Backstage at the Vinyl Cafe - School Days - School Lunch & Planet Boy

Episode Date: September 11, 2026

“Just one day, she wanted one of them to come home and say ‘Gee, lunch was good.’”The alarm clocks are set, the pencils are sharpened, the backpack is loaded. It’s September! We’re back to school and back with a brand new season of Backstage at the Vinyl Cafe and two hilarious Stuart McLean stories about school days.Ad-free listening is here! Listen to the pod ad-free and early, PLUS a whole bunch of other goodies – like virtual parties, Q&As, listener shout-outs & more. Subscribe here: apostrophe.supercast.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From the apostrophe podcast network. Hello, I'm Jess Milton, and this is backstage at the Vinyl Cafe. Welcome, and welcome back to season eight of Backstage at the Vinyl Cafe. We've had an awesome summer, and I hope you have to. And now here we are, September. We're refreshed, mostly. were rejuvenated. Our cup is filled and we're ready to work, ready for routine, for schedules, even for alarm clocks. Although, oh my gosh, when it went off for the first time last week,

it felt like an assault. The effrontery! So maybe we're not ready for that, but we are ready for you and really happy to be back with you. We've got lots of great things lined up this season, and more postcards from Canada, more backstories from life on the road with Stuart McLean in the Vinyl Cafe, and of course, more laughter with Dave and Morley and everyone else who lives in that world. For those of you who might be new here, welcome. This is the place where we pull back the curtain a little. We revisit old stories. We share memories from the road.

and sometimes we stop and sit with why these stories still matter. Today, we're talking about school because school, especially at the beginning, isn't really about school. I mean, not entirely. My girls are in grade one and grade three this year. Annabelle, age six, is learning how to read, and I can feel her on the precipice of summer. thing big. She's like a little bird flapping her wings. She's up in the air, but she's not really flying yet. But I can tell that any day now, she's about to take flight. She's about to discover that there is a whole other world out there that she didn't even know existed. And I know

she's going to love it. And Eloise has been counting down the days until school starts. She is a star student and an absolute rock star on the playground. So she loves school because at this age, school is as much about everything between the learning as it is about the learning itself. It's about who shares their markers and what you do when the answer to that question is no one. It's about confidence as much as counting. It's about independence more than instruction. It's about learning when to go first and when to let others have a turn. It's about school buses and school lunches. And that's where we're going to start today with a story called school lunch. Just like the school itself, the best part of this story

isn't the main subject. It's the connective tissue, the unexpected. the thing that happens that is so much bigger than the thing you thought. You'll know what I mean when you hear it. This is Stuart McLean with school lunch. So after supper, on the night before the first day of school, Morley sent Dave and the kids to Lawler's drugs to buy school supplies. Morley stayed home. She had already done clothes, shoes, medical forms,

the dentist, and groceries. Dave stopped at the magazines and said, choose what you need and I'll meet you at the cash. Sam was first back. He dumped a handful of stuff on the counter and he said, there, can I have gum too? He had chosen a pink pearl eraser, a package of five eraser tips that fit on the top of pencils,

a bottle of white out, and a dispenser of correcto tape. What about something to put your mistakes into, said Dave? What about a binder? What about a pen? Pencils, said Sam, not pens. He came back a few moments later with five pencils and a red three-ring binder with Spider-Man on the front. There, he said, can I have some gum?

Stephanie chose an oversized nylon binder that zipped up, a package of six pastel-colored Hillary notebooks, a giant pack of loose leaf and a $49 fountain pen. No way, said Dave. Put the pen back. Can I have gum, she said? The next time Stephanie floated up to the cash, she was holding five little cardboard boxes with cellophane windows,

labels, she said. She had big white labels and small white labels and labels with fancy red borders and green-border labels and a package of little red dots. There wasn't enough stuff in their house for all the labels she had. Please, she said, I love peeling them off the paper. I love sticking them on things. Put the red dots back, said Dave.

He had to draw a line somewhere. And the fountain pen. Dave bought himself a wooden ruler with a metal ink strip for old times' sake. A small blue notebook, because the pages tore out so elegantly and a pack of gum. On their way home, they stopped for ice cream. The world seemed perfect. The end of another summer, his children beside him with their new stuff.

When they got home, Sam threw his bag on the couch. I got correcto tape, he said. You can cover anything. And an eraser, said Dave, and pencils. Morley was making coffee. Stephanie spread her new books out on the kitchen table. Should I use blue or green for history? she asked. What about the pink one, said Morley?

I always used pink for history. That's dumb, said Stephanie. Pink's for math. Morley wasn't about to argue. It was the end of a long day. She had been grocery shopping before supper. She was tired. She had spent longer than usual in the

supermarket, aimlessly gliding down the aisles, looking for things she could put in her children's lunch bags. Something new, something surprising, something they would eat. Just one day she wanted one of them to come home and say, gee, lunch was good. You hear that just once. You hear that just once, and you could die happy. Mostly what she heard was, I hate vanilla pudding. Don't send those yogurts with the exploding aluminum lids. Mostly what she got back was criticism and half-eaten lunches. What's your name? What's your name?

Who? Richard. It's good to have you here, Richard. I don't know whether I'm going to be able to get through this with you, Richard. That's the way. She was... She was having trouble with the lunches, if you remember. I'll just recap here.

We had honeysuckle rose, and then the kids went to Lawler's drugs to get some stuff, and Dave went with them. And then Morley went to the grocery store, and she was having a hard time getting lunch. She wasn't the only one. On the afternoon before the first day of school, the supermarket seemed to be full of women like her,

aisles of mothers trapped in the same vortex, defeated mothers with defeated eyes staring into the middle distance in search of school lunch Morley felt like she'd tried everything in the store at one time or another what kept her moving was the faint hope that there was

a new idea on a shelf somewhere she knew she was on a fool's mission she knew even if she found something that they had never tried she'd be crazy to buy it her enthusiasm for unproved items tempered by the knowledge that anything the kids turned their noses up at would be her lunch until it was finished.

That's why she didn't buy in bulk anymore, because she had learned when it came to school lunch, her children couldn't be trusted. Last year they said they liked mango juice. So she had bought flats of mango juice from one of those discount superstores, carrying them from the car and stacking them in the basement. Enough mango juice to see them through Christmas. A pile of mango juice as high as her waist. The day she packed the first mango juice in their lunch, they both came home and denied ever liking it.

Why did you give us that stuff? Morley drank mango juice at lunch every day for two months straight. She used it to wash down the bowl. prune apple cereal bars that no one else would eat. It was either that or throw the cereal bars out and she was damned if she was going to do that. Even Arthur, the dog, would only eat them grudgingly, leaving little mounds of wet oats around the house, which were not a pleasant thing to step in, especially if you stepped in them unexpectedly at night, in the dark, with bare feet. This year for the first day's lunch

Morley bought Kaiser rolls An expensive salami Some crisp new apples and chocolate milk And not the little ones, the big ones, full pints Short of stuffing their lunch bags with licorice Something that she had considered doing $2 worth of licorice each And maybe a Coke or a jolt cola

Nothing else gee mum great lunch short of stuffing their lunch bags with candies the Kaiser rolls and the expense of salami were the best that she could do the kids were in bed by 10 when she went into Sam's room to say goodnight he was reading Mad Magazine

be careful he said as she stepped over his clothes Sam had laid everything he was going to wear on the floor the red t-shirt tucked into the jeans his new sneakers sticking out from the bottom of the pant legs like he could slide into them Morley knelt down in the darkness and pulled off a price tag that was still attached to the jeans

Stephanie had all her notebooks stacked on her desk all neatly labeled she'd used the labels with the red borders for her name and put a large blank white one below it to fill in the name of the subject it's like Christmas Eve said Morley to Dave when she came downstairs It's like that perfect suspended moment on Christmas Eve when everyone's in bed and the presents are under the tree and the only thing left is potential

when everything has the possibility of perfection. Before she went to bed, Morley looked in on both her children one more time. Sam was sound asleep on his back, his hands folded behind his head, huge grin on his face. Stephanie still had her light on reading a fashion, magazine. Lights off, said Morley. And then she went back at the Sam's room and stood there for a moment, looking at him, smiling and asleep, reaching out with her fingers and touching her son's grin. And then she went to bed. And she lay in bed and she thought about the year ahead and

she felt pleased. First day of school was like launching a new ship. The kids had been in dry dock all summer. Tomorrow it was time to push them out to sea again. Everything was ship-shape. She had done everything she was supposed to do. She began to run through the day in her mind. She got up and checked the alarm. It was set. Their clothes were ready, their books were ready. She had bought a box of some awful cereal for breakfast, a cereal that would change the color of the milk they poured on it, to a bright primary color. a cereal with enough sugar in it to wake them up on the first early morning of the school year. And she imagined the perfect lunch that she had prepared, the chocolate milk, the good salami,

and she'd wrap the Kisers in Saran wrap, instead of wax paper so they could see what she had made them. She thought of these things, and they made her smile. And then as she lay in her bed in the darkness, Morley frowned. the lunch bags were missing. Each child had a reusable nylon lunch bag with a Velcro fastener at the top, and the lunchbags hadn't crossed her consciousness all summer. Morley frowned because she knew they weren't in the lunch bag drawer

where they were supposed to be. She rolled over, so she was looking towards the bedroom door, towards the stairs, and she tried to remember if maybe she'd washed the lunch bags. Maybe they were hanging in the basement. but she couldn't remember them at all, couldn't imagine where they might be. She was sure they weren't in the basement. Because she wanted the day to be perfect, she lay in bed, and in her imagination, she looked through the kitchen.

She did an inventory of the drawers and cupboards, but no matter where she looked, the bags were nowhere to be found. They weren't in the drawer where they belonged or the cupboard where she put things she wasn't using. She lay there for maybe ten minutes thinking about the lunch bags before she was suddenly seized. by a horrible notion. When the thought came, she sat up in bed abruptly, she knew exactly where the lunch bags were. She'd passed them a hundred times since school was out. They were in the kids' backpacks,

which were hanging downstairs by the back door, where the kids had left them in June, after the last day of school, where they'd been all summer, unpacked, and festering. Morley switched on the light beside her bed and got out of bed. She couldn't sleep without knowing the truth.

She retrieved Stephanie's backpack first, carrying it from the hook by the back door to the kitchen table. It must have weighed 50 pounds. Crammed with every book Stephanie had used in grade 11, how could she have forgotten about this? She pulled out the books one by one, and she made a pile on the kitchen table until she got to the very bottom of the backpack.

And there at the bottom of the pack was a blue nylon lunch bag with a Velcro fastener, as flat as a pancake. Morley opened it slowly and peered inside. Everything had fused together. The weight of the book squeezing the life out of the uneaten lunch.

So it had hardened into a leather-like strip. Morley put the bag down and walked across the kitchen and got a pair of yellow rubber gloves from under the sink. She put them on and then she pulled at the leather thing in her daughter's lunch bag. It came out in one piece. It didn't resemble any kind of food Morley remembered having in her kitchen. In fact, it didn't resemble food. It looked more like the pictures she had seen in National Geographic magazine of dead bog people. She put it back in the bag.

Sam's lunch bag was on the top of his backpack. Morley thought she remembered packing him a pair on the last day of school and a container of yogurt, one of the ones with the exploding aluminum covers. She pulled the lunch bag out of the backpack and opened it carefully. It was dark and damp in there. It was like a compost heap. And for a moment she thought of reaching in

and then she thought better of it. Instead of reaching in, she closed the bag and put it back where she found it at the top of Sam's backpack, and she hung the backpack up on one of the hooks by the back door, besides Stephanie's. And she went back upstairs and she got into bed, but not before she had reset the alarm clock for 15 minutes earlier. So there would be time in the morning for the moment she imagined now as she lay in bed, the moment when Sam and Stephanie were eating the sugar cereal, and she said, where are your lunch bags? And she sent them to find them for themselves.

It was 1.30 in the morning. They'd be up in less than six hours. As she drifted to sleep, Morley thought of a bottle of whiteout on Sam's desk, and she wondered when he would first have to use it. And whether maybe tomorrow she should go to Lawler's drugs and get Stephanie that fountain pen. prepared to do anything, anything, to make the year ahead a perfect year for her children. Anything but cleaning out those bags.

That was the story we call school lunch. It's an old one. It was recorded right here at the Glenn Gould Studio back in 1998. That is the exact same place where I'm recording this podcast right now, Glenn Gould Studio. It is so fun that we are here almost 30 years later playing that story. I wish Richard was here with us like he was in that story. What a great moment that was. But luckily, Louise Curtis and I are here with our good friend Greg DeClute,

and we can always count on Greg to give us a giggle here and there. We're going to take a short break now, but we'll be back in a couple of minutes with another story. So stick around, especially you. Greg. Welcome back. Time for our second story now. This is Stuart McLean with Planet Boy. Morley can pinpoint the exact minute when Sam received his first phone call from a girl. Tuesday, October the 14th, 6.48 p.m. She was getting ready for book club, that's why she knows it was a Tuesday, and she was cutting it close, totally watching the

clock. Could have been 647 or it could have been 649, but it wasn't 650. She was in the car at 650. She remembers the clock on the dash. It was 650. And that meant she could make it if she was lucky with the lights. And just before that, just before 650 and she could make it if she was lucky. Just as she was about to leave the house, Morley remembers the telephone ringing, remembers hesitating by the back door, conflicted, thinking she should get out of there fast in case it was for her, thinking she should stick around for the same reason. Maybe someone was calling because they needed a ride. She remembers standing by the door not knowing whether she should stay or go as clearly as if it happened yesterday. Sam, she said, can you get that? Sam,

says hello and she's staring at him with her eyebrows up and he's staring back at her and that's when she felt it before he turned away from her before he started using the monosyllables that she was so used to hearing herself before any of that she felt the barometric pressure in the room dropped dramatically and she knew she knew right away it was like they were in a plane and the window beside her had blown out there was a whoosh it was the sound of his childhood being sucked out of the room. He said yes. He said, I don't know. He said maybe. He said yes again. Then he said okay and hung up without saying goodbye. Morley said, who was that? No one, said Sam. And he walked out of the kitchen leaving Morley alone by the back door,

6.50 on the nose when she got in the car. It happened again a few weeks later and then again, and then it began to happen a lot. Girls. Girls calling her little. boy. Took a while before Morley realized that Sam wasn't getting it. Girls got it. Girls were out there on the far side of the fence, firmly in adolescence, and they were reaching over the fence trying to tug her little boy across it. But Sam, bless his little heart, wasn't getting it at all. He saw the fence all right. Morley was sure he knew the fence was there. He had, after all seen the film at school every year since grade four. But he was still only interested in throwing things at it or running a stick along the pickets. The idea of scaling it of dropping down onto the other side hadn't occurred to him.

The idea that something was going on over there that he might find interesting had never entered his mind. And then one Thursday night after supper, Sam said, there's a dance tomorrow at school. And there it was again, that whoosh sound. The air going out of the plain of childhood. Morley felt her stomach drop. The plane was coming down too fast. She knew this was going to happen one day, but not so soon. She didn't want the flight to end, not yet. It was a flurry of calls between eight and nine that night.

At least three of them were from girls. The dance was supposed to start at seven. Dave said, I'll drive you. Sam said, I'm going with Murphy. Sam's best friend, Murphy, moved into the neighborhood a year ago. He's smaller than Sam and he knows more about movies than any other human being than Sam has ever met. Murph, who taught Sam to sleep on his side. I figured this out at camp, he explained earnestly the first night he had a sleepover with Sam.

They had really crappy beds. He was lying on the top bunk in Sam's bedroom. Sam immediately worrying if maybe they had really crappy beds too. If I lay on my back, the mattress curled up on either side of my head. head. Have you ever seen King Rat? No, said Sam. He hadn't. This was before they learned that Sam had never seen any of the movies Murphy had seen. It doesn't matter, said Murphy. And then he said, did you know the air you breathe out is heavier than oxygen? So if you sleep on your back, said Murphy, and the mattress is curled up, all the bad air bills up around your head and you can

suffocate. I was lucky, said Murphy. I kept waking up just in time. And when I woke up, I'd wave my hand, across my face and that would clear the bad air. And that's when I figured out if I slept on my side with my face on the edge of the mattress, the bad air would fall over the edge. What about the guy on the lower bunk, said Sam? I hated the guy on the lower bunk, said Murphy. That's Murphy. I'll drive you both to the dance, said Dave. Just to the corner, said Sam, not to the front door. Just to the corner, said Dave. We have to leave at 6.45 so we won't be late, said Sam. On the nose, said Dave. And so it was that on Friday night, Sam and Murphy, both of them wearing their favorite clothes, arrived at the school dance at 7 o'clock on the nose, standing at the entrance to the gym side by side as if they

were standing in front of the gates of heaven, standing small and standing confused. How come no one else is here, said Sam. Are you sure no one else is here? said Murphy. Murphy had taken off his glasses in the car. Without his glasses, Murphy was virtually blind. To Sam, the gym looked dark and foreboding, unfamiliar and empty. To Murphy, the gym looked like a blotch of mysterious colors, like a dark, impressionistic painting. Are you sure this is the gym? It was the gym, all right, but it wasn't the gym they knew from gym class. There was a stage at the far end and two huge speaker columns on either side. There was a mirrored ball and a spotlight.

And in front of the spotlight, there was a revolving disc with a green section and a red section and a yellow section. So the light in the room kept changing. Murphy squinting. There's something matter with the light, he said. We're too early, said Sam. We'll go to the corner. We'll come back. Murphy reached for Sam's elbow.

and they headed down the gym ramp towards the boys' locker room like two old tailors. I thought it started at seven, said Murphy. They walked to the corner. They went into Snyders. Murphy bought licorice nibs in a vanilla coke. Sam didn't buy anything. Sam had exactly $5.25 in his wallet. $5 to get into the dance, $25 in case he needed the phone.

When he finished the nibs, Murphy bought some chips, and they walked around the block while he shared the chips, and then they walked around the block again. Then they went into Lawler's pharmacy, and Murphy bought a stick of deodorant, his first time ever. They took it to the washroom at Snyders, and they opened it up. How do you do this, said Murphy. You put it on where you sweat, said Sam. Murphy rubbed the bar deodorant against his forehead and along the back of his neck. Then they went back to school. This time they weren't the only ones there.

The first person Sam saw was Miss Young, their math teacher. Miss Young is six foot one inch tall. Behind her back, her colleagues refer to Miss Young as her hugeness. Miss Young was standing by the gym door talking to a girl Sam didn't know. Miss Young was wearing a dark blue shirt and a crocheted vest and the shortest skirt Sam had ever seen. Sam took one look at Miss Young's thighs and looked away quickly. Her thighs made him nervous.

His forehead felt hot and sticky. Perspiration was beating at the back of his neck. He wished he'd put on deodorant. There was something vaguely familiar about the girl Ms. Young was talking to. Sam felt he knew her from something. somewhere. He watched the girl touch her lips self-consciously. He thought, that girl reminds me of Allison Metcalf, except she was taller than Allison Metcalf, and her hair was fluffy, and Allison's hair wasn't like that, and Allison didn't wear lipstick or earrings, and there was something wrong

with this girl's eyes. Her eyelashes were black and spiky. Hi, Sam, said the girl. Hello, Allison? Mumbled Sam, feeling suddenly that this dance was not a place where he belonged. There were things happening in the gym that Sam felt he shouldn't be exposed to. Murphy said, who was that? But Sam didn't answer. Sam was staring at Mr. O'Neill. Mr. O'Neill who taught them social studies,

Mr. O'Neill who always wore a corduroy suit and a knitted tie. Mr. O'Neill who was leaning against the gym wall wearing black pants, pants, a black turtleneck, a black leather jacket, his hair shiny and greased back. Murphy's still squinting at Alice and said, who was that? And still, Sam didn't answer. Sam was frozen. The whole thing was too much for him. The music was too loud.

The girls were too tall. The gym too dark. The teachers too weird. Sam felt overwhelmed. Murphy said, I'm going to ask Emily to dance. And Murphy let go of Sam's arm and Sam watched him walk across the gym, realizing too late that in his myopic state, Murphy was about to make a terrible blunder. Trying to navigate without glasses,

Murphy was about to confuse Emily Traversy with Elliot Katz. It was an honest mistake. Elliot wears his hair long and tonight, especially for the dance, Elliot was wearing it in a ponytail, just like Emily. Sam took off, but he was only halfway across the room when he saw Murphy tap Elliot on the shoulder with a flourish, saw Murphy lean forward and whisper something into Elliot's ear, watched Elliot stagger backwards, watched Elliot winding up. Sam grabbing Murphy and pulling him away as Elliot's fists sailed through the air.

Come on, said Sam to Murphy. He was only joking, said Sam to Elliot. Just at this moment, just as Sam was dragging Murphy out of the gym, Elliot cats pointing at them as they went and saying something to a group of boys hanging around the stage. Just as Sam and Murphy were making their getaway, a girl wearing big hoop earrings, a midriff t-shirt and low-cut jeans was standing on the front stoop of Sam's house. Just as Sam and Murphy disappeared down the ramp that leads out of the gym and into the boys' long, locker room, the girl who'd been waiting with her hands on her hips for her mother who had

driven her there to Sam's house to leave. Just as Sam and Murphy disappeared from the gym, the girl in the mid-drift t-shirt and the low-cut jeans on Sam's front stoop, opened her purse, took out a stick of lip gloss, cherry, ran it over her lips, checked that her mother had really gone and reached up and rang the bell. Hello, said, Dave, who answered the door. Hello, said the girl, I'm Emma. Where's Sam? I'm his date. Now there are moments in a man's life when something happens

that is so unexpected, so beyond the realm of what he's considered might happen at that moment, that a man must give himself over to the moment and not try to impose his will upon it, because under the circumstances, it's likely he will have no will. Hello, Emma, said Dave, knowing as he spoke the next three words, that he was for all intents and purposes abandoning his own free will. Hello, Emma, he said, I'm Sam's dad.

And that's how it came to pass that as Sam and Murphy were slipping into the science room, seeking sanctuary from the posse that was seeking them. That Dave, with one last forlorn look at the television, he'd been watching a bootlegged video of a 1969 Monkees concert shot in Poland that Dave was backing his car down the driveway, driving Emma to the dance, trying to make small talk with a girl who wasn't the least bit interested in small talk or in him. He said he would go to the dance with me, said Emma, sitting beside him, but staring ahead. What a loser, said Emma.

I should have asked Tim. Dave didn't know what to say to that. He had been completely thrown back on his heels by this child. He was only intent on getting her to the dance, on finding his son, and when he found him, on instructing him in a few of the rudimentary courtesies of dating. That light was yellow, said Emma. Who taught you how to drive? Sorry, muttered Dave.

Honestly, said Emma. Meanwhile, Sam and Murphy, who have sneaked into the same thing, science room and are crouched behind the demonstration table at the front, trying to be as quiet and as unnoticeable as two boys on the lamb can be, are suddenly aware that they are not the only ones in the room. ...himself up young and Mr. O'Neill. Brace. Dave, at this moment, is not 50 yards away.

Dave is standing at the gym door beside Emma. What do you mean you're leaving Emma saying, you can't leave? I told my mother you'd look after me. Dave standing there wondering what could possibly happen next. And what happens next is Sam and Murphy pelting along the hallway, Sam and Murphy galloping by so fast that they don't see Dave and they don't see Emma. Sam and Murphy and hot on their heels a pack of other boys Dave has never seen in his life. And Dave, who has arrived at this dance irritated with his son,

planning to give his son a piece of his mind, misunderstands what's going on, thinks to himself, and not unkindly, they're playing tag. He thinks this with great fondness, because he is suddenly remembering the dances he went to at the community hall when he was a young boy in Cape Breton, when he was still too shy to dance himself.

The nights he spent running around with his pals, they ran around all night thinking they were impressing, girls with how fast they could run. How quick they could duck and weave. He once asked morally about this. When you were a kid, he said, and you went to a dance, what were you thinking? I used to think that the boy of my dreams would appear and ask me to dance, and it would be like dancing with a prince, she said.

But as soon as you got to the dance, you learned pretty quickly that there were no princes, and that the boys who were there were the same boys from school. and they only liked the slow dances. And when you finally figured that out, it would be time for a slow dance, and you'd see someone like Jonathan McDermott walking across the gym. Jonathan sat beside me in math, she said,

and I would start to pray that he wasn't walking toward me. And, of course, I knew he was, and there was nothing I could do about it. I couldn't say no, because, you know, you didn't want to hurt his feelings. That was me, said Dave. What, said Morley? I was Jonathan McDermott, said Dave.

I spent years walking across the room while the girls I was walking towards were praying that I would stay put. Or not. Or not, said Morley, or mostly, said Dave, I didn't cross at all. And that's why Dave was delighted when Sam ran past him and he thought he was playing tag. That's why Dave was happy his son was ducking and weaving instead of dancing, even if it was totally inappropriate. Somehow his son had agreed to come to this dance with a girl who was now, by all accounts, Dave's date. And he had done this apparently without any understanding of what he had done.

If Sam was capable of that level of misunderstanding, what were the chances he would have had a successful date? What were the chances he would have navigated the night with any grace? Dave looked down at Emma. She was standing there with her arms crossed. Dave was having enough trouble with her himself. The moment he saw him running by, Dave realized that Sam was lost on Planet Boy.

He'd come to the school intending to give his son a lecture, to teach him a thing or two about girls. He decided to leave him where he was. And before anything happened that would change his mind, there was Emma. I'm thirsty, she was saying. I want a Coke. The dance ended at 11.

At five past 11, Emma met Dave where they'd agreed to meet. On the bench in front of the principal's office, there were three new girls with her. I told them you'd drive them home too, said Emma. Dave didn't get home until almost midnight. Morley's still up. We're the boys, she said. Aren't the boys with you? I thought Murphy's dad was picking them up, he said.

He couldn't find them, said Morley. He called, I told him not to worry, I said they must have gone with you. When Dave got back to the school, the lights in the gymnasium were on. The DJ had left, and most of the mess had been tidied up. The stage had been put away, and the speakers were gone. And the only person left was the school janitor, alone at the far end of the gym, mopping the floor. He was wearing headphones.

He didn't hear Dave, and Dave didn't disturb him. He wasn't really worried about Sam and Murphy. There were two of them. They were good boys. They would look after each other. As he walked through the school, he started to think about the year that he was in grade six. And somehow he landed on his geography notebook and on a picture of a codfish, his mother had helped him draw. He was so lost in the memory that he almost missed the boy.

they were in the kindergarten. He walked right by it, noticing at some level of his consciousness that the lights were on and thinking that that was odd, but not really noticing until he had walked past and then stopping and staring. He opened the door quickly and peered in,

and there they were, the two of them, squatting on the floor. Murphy with his hair and his eye, Sam in his faded red Spider-Man sweatshirt. Most of the boys David's seen had been wearing oversized sports jerseys. Sam's sweatshirt was at least two sizes too small. Everything finds its level. Sam and Murphy were playing with a Lego.

They didn't notice, Dave. So he just watched for a moment. Watched the wonder of boys. big blocks and fire engines, toy trains and television, bikes and balls. They had a tower of Lego as high as he'd ever seen. Dave had his hands in his coat pocket. He was fiddling with something and he didn't know what it was. He pulled it out.

It was Emma's cherry-flavored lip bomb. She'd given it to him to hold when she started to dance. He pulled the top off and ran it over his. his lips. Not bad. One day these guys would get to try it, but not now. He could have been angry with him. He could have come on heavy. He could have said, what do you think you're doing? But they looked so happy. What was the point? Instead, he opened the door slowly and he wandered in and he said, hey, the dance is over. Then he squatted down on his heels and said, what are you building anyway? It's a tower, said Murphy, looking at it blearily, adding, I think.

It's a pretty tall tower, said Dave. Can I help? Thank you very much. That was Planet Boy. We recorded that story in Halifax, Nova Scotia back in 2003. All right, that's it for today. But we will be back here next week with another Dave and Morley story. How was Dave to know Morley was talking about her hairdresser? He used to know what I like, she said. But I've changed.

I'm ready to experiment. I've seen things in magazines. I'd like him to try on me. That's next week on the podcast. I hope you'll join us. Backstage at the Vinyl Cafe is part of the apostrophe podcast network. The recording engineer is Got the Giggles Greg DeCleut. Theme music is by Danny Michelle.

And the show is produced by Louise Curtis, Greg DeClute, and me, Jess Milton. Let's meet again next week. Until then, so long for now.