THERE WAS ONE YEAR that southern Ontario was subjected to an influx of Great Grey Owls. They came from the north and for a few months or a year adorned all our fences and posts, watching us, seeing what we would do. Some people watched, photographing and writing about this massive silent invasion, but in the main, it was we who were being watched for once and not the other way around.
Or so Stella thought on her way home from Toronto, taking the Greyhound. In Oshawa the bus always stopped to let people off or on. Stella liked it when her schedule coincided with the express bus, which stopped only at Scarborough Town Centre. But if not, there she was in the ’Shwa again, adding half an hour to her trip home. On the good side, in ’Shwa she could get off the bus and have a breath of fresh air and a smoke. Stella still smoked in those days, the ones she is remembering, the ones she is describing here. It was before everything changed. Now, post change, it is no longer possible to smoke cigarettes, no matter how much she misses them.
Sometimes missing them is akin to heartbreak. Sometimes missing them is like losing her best friend in all the world. Sometimes missing them is like having to grow up forever and never look back. Not even once, for a single backward look would inevitably coincide with the first cigarette. It is like she swore. It is like she made a vow, she isn’t sure to whom. It is like she made this vow when she wasn’t looking, for had she been looking, she would never have made it. The sacrifice, the murder even of her smoking self is so large, so violent. It is like she made the decision to quit in her sleep.
She remembers how she told herself the new story, this ground-breaking story about art and tears and luck and being young again, and saying goodbye and never looking back, not even once, for you know what happened to Lot’s wife. Because of her decision, the stars perform new constellations. Because of her follow through, a new season approaches. Because of her forthrightness, her dog begins to talk. Because she cared, the children all get new ice skates for Christmas, and actually turn off their computers long enough to put them on and go outside to the pond on the point to skate beneath these strange new stars that appear, even, to dance a little above their heads.
In a way she has had to leave two lovers. She and her man were co-dependent, but in a nice way. In the evening they would sit together, discussing books and movies, watching movies and reading, sipping beer and wine and tea and smoking really a lot of cigarettes. She cannot do this anymore. She stares at him now across naked hallways. I do not love you any less. If anything I love you more. Love us more. Love the world more.
Now her evenings are spent blogging on all the world’s activist sites. She can’t help it. She has so much to say. She always did have so much to say, but she used to say it to him, while she smoked a cigarette. Now she can’t do that anymore, so she says it to the world. The typing keeps her hands busy, hands which she would otherwise use for smoking. Typing hands cannot smoke, it is true. She has expanded her audience, now that she no longer smokes. She talks to the world, and not just to him.
She can no longer write anything of any length. A beginning, middle, and end, stretched across ten entire double-spaced pages seem a minor impossibility. The thought of revising her new novel yet again elicits unexpectedly suicidal thoughts. She runs away. Whatever made her think finishing the novel was important? It is true the novel is her life’s work, a book she spent thirty years of her life drafting various versions of, a book that really would only require a few relatively short and easy months to fine tune, but no, she balks. She is like a horse throwing its rider. Absolutely fucking not, no way, not ever.
She feels no regret. Yet the pragmatic part of her thinks: thirty years, the thing is good; it seems a pity to waste it. Perhaps she could apply for a grant to hire a nice young assistant to implement the necessary nips and tucks. A young assistant who never smoked, and to whom menopause is so far in the future that she has no issues with her attention span at all. Someone who can sit and write for hours each and every day with no thought of commensurate financial reward beyond a few skimpy arts council grants, if any, and some thought of possible publication. In her spare time the assistant could do the shopping and laundry and vacuuming and make dinner to boot.
The assistant sounds like someone, in fact, quite a bit like Stella herself used to be. Maybe she has been insane all these years only she doesn’t know it. Let someone else do the work while she blogs about literacy, uranium, Indigenous land claims, nutrition and brain function, agribusiness, genetic engineering, wind farms, etcetera. The list is endless. She knows a little about everything, just the right length for a blog post, or a comment on someone else’s blog. She has opinions about very serious things and also about the Oshawa bus and plastic owls.
You know those plastic owls? You can order them from the catalogues of nurseries that sell objects as well as plants. The big plastic owls are taken home and affixed to garden posts. They are supposed to keep critters away, the sorts of critters that might come at night and snack on all one’s nice fresh lettuces.
Before the Change, the only good part of the milk run was you could get off in ’Shwa and smoke. It is just as well she quit, because the new driver, a short blonde woman, told her she doesn’t let any Peterborough passengers off the bus in Oshawa anymore, not to smoke or make phone calls or go to the bathroom or anything else. “I used to,” she said, “but then I had to go chasing after them when they didn’t come back in time.”
Stella thought about it later. At the time she was busy resenting the woman for not letting her off to smoke. But later she thought why didn’t the driver just leave these rude people behind? The reason, of course, was that they’d complain and she might lose her job if enough people complained.
Sometimes there was a new driver for the second half. Sometimes even a new bus. Once she stood there in an empty station, she remembers, with a driver. They both smoked. There was a post beneath the overhang, the part of the structure that sheltered waiting passengers in case of inclement weather. She is not sure what the post was for, normally. The driver silently pointed at the top of this post, where a large grey owl perched.
“It is plastic,” she said. “It is to keep the little brown bats away at night, and the raccoons. They would frighten the waiting passengers. You can buy them in gardening catalogues.”
The driver smiled. “Just wait and watch,” he said.
She waited and watched.
The owl turned its head and looked at her.
Then the bus came, and Stella got on it. When she looked out the window both the man and the owl were gone.