Merry Christmas (2021)

It’s a perfect day. It is Christmas Eve but days like this happen every once in a while for no apparent reason. In some ways today is nothing special. We are hanging out with Odie who happens to be semi-quiet at the moment. The temperature is going between -19 and -20 C, and the sky is a brilliant blue. It’s actually pleasant in the sun.

    We had a dump of snow last night and when we went out to shovel this morning Richard got warm enough to take off his parka. The snow was powdery so it wasn’t terribly heavy work although my Fitbit did tell me I got 23 minutes of cardio out of the activity. We don’t often shovel snow together, but today, as I was walking down the hall I saw Richard putting his keys in his pocket. I asked him if he was going to shovel the snow. He was and I was just on my way to the back door for my coat and boots. We decided to do it together. It goes much faster that way. We did the front walk, then the deck. I don’t know why I want to shovel the deck. Maybe it’s because I love to see the warm rich colours of the wood as I look out the window. Maybe it’s because I imagine taking a chair and a cup of tea to sip in the snowy landscape. I haven’t actually gotten the chair or the tea but if the deck is clear the possibility is there.

    I have wonderfully warm clothes. I wore the down ‘duvet’ that is slime green and that I got years ago for half price at MEC. I hate the colour, although I have friends who love it and I’ve had compliments on it while I’ve been shopping. There’s no accounting for taste, mine or anyone else’s. I wore the sealskin mitts that I bought from a hunter in Pond Inlet, and I topped the outfit off with a toque I crocheted just the other day. The pattern said you could finish it in an hour. Um, not in my universe! I pulled the thing down at least 6 times but ended up with a result I’m happy with. Oh, and I wore my new boots. They are actually a Christmas present but Richard wanted me to try them on to make sure they fit and once I knew what they were, I saw no point in having him wrap them up and put them under the tree even though he offered.
    

    They are Wind River X-ice and the only boots that CBC Marketplace found to really be anti-slip. (This is not a commercial.) I won’t say I can’t slip in them but if I don’t push off too hard with my toe they are amazingly steady on ice. I’m still careful crossing slippery streets but it’s nice not to have to do the ‘senior shuffle’ quite so much.

First coat of poly on the uke

   

 
 Another reason today is perfect is that I’m done making Christmas presents and have been for about a week. This has never happened before and I found myself a bit at loose ends because I had time to spare. I’ve been able to concentrate on getting ‘Lilred’ my current ukulele ready for finish. Every time I thought I was ready to go and get the finish, I found another flaw that I needed to take care of. This could go on forever, of course, so today I finally dunked the cotton pad into the polyurethane and wiped on the first coat. Because we’re not going anywhere for Christmas I’ll be able to babysit the finish which takes about 3 hours to dry between coats. I should be able to get another coat on shortly and then keep building up coats over the next few days. I haven’t worked enough with this finish to know exactly how to handle it to get the best results so it will be kind of fun figuring it out. The nice thing is that it’s a thin finish and I can always sand it down and start again if I need to. I don’t think it will come to that.


    Tonight we will head off to the Christmas Eve service, masked and triple-vaccinated. I’ve only missed one Christmas Eve service in this church since I was about 14. In 2019 we had the privilege of visiting family in Vancouver and attended a late service there. Last year we had shower curtains up to make individual booths for the singers and there were no people other than those involved in the service in the sanctuary. This year we have a cap on numbers. People signed up ahead of time and vaccine status will be checked at the door.

    Two years ago we had barely heard of Covid 19 and last year there were no vaccines by this time. This year we thought we might be getting out of the woods when Delta and then Omicron descended. We had just started to invite people, one or two at a time, to see our newly renovated house. That’s on hold again. With all the changes I’m becoming a bit more used to plans being cancelled and I think I’m calmer when things don’t work out the way I want them to. There are still days when I’m just plain mad at all the upheaval in the world in general and my world in particular but then I have days like today when I’m both happy and content.

    I have a house that is now a delight to live in. We have heat and running water, sunshine, snow, and sparrows in bushes loudly expressing their opinions. Odie looks at me, blinks his eyes, makes purring noises, and laughs whenever we do. Most importantly, though, I have kind and generous people in my life. Although we won’t be gathering in person again this year, it doesn’t matter so much. Christmas Day will be slow and casual and there are many ways I can contact those who enrich my life. I may not be able to hug them but I hope that will come. So Merry Christmas. I hope 2022 will bring good things to each of you each day and if, like me, you have days when you’re just plain cross at the whole world, may the memories of perfect days when there is really nothing special going on, lighten your mood if only for an instant.

Ukulele #3 update

  

'Lilred' the current uke under construction

     A photo turned up in my ‘memories’ on my phone the other day. It was a year ago and the photo was of Richard’s ukulele. I'm about at the same point on my current build, maybe a bit farther along. Time for the bridge. On the other two ukuleles Jake has made the bridges for me. A bridge comes out of a small piece of wood and the idea of getting a piece that size near a router bit or even a drill press makes me quite nervous.
    It’s not that I’m against power tools or woodworking machines but I am very nervous around them. They get things done much much faster than I can with hand tools but things can also go wrong much much faster. I always feel I lack control around them, even the ones I use fairly often like the band saw and the spindle sander. But it’s not even that that makes me hesitant to flip the switch on the machines. It’s the maintenance.
    I may be sounding like a broken record here. If my car doesn’t work I can take it to a mechanic. If my bandsaw isn’t in top condition, which at the moment neither of the two I own is, it’s up to me or me and Richard-the-Long-Suffering to figure out what the problem is and to fix it. I find the prospect overwhelming and tend to throw up my hands and walk away allowing the machine to collect dust, or I keep using it in less than optimal condition until it completely balks. Richard is good at troubleshooting. Even if he doesn’t use the machines, he can see how they are put together and figure out how they ought to operate. Working on shop machinery is not his idea of a good time so I hesitate to ask him for help.
    But back to the bridge. I’ve been thinking hard about whether I could learn now to make a bridge using only hand tools, not because I’m a purist but because I’m a chicken. I could learn to use the router table using guide blocks so that the operation would be as safe as possible but I wouldn’t enjoy it. I’m in the truly wonderful position of not having to do any kind of woodwork in order to put food on the table so enjoying the process is my first priority.
    I’ve been experimenting with various tools for the past month or so and, over the course of nine practice bridges, I developed a method of working that left me confident enough to actually cut into the piece of wood designated as the bridge for the current ukulele. As I was cleaning up the walls of the small mortise that holds the piece of bone I pressed a bit too hard and split the whole block of wood lengthwise. I got out the glue. (No I'm not going to point out the split in the photo.)
    I’ve seen tests on YouTube and read articles that say that modern wood glues, when properly applied and cured, are stronger than the wood they bond and certainly when joints I’ve made have broken it’s the surrounding wood that has failed and not the glue joint.
    I glued and clamped, applying sawdust to the wet glue as a filler and to hide the join. I did this several times and then picked up the work where I left off. In an ideal world the bridge of the uke needs to be of one piece of wood because it takes the most strain and is essential to the proper intonation of the instrument. Since I didn’t have another piece of rosewood and I wanted the bridge done, I took a chance.
    When Jake checked it, he thought I would need to build another one because the repair wouldn’t be strong enough. He asked my permission to try to break it. Might as well find out now rather than get it on the instrument and have it fail at that point. He wasn’t able to break it so we decided it was probably strong enough to withstand the stresses of the strings as the instrument is played. I still have some work left to do on it before it will be ready to install and I’ll see how it holds up as I work it. Jake has some more rosewood that I can use if I need to, or choose to, make another bridge. Regardless of whether I make another bridge for this instrument or not, I intend to keep building instruments and I will be quite content to build my bridges using hand tools.
    Jake can build a bridge in about half an hour. It takes me probably three to five hours to build one but I listen to my audio books, take my time and am perfectly content. Because the band saw is not cutting accurately enough when I’m ripping stock, I’ve even taken to ripping the blanks for the bridges with a hand saw. It’s a challenge and the more I do it, the more accurate I’ll get. I understand hand tools. The tool has a sharp edge that you push or pull through the wood. Period. If I keep my tools sharp and keep working to develop my skills I will have a system that I can manage comfortably.
    I’m not ruling out a time when I’ll choose to have the machines do the work, and I’m not going to sell off the ones I have in the shop. For now I’m content to poke away at my woodworking tasks sharpening as I go. As I putter, I tip my hat to my grandfather and great uncle who were trained on hand tools even as they embraced the speed and accuracy of machines.

Richard's ukulele under construction a year ago

A curmudgeonly yarn

    Okay, we have cell phones with processors more powerful than the computers that put the Apollo astronauts on the moon. We can call and text each other from almost anywhere on the planet. A cell phone means that we are never without a camera. So many innovations to make our lives more convenient. Why then is it that no one seems to have figured out a good way to package yarn so that you can retrieve the correct end easily?

    I have wondered this for many years and now I’m just old and crusty enough to complain about it. I’ve recently gone back to crocheting. I did a lot of it in my early 20’s when I spent hours upon hours in the relative darkness backstage listening to string quartets. There are worse ways to spend time but I found the time passed more enjoyably if my hands were busy. I crocheted afghans and scarves mostly. Then I lost interest and gave away all the crochet hooks.

    In retirement a friend took up crocheting and I was reminded of how I really did like it so, I bought a bunch of new crochet hooks and yarn. This time I crocheted slippers, messenger bags and toques using various weights of yarn and different patterns. It was fun and I gave away a lot of what I made. Then I put the yarn and hooks in a box and stuffed them away in the cupboard until a few months ago.

    There was a call from our church for prayer shawls. I’ve made them before, both knitted and crocheted. I had the hooks and the yarn so why not. I dug the stuff out again. Much of the yarn I had I rerolled into balls instead of working it from the skeins. My method of working is pretty simple: toss the ball or skein I’m working from into a shoe box. Put the shoebox on the floor beside my chair and have at it. When the skein gets down close to the end I often roll it into a ball because it is easier to keep together that way.

    Makers of the skeins chirpily tell you that to start a project you reach inside the skein and pull on the interior end. That way your yarn will come out smoothly and it won’t flip the skein around as you’re working with it. It’s a great theory. The problem is when I reach in, all I feel is a jumble of yarn. So I try it from the opposite opening in the skein. Still nothing. I stick fingers from both sides into the skein and root around some more.

    Eventually I get frustrated, grasp what I hope will be a clump near the end and pull. The yarn comes out politely for about a foot and then gets caught. Too late to back out now so I give it a good yank. Nothing. I yank it again and out comes what I can only describe as the yarn equivalent of a hairball. Now I have two blobs of muddled up yarn: the shell of the original skein and the guts that came from the inside. Not an end in sight.

 
    I start gently picking away at the guts, tossing them lightly and trying to get my fingers into the spaces to untangle the mess. No perceptible progress and if I start passing the blob over and under strands of yarn I’ll never get it untangled. I put it down and look at the husk of the skein. As I turn it over I see an end! This is where I’ll have to start. I grab the end and start to wind it into a ball. Eventually that part of the skein has become a ball and as I change from the husk to the guts. the yarn seems to be unravelling smoothly. Keep winding!
  

 Too good to be true. There’s a clump. I tuck the ball into my armpit so it won’t go rolling across the floor as I try to deal with the clump. It’s not a very big one and after a bit of teasing apart with my fingers it droops into a single strand. I keep rolling. There are a few more clumps but nothing that tempts me to just cut it out and knot the pieces back together. That really is a last resort.

    Now after all that fuss I can finally start to crochet the project. I’d like to report that this tussle with the yarn is an anomaly, but it happens more often than not. Sometimes I think any sane person would just rewind the yarn into a ball starting from the outside but somehow, that would be giving up and as I approach each new skein of yarn I hope this will be the one that will present the magical end to my probing fingers.

    In the meantime, I put the ball into the shoe box so it won’t run all over the floor, make a loop, take up my hook and begin to crochet. Surely the actual project will be easier than trying to find the end of the yarn.

Sparrows

Sparrows. My grandfather hated them. He even went so far as to change the words in his copy of the old blue United Church hymnbook. The hymn reads “God sees the little sparrow fall, it meets his tender view.” Pa crossed out ‘sparrow’ and changed it to bluebird.

No shortage of sparrows

I’m not crazy about sparrows either. I know they’re an introduced species and they are ubiquitous, spring, summer, fall, and winter. They don’t have gorgeous plumage although I do admit that there are many shades of grey and brown on their back feathers. Then there is the challenge of trying to tell sparrows apart. My Birds of Western Canada lists 20 different species of sparrow. So far, I’ve identified only 4, house sparrow, chipping sparrow, clay-coloured sparrow, and song sparrow. They are all little brown birds and unless I get a good look at the facial features through a pair of binoculars they are all pretty much the same.

When I see red-breasted nuthatches on the tree outside the living room window I get excited and grin like an idiot. The downy woodpeckers that visit occasionally get the same reaction, and the merlin that paid a visit once had me practically jumping up and down. Sparrows? Not so much.

I haven’t made bird watching a priority in that I don’t get up early in the morning to go to places where there is a greater variety of species. I do watch birds and watch for birds. When we’re out for our walks around the neighbourhood I keep a mental list of the ones we see, sparrows, magpies, pigeons, crows, northern flickers, and the occasional gull. Once in a while we’ll see a hawk, a downy, or a hairy woodpecker. I’m able to recognize the disappearing butt of a flicker by the white patch on its rump.

There is a thick hedge just across the street from us and I think it must be the equivalent of the sparrows’ pub. During the daylight hours there is usually a racket of cheeps and squeaks emanating from the bushes. We pick on the sparrows by sneaking up to the hedge and then saying, ‘woof!’ The sparrows quiet for a few seconds until we are past the hedge and then resume their conversations, complaining I imagine, about the two stupid humans who find the silly trick amusing. Lately, even though we don’t woof at them every time we pass, they seem to quiet as we approach the hedge. The brains of birds are mysterious places.

During the pandemic I’ve spent more time that I ever though I would watching the sparrows. They are constant. They show up around 8 in the morning, noon, and again around 2 in the afternoon. I have a pair of binoculars sitting by the living room window and today I watched 3 of them taking dust baths in the dirt at the base of a lilac bush. They also seem to appreciate the birdbath I made last year and 7 of them have tried to inhabit it at the same time. Some sparrows are better at sharing the space than others and there was one bossy little one who, with an open beak, fended off attempts of others to join him in his bath. The others retreated to a nearby bush until he flew off and then 3 of them got into the bath.

Dust bath depressions

Sparrows also provide lots of practice for me and my long lens. I need only raise the camera to practice capturing sparrows eating, sparrows preening, sparrows bathing, sparrows flying. They are little, quick, and challenging. Although I haven’t spent a lot of time sitting on the step with my camera, I know that they are always there to help me develop my photographic skills so that when a nuthatch, chickadee, or downy woodpecker decides to pay a visit to the yard I’ll have a better chance of a decent photo.

Now I just need to take those few steps out the door. The bird book, the binoculars, and the camera are waiting by the window. I love birds and love to watch them. If sparrows are the only birds whose availability I can depend on, maybe they aren’t so bad after all.

Enjoying the imperfect

    When I first started in woodworking I made a lot of boxes. Wooden boxes have always fascinated me because of their variety. A box can be plain joined with butt joints and nail or it can be an extremely intricate puzzle box with many intricate, interlocking pieces. When I started I didn’t have a lot of skill and I joked that only a mother could love what I built. But I did love them, loved the wood, loved the tools, and even though they often looked a bit odd I was pleased with what I learned from each of them. Fast forward to my latest project: The Frankenstool.

The Frankenstool!

    We need stools to go at the island in the new kitchen and there are some gorgeous off cuts from the deck and the countertop so my plan is to use those off cuts to make stools that match the counter. I’m not crazy enough to just start cutting into the good wood so I searched around for a bunch of scrap that I could use for the experimental stool.
    I like the look of a three-legged stool and one of my favourite hand tool YouTubers has a video and plans. Like most other projects this one could be done with power tools but I wanted to try it without. The longer I work the more fascinated I become with the work that is possible when a skilled woodworker uses hand tools. I bought the plans and started in.
    I have a piece of fir that was part of the bar top in the basement when R first got the house. It was an incredibly ugly thing complete with black and gold mactac on the front of the bar. The fir top was just painted. I cut a chunk of that fir to use for the seat. My stock of 2X4 lumber is running low and I thought of buying some but I’m trying hard to find things in my stash that I can use before I buy any more. I managed to round up enough 2X4 for the legs and the stretchers. Some was fir, some was spruce and all of it was knotty. It would do for practice.
    I admit to using the bandsaw to rip down the 2X4 for the legs and stretchers. I’m not yet proficient at using a rip saw on long cuts and I didn’t want to take the time on this project. The other consideration was that we were going camping for a week. I wondered if I would be able to construct the stool using hand tools, clamps and the picnic table as a workbench. I got some of the work done before loading up two boxes of tools and heading out to camp.
    There are some tricky bits to this simple stool. In order to get the legs into the seat you have to drill three angled holes, ideally all at the same angle. For that I used a brace and bit. I have a good brace and a number of bits that belonged to my grandfather. The plans called for 1” round tenons and I didn’t have a bit that big that would hold well in the brace. I did find an adjustable bit in my collection and ended up using that. As for all the angles being the same, well not so much. It’s amazing what skilled craftsmen can do by eye but it takes practice and I need more. Because it was only a prototype I carried on anyway figuring if the thing actually held up to being sat on, it would be a small victory.
    

making the round tenon

What delighted me the most about the build was making the round tenons to go into the holes. The plans said to find the centre of the square stock and mark it, then to take the brace and bit and score a circle around that centre mark. Next, mark the depth of the tenon and pare off the edges little by little until you have a round tenon that fits in the hole. Since the drill bit is the same one used to drill the holes in the seat, the fit can be quite accurate.
    I worked away figuring out how to use clamps to hold work to the picnic table. Some days I worked until my hands were too cold and I had to go into the van to warm up. Some days I didn't feel like working on it so I didn't.
    

By the end of the week and was able to finish the stool. I won’t claim it’s a thing of beauty. I am surprised that, given where knots have come out and other weaknesses in the wood, I’ve been able to sit on it for the last few weeks and it hasn’t broken. It is quite comfortable especially with your feet on the floor although the stretcher across the front is in a very good place for a foot rest too. You do have to be aware that there are three legs and not four, and given the crookedness of the build, it pays to be cognizant of where the three legs are at all times. I nearly took a header one day when I was preoccupied and misdirected my weight as I sat down quickly. Consequently, I’ve decided this is not the design for the kitchen stools. I want something with four legs that anyone can sit on comfortably and safely without having to first go through a briefing. I think the Frankenstool may eventually become firewood, but I may make another one of this design to replace one of the stools I have in the shop. Both are quite rickety and I'm expecting one of them to break any day.
    

    

While the Frankenstool is far from perfect, it delights me. I can see many more possibilities for building with hand tools and maybe on the next one I’ll do a better job of the angles. Meanwhile, I can use what I’ve learned by making the Frankenstool when I make the four-legged version for the kitchen. Stay tuned.

Camper vans I have known

We are in Little Elbow campground. When we leave it will be closed for the season and already there are many campsites that are closed so that the workers can paint the tables in preparation for the next season. We have been coming here for 35 years. At first in a tent with R’s parents, then in Kermie, the slime green Volkswagen van, then in Flopsy so named because of the imprecise steering. Now we have Vinnie, the Road Trek. 

When we first came with Kermie we used to, on a whim, pick up on a Friday night and head for the eastern slopes of the Rockies. Sometimes we’d leave as late as 8:00, pick up subway sandwiches and drive out to stay for a couple of nights. On Sunday morning we’d get up early so we could drive back into the city, shower and make it to church on time.

There were many campfires and much conversation until the wee hours of the morning, and, in those days, there was also wine and scotch for Richard and fuzzy navels for me. That made the stars brighter and the relaxation after a week of work seem deeper. 

One time we camped in the sunshine only to wake up to a van covered with snow. It must have been May because I remember needing to get back into the city for the high school graduation ceremonies. Before we left we went for a short walk, not long enough to be considered a hike, down the muddy road that led to a backcountry campground. We didn’t walk that far and when we returned to the van our boots were covered in mud and the huge soft snowflakes clung to our toques and settled like down on our shoulders. 

We brushed ourselves off, knocked as much mud off our boots as we could, and cleaned the snow off Kermie without a snow brush. We neglected to bring one. After all, the weather was summer-like when we left. We drove back to the city gas heater cranked up to keep us warm

Each of the camper vans we have owned has had its own special quirks. Kermie, the VW, had an air-cooled engine which meant that the cabin couldn’t be heated in the same way a vehicle with a water-cooled engine could. The gas heater could take the van from below freezing to tropical fairly quickly. There were two problems however, the heater used roughly a liter of fuel per hour, and it was quite stinky. The smell was not only unpleasant, it coated the windshield with a slimy film. At that point Kermie was the vehicle that Richard drove to work. Instead of turning on the gas heater, he wrapped up in parka, heavy boots, toque, scarf and heavy mitts for the drive.

It was a long straight drive and by the time he had to make a turn the whole drive train had cooled to the point where it was stiff and turning was difficult. Richard had to haul on the wheel as if he was driving an 18 wheeler without power steering. Another Kermie quirk was that the throttle had a tendency to freeze in the open position so that the driver needed to put the roaring beast in neutral, drift into the nearest parking spot, get out, engine still roaring, walk around to the rear engine compartment, wiggle a rod, which caused the engine to calm down, hop back in the van and continue on the way.

After a few years of this and a change in focus for us from canoeing to cycling, we decided it was time to sell Kermie. We sold it to the shop teacher at my school. He was delighted to get it and had the skills to put a new engine in it.  I lost touch with him when I moved schools but I hope Kermie gave him years of enjoyable trips.

After Kermie, we bought Flopsy from Richard’s mom and dad. It was a bigger van and had a V8 engine. We joked that it could pass anything on the road except a gas station. Because of the interestingly floppy steering, driving Flopsy was fairly hard work and it reminded me of the overcorrecting I did when I first learned to drive. At first I turned the wheel too far one way, then I turned it too far in the other direction in an attempt to compensate. The difference with Flopsy was that you never quite got to the sweet spot where you could keep the vehicle straight with only small movements of the wheel. You’d be driving down the road with the wheel canted to the left or the right to stay in a straight line. Then a gust of wind would come up and you’d slow as Flopsy did a little dance and you recovered control once again. Because of that, I didn’t like driving Flopsy and poor long-suffering Richard did most of the van wrangling. 

There was a lot of that. In addition to bringing Flopsy to this campground for short getaways, we drove it out to the Okanagan and the west coast to visit friends and family. On one of our first trips, we decided to visit Tofino. It’s the only time we have ever been there. We had a great time flying our kite on the beach and hanging out with a colleague who happened to be in the same campground.

Then it rained. I’m a pretty sound sleeper but Richard woke up to water pouring in through the high side-window. He quickly moved all the items sitting on the ledge below the window and placed towels to soak up the water.  The morning found us in a hardware store buying silicone sealant in a tube to fix the leak. We hauled a picnic table over to the van so Richard could reach the window. It wouldn’t win any prizes for beauty or skill but the silicone stopped the leak.

Poor old Flopsy had no garage to protect it from the winter weather so it rusted. In 2013 when Flopsy was 29 years old, we drove it to the Yukon to hike the Chilkoot Trail. It rattled and banged along and we decided to add a trip to  Inuvik via the Dempster Highway after we finished the Chilkoot Trail hike.

There are advantages to driving an older vehicle on a road like that. It’s gravel and, with the vehicle being in less than pristine condition to start with, there is less worry about rock chips. Parts of the highway are made from local shale and those sharp pieces can slash tires in an instant. We were very lucky in that we made it from Dawson City to Inuvik and back without a flat. There was an unusual noise by the time we reached Inuvik so on the advice of a guy we met on the ferry, we took it to The Midnight Mechanic. The parking area outside the shop was a mud pit as it had been raining for a couple of days. 

Both the owner and the dogs looked suspiciously at us when we pulled in. Richard explained to the owner that he had been recommended to us and, with that, he relaxed a little. He had a look at the underside of the van and told us to come back in a couple of hours. We headed into town in the rain to sit in a café and drink coffee while he worked on it. 

When we returned, he told us he had found a bolt missing and had replaced it. He also found a few other things which he fixed.  He charged us a very reasonable fee. We thanked him and headed on our way.

On one of the ferries on our way back south, we met a woman who had worked in the post office in Inuvik and who had just retired. As we chatted, we mentioned the mechanic. She laughed, “Well, it’s a good thing that you got to him this week because next week he’s headed to jail for serve time for a drugs conviction." Maybe that accounted for the suspicious reception we initially got.  Regardless, the work he did held up until we sold Flopsy at the end of the next season after a trip from Calgary to Newfoundland. But that’s a story for another day.

A stranger's story

I was in the camper van this morning with the door open looking for a headlamp. I heard a man’s voice say, “Hello?”

I thought it was maybe one of the guys who are working on the reno wanting to ask me a question. When I stuck my head around the corner I saw a rather thin guy wearing a Saskatchewan ball cap and carrying a backpack that had half a watermelon, in a grocery bag, tied onto the back of it.

He chin-pointed to the old Toyota Previa van that was parked on the opposite side of the pad. “Are you thinking of selling that?” he asked

I smiled, “No.”

“I was talking to my buddy and he says those are really good vans. My wife has had cancer for the last 6 years and we’re just now able to get out. I’d like to be able to take my family places. How old is it?”

“This one is 28 years old.”

“So you’re not thinking of selling it any time soon?”

“Nope. I’ll drive it until I can’t get parts for it anymore.”

“Ya we’ve been looking them up, my buddy and me, the prices and stuff, and that’s what he says that they’re great to drive but you might have trouble getting parts for them. I know some mechanics. I’ve got connections.”

“The problem is,” I reply, “there aren’t parts available. It was broken into in a backcountry parking lot about 12 years ago.” His face wrinkles in concern. “They took a crowbar and levered up the back hatch. We got the second last tail light in North America.”

“Oooo, I’m sorry you got broken into. I’m one of the sixties scoop kids. You know about the sixties scoop?”

I nod.

“I grew up in Ontario. If this van was in Ontario it wouldn’t be in nearly this good shape.”

“There’s a bit of rust.”

“Ya, but it would be way worse if it was in Ontario. People don’t believe I’m First Nations with a name like Carlos. My mom was First Nations and my dad was white. My foster dad was German and he had a farm, cows, pigs, chickens.”

“He told me, ‘if you can work for me you can work for anyone.’ I didn’t know what he meant. Some of the folks took in kids because they wanted the money. My family didn’t. They took me in because they wanted to help.”

“My foster dad said to me, ‘When you go to work what do you take with you?’ Tools, Dad, I said, You take tools. ‘That’s right,’ he said, ‘and when you go out into the world you’re going to need life tools. You may not recognize them for 20 years, but every day I’m going to give you a life tool. I’m going to put it in your backpack so when you get into the world, you’ll be able to reach into your backpack and pull out a tool.’ He was strict. He disciplined me. If he thought I wasn’t behaving, even if we were in church, he would grab me by the ear and hoist me up. I learned. If you show up on time, do what you said you’d do and your work is good, nobody cares if you’re black, brown, or white. He was right: it’s taken me 20 years to find those tools. Sometimes I reach back, hunt around, and there’s another one.”

He shakes his head. “These kids today, they can’t wait until they’re 16. They can’t wait to get away from home and they don’t have the life tools. They’re like a pet dog that you take to the park and you take the collar off and let it go. It goes to run with the wild dogs and it doesn’t come back, so you put a blanket out and hope it will come back. It won’t come back. It has all this freedom, so why would it come back? But it doesn’t know how to get along because nobody ever taught it. My dad taught me. I’m lucky.

My wife is from the Philippines. People say those people work hard and they do. They’ll work three or four jobs so they can save and afford to buy a house. We’ve been married for 25 years. My oldest daughter, she’s a lawyer, beautiful person. My youngest daughter, she just turned 18 and got a job. That’s why I’m looking for a van. It would really help her to get around. I’m a painter. My foster granny lives just up there next street over. Every day I go to see her. I gave her half the watermelon. She said she couldn’t eat a whole one, so I’m taking half home.

Some folks say to me, ‘You can’t be Native,’ and when I say why, they say ‘cause you don’t have a skinny ass.’ Then I tell them my mom was Native. ‘Well, you got your dad’s rounded ass they say.’”

I laugh and Carlos smiles.The timer on my phone goes off. I have laundry to put in the dryer and I haven’t found the headlamp I was looking for. I turn off the timer, put the phone in my pocket and step down onto the pad.

“God bless you, Ma’am,” he says as he turns away to walk down the alley.

“You have a good day,” I say to him, as I close the door to the van and lock it. Turning toward the garage door I hear his, “You too.”