicago and better matches in Ontario. My distant origins are in West Africa—perhaps Senegal—but there’s a lot of markers left by you European bastards in my genes.”
“Sorry ‘bout that.”
“You weren’t there at the time, Buddy. There’s a big difference between accepting responsibility for the fucking mess our ancestors left behind and taking blame for the things they did. ‘You can’t hold hands while you’re pointing fingers,’ is what my mother says. And, you know what they say, Mother knows best.”
“So what do you do with all that knowledge, Andrea? All that genetic code?” he wondered.
“Trees’ branches reach into the sky; their roots cling to the soil. Knowing my ancestry helps me understand who I am, how I respond to the people around me, what type of music I like, the jokes I laugh at, how I look in the mirror.”
“You look fantastic in any mirror.” The compliment escaped before Buddy had time to think about it. “And the things you say… They blow me away… But…?”
“What?”
“I have to wonder how I fit into that picture, Andy?”
He imagined her, touching her chin, putting on her perplexed look, glancing away as if there might be an answer somewhere over his shoulder.
“What do you think love is, Buddy?”
“It’s not something I can describe in a sentence, Andrea. It’s something you feel in the way you look at a person and how they look back at you. It takes different forms: sexual attraction between lovers; the love of parents for their children… for any child; the kibitzing between friends; the bond between dog and master…”
“Let’s narrow it down, shall we? The sexual magnetism between a man and woman?”
“Well…,” he pondered. “You’ve answered your own question, haven’t you? ‘Magnetism’ is at the heart of it, and magnetism is something that can be sensed, maybe even measured, but it can never be defined. It just is… a force of nature.”
“How romantic!” she laughed.
“Okay, Dr. Love, how ’bout you take a stab at it?”
“Love is the ecstasy of creation. It defies entropy, defines the shape of our chromosomes, dissolves hatred. Without it, nothing is possible. Not a single thing! Our very existence is inconceivable without love.”
“Yeah, but what is it?”
“It’s a mystery,” she said.
Next: Swimming Uphill