When I was growing up, we had a thing called the Generation Gap. Every family seemed to have it. It was like root rot or Dutch elm disease it soured everything for a time. But it came on different families in different ways, and wasn't always predictable.
For my family, and for me, it came on over the issue of trousers, which was what we used to call pants. My parents had certain ideas about the proper trousers for a young man to wear to school. They were brown, mainly, although they could be green or gray or even black, and perhaps blue. But they could not be blue jeans. Blue jeans or, as my parents called them, dungarees were for wearing on the farm while you slopped out the pigsty or shoveled horse manure. There was nothing wrong with dungarees; they were perfectly suited to such tasks. But if you didn't live on a farm and we didn't then you had no need or excuse to wear them.
“But, but, but!” I would say, and explain to them, patiently and at length, pronouncing the words slowly so they could understand. “Everybody wears blue jeans now!”
By everybody I meant everybody at school, and that was everybody. Nobody else counted. If some people still lived on farms and shoveled horse manure in their dungarees, that was fine with me. At my school at every school in the known universe, in fact kids were wearing blue jeans, and if you didn't, then who were you?
Nobody.
I kept it as simple as that, although, of course, it was much more complicated. Yes, everybody was wearing blue jeans to school, but wearing the wrong type was almost as bad as wearing no blue jeans at all. The very worst thing was to wear parentally approved gray or green or black or brown trousers with a sharp crease down the middle of each leg, signifying to all the world that you were still a child who had to follow directives from misguided and uninformed adults.
In Ottawa, where I lived, only one store sold the correct type of blue jeans. It was a huge blue-jeans store downtown, at the corner of Sparks Street and Elgin, and you could see it for miles. That much, at least, I knew. Everyone at school knew the right store. If you didn't know, then people told you about it. Some had been driven there by parents, although they would never admit to such. To do the thing properly, it was understood you had to take the bus, on your own, and find it for yourself. It was a rite of passage. You left your home a child, but returned completely grown and adult, with the proper pair of blue jeans.
I set out on my own, one Saturday, without telling my parents. I had learned which bus route to take, and although I'd never been downtown on my own before, I knew how to read the street signs and keep my eyes peeled for the proper jeans store. As soon as I saw it, I knew. It was enormous, with a big oval-shaped sign in red lights, and it towered over the corner of Elgin and Sparks.
I walked through the heavy doors.
Inside, shelves of blue jeans stretched floor to ceiling. Gazing around, I felt instantly dizzy, as if I'd put to sea and my legs weren't used to the roll and pitch of the ship. I immediately headed to the nearest shelf to pull out a pair of jeans. It seemed to me, in that moment of confusion, that really any pair would do. This was the right store. I could pull this pair, say, off the shelf, and they would be fine.
They did look fine.
I gazed around to see where to pay, so I could be outside as soon as possible on solid ground.
“Can I help you?” somebody said.
“No,” I replied. I'd taken the bus all by myself and come all the way downtown alone. I'd found the right store without parents or friends. I had a perfectly good pair of blue jeans in my hands. I was growing up as we spoke. I didn't need any help.
“Those are for girls,” the salesgirl said. She was perhaps a little older than me, although shorter. Girls were starting to be shorter. And she was quite pretty, with long black hair scooped behind her ears, held there with a white hair band. She had big dark eyes and a real smile not the fake, mocking sort of thing girls in my school had perfected. No, a real smile that reddened my face to the roots of my hair. I dropped them, those blue jeans for girls I'd unwittingly pulled off the shelf, and I stood dumb as a statue being pooped on by pigeons.
But the girl knelt down in a single graceful movement, the sort of movement that girls seemed to be able to make without any effort, even though they were often hopeless at snagging a grounder, say, or firing a puck. This girl knelt down like a ballet dancer and retrieved the dropped, female blue jeans. She even refolded them on her way up.
“The men's jeans are over here,” she said.
She walked along with me and, when I stood before them in a bumbling sort of silence, she asked me what size I was.
Sophisticated men, of course, know their own size intimately, and can recite it to others as easily as putting on a belt. But I had no idea, and so she had me raise my hands towards the ceiling while she took out a cloth tape and measured me. The edges of her fine hair almost brushed my shirt as she put her slender arms around my waist. Then she knelt, measured down to the ground, and soon pulled a particular pair of jeans off the shelf and handed it to me. I could have stood there eight entire Saturdays and wouldn't have been able to put my hands on exactly the right jeans the way she did, with hardly a moment's thought.
The tiny change room had a full-length mirror inside, but it was much better to pull on the blue jeans, then walk out to where the salesgirl stood waiting for me with her knowing eye. “Oh, you look great in those!” she said, and that was good enough for me. I was ready to buy them and leave. But she had pulled down several other pairs for me to try, and it would have been ungentlemanly to waste her effort like that. So I tried them on too. Some of them I thought were fine, but as soon as the salesgirl saw them, she told me they would never do. Then I instantly realized it as well whatever it was that wasn't right.
No, the very first pair was obviously the best, and she kept going back to it with her comments. “The girls will love you in those,” she said.
“Do you think so?”
She nodded, not just like a girl who knows who makes it her business to know but also like I must be a bit of an idiot if I didn't know as well. But I wasn't a bit of an idiot that message, too, was part of her little nod. I did know. I knew exactly.
So I bought two pairs.
At the cash I had an anxious moment, when I wasn't certain I had enough money to pay for both. I knew it was going to be close, but I didn't want the salesgirl to think I might be the kind of fellow who would walk into a jeans store unable to afford what he wanted and needed. In the end, I had to chip in my return bus fare, but it was worth it to see the kind approval in her eyes.
When I walked out into the bright Saturday sunshine, I felt as if I might be able to float lazily up to some low-lying clouds and let the breezes blow me home.
Everything was imprinted on my brain. I knew the route home because I'd memorized it on the bus ride over. It would take more than an hour to walk, but what was an hour on the best day of my life so far?
A pleasure.
On that walk home, I thought about the salesgirl. I regretted deeply not having asked her name. I thought when I saved up a little more cash, I could return some Saturday maybe the next Saturday and ask her if she wanted to have a hot chocolate with me. I felt certain there must be places in downtown Ottawa a capital city, after all that served hot chocolate. Perhaps she already knew of one. I would just have to go up to her and say, “Hello, there. You probably remember me. I'm the boy who bought two pairs of jeans last week.” And I would be wearing one of them and looking quite handsome, so of course she would remember.
I'd say, “You were really nice and I was wondering if you'd like to come with me to drink some hot chocolate.” Every one of those words was simple and, if I wrote them down and studied them for a week, I would certainly have them grasped in time for next Saturday.
But perhaps she wouldn't remember me. Probably hundreds of boys bought jeans from her in the course of a week. So it would be embarrassing, for both of us, when she couldn't remember me. It might be better if I simply bought another pair of jeans. We could reenact the entire scene, but just at the end, instead of leaving, I would turn to her and deliver my hot-chocolate speech.
But I didn't have enough money to buy another pair of jeans.
Besides, an important part of me realized that it was one thing to dream up and memorize a speech, and quite another to actually walk up to a girl and deliver it. I'd thrown too many snowballs at girls by then, I suppose, to expect any kind of favorable response to a memorized speech. And the words might choke me, like ginger ale gone down the wrong tube.
I arrived home the new owner of two pairs of blue jeans, but I wasn't happy. My parents still didn't want me wearing either pair to school and thought I'd made a stupid mistake buying identical trousers when I was still growing like fungus. And my mind was now sick with the thought of the beautiful salesgirl I would never see again because of personal poverty and cowardice.
I determined that I would write her a letter. In it, I would simply state my gratitude. I would say that it was rare, in my experience, for a salesgirl to make a customer feel so at ease, and that this was a good thing with the way the world was at the moment. She would understand what I meant, since she was obviously intelligent and well read. At the end of the letter, I would say, “By the way, perhaps someday you would do me the honor of sharing a hot chocolate.”
I began to write the letter in secret, at my tiny desk in the closet off the dining room, where I did my homework. My younger brother's desk was in the bedroom that we shared, so I got the closet. It was a sanctuary. When I sat at the desk, the door could not be opened without banging into the back of my chair, and so my privacy was near-complete, and I could open my soul and examine it without fear.
My first problem with the letter was over the issue of sharing the hot chocolate. The way I initially expressed it on the page made me wonder whether the salesgirl might think I expected her to share a single mug with me that perhaps I couldn't afford a mug for each of us because I'd spent so much money on the two pairs of jeans. So I rewrote the letter to clarify the matter.
I very nearly sealed it in an envelope and sent it off.
But the name issue bothered me again. “Dear Salesgirl” was a limp way to begin a letter from the depths of one's soul. As I did not know her name, then surely I had no right to send her such a heartfelt message. I tried to put the letter aside.
Yet, as the days passed, I thought more and more about the salesgirl how pretty she was, how friendly, how easy to talk to, and how attractive I seemed to be to her. It occurred to me perhaps it was the next Saturday, when I was acutely aware that I might get back on the bus and go see her that I should simply write a letter to her manager at the store.
“Dear Sir,” I might begin, man to man. “I would just like to take a moment to commend a member of your staff, who was very friendly and polite to me last Saturday when I bought two pairs of jeans from your store.” I knew that hockey players sometimes get letters from fans, and movie stars get bags of mail, and even authors, sometimes, hear from readers who liked their book. So this salesgirl might enjoy hearing from a satisfied customer, and it would be better for her if the letter went to the manager, who might then give her a raise. Naturally, she would spend at least a few moments wondering who this satisfied customer was. My name and return address would be on the envelope, so she could correspond with me if she so chose. Then, if I got a letter from her, I would know that she might be open to an invitation to hot chocolate after all, and I could just go and see her at the store without having to buy another pair of jeans.
And so the world fell into a finely patterned web of possibility.
But I couldn't send a handwritten letter to the manager. It would have to be typed. I would have to borrow my father's ancient Royal typewriter, with an e that stuck and a ribbon so tired you had to slam the keys to make even a faint impression. Worse, though, was the thought that my labors on the Royal would attract my family's attention. “What are you working on?” they would ask. My scheme, of course, was far too sensitive and complicated to explain.
So for these and other various reasons, I did not write the letter to the manager of the jeans store. And Saturday followed Saturday until it was obviously too late to return. The salesgirl would never remember me. The best of intentions and the brightest of hopes choke in dust and lie in pathetic failure at the side of the road.
Still I thought of the girl.
I knew I would never amount to anything in her eyes. By now other boys were plying her with hot chocolate or milkshakes and hamburgers while I failed to even wear the jeans she'd sold me, except for forced labor in the garden on Saturdays when I did not have the courage to visit her. But certain thoughts fine phrases, bits of wording fused in my brain.
Then, one evening, with the rest of my family still eating dessert at the dining-room table just a slender door-width away and the sound of the evening television news leaking through, I began to compose an epic poem about the whole event. It was a tragic work, but the lines seemed to write themselves. I felt like I was simply holding the pen, that the words came from the cosmos and ran through my arm and onto the page in perfectly formed, five-beat lines, some of which rhymed and some did not, in the style of a Dylan or a Shakespeare. It was pure experience, distilled like sweat wrung from a sock after basketball practice.
The poem went on, page after page. I could barely breathe. I don't know how long I wrote. Perhaps two hours, or four, or seven. When I stepped out of my room, the family had long ago abandoned the dining-room table, the lights were off, and the house was shut up for the night.
I'd written poetry before, but this was my first poem. I lay awake in bed, thinking about it.
I suppose if I had truly loved the girl, I would have made the pilgrimage back to the jeans store and asked her out for that hot chocolate. And while she was wiping the whipped cream from her beautifully thin lips smooth as polished glass, yet tender, too, and very alive I would have recited the poem to her. For days and weeks, I wandered around telling it to myself. Now that I think of it, I fell in love with the poem, and the desire to ride the bus downtown and see the girl again got pushed aside by this new obsession.
That summer, while at my cousin's cottage, I was sitting around a campfire late at night with a few others. The lake was still and dark and cold at our backs, and the fire warmed our faces. We didn't want to go to bed, but the conversation was dying. “Who knows a ghost story?” one of the girls said there were girls in the group; they were just like ordinary people. No one knew a ghost story. Someone poked my shoulder. “You're writing all the time. You tell us a story.”
So I recited my epic poem. My voice was a bit shaky at first, but it got stronger when they didn't laugh. My poem felt as natural as the water, or the fire, or the darkness pressing in on us, as the sand beach beneath our bodies. I don't know how long it took to say forever almost. But I knew it in my bones and I let it out line by line.
When I finished, there was silence just the crackling of the logs and the whisper of the lake. But I could it see on their faces as they gazed into the fire: for just that while, I'd given them the best poem in the world. Our world, the world that mattered. We lay on our backs and looked at the stars and let the words echo in the night.