Backstage at the Vinyl Cafe - The Mistakes We Make - Petit Lac Noir & Dog Pills

Episode Date: February 3, 2023

“Bonjour,” he said. “Je m’appelle Dave.”Yup, sometimes things go wrong. It happens to the best of us. Especially on the Vinyl Cafe, as you’ll hear in Stuart McLean’s Dave and Morley stories Dog Pills and Petit Lac Noir. Also on this week’s episode, Jess shares a surprising and funny backstory about the inspiration behind Dave’s mistake in Dog Pills. 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 Café. Welcome. We have two stories for you today. Two stories about mistakes. The wheels are coming off the bus. The train is going off the tracks. So buckle up. First up, this one. This is Stuart McLean with Dog Pills. Neither Dave nor his dog Arthur had a great autumn. Dave was just out of sorts. He wasn't sleeping well at night, and during the day he felt dragged out. He felt tired and listless, run down.

He got a cold and it lingered for weeks. Arthur the dog wasn't himself either, not by a long shot. For example, you'd expect Arthur to jump for joy if you took his leash off the hook by the back door. But instead of jumping up with his tail wagging, Arthur would hear the jangle of the leash and his shoulders would droop and he would pull himself to the door as if he was going to be ridden around the block instead of walked. Morley took Arthur to the vet. Vet said it was his thyroid, and he gave Morley a bottle of thyroid pills,

and pills for his skin, and pills for parasites, just to be sure, said the vet. You can never tell. And that raised the question of how you give a dog a pill. And that raised the question of how you give a dog a pill. Morley tried hiding the pills in Arthur's food, and Arthur ate everything but the pills. Next, she pushed the pills into a ball of peanut butter, which Arthur was happy to take from her, except he wouldn't swallow it. He'd work away at the peanut butter in his mouth, and then he'd spit the pills out.

Vet said, place the pills on the back of his tongue. Hold his mouth shut and blow on his nose. He'll swallow. Vet didn't mention how you get a handful of pills onto the back of a dog's tongue. But Morley realized she already knew the answer to that. You delegate it. And that's how Dave got the job of giving Arthur his pills. And that's how Dave began and ended every day this fall.

Some people meditate. Some people meditate. Some people pray. Some people drink lattes and read the morning paper. Dave got down on all fours and pried open his dog's mouth. And a dog's mouth is not necessarily the place where you might want to begin and end every day. But as they say, love me, love my dog. And Dave loves Arthur. So although Dave didn't love the task in the moment of the task, he liked the idea of it because he was doing this thing out of love. And so he kept at it until the morning his daughter Stephanie, Stephanie home from college,

watched him doing this thing with Arthur and the pills. And she said, you take better care of that dog than you do of yourself. It was just an offhand remark. But it was one of those remarks that had a ring of truth. And didn't Dave end up in a health food store a week later? Not sure why he was there, what he wanted, let alone needed. He would have asked for advice, but he didn't feel like he even knew the questions. So he walked up and down the aisle self-consciously, and he began to pick things up at random.

He chose a little brown bottle of bilberry extract because it reminded him of Lord of the Rings. brown bottle of bilberry extract because it reminded him of Lord of the Rings. That's good stuff, said the man stocking the shelves. Most people overlook supplements for their eyes. Not me, said Dave. And that was when Dave recalled that the winner of a North American wide investment contest a few years ago was a nine-year-old girl who beat out all the investment experts by assembling a portfolio of stocks that she chose because, well, because she thought their name sounded cute. Dave set off with a renewed resolve, cruising down the aisles on a quest for cute. Cruising down the aisles on a quest for cute.

Ginkgo biloba was the first thing that caught his eye. And then St. John's wort. Made him think of a little furry creature you could train to help you with chores around the house. When he spotted devil's claw, he decided to broaden his definition of cute. He picked it up, too. And then he threw in a bottle of shark cartilage for good measure. He was going to go for the salmon oil, but thought, why swim with a salmon if you could swim with the sharks? He stopped at Lawler's Drugs on the way home, and he got two days of the week pill organizers, a green one for him and a purple one for Arthur.

Jess, I think we've got an above-average audience here. He went home and he sorted the pills into the plastic containers. And then he went back to the drugstore and bought a case of oxygenated water to wash them down. He couldn't wait to get up the next morning and see what would happen. Well, I'll tell you what happened. Absolutely nothing. $168 worth of concentrates and extracts. Oil and cartilage, and he didn't feel a bit of difference, no difference at all. But he kept taking his pills because, well, like the vet said, you can never tell. Arthur didn't seem to be doing much

better himself. And then one morning, maybe a week after he had begun, Dave woke up and he came downstairs groggy and thick-headed and he began to stumble through his morning ritual. Coffee on, coax Arthur into the kitchen, hold him down with one hand, grab the pills with the other, flip the pill organizer open, pry the dog's jaws apart. And when that ordeal was finished, Dave threw his pills back with some water. Now, if he had had a cup of coffee, Dave wouldn't have grabbed the purple box This is the part of the story where I catch up to you.

And if he had had a cup of coffee, he wouldn't have swallowed the handful of pills without at least considering the funny look that passed over Arthur's face. It took Dave about five seconds to realize what he had done. Of course, the first thing that he thought was that he was going to die. Second thing was that he couldn't tell anyone what he had just done. Of course, they'd know soon enough once he was dead. But it'd be far better if they didn't know why he was dead. If people found out that he had poisoned himself by taking his dog's medication, it would just make a mockery of his whole life. It would be the kind of demise that even his best friends couldn't mention

without a smile twitching around their lips. that even his best friends couldn't mention without a smile twitching around their lips. And by the time the manner of his passing became common currency, perfect strangers would be trotting it out at cocktail parties. Did you hear about the bozo who killed himself by taking his dog medication? Can you believe that? He spent the entire day monitoring his body, scanning for arrhythmias and dizziness,

breathing deeply to make sure his lungs were clear, checking his eyes in the hand mirror. Around about 10 o'clock, he screwed up all his courage and he went over to Lawler's Drugstore, to the back of the store, to the public blood pressure chair, a place he vowed he would never return to. After the sorry morning, the cuff had seized his arm and he'd made a public spectacle of himself trying to get out of the chair. His blood pressure

shooting up into the stratosphere for everyone to see. They had to call for the fire department and use the jaws of life to cut him out. To his amazement, his blood pressure was 120 over 70, better than normal. He went to see his friend Kenny Wong, who runs a neighborhood cafe called Wong's Scottish Meat Pies. Do I look pale, he said. You look fine, said Kenny. Really, said Dave. You look as strong as a pit bull, said Kenny. Really, said Dave. You look as strong as a pit bull, said Kenny.

Well, what do you mean by that, said Dave. He went to Lawler's again at lunchtime. His blood pressure was even better. 115 over 75. You okay, asked Doug Lawler, you look a little droopy. I'm fine, said Dave. In fact, Dave was feeling better than he had felt for months. He was feeling frisky. When he got home, he looked in the mirror and he thought there was a nice glossy sheen to his coat. Hair. And that night he had one of the best nights sleep he had had for a long time.

He woke up the next morning feeling refreshed and alert. So he got up and he went downstairs and he did what any sensible person would do. Exactly. Including the pills for the parasites. Just to be sure. He gave Arthur the stuff he had picked up for himself. As Arthur gulped down the last tablet, he looked up at Dave reproachfully. You'll be fine, said Dave. Just don't say anything to anyone.

To make it up to Arthur, Dave took him for a walk. And as they headed out the door towards the park, Dave realized he was really looking forward to the walk himself. Arthur darted this way and that through the trees. And instead of hauling him back onto the path, that through the trees and instead of hauling him back onto the path, Dave trotted along right beside him. And then they spotted a couple of squirrels playing in a tree. They stopped and watched together. Later, as man and dog trotted out of the park, Dave thought to himself, I haven't felt this good for years. And Arthur was doing just fine himself. And so Dave

just kept going. And the two of them seemed to flourish. And so it was two weeks ago when Dave reached for the dog's pills, his pills now. And he saw he only had two days left in the bottle. He was seized with a spasm of anxiety. I'm supposed to take him back for a checkup when the pills are finished, said Morley. And when she got back later that day, she said, Vet says Arthur's just fine. Yeah, yeah, said Dave, but what about his pills? He renewed the prescription, right? No, said Morley. Nothing. He's finished with his medication. Oh, said Dave, his shoulder's drooping.

Dave's still going for a lot of walks. In fact, he's taken to walking home from work the long way, route that takes him right by Arthur's vet. A couple of times Dave stopped and stared longingly through the vet's window. And he's thought of going in and making an appointment for himself. So far, he has resisted the temptation. Thank you.

Oh, Dave, there's always something. You know, when we put the show together and we were looking for stories about mistakes, there were like 70 different stories that could have fit the bill. Anyway, that's the one we call Dog Pills, and it's one of many stories about mistakes. You know, especially when there's a story like that, it reminds me of the fact that everyone used to always ask me, is Stuart Dave? And the short answer is no, he's not. He wasn't. Dave is not based on Stuart. And truthfully, Stuart was not all that Dave-like in nature. I feel like there's some of you who might actually be disappointed to hear that. It's weird, right? And with Dave, there's just something about the way Sam sees the world that's similar to how Stuart saw the world, full of, I don't know, possibility and promise, and yet somehow out of reach, somehow out of touch or otherworldly or something.

Anyway, that's another story for another day. Most of the David Morley stories aren't based on anything true, but they kind of often feel sort of true because Stewart wrote about these characters for so long that they felt real. They were real to us. Maybe to you, too. But that one, the one about the dog pills, actually did happen, but not to Stewart. It happened to Stewart's long-suffering story editor, Meg Masters. All right, let me set the scene for you. One morning, well, hold on, let me set the scene for you. One morning, well, hold on before I set the scene. I have no idea what mornings are like in your house, but I can tell you what they're like in my house. They are bonkers. It's like a four-ring circus with zero ringmaster.

Each of us, Josh, my husband, Annabelle, who's three now, Eloise, who's five, and me, each of us in our own ring at this crazy circus with our own act, like juggling, tightrope walking, maybe in Eloise's case, knife juggling, like not literally, but God, it feels like it sometimes. Anyway, each of these acts is happening at the same time. And it was like that in Meg's house when her kids were younger too. And in the morning in question, the morning that I'm trying to tell you about, it was even worse because Meg woke up with this crazy headache and she, you know, sort of made her way downstairs and to start the morning routine, which should have begun with giving her cat the thyroid medication. She had this old cat

who was on thyroid medication and she started to reach for the pill bottle and then she thought, oh my God, I have to take some Tylenol or I'm going to die. So she grabbed the Tylenol bottle as well as the cat's thyroid medication. And she put both bottles on the counter and she opened them up and she tossed her pill back and swallowed it. And after it was already down her throat, she realized that wasn't her pill. That was her cat's pill. She realized she had accidentally taken her cat's thyroid medication. Skip ahead two hours or so, and Stuart calls her to talk through story ideas.

This, by the way, is what they did. This was their process. He'd call Meg, and they'd just chat. Meg had as much to do with the story ideas and the construction of the stories as Stuart did. So Stuart calls her up, and he starts the conversation the same way you would. How are you? And Meg says, I don't know. I took my cat's medication.

So I'm obsessively monitoring myself for symptoms and reaction. And that's when Meg and Stuart both realized that this was one of their Dave moments as they used to call it. It was no longer Meg's story. It was Stuart's and therefore Dave's. And that story that you just heard, Dog Pills, started the same way so many of the Dave Morley stories started, with someone calling Stuart and saying, you'll never believe what just happened. That's kind of how it worked. One of us, long suffering story editor Meg Masters, or associate producer Louise Curtis or recording engineer Greg DeClude or music producer Julie Penner or any one of Stuart's friends or neighbors, someone would just call him up and say, the craziest thing just happened to me. And then he would just sort of take that ball and run with it.

Anyway, that's the back story to that story. And I think of Meg and her cat every time I hear that story. And maybe now you will too. We have to take a short break right now, but we will be back in a couple of minutes with another Dave and Morley story. This one about a renovation that Dave and Morley do at a rented cottage. What could possibly go wrong? You'll see. Welcome back. Time for the second story now.

This is Petit Lac Noir. No one ever gasps in awe when they see the Laurentian mountains for the first time. Rather than awe, first-time visitors who've spent a morning being toured through Les Laurentides are more apt to turn to whoever it is that's been driving them and ask that mortifying question so many have asked before them. When do we get to the mountains? They are, admittedly, more hills than mountains. The Laurentians roll rather than tower, and they roll with a dignity that befits one of

the oldest mountain ranges in the world. The Laurentians and the pleasing lakes that dot the hills make you feel that there is both comfort and constancy to be had in this constantly changing changing world. Ah, tous les lacs de Laurentides, lacs Marois, lacs Saint-Amour, lacs de Cézille, et tous les little lakeside villages. Saint-Sauveur, Saint-Rémy, Val-de-Bois, and of course, Notre-Dame-des-Pleines. Hardly a village, really. One gas station, two general stores, a Catholic church, and a handful of cottages. Notre-Dame-des-Pleines and Petit Lac-Noir. The little village and the little lake lapping just over the hill, just behind the church, where Jean-François Clément and his wife Marie-Josée have whiled away summer afternoon since, well, since before Jean-Francois was a boy.

And before. Every Friday at 5.30 precisely, Jean-Francois closes his office. He's a small animal vet. And if someone were to arrive at, say, 5.25, he would, well, I would like to help you, he might say. Mais le bureau est fermé. And he would give you, or whomever it was, standing there holding their sick cat or spastic dog directions to the nearest emergency clinic.

He would, incidentally, mean it. Jean-Francois is nothing if not both earnest and honest. He would like to help you, but how could he at 5.30 on Friday? 5.30 on Friday is when he picks up Marie-José and they drive, like his father did before him, to the cottage for the weekend. Stopping on the way, of course, like his father did, at the Boulangerie in Shawbridge to pick up a country loaf and a baguette. The idea of phoning Marie-José and leaving later wouldn't occur to Jean-Francois. 5.30 is when you leave. The cottage has been in Jean-Francois's family for five generations. For five generations, Clémence have been learning lessons from the mountains. And what they have learned is to pray at the altar of tradition. The cottage and everything about it, the way you get there and the things you do when you arrive,

has been passed down like a religious relic. It is a cathedral of constancy. Nothing has changed since it was built. Now, you mustn't get the idea that it's run down. It's been kept up perfectly, but not updated. It's one of those endangered species, the cottage of the old style. There's an indoor toilet now, but there's also a wood stove and a summer kitchen. Four generations of Clemence and now Jean-François V. They've argued about this,

he and Marie-Josée. Ils sont tous morts, vos parents, vos grands-papas. C'est votre tour. Jean-François will hear none of it. The Laurentians, you might say, suit him to a T. To put it precisely, like the mountains, he is not a man who

embraces change. For Jean-Francois, je me souviens, the words on the license plate of his Ford station wagon, the exact same car his father favored, aren't a political statement. For Jean-Francois, je me souviens is a way of life. Every Friday at 5.30 precisely, he and Marie-José drive north, and every August, like his father and grandfather before him, they spend the entire month at the cottage. After all, is there anything more pleasant or more reassuring

than an afternoon at Petit Lac Noir? Marie-José on the chaise lounge reading Marie Claire and sipping homemade lemonade. Jean-François trimming the front lawn, the lawn his great-grandfather planted and cared for. Keeping it up is Jean-François' pride and joy. That's how they spent the last Saturday of this August, most of it anyway.

Jean-François puttering with the grass, Marie-José reading magazines, though after lunch, Marie-José did set Jean-Francois to work in the garden, a huge bed of wildflowers that stretches right across the front of the cottage. I want it looking its very best, she said. Hey, remember who's coming. I want it looking its very best, she said. Hey, remember who's coming. They were expecting guests, a younger couple who they befriended years ago and they hadn't seen in, could it be that long, donc, a decade.

At five o'clock precisely, Jean-Francois came in, took off his gardening gloves and said, Marie glanced at the clock over the kitchen door. It was time for his Saturday swim. Jean-Francois has a dip every Saturday at five, until the Saturday after Labor Day when he folds his trunks and puts them away until St. Jean-Baptiste. She smiled at him and reached out and touched his face. The scars on his cheek were raised and a little inflamed. It was hot. He'd been

working hard. The scars were one of the great lessons in Jean Francois's life. He got them in an altercation with a deranged cockatoo. For the first 10 years of his practice, he didn't treat birds at his clinic. But after a protracted campaign waged by his receptionist, an impatient and flighty girl, he relented and agreed to treat the cockatoo, the first and the last bird he ever admitted. He had stayed late, as was his habit, on a Tuesday night, Tuesday night being the night he does the books.

So he was, as fate would have it, without backup when he went down to the basement to check the assorted dogs, cats, rodents, and solitary bird, which appeared to be going bald, losing feathers to some unknown malaise. He was holding the cockatoo up to his face and whispering to it in that ridiculous baby style that birds seem to encourage, thinking while he did it that he might have been too inflexible about birds, that perhaps his receptionist had been right all along, that he should reconsider. He wondered what he might possibly say to her when the cockatoo abruptly turned and said something to him that sounded disturbingly adult.

Something you would never hear in church. And then the bird sank his beak into Jean-Francois' cheek and wouldn't let go, or maybe couldn't let go. Both Jean-Francois and the cockatoo panicked when they realized what had happened, and the two of them began flapping wildly, the bird shredding Jean-Francois' cheek with his claws until Jean-Francois realized panic wasn't going to get him anywhere.

And he stumbled into the OR, grabbed a needle that he had prepared for the next day's surgery, and plunged it into the bird's back, anesthetizing it. Then he drove himself to emergency at Hotel Dieu with a drug cockatoo dangling from his face, like an earring. This was over 30 years ago. The intern who removed the bird still tells the story at dinner parties. I thought the guy was crazy, he had began. He was barely coherent.

He was screaming, it's going to wake up, it's going to wake up. I said, that parrot isn't going to wake up. It's going to wake up. I said, that parrot isn't going to wake up. That parrot is dead. He said, no, no, it's just resting. Jean-Francois' wound got infected and healed poorly. And he learned his lesson. It wasn't a new one, more a confirmation than a lesson, really, but there you have it, plain as day, change never led to any good. From then on, he stuck to dogs and cats. He went to the cottage on

the weekends and to Old Orchard Beach in Maine every July. The scars slowly faded with the years, and these days only announce themselves when Jean-Francois is tired or upset, and he does his best to avoid both. Dave met Jean-Francois the summer after he and Morley were married. They met when Dave and Morley rented a cottage just down the road from the Clermonts. That was the summer Dave and Morley had already spent what little vacation money they had on a trip to Holland. They had flown there for a weekend in February so Morley could fulfill one of her lifetime dreams and skate along the frozen canals.

Dave heard about it, the cottage down the road from the Clement Place, from an old friend in Montreal. You'd love it there, he said. No one will bother you, and it would be cheap. This was, as I said, a summer when cheap was important. His friend called back a week later. You can have it for free, he said, all you have to do is a few chores. Cool, said Dave. They left at the beginning of August in Morley's old orange and white Volkswagen van. The trip took almost ten hours. They went along old highway No. 7, stopping every couple of hours for coffee or a cheese factory outside Smith Falls

for cheeseburgers at a little stand in the middle of nowhere. They shared the driving the way they shared just about everything in those days. They crossed the Ottawa River at Hawkesbury, and from there they rattled north onto Highway 329 and into the gray-blue Laurentians. Morley was squinting at a little piece of paper. Okay, she said, reaching out and turning the music down. It says to make the following turns. Gauche, gauche, droite. Dave said, huh? Dave said, huh? Morley said, that means left, left, right. Right?

Right, said Dave. Right, said Morley, but not right away. Gosh, gosh, then right. Right, said Dave. But first left, left, said Morley. Then right. Right, said Dave. Right, said Morley.

This went on for several more minutes than it should have. And they were feeling pretty goofy as they passed the gas station and the general stores and the white church and eventually pulled onto a dirt road with a bunch of cottages. Dave slapped the steering wheel and cranked the music back up. This is going to be great, he said. They passed a few cottages and then they saw the lake for the first time and a small, neat cottage with pale blue trim. Well, that was easy, said Dave as he pulled into the driveway. Easy until they lifted the welcome mat and there was no key where the key was supposed to be. Morley stood there for a moment looking around and then she slid her hand under a planter on the step beside the mat and she smiled. There was the key. The house was in much better shape than Dave had been told.

Old, to be sure, but not run down like his friends had warned. It was clean and neat and just about perfect. There's a wood stove, said Dave. This is perfect. Dave's friend had sent them a note explaining what they were expected to do in exchange for their free rent. Take down a little wall between the kitchen and the living room. And dig up the grass so they could put in a garden. You think this is the wall they want down, said Morley.

She was pointing at the door between the kitchen and the dining room. Dave shrugged. They had a week. Time enough for work tomorrow. I'll get the bag, said Dave. They found a bedroom and changed into their bathing suits. They headed across the lawn to the lake. Morley said, that's where they want the garden, I guess. Et voila, said Dave. They stood at the end of the dock gazing out at the lake and then Morley touched him on the back and she dove without testing the water. She dove clean and straight and flat and when she came out her long hair was floating behind her. It was the first time Dave had seen her in water, the first time they had swum together. She turned and flicked her hair and looked back. It's beautiful, she said. Dave stuck his foot in the lake and yanked it out.

It's freezing, he said. After supper, they went for a walk further along the road. That's the one that should be renovated, said Dave, pointing at a little bungalow with a sagging, moss-covered roof. I'm glad we're not there, said Morley. On Tuesday morning, Morley made pancakes. They ate them on the porch, and after they had cleaned up, she said, we should get to it. And after they had cleaned up, she said, we should get to it. Taking down a wood wall in an unfinished cottage shouldn't be too complicated.

Certainly no more complicated than installing an electrical outlet in a kitchen wall. Dave began slowly and carefully, standing on a chair, gently prying the tongue and groove wall boards free. By late afternoon, covered in sweat, his patience bent, he was stripped to the waist, ripping down the wall with a crowbar he'd found in the woodshed. While Dave attacked the wall, Morley was working on the garden. How big do you think they want it, she said. Morley, remember, was barely more than a girl, still in her 20s. She'd never done any gardening in her life in those days.

She considered the lawn for a while, and then she marked out a rectangular bed that ran along the front of the house. She wasn't surprised they wanted the grass out. It was so incongruous. The cottage had a woodsy feel to it. The lawn was as manicured as a putting green, flat, spongy, and soft. She used an axe to hack out large hunks of grass. Then she pried the sod loose and stacked it at the end of the driveway. Morley was finished in a couple of hours. She put the axe down and she went inside and made lunch They ate on the dock again

When they'd cleaned up, Morley stared at her garden and decided It wasn't big enough She got the axe and ripped up another section of lawn By supper, she had pulled up about a third of the grass What do you think, she said Dave thought that she'd made the garden way too big. He didn't say that, of course. Good, he said. It looks great. Things were not looking great inside. Halfway through the afternoon, Dave had uncovered a brick chimney. He'd found a sledgehammer in the shed.

He'd been going at the chimney for over two hours. Dave was spent. This wasn't the way it was described to me, muttered Dave at 8 a.m. on Friday morning. They had been up since 7. For the second day running, Morley had set an alarm. They were leaving the house the next day. It was only eight, and Dave was already sweating and covered in the brick dust that hung in the air of the cottage like smoke. But he was closing in on her. With any luck, the chimney would be down by noon.

This was the day they met Jean-Francois and Marie-José. As Dave and Morley hammered away at the kitchen in their rented cottage, Jean-Francois and Marie were driving up from the city to their place. As they crested the big hill and began their descent into Notre-Dame-des-Plaines, Marie-José was staring out the car window feeling a little desperate. They were going to spend the rest of the month at the lake. The exact same month that she had lived through every year. She knew exactly how it was going to go. On Monday morning, Jean-Francois would mow the lawn. The dandelions are terrible this year, he'd say. On Tuesdays, they would drive into Saint-Sauveur for groceries. Wednesday was laundry. Thursday, they would barbecue. On Fridays, a bike ride up the old Loken Trail. At 2.30 each

afternoon, they would swim. At 9 o'clock, their final glass of wine. At 11 o'clock, lights out. It was like summer camp. Except there wouldn't be one solitary surprise. Not one unexpected moment. I should get him a whistle, she thought. Pardon, said Jean-Francois. And then he turned the station wagon right into their driveway, and Marie-Josée blinked.

It was Friday, August 5th, 1979, and something was different. She looked over at her husband. Jean-Francois had gone completely slack-jawed. His mouth was hanging wide open. There was an orange and white Volkswagen van parked in their normal spot. There was a pile of rubble beside the van.

And as they sat there, a guy stood up from Marie-José's chaise lounge and was walking towards them. The guy was grinning from ear to ear. Jean-Francois opened his car door and got out and stood there in an uncomprehending haze. And that was when he noticed their entire front lawn had been dug out. Well, okay, a third of the front lawn. He reached absentmindedly for his face and fingered his cheek.

His scar was starting to throb. He was pointing at the disaster in front of him. The guy smiled and bobbed his head encouragingly and spoke the words he had been practicing all week. Bonjour, he said. Je m'appelle Dave. Dave. Jean-Francois didn't actually faint.

He did, however, sink to his knees, staring in disbelief at the pile of rubble and the ruined lawn, the lawn he had been weeding and spraying and mowing since he was tall enough to grasp the handle of a lawnmower, his pride and his joy. Dave was still beaming at him as he went down. Dave thought he was joking. His kind of guy. So Dave went down to his knees too. And they kneeled there in front of

each other for one long, silent, uncomprehending moment. And then Dave, who was thinking how happy the guy must be, reached out and grabbed his hand and shook it, and then put his arm around his shoulders and led him into the kitchen and pointed proudly to where the kitchen wall used to be. The kitchen wall that Jean Francois had stared at all his boyhood years. He gasped in horror. Marie-José was outside. She'd got out of the car and surveyed the piles of ripped sod, the scar of dirt across her lawn, and Marie-José had smiled. Well, she said to no one in particular,

what I think we need is wildflowers. Then she saw Morley standing uncertainly by the dock and she pointed at the black earth and said, I love what you've done to the place. Who are you anyway? Morley said, we're the renters. And Marie-José said, what renters? Which is when Jean-Francois burst out of the front door and Morley burst into tears. It was Marie-José who settled everyone down. Once she managed that, it didn't take them long to work out what had happened. Left, left, right, right.

There had been just one too many rights. Dave and Morley were supposed to be at the little cottage down the road, the one with the moss-covered roof. They tried to clear out pretty quickly. It was Marie-José who insisted they stay for dinner. They ate on the porch. Before they ate, Jean-Francois kept walking into the kitchen and staring mutely at the place where the wall used to be.

Nothing this unexpected had ever happened in his life. But then he was standing at the kitchen sink washing his hands, and for the first time in his life he could see through to the dining room and the dining room window to the lack. Eh bien, he said suddenly. Adelaide. C'est faire rien. What he was trying to say was, I like it. They opened a bottle of wine. By the end of the second bottle, they were laughing,

and they moved right past it and beyond it, and every time they circled back to it, it seemed even funnier. As they worked on dessert, Marie-José showed them her newest piece of blown glass, a piece that she'd picked up in Maine. It was a mobile, a clatter of little glass birds. Les petits oiseaux de Marie-José, said Jean-François

while rolling his eyes. Ha, ha, ha. It turned out she called him Monsieur Oiseau, the bird man. For his 50th birthday, she'd given him an antique birdcage with a stuffed parrot. It was hanging in their bedroom in the city. Where I have to look at it, said Jean-Francois desperately. It was clear that his feelings for the stuffed bird were complicated by love.

He hated the bird, but he loved her, and you could see that. And he loved that she had given it to him. They stayed up much too late. They drank much much too late. They drank much too much wine. And Dave and Morley ended up staying overnight. And they visited each year for a couple of summers. This August was the first time they saw Jean-Francois and Marie-José for almost a decade.

When they saw each other, Dave and Jean-Francois both dropped to their knees. When they saw each other, Dave and Jean-Francois both dropped to their knees. It's a thing they do. And then they got up. Dave had to help Jean-Francois, who uses a cane these days. And they walked down to the dock together, past the wildflowers that Marie-Josée put in. There is no lawn left anymore. It's all wild and grassy now.

So Dave and Jean-Francois walked along a path that goes through the tall, wavy grass. Dave trailed his hands along the lacy seed pods and said it looked very nice. I like it better, he said, than it used to be, than the lawn. And then he tried in French. He said, c'est plus sauvage. Oui, said Jean-Francois, plus wild. Then he put his arm around Dave. Comme les montagnes, he said. Oui, said Dave. Wild come the mountains. Thank you very much. That was Stuart McLean. Oh my God, the moment when the character falls down to his knees and Dave does the same thing is so funny. We call that story Petit Lac Noir, and we recorded it in Quebec City, gosh, 2007.

Is that right? I guess 15, 16 years ago now. Crazy. We're going to take a short break now, but we'll be back in a minute with a sneak peek from next week's episode. So stick around. Okay, everybody, that's it for this week's episode. We will be back here next week with two more Dave and Morley stories, including this one. He was climbing into the laundry chute.

You aren't allowed, said Annie. Dave looked at his sister earnestly. Look, he said, mom doesn't know everything. We do lots of things we aren't supposed to do. We aren't supposed to stand up on toboggans. We aren't supposed to play in the creek with our clothes on. We aren't supposed to ride cows. I don't do any of that stuff, said Annie. That's next week. You can hear the whole story next week on the podcast. Backstage at the Vinyl Cafe is part of the Apostrophe Podcast Network.

Theme music is by Danny Michelle. The show was recorded by Greg DeCloot and produced by Louise Curtis and me, Jess Milton. Let's meet again next week. Until then, so long for now.