Zippers are fifty cents; Stories are free

Posted on April 24, 2025 by maddyruthwalker

I work a volunteer shift at the upcycle store on Wednesdays. The people that come in delight me, entertain me, astonish me, educate me, soften me. Next week is my last shift at the store. I want to remember some of these people and their stories.

Once a pale man came in and asked if we had a leather hole punch. He didn’t want to buy one, just borrow it so that he could put an additional hole in his belt. He was losing weight, and his pants were hanging on him. Alas, I said, we don’t have one right now. I’m sorry.

I thought about him for weeks, his weight loss, his thinning frame, his sad face. I wondered about his story. Perhaps he was lovesick.

I can no longer untangle my hair
I feed on my own flesh in secret.
Do you want to measure how much I long for you?
Look at my belt, how loose it hangs.

Anonymous, Six Dynasties
Translated from the Chinese by Kenneth Rexroth

As if to balance the sadness of the shrinking man, the joy of meeting Randy bloomed inside of me for weeks. He flounced into the store a few days before Thanksgiving, smelling gloriously of rosemary and thyme. Randy is a contemporary dandy, stained waistcoat and tight jeans, flowing grey hair, phlegmy smoker’s laugh lighting up his brown, creased face. He brought crackling energy into the store with him, along with a small plastic bag of herbs.

Do you have any Scrabble tiles? he asked. Yes, I handed him two tall mason jars filled with tiles, and as he dug through his pockets for the cash to pay for them, he told me there was always a few Scrabble boards set up on his coffee table. When my friends come over, he said, they add a word or two or three. We play a never-ending game and nobody keeps score.

What a mouth-watering smell! He opened the plastic bag for me to see the long sprigs of green. I picked them at the side of the road, he told me, just around the corner. The herbs were volunteer plants, free for anybody that wanted them. I need sage, I said, for the Thanksgiving turkey. Oh, he said, I think there was sage growing as well. We smiled and said our goodbyes. An hour later he was back with three sprigs of sage he had picked for me and my turkey.

When I asked a young fellow what he was planning to make with the feathers he was buying, he challenged me: Guess. A headdress? No, good guess, but I am making flies for fly fishing, something his dad taught him to do. He fishes for cutthroat trout under the Bay Bridge with a bunch of female fishers who’d turned him on to it. I never knew!

Last week, a woman came in and poked into the baskets of wool, humming a tune. I noticed her tone—it was strong and true. You have such a beautiful voice, I said. Why don’t you sing us something? Suddenly, gloriously, she burst into “I’m Called Little Buttercup,” from Gilbert and Sullivan’s HMS Pinafore. Her rich mezzo-soprano filled the store as she strutted down the aisles, outthrust chest, a beautiful dockside vendor in love with the captain. I and another shopper were the lucky audience, mesmerized by a performance delivered among stickers and glue, balls of wool, knitting needles, jars of coloured beads.

I love hearing about the celebrations people are planning. The woman in her thirties who bought armloads of artificial flowers and a bolt of pale pink draping fabric for the table. She and her siblings had been planning a surprise party for their mother’s sixtieth birthday. She keeps mentioning she’s turning sixty, as if reminding us, said the young woman. She’s worried we’ve forgotten. Little does she know what’s in store! I laughed with her, feeling mudita, imagining the pleasure and wonder of her mother on that day. Surprise!

Finally, I sold the white canvas tent that was propped in the corner for months. The tent is perfect for children to hide and play in, and a woman bought it for her grandchildren. I told her about the teddy bear’s picnic birthday party I’d thrown for my four-year-old so many Decembers ago. We had a play tent pitched in our living room, and the children and their stuffies enjoyed tea and cake. The woman became excited and touched my shoulder in thanks. What a great idea! I’ve got to do that for my grandson! Then she told me that one Christmas her mother-in-law opened the gift of a vibrator in front of the whole family. I wasn’t sure what prompted the story, but we had a good laugh. Teddy bear picnics and vibrators, all in one afternoon.

There’s a regular customer who brings her baby buggy into the store, speaking softly and playfully to her little boy as she shops. She buys bits of fabric, thread, and zippers. Last week, as she paid for her stuff and her baby chortled and tried to put his toes in his mouth in the buggy beside her, she ran her hand over the camel-brown smocked dress she wore and its complementary quilted vest. I made all of this from an old bedsheet, she said. At times like this, I thought, I wish I could whistle. A good long, low whistle to show my WOW in a visceral way. Instead, I shook my head: You are amazing! Queen of Upcycling!

One day I was emptying out the green donation boxes, pricing and sorting items. My hand fastened on something soft. A bit of plush grey fur, perhaps once the collar of a stylish coat. Wrapped in thin tissue paper, there was a small tag safety-pinned to the edge: Chinchilla, written in the shaky script of somebody very old. Suddenly, I was back in the furrier’s on Spadina Avenue, sitting cross-legged on the dusty floor, playing with scraps of chinchilla, beaver, spotted lynx. I caressed them one at a time, rubbed them against my cheek. My mother and the furrier stood above me, two voices discussing the racoon coat she’d ordered. What happened to that coat? And why was my mother—a passionate animal lover—buying a custom-made fur coat?

People stream into the store. Have you got books on stained glass? Do you have leatherwork tools? Ever get pillow inserts? Sometimes I say no, sometimes yes, but other times I’m not sure, and we set out to look together, sifting through the boxes and baskets. Sometimes people cry out in delight when they find just what they were looking for. A particular size of crochet hook, fabric printed with mushrooms, a colouring book of Frida Kahlo drawings.

Last week, a short bespectacled woman said she had an unusual request: golf balls. She was undergoing physiotherapy for an injured hand and the therapist had told her to squeeze a golf ball. I haven’t seen any golf balls, I said, but I think I can help. I remembered that morning finding a bag of large wooden beads strung onto a white shoelace. I thought of a small child or a very old person practicing fine motor skills, threading each bead onto the end of the lace. I found the bag and fished out three of the beads. They were about the size of golf balls. Will this do? I asked as I slipped them into her cupped hands. They’re perfect! And we agreed that they were much nicer to handle, a globe of burnished brown wood rather than a cold, plastic golf ball.

At the end of every shift, as I cash out, sweep the cement floor, turn off the heat and lights, lock the door, I feel full of the people I’ve met, the stories I’ve heard.

For the love of books

Posted on May 7, 2020 by maddyruthwalker

Five days ago, I woke with an exquisite feeling of all-body all-soul nourishment. A rare feeling. My vivid dream was that I was wandering through a used bookstore—a warren of small book-filled rooms bathed in soft amber light. Lots of burnished wood, small upholstered chairs at the end of each row of bookshelves to sit and pore over the pages of an illustrated Alice in Wonderland or Daumier’s lithographs. The dark orange spines of Penguin editions beckon me, I walk dreamlike down corridors of books, taking volumes from shelves, paging through them, enjoying the quiet warmth of this place, just a clock ticking somewhere. It reminded me a bit of Bastion Books, one of the few remaining independent used bookstores in Victoria, with its welcoming nooks and crannies. In my dream, I wander to the far end of this bookstore to a small doorway then enter a compact room where my three sons sit on straight-backed chairs as if expecting me, all smiling as I approach. They rise to hug me. We embrace without words, and I feel their height and strength flow into me. And then I am awake, full to the brim.

The dream was significant to me now because I miss both hugging my sons and access to books (I haven’t explored the relationship between those two things…). Although I can talk to my sons on the phone, through text, or video-chat, their physical hugs are off limits. The libraries are shut, and the bookstores are too—they allow for online ordering, but the brick and mortar stores are locked, and I cannot materially browse, an activity that sustains me. In a synchronous turn of events, I came across The Booksellers, a documentary available online via Cinecenta, the movie theatre at the University where I work. Cinecenta is another small business suffering financially during this pandemic. Their theatre is dark and shuttered, the snack bar where I got so many coffees is now deserted. So they partnered with Kinosmith to offer this documentary. After clicking a link provided on their website and paying by credit card, I was able to watch a fascinating exploration of booksellers in New York City. This history of the rare and antiquarian book trade in that diverse city was peppered with interviews with some of the unusual and eccentric people that devote their lives to books as precious objects.

After watching the doc, I started to think about how my constrained access to books lately due to Covid-19 has actually enriched my life in an unforeseeable way. Because I didn’t have my usual broad choice of reading material, I started to forage a little more intently in the free little libraries in the neighbourhood. Some cautious neighbours had removed all of the books from the shelves of their little libraries and posted signs explaining that they would re-stock after the risk of virus contamination had decreased. Thankfully, others had kept their books on the shelves, and I found myself returning to these spots over and over and taking books I wouldn’t normally be interested in.

A few weeks ago, I picked up Octavia Butler’s The Parable of the Sower from the cute little library on the front yard of a house around the corner. “Take a Book, Leave a Book” was painted in curlicued white letters across the blue cupboard doors. When I was a teenager, I decided I wasn’t interested in science fiction. Somehow, I only wanted to read things that were “real.” So I turned to 19^th century British novels and early-mid 20th century American writers like Philip Roth and Saul Bellow. Of course I have cast my reading net much wider since then, but I still don’t tend to be drawn to science fiction or its sister genres, fantasy and horror. Yet, as I dug into Butler’s novel, I became engrossed by the young female narrator/ protagonist Lauren who is bent on survival in a dystopian America of the future. Her warrior spirit drives her to escape from the murder of her family and razing of her home in a gated community in Southern California and form a motley tribe of people all searching for safety. Due to her mother’s drug abuse, Lauren was born with hyperempathy, a disability that has her feeling other people’s pain to a debilitating degree. She develops a religion called Earthseed, whose God is Change because the only thing we can be certain of is that everything changes. What felt eerie about this novel, written in 1993, was that Butler’s portrayal of a dystopian nation read as strongly resembling Trump’s America.

After finishing The Parable of the Sower, I felt I must read the sequel, Parable of the Talents (1998); however, only in a world of magic would I find that book in a free little library. So I borrowed Michael’s Kindle and splurged on the e-book, and I am devouring it now. I’m still in the early chapters, and I am curious what will happen to the tyrannical megalomaniac president whose slogan is “Make America Great Again.” I am not kidding—this president really is a character in a novel published in 1998.

I always prefer books as objects over digitized texts. I love the feel and look of books. I love to explore marginalia and marks, run my hands over bindings, examine tatters and pages folded over, text that has been underlined. The other day I picked up a well worn novel (The Lotus Eaters by Tatjana Soli) from a free library that had written in the inside cover in elegant cursive, “Property of” followed by a rectangular stamp: The Cavern Hotel and Café, El Nido, Palawan. I Googled this mysterious place and discovered it is a hotel offering pod accommodations in the Philippines. So interesting. (The next day, Trip Advisor wondered if I would like to see the current rates for staying the Cavern.)

Even though I recycle books through free libraries and friends, I do keep a library at home of books that I love: poetry and feminism, how to write and teach writing, graphic novels and memoirs, and twentieth-century American novels I had the privilege of studying and teaching for a short while. But lately I have appreciated how the e-book allows me to read while Michael sleeps. With the slim Kindle propped up under the covers as I curl around it in the dark, I enter into the world of Butler’s novel, where kindness is the last good thing, where people band together in tribes because love and human relationships are all that we have, and where impermanence is the only truth. Wait a minute, all of that is sounding familiar. Is it really the future, or is it now?

I wake up every morning in this dream-like world, and I say to myself, “I wonder what will happen today?”

Sober is sexy in the Soo

Posted on July 11, 2019 by maddyruthwalker

As we drove, we talked about how we decided on names for our children all those years ago. Michael mused that his first wife may have wanted to name their son Willie, partly inspired by Joni Mitchell’s love lyric to Graham Nash. “Oh, let’s play it,” I said, and pretty soon Michael was politely commanding Siri to play Ladies of the Canyon, which we enjoyed for the next 80 kilometres. Early Joni Mitchell is smart and luminous, filled with gleaming surprises. I am constantly amazed by how privileged we are to have this kind of technology at our fingertips. To think of a song, to hear a song.

That was our hardest day, driving over 700 kilometers from Thunder Bay to Sault Sainte Marie (The Soo) while exhausted, as I hadn’t slept much in the cheap hotel in TB. We had a lovely short visit with an old friend in the morning at her place on Loon Lake outside of TB. I hadn’t seen her for 30 years, and yet when we hugged, the love felt fresh and our connection seemed unbroken. Unbelievable. And then we booted it around Lake Superior, the lake known as gitchi-gami by the Ojibway. We stopped at Old Woman Bay, a sandy beach on the Lake where I dipped my toes into the cool water.

Early evening, we arrived in the Soo and found an Indian restaurant where they gave us way too much food. So, after dinner we wandered around the historic streets dangling a carton of leftover lamb vindaloo and channa masala in a plastic bag, admiring the old Post Office and the many funky shops. As we passed under some scaffolding, we looked through the window of Winnie B’s Vintage Emporium, and I saw a lanky man wearing a black t-shirt that said “Sober is Sexy.”

“Hey, I love your shirt,” I called through the open door. “Thanks,” he called back, and he and Michael and I had a brief conversation about the joys of sobriety. Winnie’s owner, Patricia Bowles, had hired him and another guy to rearrange the stuff in her store. She came out on the sidewalk and introduced herself, then looked down at our bag. “Oh, your food is leaking!” I had tipped the carton in my excitement, and reddish-brown Vindaloo sauce dripped from the corners, so she gave us a second bag to secure the mess. The store wasn’t open, but Patricia invited us in nonetheless, and we stood among the treasures (a huge wooden bread bowl, beaded necklaces, old paintings, mid-century furniture) and chatted about the loveliness of the Soo, her mother Winnie, whom she named the store after, all of the different places she’d lived across Canada, and our trip so far. When I mentioned that the Soo was a pleasant surprise, we hadn’t expected such charm, she asked to interview us for her Facebook page (she is collecting testimonials about the little city), so we agreed and the result is here: https://www.facebook.com/WinnieBsVintage/videos/2080685375569309/

In the morning after a much needed sleep-in at the Sleep Inn, we got take-out coffee, excellent Sumatran pour-overs by Paul of Queen’s East Coffee and Clothes: https://www.facebook.com/queenseastcoffeeandclothes/

I wandered about the small shop, browsing the racks of women’s clothes while Paul worked his magic. He had only a small space behind the counter, and he told me that at the height of business, he can manage six pour-overs at once. Paul asked if he could rinse Michael’s travel mug.

“Sure.”

“I always ask because once, I just went ahead a rinsed this guy’s cup, and he said, ‘Hey, I had a shot of Bailey’s in there!”

“Hope he wasn’t driving,” rejoined Michael.

“Nope, just out walking his dog.”

As we settled into highway driving and a wonderful story by Stuart McLean (Emil), a call came through from the Sleep Inn. “Oh no,” I said to the front desk clerk, “What did we leave?”

“A phone charger.” Michael and I exchanged looks.

“It’s okay, thanks for the call, but we aren’t coming back for it.”

We were already well into our miles for the day. I started to freak out a bit inside my head, as this was the second phone charger I’d left in a hotel room in a week.

“It’s okay, honey,” Michael reassured me. “In the grand scheme of things, it’s a gnat’s fart. It doesn’t matter. We’ll buy another. We’ll buy a case of phone chargers.”

We finished McLean’s Emil and then listened to The Fig Tree. Tears poured down my face, partly because I was so touched by the stories about tenderness and caring that McLean tells with drollery and understated love, but largely because I was so happy to be with a man who didn’t try to make me feel guilty. On the contrary, when I do dumb things, he makes me feel wonderful and any guilt or shame I might have feel evaporates into pink fairy dust. So much love and abundance. I am blessed.