Smoke Gets In Your Eyes

 

The summer heat has been so intense of late that I’ve been leaving my bedroom window wide open through the night ... for all the good it’s done. I prefer my room on the cool side anyway, but “cool” has not been in the cards for early September. Even with the window cranked as far as it will go, I’ve kicked the covers onto the floor more than once.

It got worse one night earlier this week. I was awakened in the wee hours by the stink of rubbish and old cigarette ashes. My room smelled like a dirty ashtray. Already crabby from the heat, I thought resentfully of the dumpster belonging to the apartment building next door. It sits in their parking lot (the site of many an interesting bang, crash or sneeze depending on the day) and had not, until that moment, made its presence so keenly evident. I promptly determined that the heat and humidity were responsible for elevating the pong and started to steam over having to live with the stench of other people’s refuse. How do communities deal with neighbourly disruptions of the olfactory sort? Was it something our society board could address?

Ugh. Dopey and pissed about it, I buried my head under my quilt and drifted back to fitful sleep in hope that the wind—any wind—might shift and clear out the toxic air before sunrise.

Well, it didn’t. In fact, it was worse when I woke up a few hours later. Crappage. I got up, got dressed, got the bears up (they were cranky, too), then opened the blinds to see a sickly pall lying over the ’hood.

Fog? I thought. In this heat?

Then it dawned on me. It wasn’t fog. It was smoke.

I wandered out to where Ter had just emerged from her vacuum-sealed room. The whole suite smelled like an overstuffed ashtray. “It’s the forest fires in Washington state,” she said when she saw me. We hadn’t realized (or I hadn’t, anyway) that pretty much the entire west coast of America is on fire, but more appalling than the unbridled greed of ravenous flames south of the border was my initial reaction to the news.

Apparently I live in a bubble so dense that the reek of entire towns being burned out and thousands of folks losing their homes is okay if it means it’s not the dumpster next door!

Honestly, Ru, really???

Once I realized how messed up my priorities are, I adjusted them most speedily. Understanding has helped me to accept the ongoing haze and lingering acridity ... but, confidentially, I am still relieved. When I figure out what that says about me as a person, I’ll get back to you.

Crap O’Clock

I am slumped in my comfy chair, still in my jammies with a hot Magic Bag softening my stiff neck and shoulders. A bleary-eyed Ter is nursing the day’s first cup of tea from her corner of the loveseat. Neither of us has the energy for small talk. A mournful wail suddenly wafts up from the lawn beneath our window, wending its way into our living room—it’s the three-year-old downstairs, voicing his displeasure at being dressed and out the door to daycare before seven a.m. on a weekday.

“Suck it up, junior,” I say, bluntly. “Life is hard so you’d better get used to it.”

Cut me some slack, okay? This is the same kid who wakes me from a sound sleep at this same ungodly hour on a Sunday by galloping gaily up and down the hall beneath our suite. Instead of sympathizing, I take a perverse pleasure in him being hauled out the door against his will two days a week when I have to get up and go to work for five. He thinks he’s hard done by now? Wait until he starts school, heh heh.

Yup, it’s a hard life all right. I am not nor ever have been a morning person. I have learned to appreciate the beauty of a sunrise over the ocean or the tranquil solitude of a pre-breakfast flânerie, but overall, I’d rather stay up late than get up early. And I can sympathize with Junior Jinx (as Ter calls him) to some degree: I became “anti-morning” when I started school myself. It’s not that I disliked school (much). I’m generally quite happy when I get to the office, too. It’s the getting up at crap o’clock to go somewhere I’d rather not go that well and truly bites.

I don’t know how my mother did it. She was always the first one up, summer or winter, rain or shine, and breakfast was usually on the hob before she knocked on my door with a cheery, “Wakey, wakey!” or—after my bones kicked in—an even brighter, “Pill time!” Those were bleak mornings for sure. I can’t imagine she liked them any better than I did, but I never saw it.

During a recent work tea with Treena, she reminisced fondly about the idyllic days of childhood. “Do you remember waking up every day, full of excitement and eager to see what adventure awaited?” she asked, wistfully.

I just stared at her, wondering what that must have been like. It seems every morning of my life is met with the question of whether I can do it. Whether I can get up and get going. It was particularly grim when I was younger, but I’ve hated being woken up forever. Sure, I can wake up happy on a weekend, but who doesn’t? It’s a weekend, for Pete’s sake!

Which reminds me: I have to reset the alarm before I go to bed tonight.

Crap.

Round One

Our downstairs neigbours brought their baby home on the same day as the Flyers made the playoffs. Basher and I have had a couple of days to enjoy our team’s successful entry into the post-season, and the little guy below us is causing no ruckus at all. In fact, we only knew he had come home because I ran into another neighbour who had run into the new mum’s mother (with five suites in the house, you’d think the communication flow would be more direct) and got a heads up from her.

After Ter dropped me at work the following Monday, she sent me a text:

“First baby crying noises when I got home!”

“And I missed them!” I wrote back. “How good are his lungs?”

“Oh, just the usual tiny gasping cries when they are first out of the shell.”

The same sounds I’ll be making tonight, when the playoffs start for Philly.

Bump in the Night

I think I’m dreaming when I hear someone screaming for help in the dark. Strident, desperate, truly panicked. Once I know I’m awake, my next thought is that the girl downstairs is in trouble. She’s pregnant and her filmmaker husband is out of town; they moved in two days earlier and if something is wrong with the baby …

The screaming gets louder. Someone starts hammering on our door. “She’s going to die! Help me; help me; why won’t you help me?”

Oh, God, it is the baby!

Ter is awake by now; I’m already dressed and flipping on the lights. Still confused, I blurt that it’s the girl downstairs and what the—

A shuddering sound: wood splintering as if a door is being kicked in, glass breaking, and the screaming in a voice gone hoarse. Ter beside me at the top of the stairs. “What is going on?”

I’m thinking, Great, the new neighbour is bipolar and having a seizure. I’m shaking with adrenaline, my mind racing in circles: call 911, go downstairs, see what the hell is happening in our building fo—

There’s an almighty BANG! and the voice receding as the owner takes her screaming back out to the street. Still shaking and moving by instinct rather than common sense, I take my phone and descend the stairs to our front door. There’s a jagged hole in the stained glass at eye level. “Oh, my God,” I say, “the window is broken.” I open the door and find that the foyer has been trashed. Glass shards are strewn across the carpet. The floor lamp that stood in the corner is bent in half and the shade lies in pieces. The building’s front door has been flung wide open and one of the porch chairs blocks the exit. The SOS sounds like she’s heading toward the point.

The door on my left opens cautiously and standing there in her jammies is our new neighbour. “Was that you?” I ask, stupidly.

She shakes her head, half-numb.

To help with the picture, our building is a five unit strata – two suites on the main floor, two on the second and the penthouse up top. The foyer is square, the main floor doors across from each other, the second floor doors side by side. This night, the folks in the other main floor suite are in Toronto, and the fellow who lives above them only emerges when our voices wake him. He’s as gobsmacked as the rest of us.

The screaming outside continues toward the water. Ter is on the porch, listening. “Ruthie,” she says, “time to call 911.”

So I make my first ever 911 call. I describe the events and give directions as best I can. Within seconds of me disconnecting, the cops arrive, a fleet of them, lights and sirens galore, accompanied by two ambulances, a fire truck, and what appears to be a marine rescue boat offshore. Whatever it is, its lights are aimed at the beach. By now I’ve called the folks in the penthouse and they have joined the rest of us on the porch. “Welcome to the neighbourhood,” someone says to the new girl. “This never happens here,” someone else says, but she is adding security to the top of the agenda for the strata’s annual general meeting this weekend. (She proves to be a force of nature herself; when all is said and done, she and hubby are likely to be a super addition to the community.)

Eventually, half of the vehicles depart and an officer makes her way over to the house. Turns out that a mother and daughter have gone on a drinking bender and something went wrong. The cops found them in the water, and if they can get a confession, does anyone want to press charges? A conviction is unlikely, we’re told, given that there are no eyewitnesses or video surveillance to support any action taken. Names and phone numbers are exchanged, the officer leaves, Ter helps to clean up the lobby while I stand with the men and ponder the insurance portent. None of us gets back to sleep before four that morning, but we retire as a group more strongly bonded than we were before the incident occurred.

Since then, we’ve heard that the malcontents apologized to the police but they have no priors so no charges are recommended (to which I reply, how does one go about getting a prior unless charges are pressed?). The broken glass in three of the four doors is presently being repaired, and I presume the strata’s insurance is covering the bulk of the cost. Ter and I have an advantage here: being renters, we just comply with whatever work must be done and don’t worry about the finances.

This does not spare us the slings and arrows suffered by the owners, however. Since we moved in, we’ve been embraced as members of the family and have weathered the same storms as everyone else—everything from an upstairs water leak soaking our carpet to street parking wars to disgruntled neighbours foiling our recycling collection, not to mention the summer of constructing the Trump Tower out back. There is no dissention among the residents, I’m relieved to say, and now that the kids have moved in downstairs, we’re hoping for a warm and peaceful winter.

There’s no place like home.