I'll Seize the Day Tomorrow (2 page)

Perhaps it's best to think of this book as a sandwich. A sandwich made of delicious, crusty, fresh-baked bread. Smeared on this bread is something that tastes like, well, let's just keep this civil and say, I'll see you at the end.*

*Hummus.

Youth

(39th birthday)

MONDAY.

Before stepping out, I accidentally put my shoes on the wrong feet. It's something I haven't done since I was a kid. The sensation of my left shoe on my right foot makes me feel about six years old. It's like playing with ants, like sitting in a sunbeam on the carpet.Though we pretend otherwise, we're all our ages at once. I decide to start putting my shoes on the wrong feet whenever I need to remind myself of that. To this end, I will also take up skipping, though only late at night when no one is around. This, too, will make me feel young. But also insane.

THURSDAY.

It's close to midnight and tomorrow's my thirty-ninth birthday.

I wish you could leap from thirty-eight straight to forty. More dignity to it than hanging on to the last dregs of your thirties.

Forty was the age at which I thought I'd have a house full of oak shelves spilling over with hardcover books. Cabinets loaded with china. Carpets brought home from exotic trips abroad.

“Where'd these come from?” they'd ask.

“Abroad,” I'd say.

The age at which I'd have a piano substantial enough to cripple the back of each member of the moving team that finally gets it into the upstairs parlour.

“Do you play?” they'd ask.

“I always wished I could,” I always wished I could say.

Forty was supposed to be the age at which I'd have a gigantic flat-screen TV, one that sinks into the wall like a corrugated iron anchor. A wife. Kids. Peace, too. The kind that rises like mist from a settled life, the life of a man who's figured out the cologne that suits him and the channels he wants programmed into his car radio.

With all that in order, I'd be ready to do one of those Russian leg-kicking dances straight towards the grave with a smile on my face.

But here I am with no wife, no kids, no car, and no house. Not even a house
boat
. And the clever names I could have given one!

With so little to show for it, is it possible to even call myself a grownup?
I need to get my house in order. Man up and settle down. And the way I see it, I have one year left to do it.

This weekend will involve dinner with my parents and phone messages from my friends' kids singing “Happy Birthday.” I'm sure it's just me, but every year the tone of their singing seems to get more mocking.

FRIDAY.

Step one: shave.

While doing so, I stop at the moustache and stare at myself in the mirror. Moustachioedness. I look like a completely different style of person, like the kind of guy who'd sing Motown songs in the public showers at the Y— someone who'd shirtlessly open his front door to the gas man, possibly calling him “chief.”

When I finish I'm left feeling as if, after a long night out, my face has finally taken off its pants. But when Gregor stops by, he tells me I look older.

“I'm on public radio,” I say. “It doesn't matter how I look. And for that matter, it's also why I don't need an agent.”

“You already have that old-person smell,” he says. “Hospital cafeteria. Hamburger steak in particular.”

“I'm feeling a little sensitive about my age at the moment,” I say, “so maybe lay off.”

“By my math, you're thirty-nine going on dead,” he says in his version of laying off. “You're aging out of your
audience by the second. Do you think Millennials will tune in to hear about your latest visit to the doctor? And so I propose The Goldstein Pavilion, a section in Canada's Wonderland with rides based on your show. Stuff like the Monologue Monorail.”

“Which would be?”

“A slow, meandering ride with no end in sight.”

According to
Film World
, the secret to Fatty Arbuckle's success—what set him apart from other morbidly obese vaudevillians who could balance on telephone wires— was that he was possessed of an ability to laugh at himself. This is another in a long and growing list of reasons why I am nothing like Fatty Arbuckle. Nonetheless, as Gregor jokes, I try to laugh and my face takes on the expression of someone trying to lap up a saucer of pennies.

The way that people can learn so much personal information from looking at a face strikes me as unfair. Even a beard is not enough to cover up the truth of who you are.

The Things Left Undone

(52 weeks till 40th birthday)

SUNDAY.

My father is now on the internet and we've started emailing each other. The way it works is he sends me an email and then calls several seconds later to make sure I've received it, just in case.

For my father, a man who shows up at the airport five to six hours before departure—a man who fills his gas tank about every ten minutes—“just in case” are the three most important words in the English language. If we were the kind of family to have a crest, those words would be emblazoned in Latin across a figure of a man wearing a medicine ball–sized fanny pack.

I read his emails back to him over the phone.

“HI, JONNY,” I read, “REPLY AS SOON AS YOU CAN AS I WANT TO SEE IF MY EMAIL IS WORKING.”

“Unbelievable,” he says. “I just sent it to you a second ago!”

I've also started sending him links to sites I think he might enjoy. Among them,
The Onion
.

“I read this op-ed piece,” he says, “about a man who leaves behind instructions for what to do with his sandwich in case he dies before finishing it.Very poignant.”

I try to explain that it's a joke, that
The Onion
is a satirical newspaper, not a real one, but my father won't buy it.

“It's poignant,” he repeats. “It addresses one's sense of mortality and the legacy we wish to leave behind. The sandwich is a metaphor for the things left undone.”

“What's the article called?” I ask.

“If I Die, Please Finish This Sandwich.”

We argue for a while, but then I decide to drop the subject. His way of reading the paper might be better anyway. I can see the
Onion
headline: “Area Man Mistakes Humorous Weekly for Legitimate News Source.”

MONDAY.

In my latest bid to multitask, I've begun screening silent films while listening to the radio. And so I watch Buster Keaton hop from train-car roof to train-car roof as a German scientist on the CBC explains how the Earth might one day be engulfed by the sun. The combined effect has me toggling between joy and existential terror. Not so different from how I feel most of the time, anyway.

The film is
The General
and it takes place during the American Civil War. In it, Keaton is trying to outrace the Unionists back to his base to alert the Confederate troops of a surprise attack.

As I watch, it strikes me how many movie plots would have been ruined if cell phones existed. I mean, all Keaton would've had to do was call ahead and let them know the army was coming and the whole film would have been over in five minutes.
Deliverance?
The war with the hillbillies would have been averted by a call to 911.
The Wizard of Oz?
They call up the wizard, and he's not home. The end.

The scientist on the radio is now describing what the Earth being consumed by fire would look like; although, he concedes, no one would actually get to see it happen, as human life would be long gone before then.

I get up and turn off the radio. Life's too short to attempt too much at once. I sink back into the couch and watch the rest of the film in silence.

FRIDAY.

Tony is driving me home from work. At the stoplight, he calls his fiancée, Natalie, on his cell phone.

“I'm on my way home,” he says. “Need me to pick up hot dogs?”

Tony really likes hot dogs. Natalie doesn't. He listens for a while, says goodbye, and then turns to me.

“Her answer is always no,” he says, “but I just can't stop trying.”

Sometimes a cell phone can change life's course of events, but most of the time it's just as powerless as anything else.

Popeye Loves His Olives

(51 weeks)

TUESDAY.

I'm out for dinner with Marie-Claude, and after the waiter takes our order she stares at me appraisingly.

“A spinach salad?” she asks. “With cranberries and goat cheese?”

“I like spinach,” I say, suddenly ashamed.

“I don't get you. Whatever happened to the Jonathan Goldstein who never felt a meal was complete without French fries?”

“He died of a heart attack at thirty-two.”

The thing about having childhood friends is that they see any changes in your behaviour since the age of eleven as a betrayal of your basic personality. If you're not collecting hockey cards with a face covered in chocolate, you're a pretentious ass.

As a compromise, I consider eating the salad with my hands when it arrives.

WEDNESDAY.

I'm on my way to Waterloo, Ontario, to deliver a keynote address, and while waiting for the plane to board, I have a sandwich and beer at the airport bar. The tab comes to nearly seventeen dollars. After paying it, I look at the bill.

While I'm irked that the bartender has bundled a service fee into the total, I'm galled that the additional tip I just paid him was calculated based on that total—a total that included a gratuity I'd been unwittingly bilked out of.

Just as I'm about to say something—or, rather, just as I'm about to
consider
saying something—the bartender approaches me with a large jar of olives.

“I've been trying to open it all evening,” he says, his face red with exertion. “Would you mind trying?”

His request catches me off guard. In an instant I go from feeling angry to feeling needed. I attack the jar with the kind of ferocious determination that involves grunting, grimacing, and almost herniating my disc. For some inexplicable reason, I want nothing more than to prove myself to a complete stranger who, only moments earlier, ripped me off.

After about a minute, the lid pops open. I'm covered in sweat and olive juice. The bartender thanks me and then,
for a job well done, hands me a plastic shot glass full of olives.

As I walk away eating olives and feeling grateful, it strikes me that the bartender's gesture could very easily be employed in other ticklish social situations. Newspaper vendor treating you brusquely? Office manager doesn't say hello in the elevator? Friend thinks your choice of healthy appetizer makes you seem too high and mighty? Just pull a jar of olives out and ask for help. Call it “extending the olive jar.”

FRIDAY.

Flying back to Montreal after my talk, I grab some air sickness bags to use for packing work lunches. Not only will looking at them work as a natural appetite suppressant, but they might also discourage anyone from stealing my lunch from the refrigerator.

Why a Duck?

(50 weeks)

MONDAY.

The janitor has emptied the garbage can in my office a day early. It's a small thing, but it's still a break from the routine. I'm reminded of the day in grade three when Eddy Kaplan showed up in the lunchroom with a sandwich made with green bread. Eddy's mother was different from the other mothers—into meditating and yoga—and she'd dyed his bread with green food colouring. It wasn't St. Patrick's Day or anything. She just wanted to remind him, and everyone else at the cafeteria table, that when you unexpectedly break from the routine, you are reawakened to the possibilities around you.

I look at my trash can, its emptiness one day early and so full of possibility that I hardly know where to start.

TUESDAY.

Josh has just returned from a trip to upstate New York. He says the best part was buying roadside pot pies. In the area of pot pies, he says he now has two pieces of wisdom: “One, when given the opportunity, always take the duck pot pie; and two, the more decrepit the sign at the side of the road, the better the pie.”

He then tells me about a place where the sign on the lawn looked hand-drawn by a hillbilly with a broken arm. When he rang the doorbell, he was greeted by an old woman wearing what appeared to be a hospital gown. She looked as though he had woken her out of a deep sleep. She invited him in and prepared him pies while he sat waiting at her kitchen table.

“I ordered the duck,” he says, “and I never looked back.”

I nod my head and Josh repeats “duck pie” over and over, as if the words are filled with magic.

WEDNESDAY.

I've been experimenting with colognes lately, trying to find one that could become my signature odour. I don't know how people make such a choice. It's like choosing your eye colour. It feels too big, something that should be left to the deity. Nonetheless, I've become rather fond of Gucci. To my mind, it makes me smell like the inside of a rich old man's toiletry bag.

As I walk to the store with Marie-Claude's kids—my goddaughters, nine-year-old Helen and seven-year-old Katie—they complain about my smell.

“I like the way you stink normal,” Katie says.

“Yes,” I say, “but my normal stink is too subtle.” Plus, I explain to her, by leaving a heavily odorous trail, we'll be sure to find our way back home more easily.

“Like Hansel and Gretel with the bread crumbs,” I assure her.

This gets Helen thinking.

“I never could understand why that witch was so excited about eating kids,” she says. “She could have just eaten a chicken.”

Helen will come to learn that everyone, even witches, likes a little break from routine. That's why there are not only chicken pot pies but duck pot pies, as well.

THURSDAY.

Outside my window, I hear the sound of the garbage truck advancing and, as always, I am filled with a low hum of anxiety. Even if my garbage is already out on the curb, there's always a part of me that views the approaching truck as a chance to throw one last dunk shot into oblivion. Though not hungry, I'm tempted to force-feed myself a banana just for the opportunity to barrel out the door and rid the household of the peel. For me, a garbage truck is a
hybrid between an empty work trash can and the ice cream man.