Don’t worry – I’m not here to tell you my frickin’ life story.

God spare us.

The main reason is that I can’t remember most of it. But like an aging nonagenarian suffering from dementia and wasting away in a nursing home, certain ‘highlights’ still register, like an out-of-control kaleidoscope.

Such as when my grandfather, father and I were out walking one night on the country road in Quebec’s Eastern Townships not far from my grandfather’s farmhouse. This was in the early 1960s, before some government bureaucrat decided to flatten the natural topography, pave it, cut down the mature maple trees lining the road and turn it into a highway. This seemed to serve no purpose other than to speed up traffic and kill a succession of my grandfather’s dogs who never seemed to adapt to the idea that they now lived along a busy highway. In that way they were no different than most of the people who lived in the area.

This story has a point, although I have heard it said that most of what I say and write is lacking in that department. The three of us came across a chubby, more- than- slightly dishevelled woman sitting underneath one of the aforementioned maple trees and smoking a cigarette. She was not unfamiliar to us, even if she did not usually sit by the side of the road by herself in the dark, smoking cigarettes.

If this was the city today, we would have lowered our heads, avoided eye contact and hurried on by, surmising that she was drunk, high, begging, mentally-ill or quite possibly infected by some new variant of the novel coronavirus. But this was the country, where everyone knew one another and even greeted people they didn’t even know.

Imagine that.

“Hello Marjorie,” said my grandfather. He didn’t smoke, but he did chew tobacco. I always marvelled at how he never seemed to swallow any of it. You don’t see it much anymore, especially in the coffeshops of Ottawa’s Glebe where I now reside. It would rank considerably below heroin addiction and panhandling in acceptable social habits. Just above smoking cigarettes. But for those of you who consider it a filthy habit, my grandfather spent most of his time in a barn, hayfield or the woods. Spitting there didn’t seem to do so much damage. When he was old he kept an empty milk carton beside his rocking chair. I never saw him miss it. However, once in awhile his dog would come by and knock it over. Eventually, he or I would clean up the mess.

“Can I bum a cigarette?” Marjorie asked. I guess she didn’t plan on getting up for awhile. My father never ventured out without them. He handed one over and as she reached out to take it my father asked, “How old are you now, Marjorie?”

Marjorie didn’t miss a beat, as she lit up and exhaled slowly. “I’m thirty six” she answered. “Next year I’ll be twenty seven.”

As you can well imagine, Marjorie had never finished high school. Today with our advanced systems she probably would receive a diploma, probably even with ‘honours.’ But she was looked after by her parents, even if my memory draws blanks when I try to recall her eventual fate.

Marjorie left us with one unforgettable gem. As we turned to go I thought I should add my own two cents worth. Despite what has happened to me since, my parents brought me up to be polite and well-mannered.

“It was a pleasure running into you again, Marjorie,” I called back over my shoulder as we turned to leave.

She must have been unimpressed with my chivalry. “The pleasure was all yours’,” she answered, blowing smoke in our general direction.

It’s probably not the last time someone walking away from a conversation with me would have the same thought.