ZIGGY TUPPER

So many true bits in this one along with all the lies. Sometimes I forget which is which.

Thanks for being here.

Ziggy Tupper by Sherry Cassells

He used to let me read his stories and I was taken by his handwriting, it was beautifully unconventional, I didn’t come to understand for some time that his penmanship controlled the speed at which I read, allowing the story to get into my bones, and in the night it would find me again, that was the beginning of my insomniac years which continue, I love waking up to sentences.

That was 30 years ago. Thirty is my go-to number, it explains most things including the pounds I am overweight, the minutes I am late for almost everything, the dollars I am always short, I still live in the same house, 30 Rowatson Drive.

I read the first one over his shoulder on the hill where we ate lunch, thought I got away with it until that evening after dinner the doorbell rang and it was him, easy as pie he said I wondered if you’d like to read another and this went on for the rest of high school, he brought me stories a couple of times a week, I’d give him his old ones back, worn and torn, I ran upstairs to my room and was already reading, or seeking, or whatever I was doing, word by word, and when I say his penmanship was controlling, I think those first sentences made me look up on purpose because there he always was on the sidewalk, through all the weather in the world.

Today my doorbell rang and I got a wallop of deja vu, I don’t get a lot of visitors, I remembered the way it felt to open the door to him, to surrender, and I half-expected it to be him again after all these years, but it was a delivery, the guy asked if my name was Claire Desjardins, which it is, and I signed for a box with my name on it, from Dunn, Forester and Silver, solicitors.

I ran up to my room.

Dear Claire
I have never done my best at anything until now, I am doing my best at dying.

I looked out the window to the empty sidewalk.

His writing was loose, nothing touched, heavy looping descenders and barely there ascenders, it reminded me of the bedside monitor my mother had been attached to, his signature, Ziggy Tupper, the final stagger across the page, and beneath it, all the stories in the world.

There’s one about a man who can’t stand any light at night, it drives his wife crazy, although she cannot detect it, she goes to turn off the offending switch, he is always right, there's a light left on in the bathroom downstairs or the one in the oven or sometimes it’s the moon she drags the curtain over it like a spell, but this one night the man comes to bed and it’s his wife who says but there’s a light on. Earlier in the day the man bought a few things for the fishtank, two plants and a gnarly piece of wood, somebody at dinner commented on the pinkish tint of the water, it looked like sunset in that tank and it was very beautiful, but the colour was the canary, it indicated toxins, all the fish died but for one the man was able to rescue and put into another tank, which was already set up, waiting to house the small goldfish in the cooling pond outside. I have left a light on for the fish, he said.

There’s one about a math teacher who gives his best student a problem to solve over the weekend, it’s all the numbers between 10 and 100, and the challenge is for the kid to determine how they are arranged and we see that kid all weekend flipping pages in his notebook, trying over and over again, never giving up until it’s Monday morning and he hasn’t got it, he doesn’t want to go to school, he plans on walking his little sister to school and coming back to the empty house to work on it again, on the way there his kid sister says what’s bugging you Clem and he says it’s a problem I can’t figure out and she says mom says to talk about your problems so try talking to me and he does, he tells her about it and she says so what, go to school and tell Mr. Smith you can’t figure it out. Such a simple solution, and so that’s what he does, in the way he’s tried to reduce numbers he reduces himself and it’s when he is in this reduced state he glances one more time at the numbers and sees they are in alphabetical order.

There’s a love story separated by the Irish Sea.

A whispering horse.

Every so often a perfect day with Claire.

100 per year for 30 years there are thousands.

The first sentence is what comes through my bones at night, and I get a moment of how it felt when I saw him on the sidewalk, I can’t tell you why I didn’t love him out loud.