The other day my girlfriend was driving my daughter and I up Bathurst so we could have a shortform Seder with my younger sister and her husband. We got to Davenport and Bathurst, and I glanced over at the empty lot at the southeast corner. And though I’m sure I’ve passed that corner a hundred times in the last couple of years without having this thought, on this occasion I was surprised not to see the gentleman who used to have a van and a table parked there, selling bonsai trees.
I was driving up to see my mother in 2004 and stopped there to buy her a bonsai tree. It would have been for her birthday in June though I suppose it might have been for Mother’s Day. Later that summer, in August, she died. That’s how I know it was 2004 because I know that bonsai tree was the last present I ever bought my mother.
I kind of remembered that I had said those very words – “that was the last present I ever bought my mother” in my film Lovable that I started to make just after she died. And that the bonsai tree was in the frame when I relayed that information. I thought I’d get a screen grab, so I just watched the film waiting for it to appear.
I saw one little reflection of the tree in a mirror, then another, and I grabbed those. I was starting to wonder if I really had a clear image of the tree in the film and then there it was. It was in a little speech in which I talked about how I had been alone when my father died, which at that point was 12 years earlier. And how I hadn’t been able to really cry and imagined that if I’d had a partner I could have cried in her arms. And how I had thought at the time, I hope I have a partner when my mother dies. And how she had just died three weeks ago and sure enough I was alone again.
If I hadn’t been alone again, I wouldn’t have been making that film. So I guess there was a silver lining to my being alone, if you can follow that logic.
I don’t think the whole film is as sad as that speech. But sadness is in the eye of the beholder. My girlfriend had watched it before we met, and said she found it unbearable to see how desperate I was.
I had just recently showed some moments of Lovable to my daughter because she said she wanted to see how I looked a few years before she was born, specifically how long my hair had gotten. I fast forwarded through the film looking for images of my various hair lengths.and she was amused by it but genuinely freaked out when she saw me smoking, which I stopped doing the same year that film came out.
Coincidentally just last week there was a 25th anniversary screening of my first “mirror film” Vinyl to celebrate Canada Film Day and I brought my daughter to the screening. This was the first film of mine she ever saw. You’ll have to ask her what she thought of it as a film. She laughed at many of the right places. And she also laughed at me in places no one else might notice. There was a certain shot came up, that she told me was “cringe” and I kind of agreed with her; it was one of the many things in the film I would change if I could.
In any case as I watched Lovable by myself the other day, waiting to see the bonsai tree, I couldn’t help thinking about the apartment where I shot the film, the apartment I lived in before I bought my first house and subsequently met the woman who would marry me, and give me a daughter.
It’s odd to think about how my life changed so much after I left that apartment given the fact that I lived above a couple of young men who fucking hated me and couldn’t wait to see me gone.
They wrote me a note shortly before I left. And in the note, they referred to me as “ogre-like”. I’ll always wonder why they didn’t go all the way and call me an ogre.
Mostly they hated me, I assume, because I smoked. I had told the landlord I smoked when I got the place. I wouldn’t have taken it if the landlord told me I couldn’t smoke. I smoked on the balcony when I could, but I certainly smoked inside as well.
It’s also true that before I quit smoking, I wouldn’t have been aware how insidious second-hand smoke can be. Apparently my smoking on the third floor made their lives on the second floor almost unbearable.
They also hated the way I rolled around the room on my office chair and the noise that it made. Unfortunately, I never heard about that until they sent me that final note. It was as if they hated me so much, they couldn’t even communicate with me. I had sensed that in the way they looked at me. But I don’t think we ever spoke.
I do seem to remember that they yelled at me on a few occasions but in my memory, they didn’t scream words so much as some kind of wraith-like screech of frustration.
Their hatred was so palpable, it burned. It was clear to me from the language in their parting note that though their distaste may have started with the smoking and the rolling chair, they had come to believe that I was truly a horrible person.
And unfortunately, I can’t say they were the only ones who have ever felt something like that about me. I won’t tell you the stories right now but there have been at least two others who hated me enough to make repeated attempts to spread false rumors and besmirch my good name; I’m pretty sure one of them succeeded to some degree. I’ve run into people who appeared to believe the rumors.
My downstairs neighbors never resorted to rumor mongering as far as I know. They just seethed and set their yappy little dog on me.
Perhaps some of you would have also found me ogre-like. Or ogre-light.
This part of our story reminds me of the point in Vinyl, where I felt I had to tell the audience that I was,“trying to find the line between maudlin and pathetic”. Reporting here on some of the folks who have found me objectionable, I feel like I’m at that point again. I’m going to take the chance though, that nobody reading this is surprised I had some annoying, negative, anti-social, slovenly attributes back before I became the upstanding citizen, father and partner you see before you today.
The reminds me of the late great Canadian gadfly Mendelson Joe. When I made the first of my autobiographical docs, the aforementioned Vinyl, Joe sent me a postcard congratulating me for the film. He did it again after I, Curmudgeon, which he could have easily been in. But when I made Lovable, Joe a well-established anti-smoker sent me a postcard making the point that though I was questioning why I didn’t have a relationship, in fact I did have one and it was with cigarettes.
Someone i interviewed in Lovable told me that if I wanted to have a relationship I had to look like I wanted one. I had to get ready to have one. That’s part of the reason I bought the house. Once I moved to the house, I think I kept it somewhat tidy. And a year later, I had met my future ex-wife and given up smoking.
I often fantasized about running into those downstairs neighbors and telling them that I’d quit smoking right after I moved out
After my daughter saw Vinyl yesterday, I asked her if it had upset her to see how I’d lived 15 years before she was born, and I’m not thrilled to report that her response was “No because you lived that way after you and Mummy broke up”
That was a dark period. For my daughter’s sake we had agreed that I would stay in the house and move upstairs into our tenant’s one-bedroom apartment. And I kind of fell apart up there. In my defense all I can say is that I had moved from my lovely renovated marital home into what was basically a bachelor apartment, having given the one bedroom to my daughter. It was a bit crowded. I had to put my office in the kitchen and get a Murphy bed.
But I could have done a lot better.
I admit that even now when I live in a relatively tidy home with my partner, I’m still pushing against the tidiness that she tries to maintain, I still leave my stuff around, don’t close closets, and occasionally allow food to linger on my hand or my clothing. There are socks everywhere.
My mother would like you to know I didn’t grow up like that.
I don’t have an excuse. But I might have an explanation. The middle of my life, the 25 years long second act that went from 25 to 50, when nothing was working out, was the definition of a vicious cycle. I got fat because no one wanted me, and no one wanted me because I was fat. I developed some sloppy habits because no one wanted me, and no one wanted me because you know. I got really negative because I had no career and no family and I had no family and career partly because what I saw as a humorous edge to my personality, the sarcasm, the dry wit, the not suffering fools gladly, all of which I felt I’d been gifted as a birthright, was not always as entertaining as I thought. Sometimes it was borderline toxic. Or at the very least off-putting.
Sometimes that was on purpose. Sometimes I pushed people away. But usually I was unaware I was doing it. I made films by using mirrors but in the rest of my life I hid from them.
That’s what my second mirror film, I Curmudgeon was about – the negativity that had developed from world weariness into bitterness.
I realized I’d become bitter. I don’t know how it affected people or who it had affected but I know that it did. And to some degree I know it because even now, when I am so much happier and less annoyed, I still occasionally see people recoiling from my pronouncements.
The bad habits I developed were, I suppose, a kind of defense. And that included that Pigpenesque cloud of dust and smoke with which I surrounded myself. If Pigpen had an uncle, maybe he’d have been called Ogre.
I really did intend to talk about trees. So let’s go back. During the big storm of 2013 I was in the hospital with an infected gall bladder and completely oblivious to the forces of nature outside. One day my then-wife and daughter drove to the St Joe’s to visit me. They parked at the corner of Marion and Sunnyside. When they came out, they saw that a tree had fallen on our car.
I loved that car, a Camry. It was the first nice car I had ever owned. But the insurance company wrote it off and we had to get something to replace it. My ex wanted a car with some trunk space and fell in love with a Subaru. Lots of people love their Subaru; I didn’t enjoy driving it. But she had gotten rid of a car she loved, I thought it was her turn, and I happened to have a chunk of money because later a couple of months after my stay in the hospital, my newest film had won a nice cash prize.
So we bought the Subaru, and it was an absolute nightmare. Seventeen thousand dollars to buy it, another few thousand to try and keep it running and in the end the mechanic told us it was unsalvageable.
All because a fucking tree fell on the reliable car I loved.
That’s not much of a tree story. Neither is the story of the tree root that broke our water pipe and cost us thousands of dollars to tear apart the floor and rip out the root.
I shouldn’t focus on trees that have cost me a lot of money.
In the backyard of the house where I lived from 4 to 12 was a weeping willow. That was probably the first tree I loved. In the decades after we left that house, I seldom saw another weeping willow, and so my love for that tree grew. It was that tree I was thinking about when I came up with one of the favorite stories I ever told my young daughter, about a weeping willow that would lean down its branches to give its love to a young girl. I wish I remembered the rest of that story.
That house bordered some train tracks. There was no wrong side of the tracks in that neighborhood. I used to bring home rusted old railroad ties and other treasures from the track. I loved it back there. But those tracks were subsequently ripped out and the strip of land was turned into the Kay Gardiner Belt line. I went there a few years ago to see if I could look into our old backyard and I was disappointed to see that the first tree I ever loved was gone.
Perhaps the willow wept too much after the little ogre boy moved away and they put it out of its misery. I would understand that.
