McLeod's Bookstore, Basement Edition.

Here is McLeod's Bookshop again - the biggest firetrap in Vancouver, literary edition.  It is the most bookish bookstore I've ever been into, and comes complete with a crotchety bookstore-keeper, who sits behind an old wooden desk in the center of the maze on the upper floor and snarls when you ask for a price-check or worse, and cheekily, approach him with a title search.
            There's something about a really bookish used bookstore that inspires presumptions of magical powers in the proprietor.  And the worser and more impenetrable and zoo-ish and Escher-esque  the interior of the shop, the harder you presume an inverse relationship between the crumbling chaos and a level of arcane omnipotence on his  part - of course he knows the name and location of every single book!
            In revenge, he will, entirely fallaciously, direct you to the basement, where the books are stacked two-and-a-half-thousand to the cubic meter, in dusty towers as tall as you are.  There are handwritten subject catalogues pinned to pointing to the bottoms of  the stacks.  The lights are dim and the air is close and uncomfortably warm.  One stray spark off of the ancient polyester carpet underneath your feet and the whole place would go up like a bomb. 
            You flee for the dusty daylight of upstairs, and leave in determination, intending to return directly with a fire-proof suit and a scuba tank full of sensible ventilation in case of crisis.  You'd gotten almost lost down there, and in the warren of obscure academic subjects, you'd scarcely made it past the letter B.

Capilano Suspension Bridge

We found somewhere to live so quickly that we had to wait almost a month before our personal effects arrived and we could move in. So I flew up to Vancouver to spend a bit of time with Mum and Dad. And they took me to Capilano.
             The Capilano Suspension Bridge, in all its verdant redwood wilderness, is actually only 15 minutes from Downtown Vancouver. And it is a terrible thing.
             The Capilano Suspension bridge is a terribly wobbly bridge.  Being a terribly wobbly bridge has been its claim to fame since 1889. The bridge is terribly wobbly and the gorge below is terribly deep and there is always some sadistic monster child in the middle bouncing up and down to make it swing and tip from side to side until everybody on it is in terrible danger of falling off.  And down.  And further down until there isn't any more down and you get hurt.

             Mr Tabubil swears black and blue in engineering parlance that the thing can't tip over or snap and spill me off.  But I prefer hearing all about shear ratios and steel strength coefficients on solid ground where everything is hypothetical.

             But that bridge is the only way across, so I go.  Swearing under my breath all the way across. By way of prayer.

In the redwood forest on the other side, the trees are vast and out-scale trees and a tree-top walk runs a ten meters above the ground at the level of their knees.  

The leaves are huge because the trees are huge.  They go all the way up to the sky and when dusk comes (if you are still on the far side) the stars get hung in their upper branches.

It's wonderful in those trees.  But to get home you have to go back across the wobbly bridge again. 

There may be tears.

The Ice is Nigh!

We are suddenly in winter.  We had no autumn; we went from skirts and t-shirts to 15 degrees Celsius - with rain-  between Monday and Friday.  And now we are freezing. The concrete buildings  here are cold-sinks, and we're not allowed to turn on our central heating (gas fired) until we've had it officially inspected (to avoid surprise explosions).  Now we're sort of scrambling to have it done… everybody in Santiago is scrambling to get it done, and there are only so many gas inspectors to go around!

            But it is so pretty at the moment.  The rain has cleared the air, and the mountains are full of snow and the leaves are.... well turning brown and dropping off. It's not exactly New England with its burning autumnal forests (I have a friend here from New Hampshire who is pining) but there's just enough color to keep the streets pretty.  What I do miss is being able to crunch the leaves as I walk through autumn streets - here the building concierges are so conscientious that they sweep up everything as it falls - four times a day and at least twice during the night, so that when people leave for work in the morning, the verges are spotless.

            Which leads to some highly contextual frustration - on Sunday, as I was walking to meet said friend from New Hampshire at a coffee shop (for purposes of pining), I passed a building where the concierge was outside raking.  It was a gusty day and the leaves fell as fast as he raked and as I passed by, he hit his limit- he had both hands around a big sturdy branch of the nearest tree and he was shaking that tree with everything he had - he was going to get it all over with at once, by damn!

House Hunting

We had a few requirements. We wanted to live no more than 20 minutes walk from Mr Tabubil's Office.  We wanted to be close to the shops and to the metro. We wanted trees around us.

            And we wanted a decent, gringo-friendly kitchen.  Most kitchens here are dark and ergonomically illogical galley kitchens in the bowels or the backs of the apartment.  Sans natural light even, sometimes. They're for the maids, not for people.

            On day 4 of Being in Chile, Mr Tabubil's company relocation people - a lovely lady named Beatriz and her minion - came to meet with us.  Sitting in the living room of mi suegro's apartment, they looked around the pretty, tidy room, and shook their heads and set about disabusing us of finding anything pleasant - or even habitable.

            We told them the rent we hoped to pay, which we'd researched and should have been sufficient for a comfortable place, and they got very dour and told us that we had two options: We could live in an ultra-modern apartment -with all mod cons, but a shoebox, or we could live in a larger apartment, but it would be falling apart. Literally,  Beatriz told us, her eyes wide.  Larger apartments are in older buildings and the owners don't want to do anything and the walls are all falling down.  She and her minion both nodded solemnly.  And as for a decent kitchen, forget it.  Kitchens are for maids. In the back -out of sight, out of earshot - You'll just have to adjust your lifestyle - cooking is a chore, not a pleasure!

            We felt rather despondent and said to just show us everything they had and they suddenly became rather perky and told us that in the following 48 hours they'd show us 12 apartments and we'd be very very happy and could choose one of them.  If we didn't mind crumbling walls and bathrooms that maybe didn't work much.  At all.

            Then they left, smiling,  and we had a small emergency meeting and calculated by how much we would have to increase the rent in order to get something we could live with.

So we started house hunting in a state of some perturbation.  The first place Beatriz took us to was a 12th storey penthouse.  It was old and it was rickety and it was shabby and it was falling apart with crumbling walls and floor paneling that bucked up almost  to knee level in the middles of the rooms, but it was enormous and full of light and the kitchen may have been 30 years old but it was a proper kitchen, not a railway galley, and the owners were engaged in necessary maintenance and nailing down the floor at that very moment.

            After that we were driven to another building on the very edge of our walking radius.   We took an elevator to the third floor and walked into - space, and light, and... charm.  The owners were Spanish and didn't think much of Chilean apartment lifestyles, so a year and a half ago they'd knocked out half the walls and totally rebuilt the kitchen to suit a lifestyle that didn't involve a maid exiled to Siberia, and because they didn't want a live-in maid they'd knocked out the maids bedroom room and added on to the kitchen with pantries and a breakfast nook and.... have you ever walked into a space and just felt good?

            And it was five minutes walk from the subway and the shops, ten minutes walk from my in-laws' place, and when we looked out the widows, we saw trees .

            We walked all over it, and loved it, and made friends with the owners, and when we finally left, I finally drew breath.

            "I want to live here."

            "Me too."

           "Did you see the man sitting in the living room?  He wasn't a friend of the family - he was waiting for another real-estate agent!  And did you see the two men going up in the lift when we came down?  They're going to see it as well!"

            And because we couldn't imaging seeing anything nicer in the whole city, Beatriz pulled her car over to the side of the road and called her real estate agent to draw up a letter of offer (Chile is very formal) and because we'd taken the time to get to know the owners, they decided that they liked us and the same night, Beatriz called us to say yes.  The apartment was ours.

We spent all of the next day filling out forms, and early on the day after that, Beatriz hustled us into a notary's office to sign the paperwork and make it all official before anyone else came through with a better offer on the apartment.

             A notary's office in Chile is a very special place.  Signing the lease took two and a half hours.

The office proper was an enormous room filled with queues and electric typewriters.  Beatriz found us a conference room because she knows everybody and everything (she's the Original Fixer) and we all sat down - Mr Tabubil, Me, the dueno (the landlord) the dueno's daughter and the real-estate agent.  At intervals the agent would appear with paperwork that we'd pore over and mark up all the typos, then he'd vanish back into the scrum and, after half an hour or so, reappear with it all typed up again - and we'd check it again and send him back.  Eventually we signed things.  The signatures had to be ratified and counter-signed in the outer room, and at length we were all given receipts - which had to be ratified and photocopied and counter-signed - it was something of a zoo.
             Our stupefyingly swift success  in finding a home has made us the Mr Tabubils' company's poster children for rapid assimilation.  Two days to find a place to live? The usual process can take two months!  They think we're wonderful.

      

And as we couldn't move in until our personal effects arrived - five or six weeks later, I flew up to Vancouver and spent three lovely weeks with Mum and Dad.

Chamber Pots

Chamber pots are, in my world, a vanished Thing.  A THing with a capital TH, spoken of with hushed tones and curled lips  and surreptitious glaaahs and gaaaks by people of my mother's generation.

Mum glaaahs and Dad is smug.  He might have had an outdoor dunny when he was a nipper, but it was a flushing model, in a shed with electric lights, even.  My city-girl Mum gaaaks and says that she spent her summer holidays in country-er towns than the one he came from - towns where the dunnykin man came once a week in a horse-drawn cart, trailing a boiling cloud of black flies behind.

HER dunny was a dunnykin - a glorified milk bucket in reverse, under a hole in a wooden seat.  A new one was delivered every Monday.  By Wednesday it was unspeakable in the boiling Aussie summer, by Thursday it was crawling, and by Sunday night it was crawling an inch up underneath your bum.

The dunnykin man worked in dark and secrecy - by broad daylight.  On delivery day, Nice People huddled in their living rooms and were ostentatiously Not There as he stealthily carried the noisesome gong bucket down the garden path to where the horses stood, and stamped, and trailed a boiling cloud of black flies behind them, all new hatched and rising straight up out of the muck.

Chamber Pots are unlamented, unmourned, unremembered and unknown to me and mine.  Last year, just before we left Australia, I fount two elegantly enameled tin basins in a thrift store.  They were teal and celadon blue, and I brought them home to put flowers in - a la Martha Stewart - at a tea party.

We never held the tea party, on account of packing up the house to move to Chile instead, but my Mother visited me last week and I held one here in her honor, and brought out the new flower pots to decorate the tea-table.

Mum screamed.

            "Chamber Pots!"  She shrieked.

After a brief moment of dismay, I giggled. 
            "No one will know."  I said.  "I didn't.  And Martha Stewart would call it Retro-rust-pan Chic!"

Mum glaaah'd.  AND gaaak'd.  But nobody knew.  And Martha Stewart would have smiled, enigmatically, and cut me a bunch of roses.

The Devils you Don't know At All and Don't Want To - Ever. So There. THANK You.

Not long after I moved back to Australia, I was out to dinner with Mum and Dad and a group of other brand-new arrivals.  Among them was a lovely young man from South Africa (which is not exactly under-populated with its own beasties), who'd immigrated to Australia with his wife and two small children.

            The thing about Australians is that we're well aware of the reputation for the sheer versatile lethality of our flora and fauna, and we take a perverse and sophisticated satisfaction in winding up foreigners until they're strung so tight you can pluck that last stretched nerve and bounce them half-way to Jupiter.

            This young man had been pretty well worked over by the well-meaning folks in his new office over the past week, and by the time he got to us, he was in a state of bug-eyed paranoia that had him checking underneath his restaurant chair and carefully inspecting the folds of the table-cloth before he sat down, just in case the shadows were harboring something unsavory that would jump out and bite him in the neck.

            Mum and Dad watched him narrowly, and with very little prodding, led him into  a breathless exploration of how Australia required its citizens to maintain a perpetual state of readiness -

            "My God," he said feelingly.  You've got the world's deadliest snakes and the world's deadliest spiders, and they tell me that they all live inside your bloody house. But you can't go outside into the garden either!  You can't put a picnic blanket down on the grass - there's trapdoor spiders in the grass.  And you can't go walking in the bush - there's snakes that look just like little brown twigs lying on all the paths, and when you go home, there's huntsman spiders in your beds, and redback spiders underneath the toilet seats - I tell you, I'm about to quit this job and take the family up north for a long, quiet tropical holiday on the beach.  At least the beaches are safe!"

            This was Mum and Dad's cue.  Mum, who has spent considerable time teaching on the coast up north, launched into a story about her seven-year-old student who walked barefoot to school one day and stepped on a stonefish.  He lived, barely.

            "Don't forget the box jellyfish."  Dad said.

            "The What- ?"

            "Cone shells." Mum said.

            "Sharks."

            "Sea snakes."

            "Salt-water crocodiles."

            "And," Mum said, "The little blue-ringed octopus. It's so small you barely see it, but there's no known antidote. You die in agony; paralyzed and writhing."

            The South African blanched. "About the only bit of Australia that's safe must be the little strip of sand around your coast between the high-tide line and the start of the bush!"

            "Malaria."  Mum said consideringly.

            "Japanese Encephalitis,"  Dad nodded

            "Dengue Fever," Mum said, and nodded harder.

            The poor man had to call a waiter over for something to settle his nerves.  Several stiff drinks later, Mum and Dad poured him into a taxi and went home very pleased with themselves.

Australia is a lovely country.  And if the new immigrants can survive the Australians, they can survive anything.

It's the 25th today

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:

Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.

At the going down of the sun and in the morning

We will remember them.