Estates Large and Small Read online

  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 PS8585.O3219 E88 2022 | DDC C813/.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 intima
tions 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?