Pamela The Gardener

If you're smart, you're smart, regardless of any formal education.

***

She had the most beautiful garden in the neighbourhood, easily besting the ghetto of Chinese yards choked by the weed-like tendrils of squash and melon. The little plot of her rental home often drew admirers and visitors in better days, but this became especially pronounced during the week before it all came to an end. A steady stream of fellow gardeners came by that final week with shovels and containers to take away whatever was proffered that caught their fancy.
She and her husband were in their sixties. I had no idea what they did for a living or if they were retired. Her husband did mention to me late one night in slightly accented English (we were looking at a star cluster through my telescope) that he had once studied navigational astronomy back in Israel. She spoke with a British lilt, wore glasses, and donned a bonnet whenever it was sunny. She looked, sounded, and acted like somebody with a formal education.

On the day before the bulldozer was scheduled to arrive, I lamented to her about the loss of her garden and her predicament—and for the first time asked what her name was. It was Pamela. Pamela, lover of flowers and trees, neighbour of ten years.

The new neighbour's yard is barren, home to neither leaf nor bee.

***

I took November 7th off to take my mother-in-law to Mount Saint Joseph Hospital to get her cataract removed. In the waiting room was a thin caucasian woman, probably in her late sixties, a splitting image of Pamela. Aha!, I thought to myself, a formally educated woman, no doubt a biology major. Fortuitously, I was able to confirm my hunch, for she effectively recounted her whole life story to the person sitting beside her. She and her husband live on Cortes Island. Her husband was the one in for a procedure. He was once a tenured professor and was called to the bar. She attended the University of Toronto and took some biochemistry. I raptly listened to her tale about her undergrad calculus course taught by Lister Sinclair. He was apparently a strange bird for whom the teaching post was merely a stepping stone to the CBC. For his lectures, he would scribble equations on the blackboard, without explanation, and then leave the classroom. But if somebody were to ask him about yesterday's concert, he would stop in his tracks, put down the chalk, and spend the rest of the hour talking about the arts. The class was so freaked out that nobody showed up to write the first term final exam. Sinclair made no mention of this absenteeism at the beginning of the second term.

***

I went by myself to Quiznos last week to take advantage of the about-to-expire "buy one get one free" sandwich deal. Behind me in the lineup were two guys in their late twenties, sharing the same coupon. This particular Quiznos caters to a mixed clientele—there were people in construction cheek by jowl with high-tech office workers—but for some reason, these two stood out in the crowd. I made a mental note that these guys looked well-read, educated, and had they had the chance, probably would've gone to the Deep South to protest segregation. On my way out, I caught a glimpse of them at their table. On it lay a copy of Scientific American, Richard Ford's The Sportswriter, and John Grisham's The Broker (two out of three ain't bad).

You know what? I'm getting pretty darn good at reading people solely based on dress and looks.