Estates Large and Small

Contents

ONE

TWO

THREE

FOUR

FIVE

SIX

SEVEN

EIGHT

NINE

TEN

ELEVEN

TWELVE

THIRTEEN

FOURTEEN

FIFTEEN

SIXTEEN

SEVENTEEN

EIGHTEEN

NINETEEN

TWENTY

TWENTY-ONE

TWENTY-TWO

TWENTY-THREE

TWENTY-FOUR

TWENTY-FIVE

ALSO BY RAY ROBERTSON

Home Movies

Heroes

Moody Food

Mental Hygiene: Essays on Writers and Writing

Gently Down the Stream

What Happened Later

David

Why Not? Fifteen Reasons to Live

I Was There the Night He Died

Lives of the Poets (with Guitars)

1979

How to Die: A Book About Being Alive

The Old Man in the Mirror Isn't Me: Last Call Haiku

Estates Large and Small

Ray Robertson

Biblioasis

Windsor, Ontario

Copyright © Ray Robertson, 2022

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher or a licence from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For an Access Copyright licence visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll-free to 1-800-893-5777.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Title: Estates large and small / Ray Robertson.

Names: Robertson, Ray, 1966- author.

Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20220144095 | Canadiana (ebook) 20220144184 | ISBN 9781771964623 (softcover) | ISBN 9781771964630 (ebook)

Classification:

LCC

PS

8585.

O

3219

E

88 2022 |

DDC

C

813/.54—dc23

Edited by Daniel Wells

Copyedited by Chandra Wohleber

Text and cover designed by Ingrid Paulson

Published with the generous assistance of the Canada Council for the Arts, which last year invested $153 million to bring the arts to Canadians throughout the country, and the financial support of the Government of Canada. Biblioasis also acknowledges the support of the Ontario Arts Council (OAC), an agency of the Government of Ontario, which last year funded 1,709 individual artists and 1,078 organizations in 204 communities across Ontario, for a total of $52.1 million, and the contribution of the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book Publishing Tax Credit and Ontario Creates.

To Randy Harnett and Tim Hanna

And all the other true believers at She Said Boom!

The City & The City, Pandemonium and Zoinks!

And Sister Patti McCabe and Eddy Webster

And Mara Korkola and the Ums

Til things we’ve never seen

Will seem familiar

— Garcia/Hunter, Terrapin Station

ONE

Brick and mortar, horse and buggy, say hello to tomorrow today. But I’m down, I’m not out. Not yet anyway. If readers won’t come to the bookstore, then the bookstore will have to come to them. A virtual bookstore, with 10,000 or so more-than-virtual books, as well as full-on, full-time partnership with abebooks.com, the very sort of e-commerce marketplace that’s one of several reasons why I’m in the position I’m in now. I miss having somewhere to go every day and people to talk to once in a while, but on the other hand it’s nice to not have to wear pants to work if you don’t feel like it. Or a mask. You win some, you lose some, it’s how you keep score that counts.

But even if head office and the warehouse do happen to share the same mailing address as your house, that doesn’t mean you always get to do whatever you want. Until every one of those 10,000 books that used to fill the shelves of the Queen Street West bookstore I owned for twenty-one years is inputted and eventually put online, every Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday means my nephew Benjamin, and having to be up and fully dressed by 11:00 a.m. It’s difficult to inspire loyalty and dedication in your staff while attired in a housecoat and flip-flops.

And today there’s someone else too, Cameron, from something called Toronto West Social Media Solutions. The world, it seems, is increasingly populated with Benjamins and Camerons. At what point did parents come to believe that bestowing their children with three-syllable names increases their offspring’s chances of being private-school worthy? My own childhood was full of Davids and Donnas, Julies and Jims, names remarkable only for their ordinariness. Of course, I wouldn’t trust a nature writer who had never stepped outside, so my offspring-free opinions about contemporary child-rearing are likely equally suspect. Doesn’t stop me from having them though.

The only child in my life is my mother, and that’s not cruel, that’s the truth. Or maybe it’s both. Either way, it’s not my fault, just like it’s not hers. Besides, it’s not so bad. Oh, it’s bad — retirement-­home, borderline-dementia bad — but it could be worse. Much worse. Mum isn’t Alzheimer’s-losing it — doesn’t forget any of the really important stuff, least of all the name of somebody she knew sixty years ago, and the rheumatoid arthritis in her hands and feet and knees excepted, for an eighty-one-year-old woman she’s shipshape physically — she’s just losing it. And seems as if she’s having a pretty good time doing so. Forty years ago, she’d just be called dotty. What we call things matters. Words matter. My mother is just dotty.

Another hour until the doorbell and Benjamin, and an hour after that the person from the social media company, but I can’t complain, I’ve been my own boss for a long time, haven’t had to endure chattering co-workers or team-building exercises or casual Fridays for just as long. The mass of men wish they led lives of quiet desperation. You meet someone and they ask you how you got into the used books business and you say something about always wanting to be a writer or an English professor and neither being in the cards and always loving books and it just making sense and that’s all true, but it’s not the truth. Not the entire truth. I like sleeping in and I don’t enjoy chit-chat and I could never listen to someone else’s music all day at work, so I had to run my own business.

Not that every hour is my own until all of the books are online; I still need to periodically replenish the store’s stock, the healthy red corpuscles of any respectable used bookstore, which is why I need widows. The wives of dead collectors are my bibliophilic blood supply. Not that there aren’t women who are collectors themselves who die and leave behind houses full of suddenly superfluous books. There are — I’ve bought a few of their collections — but it’s mostly men and they usually die before their wives and it’s the widows I ordinarily deal with. Women, I’ve found, tend to be the better, more knowledgeable readers; men, the more conspicuous collectors. The widows call me on the telephone and invite me into their homes and I spend an hour or so sorting through a lifetime of fervent collecting before eventually making them a cash offer for their recently deceased dear one’s lifelong labour of love. I don’t buy textbooks, musical scores, or encyclopedias, and what I’m most interested in is literature (all genres, including criticism), history, philosophy, and biography, and, no, I can’t give you a rough idea of how much I think your collection is worth without first looking at it in person. But I do buy entire estates, large and small.

Before any of that, though: a shit (hopefully), a shower and a shave (probably), breakfast (almost certainly). At fifty-two years old, you learn not to take anything for granted. Visit enough widows, you discover the same thing.

.

I used to be in a relationship — for nearly ten years — but then I met Jerry Garcia’s guitar and good weed. That’s my theory anyway. Debbie might have a different answer if you ask her, but you’d have to call long distance to get it. And she’s a busy woman, be prepared to leave a message.

We both liked being busy. It’s probably why we lasted as a couple as long as we did. We liked to work hard and enjoyed what we did for a living and appreciated that the other one felt the same way. We even met because of work. Debbie was employed as a paralegal near Osgoode Hall, which wasn’t too far of a walk to my store on Queen Street, and she came into the shop one day and said she had to buy a gift for the head of the law firm she worked for who'd decided to run for Parliament on the Conservative ticket. I succeeded in suppressing the desire to suggest The Idiot and instead recommended an expensive first edition of Robert Penn Warren’s excoriation of political power, All the King’s Men. She’d seen the movie it was based on and got the joke and we shared a conspiratorial smile while I rang up her purchase, which led to an afternoon cup of coffee and then to a late dinner and then to sharing the same bed. The sex was good and she didn’t seem to mind that I had books on the brain the majority of the time and it was easier to keep my toothbrush in one place instead of two.

We were born in the same year, but entering our late forties and intimations of holy-shit-I’m-going-to-be-fifty-soon meant something very different for each of us. Debbie grew up in Northern Ontario, on the north shore of Lake Superior, and was always after me to visit where she was from and to sample its bucolic delights. I went once — her parents still lived up there — and it’s sublimely beautiful, I get it, but when she took up hard-core hiking in the shadow of the big five-0, however, she was on her own. She never made me feel as if I wasn’t welcome to join her and her growing circle of hiking buddies — just like she’d always encouraged me to emulate her daily hour-and-a-half workout at the gym or to join her whenever she’d run or walk or climb for one good cause or another — but driving several hours somewhere just to be able to spend several more hours slogging across the Canadian Shield while swatting away mosquitoes and keeping an eye out for bears isn’t my idea of R&R. Sounds more like punishment than pleasure.

Around the same time, I began to feel that, staring down my own half century, I’d earned the occasional timeout from human interaction as well, and discovered an unexpectedly effective way of simultaneously shutting out the outside noise while turning up the volume inside. Turning it way up. Headphones and red wine and the right record album had always been a favourite means of washing away a busy day of words, words, words, whether buying them or selling them or reading them, but marijuana took the cerebral cleansing of a full-bodied Chardonnay to a whole other level of psychic relief. It was as if I’d never really heard music before; or, I’d heard it, it was the same sounds, but it was like listening to them in stereo for the first time, each instrument clearly, magnificently audible in isolation as well as a participating piece of the greater musical whole. It was like learning a new language. And the best music to get the best value for your doobie was music made by Jerry Garcia.

Garcia’s guitar tone, his instrumental DNA, was, like pot, a late-in-life revelation, was delicately, powerfully, swoop-and-soar sinewy and inimitably his, his ceaseless musical curiosity compelling him to eschew guitar-solo clichés and squeeze out the full emotional range of almost every note he played. I’d listened to rock and blues and hard country most of my life, and could appreciate a tasteful, economical guitar or keyboard solo as much as the next person, but the prolonged exhibition of instrumental virtuosity had always been something you waited to be over with until you got back to the song and the words. But Garcia’s guitar had a personality; Garcia’s guitar talked — was alternately thoughtful, playful, melancholy, anguished, ethereal, obstinate, joyful, bewildered, blissful, and oftentimes all of these things over the course of the same ten- or fifteen-minute song. They couldn’t be any shorter. It would be like asking Monet to paint a pond full of water lilies on the inside cover of a book of matches.

Debbie thought I’d regressed to being a Grateful Dead–besotted teenage pothead. I thought she was mindlessly marching her life away. Maybe we were both right. You’d think, though, that it was the kind of impasse that two people who cared about each other should have been able to overcome by listening to each other and jointly seeing the bigger picture and by working out a mutually satisfactory compromise. You’d think.

They say that if you could correct an author’s weaknesses, you’d also eliminate their strengths. I could have been more understanding of her need to reconnect with her woodsy upbringing. I could have cut back on the weed and the Dead and bought some OFF! and roughed it with her in the great outdoors once in a while. When she found a job in BC that would allow her access to mountains and ocean and miles and miles of unknown hiking trails, I could have packed up shop and gone along. But it’s hard not to be who you are.

As far as these things go, the breakup was amicable. She took the job and moved west, I bought out her half of the house and had room for more books and music, and two thousand miles between us meant a fresh start for us both. The saddest part is that I don’t think we missed each other.

.

After we split, I’d work all day, eat whatever takeout I’d picked up on the way home, and get stoned and listen to the Dead before falling asleep in bed watching YouTube videos on my laptop. It’s easy to get lost when you haven’t got anywhere else to go.

When there wasn’t any her and me any longer — only me — I realized I really didn’t have anyone to talk to anymore. Life is mostly just a bunch of things that happen, or don’t, but a good story makes up for it. Reality is just the rough draft, and a story needs not only a teller, but a listener. Not that I noticed much. Aided by just enough red wine and a great big fatty and one of Jerry’s winding, probing, silky guitar solos circa, say, 1973 — sweet-and-sour satori with a wah-wah pedal thrown in to seal the deal — being able to actually experience what you’d previously only been able to read about in mystical poetry made up for not having somebody to share a pizza with or to sit beside at the movies. Warm oneness with the coldly indifferent universe; individual consciousness solemnly merged with a great big cosmic belly laugh; maybe not quite William Blake’s world in a grain of sand, but certainly a decent-sized portion of that same shimmering world contained in a sustained E chord: in comparison, being by myself a lot didn’t seem like such a big deal. Even when the world was in full-on COVID-19 lockdown, except for a chronic shortage of toilet paper and having to stand in line at the liquor store or at Loblaws, I can’t say it made that much of a difference to my day-to-day life. It turned out I’d been practising social distancing long before the government told us it was a good idea.

I didn’t do much dating after Debbie and I broke up. Or any, actually. I wasn’t celibate, but what few next-mornings there were never turned into anything more. And then there weren’t even any more next-mornings. Sometimes I felt like even though, all things considered, I had a pretty nice life, it might be even nicer if I had someone to share it with, but then you get busy at the store, or when you’re not busy working you’re dealing with sundry this-and-that connected to selling your mother’s house and easing her into her new retirement community, or Canada Revenue decides to audit your already-struggling business, or . . . Like a lot of things, being alone wasn’t a decision, it just happened.

When I had to shut down the shop because, even before COVID, sales had been declining for years (digital books, online-buying sites, the decline in interest in reading in general) and I couldn’t afford another Toronto retail rent hike, that was something else that happened. Thankfully, the house is mortgage-free and the wine I drink is cheap and I can’t recall having bought a new shirt or a pair of shoes since mullets were the haircut du jour. Between having to close down and box up and move several thousand books and needing to think about things I’d never had to think about before, like venturing into the world of virtual retail, I didn’t have as much time to puff away the night and ponder the infinite.

And what do you know? Not only was I reminded that there wasn’t anyone in my life I could have a conversation with, other than people I was biologically related to or ex-customers or a handful of neighbourhood merchants, it also turned out I was tired of listening to all Jerry, all the time. Jerry was still Jerry, the Dead were still the Dead, but even the sublime can become samey. I also suspected I might be smoking too much pot. I even drew up a list of pros and cons. As might be expected, the cons side of the page filled up rather quickly. The pros side of the page was slight by comparison: I like to get high.

So I’ve made a decision: less pot and less Dead; more red wine and more reading. More specifically, I’ve decided to teach myself 2,500 years of Western philosophy, all of the most important thinkers, the greatest hits of intellectual history. Like a lot of people on the other side of middle age, I’ve come to realize relatively late in the game that I’ve been so busy living, I’ve tended to neglect my life. I went to work immediately after high school, a stock boy at Coles bookstore, partly because I never enjoyed sitting in a classroom all day listening to someone else talk, partly because having a full-time job meant I could move out of my parents’ house in Etobicoke and into my own place in Toronto. It worked out, I don’t have any regrets — went from stock boy to sales staff to my first job working for an antiquarian bookseller to one second-hand bookstore to another until my own shop and que sera sera where did all the decades go?

But if seventy-something is my approximate expiration midnight — thanks for being born, Phil, and goodnight and please turn out the lights on the way out — my metaphorical mortality clock is coming up fast on 10:00 p.m. I figured I’m overdue when it comes to getting a better idea of who I am and what I’m doing here and where we’re all going. Or at least finding out what philosophy’s biggest and best-known brains believed it all means. Why not? I’ve got the time.

TWO

This, I wasn’t expecting.

So how are we going to do this? the young woman in the wheelchair says. I’m standing on the front porch of my house with my phone still at my ear; she’s at the bottom of the steps doing the same thing with hers. We both lower our phones and look at each other. She’s wearing a white mask and black sunglasses.

I didn’t, uh . . . I say. I mean, the house isn’t really . . .

Don’t worry about it, she says, removing her knapsack from the back of the wheelchair and tucking her phone inside. My bad. I remember now, you told me on the phone, but I guess I forgot that Queen West Books is a house, not a store. Zipping her bag back up, Let’s see what we can do about that, she says. If you can just grab my knapsack and my chair and bring them inside, that would be great. I’m hoping your computer is on the main floor.

It’s in the back, in the mudroom.

What’s a mudroom? she says. She takes off her sunglasses and sticks them inside the knapsack too. Her hair is naturally wavy and dirty blond and falls well past her shoulders. She’s wearing black gloves without fingers on both hands, presumably to aid her in wheeling herself around.

I’m not sure, I say. These old houses, that’s what they called the back rooms back then.

How long have you lived here?

Christ, I don’t look that old, do I?

We moved here in ’07. No, ’08. February 2008.

I got the impression from when we talked on the phone that you’re the only person who lives here, she says. Because you said you only have the one computer in the house.

Right. I mean, my ex and I bought the place, but I’m the only one who lives here now.

She nods a couple of times, as if it’s best if we put the entire subject behind us, and pushes herself up from her wheelchair, her hands on its armrests delivering her to her feet where she manages to stand up by holding on to the back of the chair. Without the slightest self-consciousness that I can see, she uses the wheelchair as a makeshift walker to get to the wooden handrail at the bottom of the steps which she uses for support.

Do you think you can lift my chair into the house? she says.

Again: How old does this girl think I am?

No problem. But what about the steps?

Just get my bag and chair and I’ll be right behind you.

I place the bag on the seat of the wheelchair and give it a heave-ho and start up the stairs. I can hear slow, thuddy, but steady steps behind me and want to turn around to see how she’s managing, but by the time I get to the porch and set down the chair, she’s there too. I lift her bag from the seat and she sits back down and we wheel and walk, respectively, inside.

Where Benjamin is ostensibly entering the title, author, publisher, year of publication, and condition of book into his tablet to aid in getting the store’s inventory online. As he’s reminded me more than once, newer books can be catalogued simply by scanning their ISBN, but as I’ve just as often reminded him, older books, the more valuable ones, still need to be manually catalogued. By the smirk on his face before he sees me and the look of feigned concentration after he does, it’s obvious he’s been texting someone instead of doing his job. Just when you thought people couldn’t possibly get any dumber, duller, or more distracted, along comes sage technology to bestow upon humanity the ability to effortlessly engage with one another over such timeless questions as what 4? and what r u doing? and is she there2? That I managed to avoid owning a cell phone for as long as I did is my single proudest act of civil disobedience.

Benjamin looks up from the screen like it physically pains him to be interrupted from his weighty labours, and I introduce him to Cameron and her to him.

Hey, he says.

Hey, she says.

And that’s all it takes — to be approximately the same age. I can walk into a coffee shop, and if there’s a geezer at a table sipping his espresso, we might not have a single thing in common — or, even if we did, might not like each other — but there’s an undeniable ease of understanding between us merely because we were born in the same decade. The same songs, the same television programs, the same I-remember-where-I-was-when-that-happened stories: who we are isn’t just us.

The computer’s back here, I say, leading the way to the small office at the back of the house. Over my shoulder, in my best long-suffering-yet-nonetheless-benevolent boss tone I can manage, We’ll be out back, Benjamin.

A U of T undergraduate who can’t decide whether he wants to be a postmodernist poet, a discipline-shattering academic, or perhaps a beguiling blend of both has to have a name like Benjamin. I get it, I was young and existentially amorphous once too: until we turn into ourselves, it’s necessary to impersonate who we want to be. And Benjamin’s okay. Really. It’s just that it’s the generational obligation of every twenty-two-year-old to be insufferable to anyone over the age of fifty. I’m actually a little jealous of him, and not just because he’s got me as an uncle. He’s young. He’s finishing up one university degree and planning to go to graduate school and get another. His parents are rich. No wonder he gets on my nerves sometimes.

Almost everything to do with my actual computer we could have done over the phone, but it’s Toronto West Social Media Solutions policy to discuss with each of its clients in person their various web-based needs, and to do it, of course, in as safe and hygienically responsible a manner as possible.

You don’t have to wear your mask if you don’t want to, I say.

Great, she says, taking it off. I never know if somebody . . .

It’s fine.

Her face is thin and her nose is the same and long, and she has what looks like a permanently furrowed brow, like she’s been pondering some impenetrable riddle her entire short life.

Eventually, I want to sell people books, I say. My books. Over the web. Like I used to do over the counter.

Right, she says, tapping away at her tablet resting on her thigh. I wait for more questions; she continues to tap. Looking up, Have you given any thought to what URL you’d like to use for your new e-business?

You mean the name you type into Google?

Among other things, yes. She says this with a slight, tight smile, the kind patience of the younger for the endearing cluelessness of her elders.

Queen West Books, I say. That’s the name of my store.

The one that closed.

That’s right.

Hmm . . .

Hmm is the polite version of Are you sure you wouldn’t like to reconsider your answer?

Why would I want to use a different name? I say. I was in business for twenty-one years. That’s nearly a quarter century of brand identification and customer loyalty. I impress myself with this unexpected burst of business speak.

"Customers who in large part don’t exist anymore. Or at least not enough of them to keep your