Some Friends of Mine

Gerald Noonan was Associate Professor of English at Wilfred Laurier University in Waterloo, and co-editor of A Public and Private Voice.

The clue to this book lies in the cover blurb. Ernesto Cuevas, last heard from in Robert Weaver’s Canadian Short Stories (Oxford), has a hobby. “His hobby is meditating.”

That helps to characterize this slim collection of sketches-cum-parables that focus wryly on the human perdition of dreaming and worrying and doing, usually, nothing at all. The 13 meditations are straightforward, highly readable. They do not last long and, almost always, evoke an arcane reflection on rueful smile — about owning exotic cars, or secluded estates, about cult courses, commuting, housekeeping, and bureaucracy.

It is typical that Morris, the proprietor of these musings, envies the inhabitants of the cemeteries that he passes twice daily on the bus going to work. “They do not have to be to work on time, they have no taxes to pay, no children to worry over; they can lie there year after year in all seasons ... in no kind of possibility of trouble. They might not look very well, but they have not even to worry about that — no one can see that their teeth are not properly brushed” (p. 39).

If the number of the dead so far exceeds the number of the living, Morris puzzles, where are they all? “Cemeteries held only a handful, so to speak, but downtown at lunch hour there are masses of moving living people.” He figures out, eventually, that “they are on the bus with him,” like the lady who “looks at him silently with grey eyes,” and who will “without speaking to the driver or to anyone else, get off and get on another bus, and she will ride silently all day and half the night throughout the city, never eating, never speaking ...” (p. 40).

One of the best pieces is on the subject of a friend whose hobby is juggling — though “he can hardly hope to get much opportunity to demonstrate. At the few parties he does attend, no one ever asks him to juggle. The demand for juggling on social occasions is small. It’s difficult to work it into a social evening, and my friend is too shy to approach a hostess and whisper, ‘Would your friends like to see me juggle?’” (p. 51).

A hobby, in some respects, much like meditating.