Dreamtime: A Happy Book

Doing Nothing, Nothing Doing

98 Doing Nothing, Nothing Doing “Here you are,” Vicki said, standing in the doorway, rain raking the fog outside, “a gray man in a moldy room. What are you thinking?” I could have been thinking about many things: Excalibur, the name Edward dubbed the trowel used to scoop dog droppings out of the side meadow; a recent dream in which I underwent treatment for prostate cancer, the doctor flipping radium pellets into my innards like a boy skipping flat stones across a pond; or even thinking about two barns east of Meteghan on Route 1, a stone wall running between them, the paint on the barns giving the lie to Robert Frost’s contention that stone walls make good neighbors. “Choose Life,” massive white letters on the side of one barn urged, an open hand stretched beneath, index finger extended . Painted on the second barn and facing the command on first barn, the two buildings bookending the wall, was “Barn Again,” the letters salmon, beside them a cartoon of Jesus in his hippie, or Woodstock, phase, his eyes a glaze of bleached blue, hair exploding psychedelic about his head in a rainbow of dreadlocks. I could also have been pondering two stickers pasted on the rear window of a rusting white Pontiac I saw parked outside Tim Hortons on Starrs Road. To the right of the imperative “Drive It Like You Stole It” was a cautionary yellow square advising tailgaters that there was a “Baby on Board.” I bought coffee and a dutchie in Tim Hortons and tried to identify the owner of the car. I failed. The only other customers in the coffee shop were eleven men, friends seated around two tables pulled together into one, none of the men under seventy and most at the tipping point of eighty, beyond both babies and a heavy foot on the accelerator. I might have been thinking about a battered tin sitting on the front left corner of my desk. Vicki bought the tin for two dollars at a barn Doing Nothing, Nothing Doing | 99 sale, thinking I would like it. She was right, and when words failed me, I sometimes picked the tin up and turned it about in my hands. The tin was six inches long, three tall, and four broad. Once it held J. G. Dill’s “best cut plug” tobacco, manufactured in Richmond, Virginia, and “Celebrated for Its Smoking Qualities.” The tin was painted gold and yellow, black stenciling running across it, sometimes in curlicues, other times in rows resembling tiles. In the upper left corner of the lid was Dill’s trademark, an oval in which a woman leaned backward and stared to her right as if looking at a mirror, her hands behind her head, arranging her hair. Her sleeves were rolled above her elbows, and her blouse splayed open below her neck, low and scalloped, turning her into a bowdlerized Anglo-American belly dancer. Of course I could have been considering truths, those that the ambitious dare not speak and that no longer intrigued me. I might even perhaps have been thinking about the news, although the world that papers now described was not the one in which I grew up or which I cared much about. No, no, I was thinking about gourds, the sort my grandmother grew at Cabin Hill, my grandparents’ farm in Virginia. “Gourds,” I said to Vicki. “Rarely do I see them nowadays, and I miss them.” Before I could recount drying and polishing them, rubbing my hands over their surfaces almost as if they were pets, Vicki interrupted. “You miss a lot of things, more and more these days,” she said, misinterpreting my remark, her tone resigned. I have grown progressively silent. Much of what I did in Canada was repetitive, turning conversation into a litany. Every day during the first weeks we were in Nova Scotia, I dug Japanese knotweed from the edge of the side meadow. From rugosa roses I pulled fence lines of Virginia creeper. Although the work caused pain to rattle along my spine, my admiration for the plants swelled. I envied their vegetable resilience. Of course time eventually blights all plants. The roses themselves were over thirty years old and no longer blared boldly into a second blooming in August. Instead of downy with lively stems, their canes had aged gray and barren, often serving as trellises for the creeper. Jewelweed took advantage of the dieback and spread through the canes. In front...