A Day to Remember

We were going much too fast and I didn’t know why. Hell, I knew nothing. Tilson was driving, booting it north on the 400, hitting 150 an hour. At that speed I had tunnel vision with blurring on the sides.

"What the hell Tilly," I squeezed through clenched teeth as we veered around another car.

"What’s the rush?" He just laughed and kicked the car into overdrive. Was he crazy or just suicidal?

We flashed by a large rig and the trucker gave us a long blast of his horn.

"For God’s sake Tilly, slow down. You’ll kill us!" He just laughed again, his eyes blazing with excitement. He pulled around another vehicle, the tires squalling on the pavement. This was madness. I braced my feet against the firewall as if that would help me in a crash at this speed.
I smelled the smoke of oil burning in the engine compartment, pouring through the vent. "Tilly . . ." I was now begging. One thing worse than crashing at this speed was burning to death at 150 k’s an hour. Like a meteor. "TILLY!" I was becoming desperate.

"Shit!" Tilsen exploded, hitting the dash with his fist. He was trying to push the accelerator through the floorboard.

"What. . .?"

"Look behind us," he hissed, bending over the steering wheel, careening us around a minivan.

I looked back and saw flashing blue and red lights closing in on us. It was a police car, slowly gaining on us. And then I heard the wailing of the siren. "Shit, shit, shit." I said. "The cops." The full impact of our predicament hit me. "Slow down."

"I can’t."

"Why the hell not?"

"I got drugs in the glove compartment." Shit! This was not what I wanted to hear. We were doing 160, maybe on fire, a police car chasing us, and Tilson had drugs in the car.

"How much?"

"More than recreational . . ." His voice broke and he was sweating.

We blasted by a dump truck as if he were standing still, coming upon flashing red and blue. We were bracketed, police in front, police in the back. "Shit, shit, shit . . ." we chorused. Finally Tilson allowed the car to slow as he edged to the side. The police cars closed in, and the cop in front motioned us to pull over. Tilson eased onto the shoulder, praying under his breath, "Please don’t look in the glovebox . . . and not in the trunk. . . " For Christ’s sake what was in the trunk?

As we ground to a stop, spraying gravel, real smoke was coming through the vent, and I was fumbling with my seat belt. It was stuck and my panicked fingers could not release it. The cop ahead got out and approached us with his gun drawn and pointed at us. The cop behind likewise. The wailing of the sirens was still shredding the air, and I could not think. Somehow I rolled out of the car into the ditch. The next thing I knew, Tilson was helping me to my feet, and the two of us were standing there like plucked chickens, hands in the air, with two automatics covering us.

The car was smoking and I could hear Tilson cheering it on. "Burn baby, burn. Please, please, please. . . " Of course, he was ready to sacrifice the car if that would get rid of the incriminating evidence. But no such luck. Smoke was still rising but no flames.

"On the ground," the nearest cop barked at us. "Lie flat on the ground. NOW!" In one hand he had his Glock, in the other a Taser, both aimed at us.

This can’t be real, I told myself, as I threw myself on the ground. Tilsen did not and he was tasered. With arms flailing and legs jerking he collapsed like a wet rag.

"Hands behind your neck." the nearest cop commanded, "Lace the fingers. . ."

I squeezed my eyes shut and prayed. "This can’t be happening. Just can’t. . ."

And it wasn’t. I opened my eyes and found myself in bed, napping at midday. "Shit, it was all a dream," I said, as huge relief washed through me. I was sweating from fright, from the sudden save. All a dream.

Not quite, there WAS smoke in the air, the smell of burning. Ever since chemo I can hardly smell anything but I could smell this. I snapped upright. "Was the house burning?" I rushed into the hallway-- nothing; up the stairs--nothing. Nothing in the kitchen, nothing in the mudroom.

"What the hell?" I looked south through the window--nothing. Ran to the north side and saw smoke flowing through the trees, driven by a sharp westerly wind. My God, sixty yards away the cottage was on fire. My heart hammering I ran outdoors and up the driveway toward the place. Grey smoke swirled around and over the one story wooden structure. My son and his girlfriend just moved in, their stuff all over the place. Neither was home and it was all burning. I saw no flames, but smoke as I pushed into the swirl of it. I looked through the glass, no flames inside. I ripped open the door, pushed inside. No smoke--so it was not the cottage, but then what was it?

I went outside and tracked the smoke upwind. It could only be coming from the neighbouring farm property; something was burning there. They had just completed a new house there last year and moved in. Hope it wasn’t the house. But the smoke was light grey, not black from burning plastics and modern building materials. It must be the old barn, a wooden, sun-bleached structure from the turn of the previous century. Thank God, there were no animals, as the farmer grew only corn and grains.

Then I heard the sirens up on the concession road. Just like in my dream. It cast me back into the same dread.

I ran into the house and yelled upstairs, "Melanie, the neighbour is on fire. I’m going to take a look."

I ran for the Jeep, jumped inside and was hurtling up my driveway to the concession road.

Looking west, I saw a police car blocking the road, its light flashing just as in my dream. I pulled next to him and walked up to his window.

"Don’t go up there." he said officiously. "The firemarshall asked us to keep people away."

"What is burning?" I asked. "The house or the barn?" I peered toward the place, but the trees and bushes along the fence line blocked my view.

"The old barn."

Up the road, a firetruck pulled out and headed toward Middletown. A tanker truck, going for more water, I reasoned. In the other direction a line of cars were forming, as the curious were coming to see what was going on, but the police blocked the road, so after staring at the trees for a few minutes they left reluctantly. Another police car arrived and the two cruisers were parked nose to tail while the drivers talked over the situation. With nothing to see, I decided to return home as well.

Just as I was pulling up to the cottage, Melanie was emerging from the smoke. She backtracked the flow across the field to the fence line and reported that she saw flames consuming the old barn. Luckily there were no animals inside, and no expensive farm equipment, otherwise the smoke would be darker and smelly.

The wind was still brisk and forced the smoke to flow along the ground due east, the cottage directly in its path. No wonder I thought at first that the cottage was burning.

I called my younger son on the cell, who was who-knew-where, and told him about the fire. He had already heard all the details. I asked him to text his older brother, to let him know that it was the neighbour, not us, burning and that his stuff was safe. I was glad I had been home, as it would have given me a heart attack, seeing smoke rise in to the sky near my place.

Later, I drove by the neighbour. Fire trucks were still on the scene, dousing what was left of the barn while an industrial-size backhoe was dismantling what little yet remained. A line of cars were cruising along the concession checking out the aftermath.

Over coffee, Melanie and I talked-out the event, bleeding it of anxiety. Inside my head I was still arguing with myself what was worse, emotionally, being arrested for possession after a high-speed chase or the shock of believing the cottage was on fire. The dream or the reality?

Paul Tee

In my garden of delights.

For the hundredth time I dragged myself through Travis, the story of my somewhat psychic hero, still finding errors. Very discouraging. There are still typos, despite the fact that my wife and I have been over this work with a magnifying glass. These are not just guerrilla punctuation hiding in the folds of a sentence, these are bonafida errors. Things like hose instead of house, hat instead of heat. I can’t believe my eyes just jump over such obvious mistakes. And it’s beyond me how they escaped the eagle eyes of my wife with an almost supernatural sense of right and wrong.

I developed a number of theories to explain the unexplainable. Aliens, YES aliens, insert these just to keep us off balance, sapping our moral, before they launch their "final conflict." This became clear to me during a SciFi movie on TV last night.

Another hypothesis centers around the inherent self-determination of any length of text to undergo spontaneous mutation. Hence house can easily become hose, and heat transmute into hat. Why then, you may well ask, does not house produce an equally likely fouse? A reasonable question that aims at the natural selection criteria, the survival of the fittest. Only those mutation that can fool the Spellcheck have any chance of success. Any maladaptive alteration would be instantly recognized and obliterated. Successful errors try to mimic righteous text.

A further theory would cast the phenomenon into a more organic context. Like weeds, these errors insinuate themselves into the lines, disguised as other beneficial words. I once had an acquaintance--a confirmed urbanite, who had just moved from a high-rise into a house, and who was experimenting with horticulture for the first time--point out with great pride a robust plant growing in her flowerbed. I didn’t have the heart to tell her that she was nurturing a thistle that would grow to seven feet and attack any passerby with barbed implements. Agreed, that was an overdrawn example, but successful weeds are able to mimic more desirable varieties. And so it is that house turns into hose (or even horse) and heat into hat. The eye jumps over the minor variation. Expectations fill in the gaps.

So I have to constantly tend my garden of words. Painstakingly riding shotgun among the rows, patrolling the pages, annihilating any aberration. Watch out for that predatory quotation mark, laying false claim to a line of text, they do not belong--at least not there. Be on the lookout for derivatives, such as spun off by, say, cat; bat, cab, car, eat, fat, hat, mat, rat, sat, tat, vat... and so on. Be on your guard for a shift of emphasis, such that would transmute slower into a shower; read into red, or sad into sled. And my personal nemesis, text that slips from the past into the present and back again. Believe me publishers don’t want to go back to the future past.

The permutations are mind boggling. Add to this phenomenon the ability of technology to propagate errors at an incredible speed. Say for example, during a long editing session you want to change a misspelled feat to feet, and unleash the change function to make the conversion, not realizing that inadvertently all eat’s are changed to eet’s. Later one wonders where the hell did cheet, beet, cleet, meet, and ... sleet came from.

Alas, what does it all add up to? Sadly it seems I have to go through once again and again ... working in my garden.