Write me a Letter

sightseeing or read a good book or, even better, some good rubbish. However, when I am in a new town I’ve always found it fruitful to try and get a feel for the place by mingling with John Q. Public in one of his typical habitats, so I changed some money at the desk and then, although it was undeniably early in the day, I decided a tavern I’d noticed just around the corner from the hotel would be a sensible place to begin my studies. Therefore into the St. George’s tavern I went. I found a seat at the bar, ordered a Molson Export from the innkeeper and shifted the bowl of free pretzels a soupçon closer to my elbow. I was happy to see that the St. George’s tavern looked remarkably similar to a lot of other low-class joints I’ve had the luck to visit over the years during my investigations of the local populations. It had the usual beer signs on the walls and miscellania behind the bar and a shuffleboard game along one wall; even the drunks looked familiar.
    There was a little fellow sitting two stools down from me who was frowning at some words he’d just scribbled in a kid’s lined exercise book on the bar in front of him. He had a red, white, and blue woolly hat with a large C on it on his dome, horned-rimmed glasses on his roseate nose, and worn over a lumberjack’s checked shirt, a T-shirt that said, in English, INSTANT ASSHOLE-JUST ADD ALCOHOL.
    ”Like the message,” I said after a minute, when I’d caught his eye.
    ‘All men should learn to hear truth,” he enunciated carefully more or less in my direction. After another peaceful moment or two had passed, I asked him politely what he was writing, was it mayhap a letter to mother? Which reminded me—postcards, to the folks back home. But not one to Lew Lewellen, that... that film producer.
    ”At the risk of evoking your ribald laughter,” the guy said, ”and it is a considerable risk, one that I would not undertake did I not perceive you to be a visiter to these fair shores, I am endeavoring to scribe the great Canadian novel.”
    ”A worthy labor,” I remarked, falling easily into his professional vernacular. ”I happen, at this very minute, to be traveling with a noted Californian poetess who, unfortunately, has only been privately published so far.” Fortunately is more like it, I thought.
    ”Indeed,” the fellow said. ”Not unlike myself.”
    ”I wonder if I might contribute to the encouragement of Canadian letters in a modest way by offering you some warming libation?”
    ”Double C and C, Samuel,” the guy said instantly.
    ”Comin’ up,” Samuel said.
    When Sam had served us both refreshers, I asked the scrivener how long he’d been working on his great epic. He looked at his watch and said, ”About twenty minutes.”
    ”And how is it progressing?”
    ”Brilliantly,” he said. ”I have the first three chapter titles already. ‘Out of the Closet and into the Saddle—A Short History of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.’ ‘Birchbark—Fact or Fiction?’ ‘The Use of the Moose in Saskatchewan Dance Hall Mythology.’ ”
    ”A great start!” I enthused. After I’d put away a tasty snack of two pickled jumbo wieners, two pickled eggs, and one giant pepperoni stick, my erstwhile companion furthered, if not increased by several hundred percent, my knowledge of Canadian history by informing me that the ex—prime minister of Canada, one Pierre Trudeau, once had a wife who always wore, next to her skin, a cameo brooch containing a lock of Mick Jagger’s hair. He also told me the Canadians had once marched south and burned Washington ; I didn’t know which statement was the more unlikely.
    I got back to the hotel about two-thirty; the kids showed up, bursting with news, about a half-hour later. They also burst into my room, where, postcards bought in the lobby all written, like a good boy, I was stretched out on the bed ruminating, not for the first time, on the slim monograph I planned to scribe one day. It wouldn’t be as mammoth an undertaking as the great Canadian novel, of course, I know my limitations only too well, it would merely be a few pithy and cogent reflections about those illusive fragments in the puzzle of existence—why did they seem more attainable after six Canadian beers and assorted pickled goods?
    As my favorite nitwit was hopping up and down by the bed, I had no choice but to put my idle cogitations away for another day.
    ”Guess where we’re going tonight!” she said. Her cheeks were