The rough charm of the oil change man

I roll the old Miata into the lube shop. It seems I'm the first customer this morning. The young man brings me The Province, and offers me a cup of coffee. This paper has a good crossword, and the coffee is unexpectedly delicious.

He thinks he has me where he wants me. "Would you like..." But I've already worked out my strategy. I'm one step ahead of him.

"No," I answer firmly. "This is my daughter's car, and she instructed me. Only change the oil."

I dig out a pen, settle my newspaper on the steering wheel and have a sip of coffee. I'm filling in the first clue when he pipes up again.

"Ma'am, would you like..." He doesn't give up easily.

"Does it cost extra?" He admits it does, and I firmly tell him, "In that case, no, thanks," and turn back to my paper. I sip my coffee, then a violent sneeze erupts. Lucky I set the cup down in time.

"Bless you!" says the young man, and I thank him.

"Thanks. I can always use a blessing." I sip the coffee again, fill in another clue or two.

"Excuse me..." I look up to see him smiling at me, all charm. "Sorry, but we're required to ask..." I shake my head no and turn back to my coffee and puzzle, only to hear him address me again.

"Your brake light is burned out. Would you like us to change that?"

I agree to this and he tells me the price. Then I turn the tables on him. "Can you give me a coupon?" I ask him. "My daughter brings the car here all the time."

He will indulge me. "I can give you a five-dollar coupon from the book," he says, "if you're on our email list." I thank him. That will reduce the cost of having the light bulb replaced to a mere nine dollars. Can't drive around with a burnt-out brake light.

He opens the trunk and I feel the little car shake. Then he comes round with a can of lubricant and greases both door hinges. "Do you like driving this car?" I tell him I do.

His smile is fetching. "I bet your car is bigger than this." I admit this, but tell him how I love driving this car, especially with the top down.

"You're a good mother," he says. "Changing your daughter's oil. Tell her to come in if she wants the washer fluid topped up. It's free."

He brings the bill and we go over it. "I didn't wash the windows," he admits. "It's raining."

"No problem," I say and we exchange goodbyes. These guys are programmed to sell, but they love cars. This fellow's rough charm is unique, and I smile and wave as I drive away.

How introverts and extroverts ride on transit

Photo: Getty [Commuter reads a book from the Choose What You Read scheme. See "The Telegraph" story here.]

The introvert stands at the end of the platform, right where he knows the train doors will open. He doesn't push past other commuters, but moves with decision. This last car is less busy than the others.

Aha, a single seat that backs on a bulkhead. Great. He tucks his briefcase in beside his feet, pulls out his book and begins to read.

For a moment of blissful silence, our solitary commuter is absorbed in the drama of his novel, oblivious as more riders flow onto the train. Someone takes the single ahead of him.

Then across the aisle all hell breaks loose. Extroverts. They slap each other's backs and raise their voices in snatches of song. The car fills with a chorus of loud laughter.

Should he move? Surreptitiously, the introvert looks around. Nowhere to go. He glances at his watch. How can people be so noisy this early in the morning? Incredible.

More people are piling in. Crammed together, they sway as the train rocks into motion. They brace themselves, cling to the straps, buffering the noise across the way. Saved, thinks the introvert. Hey, this book is really quite interesting.

In the single seat ahead of him, a cell phone rings. A teenage girl with a high voice speaks into it, giggles loudly. He sighs. Closes his eyes briefly, then opens them, stares out the window. Breathes deeply, returns to his book.

How introverts and extroverts park their cars

The introvert drives her small car to the very last parking space (small cars only) at the edge of the fence at Two EEs Farm. Bliss, she thinks. Nobody can block my view and I can easily escape out the gate onto the Fraser Highway. It's early morning and there are few shoppers. She'll just grab a couple of things.

Alas, no. When she returns to the vehicle with her lettuce and lemons, she finds that someone has parked a huge pickup truck beside her little car, though the rest of the lot is empty. Now she cannot see to extricate herself.

Why do people do this? She simply doesn't understand. Carefully and with trepidation, she backs out past the huge obstacle, breathes a sigh of relief when she finally rejoins the traffic on the busy road.

***

The extrovert rolls into the parking lot, alarmed to find there are no other cars. He can't expose his truck all alone out here in this desert of silence and space. No sign of life. He looks over his shoulder with apprehension. Where are the other humans?

Then he spies it. A little white car is parked way up at the front, by the fence. Relieved, he makes a beeline for it, slides in right alongside. At least he has only one side exposed now.

Next time he'd better shop later, when there are more people. This place looks like a morgue.

Clooney's Cage -- the next generation

Photo: Pierrotsomepeopleon Flickr

Over Sunday breakfast I was telling my adult daughter about writing a post on Cluny's Cage. It's a scene in R.L. Stephenson's Kidnapped, but also a real  historic place.

"Does the phrase 'Cluny's Cage' suggest anything to you?" I asked.

"Doesn't that refer to George Clooney?"

I waited, watching her face. She didn't miss a beat. "You know," she continued, "his refusal to get down and dirty in acting."

"How do you mean?"

"Well, he plays only roles like the austere pilot, the suave, crisp lawyer or the handsome doctor who never messes up his clothes. He's like Devon Cream, all smooth and slippery."

I grinned as she amplified. "He wants to be the modern day Cary Grant or Clark Gable. He refuses to lower himself to the dirty mud of acting. It's a kind of mental prison, Clooney's cage."

Cluny's Cage

Building forts was a favourite childhood activity after we moved to our home in Terrace with it's forested lot at the back.

One of my favourites was one we called Cluny's cage. The name was based on Robert Louis Stevenson's novel Kidnapped, which features the Jacobite Highlander Alan Breck fleeing across Scotland from his enemies, moving from one safe house to another.

One of these hidden sanctuaries was Cluny's cage and we decided to build our own. My brother was handy with an axe, and he felled a few small trees. We formed these into a square, log cabin style, piling one on top of another and hewing the corners to fit. But the business required a lot of logs. Though originally we wanted it to be high enough to stand up in, we didn't get that far.

As we didn't know how to make a door, we built a stile as an entrance. At the door, we gave the password before entering, just like at Cluny's Cage in the story.

Like the original that inspired it, the fort was small and plain. The lack of windows wasn't a problem. It helped us feel suitably hidden inside. We could see out well enough through the wide cracks between the logs. We built a plank roof over half the fort and left the rest open. That summer, we were rebel Highlanders in flight. Cluny's Cage meant safety.

My mother had an electric wringer washer by then, and I remember it sounding out another name from the book: Colin Roy, Colin Roy, sang the agitator as it washed our clothes.

Reading mother

As children we lived on a farm and had only an old-fashioned battery radio for entertainment. We had to amuse ourselves, and much of that centered around reading.

It was during Mom's early bedtime reading on the farm that the ancient poetry of the King James Bible seeped into my bones.

Later, with Dad was away working, we lived in town and Mom started reading us books. I remember plucking at the chenille on her apricot bedspread when the suspense became too much.

In Terrace, we rented at first while my parents house-hunted. When we were snug in a wee house on an acre of land and accustomed to riding the bus to our new school, Mom celebrated by reading us Kidnapped, Treasure Island and Robin Hood.

When Mom stopped reading to us, my elder sister, then entering her teens, took up the task. She began with The Casebook of Sherlock Holmes. When she stopped at the climax to ask us to predict what was going to happen, I internalized the structure of story.

In summer, we read outdoors, sitting on the trunk of an uprooted jack pine. The vertical root ball formed the wall of our hidden reading fort. Whenever I think of Holmes and Watson, I smell again the fresh air and soil of our backyard jack pine forest.

My parents married on April 2, 1945. Today I celebrate them for reading and instilling in their children an abiding love of books. As books morph into surprising new forms, reading lives on.

Reading with Dad

When I was a kid we lived on the small Alberta farm the DVA (later called Veterans Affairs Canada) settled on my father at the end of the war. He had volunteered for the navy and spent the war on convoy duty in the North Atlantic.

A quarter section of land was not a living, and my father was often away working. After the big oil strike in Leduc in 1947, he worked on the gas line. He also built grain elevators in towns around Alberta.

When I was six or so, he came out to Kitimat to find work while Alcan was building the smelter. The farm in winter, with its coal and wood stoves, the unfinished house and the prairie wind, was too much for my mother and three small kids. Dad rented us a house in town.

Dad worked in Kitimat for nearly two years before we left Ryley. Then my parents sold the farm and bought a little house in Terrace.

There, when he was not working, he would lie on his bed reading Bertrand Russell and the ancient philosophers -- the old Greeks -- Mom used to call them. Periodically he would call Mom or one of us in to read a particularly interesting passage.

He also liked to write out brief quotations from these works and pin them to his wall. I do the same, but with my computer. Instead of pinning the quotations to the wall, I add them to my file.

Thanks, Dad, for demonstrating for us the mystery and value of the written word.