The Orphan Dog

A Meaningful Encounter

By

Jane Hammond

When I noticed the young couple with the skinny, black and white dog I wished I hadn’t forgotten the dog biscuits I usually bring.  The dog looked upset and troubled and they looked uncomfortable.  The dog was jumping around and pulling on his leash.  They didn’t look like the dog-owner types.  Maybe a dog buiscuit would have helped.

The Farmer’s Market mainly features fresh fruit, vegetables and homemade baking.  I sell orginal small paintings and cards and because fine arts aren’t a big seller I’m never that busy and I have time to observe the market scene and chat with passerby.

I know about dogs.

When I first came to the island 11 years ag and found my senoir’s pension wouldn’t stretch to cover my food as well as my rent I was pressed into looking after dogs.

At low tide I loved taking them to Browning Harbour or Mortimer Spit to run on the beach.

As  the couple was passing my table I called out and asked, “what kind of dog is it?”

“He’s and old border collie,” the man answered.  “He’s an orphan dog.”

“We’re just getting used to each other,” he added.

They came over and when the dog sat down down on his haunches and looked up at me I leaned over, my arms on my table, and looking down at him I told him how sorry I was about him being an orphan.

The whole time I saw talking to him his eyes never left mine and when his tail began to wag the young women looked at her partner and said,

“Look at that!”

An Artist’s Journal

By

Jane Hammond

She sat at the dining room table writing in her journal about the Canada geese who had
invaded what used to be the airstrip across the road and the snow drops that had just popped up in her front garden – at the same time she was wondering what to do with the journals she’d already written and now took up a couple of shelves in her book case. She was 89 years old and she knew it was time to sort out her belongings – to make a list of what she wanted to leave and for who and what to throw away.

I met Hedi in Montreal in the late 90’s when we were working as extras in a remake of the movie, Judgement at Nuremberg. You didn’t make much money but it was fun and it put food on the table. Hedi asked me to join the German Film Society and that winter we took the metro together once a week to the corner of Sherbrooke East and St. Denis street and saw German films in the basement of an old grey, stone mansion. Sometimes we went to Hedi’s place for coffee. She lived on the third floor of an old apartment building in lower Westmount on St. Catherine street within walking distance of Westmount Park and the stores on Greene avenue. It was a well kept building, not too expensive with good security; an ideal place for an older woman of little means who lived alone.

It was one of those times when we were discussing keeping journals that Hedi told me she had just burned hers. She said she put them down the incinerator. There was an incinerator provided for tenants on each floor. I didn’t ask Hedi why she destroyed them, I didn’t know her that well and so I didn’t like to pry. She was born in Austria and was just a baby at the beginning of World War 2 when she and her parents fled to Israel. She said that was where she grew up. She sometimes talked about a daughter who lived in Montreal and I thought later maybe she burned them because there were things she had experienced and written about that she didn’t want her daughter to see.

I think Hedi’s about ten years older than me and now that I’m 89 I have reached approximately the same age Hedi was when she got rid of her journals by putting them down the incinerator. I’ve been wondering for some time what I should do with mine.

I wish I could talk to Hedi and discuss journals again. And perhaps get some advice about what to do with mine. I’ve been keeping journals since the mid seventies so I have a lot of journals. But I’ve lost touch with her since leaving Montreal and moving to the west coast. I don’t have her phone number and there’s no sign of her on the internet.

This morning I’m sitting facing the wardrobe where I keep all my photos and camera equipment (more possessions to go through and make decisions about). But one thing at a time. There are mirrors on the wardrobe doors and when I look up and see my reflection I think how much I look like my mother, especially now that I wear my hair pulled back the way she used to wear hers.
I was the one my mother pinned her hopes on. Maybe because as a child I loved reading and had a good vocabulary and at school got good marks in English composition.

She wanted one of us to be a writer – to follow in her footsteps. Doesn’t every parent want that or at least most. I had two older sisters and a younger brother but I was the chosen one.

After graduating I got a job as a cub reporter on the Toronto Star. I didn’t mind leaving Montreal because my boyfriend was going out west for the summer so I could begin fulfilling my mother’s dream as well as having something to do while Steve was away and make some money. Having a career as a writer was the farthest thing from my mind. But I can’t say I didn’t enjoy my beginning work as a writer, working out of City Hall covering a downtown county court. I enjoyed listening to the mostly domestic cases and break and entering ones and returning to our office in City Hall where I filed my copy which then went by tube over to the Star.

I was 22 and it was the first time I was leaving home and going out on my own. We were living on McTavish street in downtown Montreal and my father walked me down to Windsor station to take the train to Toronto. We stopped at the corner of Peel and St. Catherine where he bought me a newspaper so I would have something to read on my trip. My father knew the trains well as he travelled all his life for his job. And he also knew most of the porters, some of them by name. And I remember how mortified I was when he called over the porter who was serving in the car my father had settled me in and asked him to look after me. I knew my father was partly joking but he was also serious. It was his way of dealing with his emotions when the family was fragmented in any idway. He was very family conscious.

I arrived in Toronto around noon and went and checked in at the downtown facility run by nuns for women needing accommodation. After a few days I found a room ith cooking privileges to rent and I moved there. I stayed for a month and then moved in with a coworker who had room in her house because her parents who were both teachers had gone to their cottage for the summer. It fit into my plans because I was planning to leave to go back to Montreal when they would be returning.

I never told my mother my plans. I just showed up one day in the first week of September. I will never forget the look on her face when she opened the front door of our apartment and saw me standing there. It was one of shock. But when I told her I had quit my job it turned to one of displeasure. My mother never said anything when she was annoyed with us but she had a certain look that said it all. And that’s what the look of shock turned into. Especially after I told her that I had quit my job.

At supper that night she talked about how getting a job on a newspaper wasn’t easy and that I’d have a hard time finding another one. Which turned out to be only too true. But it was the 50’s, a boom time after the war and jobs were plentiful. You didn’t even have to be that qualified. I couldn’t find a newspaper job but I found one as a substitute music teacher in a French school and then as a stenographer for CIL at their facilities in Beloeil, about 30 miles outside of Montreal. I returned to Montreal after about a year and a half when I finally was hired by the Montreal Star to work in their Women’s Dept.

I’m pretty sure my mother pulled some strings to get me my job at the Toronto Star and the reason she was so displeased with me quitting was knowing how difficult it was to get a newspaper job especially for a kid fresh out of college with no experience, At least at the Star I felt I was hired because of my experience at the Toronto as a music teacher and stenographer. I guess you could say I’d done my penance. I wish now I’d asked my mother if she’d used her influence to get me hired. She knew her way around the Montreal press scene. She worked as the public relations director for the shoe industry in Canada. But not only that; after we moved from Toronto when I was five she went back to work as a journalist and was hired by the Montreal Star to be the Women’s Editor of The Family Herald and Weekly Star, an adjunct of the Star that came out on weekends; so she knew her way around.

I much preferred my work at the paper to what I had been doing. I rented a room in the basement of the building where my parents had their apartment. It was just adequate for sleeping. I cooked upstairs at my parents and when I wasn’t working, I spent most of my free time there. I didn’t see Steve much because he was out at MacDonald College in St. Anne de Bellevue studying for an education degree. We were still going out together when he graduated after 2 years with a B.Ed. I know because I still have the picture of his mother and I on the grounds of the college with him the day he graduated.
It was when I was out at Beloeil working for CIL when he broke up with me. He had started going out with another student who he had met at MacDonald College and like him was planning to go into the teaching profession. On the surface I accepted our breakup although I was heartbroken. And hoping it would help I applied again at the Star and was hired.

She wished she could talk to Hedi about all this now but she had lost touch with her after moving to the west coast in 2002. She didn’t have her phone number and there was no sign of her on the internet.

She didn’t start keeping a journal until she was in her forties. She was living a comfortable life in the eastern townships 80 miles from Montreal on the Quebec – Vermont border. She was married to a dentist. They met in Montreal and moved to the Three Villages in “59 after Wil completed his degree and in ’64 they had twin sons.

She left Wil in 1980 and lived in Montreal for 22 years before coming west and settling on Pender, one of the gulf islands in the Pacific. She came to help her son Andy who was moving to the island from Vancouver in 2002 and never left.

When she decided to stay she was followed by Peter, her other son, who fell in love with
Michelle, an island girl. They married in 2007 and were blessed with a daughter, Neko, in
2010.

It was when Michelle came over to pick up Neko who had been staying with her for the afternoon that she asked her if she had any regrets about leaving my marriage. I didn’t answer right away. I knew she was asking me because she was thinking about and Peter and herself. And I wanted to give her a truthful answer. So she didn’t answer right away. She had thought about it sometimes but had never come to a clear cut conclusion.

Finally she answered sometimes yes and sometimes no. She told her she had regrets when she came down with a bad cold or the flue, and especially when she fell and broke her wrist falling on the ice at the corner of Prince Arthur and St. Lawrence that first winter. It was then she thought longingly of her comfortable bedroom in the country and being secure and looked after. She supposed that in that moment she had some regrets at leaving.

But most of the time she didn’t have any regrets – that she loved being free and back in the city. That was at least five years ago that Michelle had asked her whether she had regrets about leaving her marriage.

Now she would say unequivocally she had no regrets. And she had now come to the time like Hedi had – to burn her journals or keep them for posterity. But she thought before she made any decision as to burning or saving them she would write down an account of her life using the journals as reference. She wasn’t writing the story of her life for her grandchildren or for future ancestors . She was doing it for herself.

She started keeping a journal in ’75 when the boys were ten and looking back now she understood Socrates’ famous dictum – ‘an unexamined life is a life not lived’.

Socrates believed that living a life where you live under the rules of other, in a continuous routine without examining what you actually want out of it is not worth living.

And that’s exactly what she had been doing. And feeling miserable a lot of the time and not knowing why or what to do about it. When she began writing in her day to day journal about her life she had no idea where it would lead her. It was a long journey. She went down many avenues. And there were many twists and turns. But now that she was nearing the end of her life she thought she had learned what she needed to learn and she had no regrets. To quote another great philosopher, Soren Kierkegaard, ‘life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.