Backstage at the Vinyl Cafe - There's No Place Like Home - Tree of Heaven & Burd

Episode Date: January 27, 2023

“She was a woodland bird, in the middle of the city, way off course, and she had landed at his feeder.”Stuart McLean tells two Dave and Morley stories that explore the idea of home in its various forms: in Burd, a tiny feathered friend gets blown off course and finds its way to Dave and Morley’s garden where it decides to stop a while. And in Tree of Heaven a seedling takes root – in Dave’s car… and in his heart. Also this week, Jess tells a hilarious story about the trip she and Stuart took to Point Pelee to learn about birders and birding. 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 about home. I just moved a couple months ago and I've been thinking a lot about the idea of home and what makes a home. Is it a house? Is it a family? Is it love? History? Connection? The two stories we're going to share with you on today's episode explore these ideas a little bit. First, we have a story about a small bird that makes its home in Dave and Morley's backyard. And later, we have a story about a little seedling that Dave finds growing on the floor of his car.

Dave. We're going to start things off with this story. This is Stuart McLean with The Bird. Dave and Morley gave the bird feeder to Stephanie the Christmas she was 13. Who knows? They thought it might distract her, get her involved in the greater world around her. It was an unqualified failure. When she opened it on Christmas morning, Stephanie squinted at the bird feeder, frowned, then checked the gift tag to see if she had opened the wrong present. Is this a mistake? she asked without a trace of enthusiasm.

So it was Dave who ended up assembling the feeder and Dave who filled it each day. Every day through the dark mornings of January and February, when the snow and ice was piled up in all the provinces, it was Dave who beat the path from the back door to the bird feeder on the pole in the center of his backyard. At first, the only birds interested in his efforts were a gang of grackles. They flung Dave's bird seed onto the ground where it was pecked over by a bunch of pigeons. The only member of the family who displayed any real passion for the arrival of the feeder was the cat. Galway spent hours perched on the kitchen radiator, her face against the back window, her tail twitching in frustrated concentration. There were not only birds to lust after, but a squirrel too.

The squirrel appeared on Boxing Day an hour after Dave got the feeder up. It spent the week between Christmas and New Year trying to shimmy around the squirrel guard. It would get halfway up the pole and then drop to the ground like a plate of china. You would have thought he would have given up, but this squirrel was not a quitter. If anything, its determination grew. Having failed from below, it shifted strategy and began hurling itself

at the feeder from the rooftops. Dave would be washing the dishes and there would be a blur of gray in his peripheral vision. And he would turn just in time to see the squirrel ricochet off the barbecue. Galway studied the squirrel with the intensity of a general studying military history.

One afternoon, Dave and Galway watched the squirrel haul itself upside down along the clothesline, paw over paw. It stopped a few feet from the feeder and it lost its grip. Hung there from the line for a moment by one leg.

Looked like a doomed mountain climber. And then it dropped to the ground. Galway, who was sitting in Dave's lap, dug her claws into his legs. Wouldn't it be simpler, said Morley, as the squirrel bounced off their compost bin to take the winter off? Isn't hibernation an option?

In the new year, Dave got a blue jay and a junco, and then a gang of chickadees and some birds who seemed to be traveling with him. But the vast flocks that he had imagined filling his backyard were avoiding it. Short of amusing the cat, the feeder seemed to be filling no real need in the universe, and certainly none in the bird universe. Then, on a chilly, gray Saturday in the middle of the month, something came.

Dave pointed it out to everyone at lunch. Over there, he said, see in the lowbeer's pine tree. No one was particularly interested. It was not a big bird, not as big as a robin, with olive green above its wings and a dull yellow below. It seemed to favor the evergreen hedge that bordered his backyard. It would flick out of the thicket and peck at the seed in the feeder tray and then vanish into the hedge again. Dave watched it for a week before he asked Gerda Loebier if she knew what kind of bird it was. Gerda brought her bird book and binoculars over and she said, it looks like a tanager. Female summer tanager. But a summer tanager is not supposed

to come this far north. Gerda's finger was moving along the small print of her bird book. In January, a summer tanager is supposed to be on a beach in Brazil. Dave was watching his bird through Gerda's binoculars. He'd never seen it so close. It had a stubby bill, almost swollen, not pointy like a robin. And it shouldn't eat seeds, said Gerda. A tanager eats insects and wasps. It's a carnivore.

When Gerda left, Dave put out a few pieces of tangerine, the sort of thing you might expect to find if you were used to wintering in Brazil. Then he drove to a pet store to see if he could buy his bird some insects and wasps. He settled for a bag of crickets. The bird fell onto the crickets like she hadn't eaten in months. That bird was starving, thought Dave. For two hours straight, she flicked back and forth from the hedge to the feeder.

But as happy as she seemed with the crickets, Dave could see that they weren't going down easily. She was having trouble with the shells. It was now a quarter to six. Dave returned to the pet store and came back with a bag of mealworms. The bird didn't stop eating until 9.30 that night. It only took a few days for the bird to train Dave. By the end of the week, they had worked out a routine that they could both live with. A scoop of worms at breakfast, a scoop of fresh worms at lunch,

and a scoop of worms at dinner. Man, Dave had to come home at lunchtime. I don't mind, he said. And he didn't. Dave knew that if Gerda was right, the bird would die if he stopped feeding it. By February, he had bought so many mealworms that the pet store gave him a discount. He felt a sense of pride about what he was doing.

He felt honored that the bird had chosen him. It was not long after Valentine's Day when Gerda mentioned the bird to her friend Nick. She said, Nick's a bit of a birder. She brought Nick over that evening so he could see it for himself. Nick watched for half an hour and said, do you mind if I call my friend Bob? Bob arrived wearing a tilly hat, camouflage pants, and a vest with 37 pockets. a tilly hat, camouflage pants, and a vest with 37 pockets. He was carrying a pair of binoculars and a canvas shoulder sack.

He took one look at Dave's bird and asked if he could borrow the telephone. He didn't even use the binoculars. I'm in some guy's kitchen, he said into the phone. He was excited. His right foot was bouncing up and down. He smiled at Dave. Dave nodded. You aren't going to believe this, he said into the phone.

Summer Tanninger. When he hung up, he pulled out his bird book, the National Geographic Book of Birds. He flipped it open in the middle. That's the bird of the winter you got there, he said. Dave peered at the picture in the book and nodded. The man said, there are a few of my friends who'd love to see it. Would that be okay? That night as Morley was brushing her teeth, Dave said, some people might drop over in the morning. Who, said Morley.

To look at the bird, said Dave. What bird, said Morley. The bird I feed the worms to, said Dave. It's supposed to winter in Brazil. It shows our backyard over Brazil. So people want to see it, said Dave, because it's a rarity. It'll be okay. These are burgers. Nice people. I don't want people poking around our backyard in the morning, said Morley. The sun wasn't up the next morning when Dave heard the noise. He felt his way to the window and squinted into the backyard.

There was a smudge of gray on the horizon. When his eyes finally focused, he gasped and stepped back from the window. There were maybe 50 motionless men lined up in the shadows behind his house. 50 men strung out along the alley. 50 men leaning over his back fence and scanning his backyard with long binoculars. Dave inched forward and peeked out again, and then he pulled the curtain shut and sat on the edge of the bed. Houston, he said softly, we have a problem.

Morley mumbled and rolled over. Dave said, don't wake up. I need a plan before you wake up. It was 6.45 a.m. Fifteen minutes later, Sam's clock radio snapped on. Here we go, thought Dave, liftoff. He was sitting at the kitchen table. He wasn't sure what he was going to do. He wasn't sure what he should do. Before he could do anything, the phone rang. It was Carl Loebier. Dave, he said.

Carl was whispering, there seems to be something going on outside. It doesn't look good to me. It looks terrible. Well, it wasn't as terrible as what was going on at the Turlington's house. At the Turlington's house, Mary, Bert, and the Turlington twins were lying on the floor of Mary and Bert's bedroom with their hands over their heads. At five to seven, one of the twins had looked out her bedroom window to see if there was snow. When she saw the men with binoculars, she ran to her parents' bed.

The house is surrounded by police, she screamed. I think it's the swap team. Bird is not what you'd call a morning person. Bird is not what you'd call a morning person. He was not thinking clearly when he looked out the window and saw the men in dark jackets with the binoculars trained at his kids' windows. What he was thinking about were the carpet installers who were accidentally shot dead through their motel room door by overzealous police in the eastern townships of Quebec.

It was a case of mistaken identity, as this obviously was too. Bert dropped to the floor and crawled around, waking everybody up. We're surrounded, said Bert. Get into our bedroom fast. And now the whole family was there except for Bert's teenage son, Adam. Adam had locked himself into the upstairs bathroom. Bert wormed his way into the hall and pounded on the bathroom door. What are you doing, he howled. Adam, who had never gotten up so fast in his life,

was trying to flush the first marijuana he had ever bought down the toilet. He had bought it three weeks ago from a kid at school. He'd been afraid to smoke it. He had hidden it in an old pair of sneakers in the back of his cupboard. And now the marijuana kept floating up to the top of the toilet. And the house was surrounded by police. Bert inched his way back to the bedroom and pulled himself up to the window. He peered over the cell. There were cars everywhere. Cars parked on both sides of the street and pulled up over the cell. There were cars everywhere. Cars parked on both sides of the street and pulled up onto the sidewalk. Bert's heart was pounding.

There were men who looked like they were carrying telescopes running down Dave's driveway. High-powered rifles, thought Bert. The low-beer's dog was barking. A Man came running out of Dave's yard and pointed directly at Bert's house. Bert gasped and dropped to the floor. Blessed mother of mercy, he said, we're going to die. 20 minutes later, Dave was still trying to explain things to the neighbors standing on his lawn when suddenly the Turlington's front door flew open and the entire Turlington family burst out of the house. They had wrapped themselves in a large white sheet. They were running down their sidewalk like a bunch of shriners in a horse costume.

down their sidewalk like a bunch of shriners in a horse costume. Bert was leading the way, waving his hands in the air and screaming, Don't shoot! That night, 1130, Dave was standing on a ladder in his kitchen, tacking a sheet over the sliding glass door in the kitchen.

It'll be over soon, he said to Morley. There can't be that many burgers in the city. The phone rang at midnight. Dave and Morley stared at each other. Dave picked it up. Who was it, said Morley. Some guy from Halifax asking if the bird's still here, he said. Halifax, said Morley. He said he'd be up here on the weekend.

He said he heard it was a mega twitch. Saturday morning at 9 30, when Dave came downstairs, there were already 15 people outside. Sam was heading out the front door with a hammer and a large piece of cardboard. Where are you going, said Dave. Sam stopped. As he flipped his sign over, he dropped the hammer. See the bird, it said in large hand-painted letters. B-U-R-D. Under the writing, there was an arrow which Dave assumed would soon point down his driveway. We're going to sell hot chocolate, said Sam. By 10 o'clock, there were close to 100 people

milling around Dave's house. Even though none of the birders was any further than 20 yards from the bird feeder, they had ringed it with binoculars and telescopes, many on tripods. One man was peering through a camera with a lens as big as a toilet bowl. At noon, when Dave stepped outside with fresh worms he heard someone whisper feeding time and he felt the crowd stir felt like an aquarium showman he considered climbing onto the feeder and holding the worms between his lips so the bird could pluck them out on the fly. Early on Sunday, a man arrived in an airport limousine, ran into the backyard, saw the bird jump back in the limousine and headed back in the direction he came from. Never even closed the car door. Limousine never shut off its motor. Not unusual, said an older man.

He was wearing sneakers and a rumpled canvas hat. He gestured over his shoulder where the limousine had been. We call them twitchers, he said. When they get close to whatever bird it is they're trying to add to their list, and they aren't sure if they're going to see it or not, they start to twitch. It was getting chilly. It was only this man and Dave left in the driveway. They can pretty much tell as they drive up the street, said the old man.

If everyone is looking through their binoculars, then they know they're all right, and they can relax. But if people are walking around, that's when they start to twitch because they know as soon as they get out of the car, someone's going to say, well, she was here two minutes ago. You missed her. You watch her long enough, said Dave, and you get to know her habits. She likes to fly in from the right, said the old man. Out of the hedge, said Dave, and you get to know her habits. She likes to fly in from the right, said the old man. Out of the hedge, said Dave. She comes every 15 minutes or so.

As they stood watching, the little bird flicked out of the hedge and landed on the feeder. She looked around rapidly, knocked back a few worms and flew off. She feeds more in the morning, said Dave. Old man nodded. Bird flew back. This is a crippling view, said the old man. It was like that for three weeks. But then instead of trailing off, it got worse.

Someone from one of the television stations did a feature on Dave's bird. Following weekend, when Morley was coming home from grocery shopping, she was stopped by a policeman a block from her home. You can't go down that street, said the cop. Some idiot put signs up all over the place about a rare bird. That was the weekend when people who weren't even interested in birds started coming. They wanted to be there because they had heard a lot of other people had been there and they just didn't want to miss anything. One of the men who had come in from the suburbs

chewed Dave out. Doesn't look so special to me, he said. I drove for an hour to get here. It's not like it's an eagle or anything. Bet that bird's never killed anything in its life. The second time that happened, Dave called the hotline and said, the bird has gone. Could you take it off your list, please? Then he went outside and took down Sam's sign and put up a new one.

The bird has gone, it read. That was the end of March. The bird had stayed all winter. David spent over $200 on worms. He came to know her well. She was a woodland bird in the middle of the city, way off course. She had landed at his feeder. He felt proud that he had seen her through the frigid months, that he had kept her alive.

Felt affection for her. Felt that she belonged to him somehow. He knew this was sentimentality. He knew the bird didn't feel anything about him. If anything, he was just another intruder in the backyard. And God knows there were enough of them. But one soft morning in May, when Dave slipped into his backyard and counted the worms and found none missing, he knew she was gone, and he felt sad.

Sad, he was more heartbroken than sad, although he realized the bird had probably migrated, and that was the best thing for her. He wondered if he would see her again in the fall. He imagined that whatever else his bird had felt, she'd felt a sense of home. She could have left any time she wanted, and now she had. Just like everyone else who has ever had a home, she had followed that universal urge to leave. Dave stared out the window. He was thinking of the mysteries of migration. He was thinking that of all the mysteries, maybe the one true thing we know and share with the animals

was this sense of seeking, finding, leaving, but above all, of returning home. That was Stuart McLean with the story we call The Bird. And to clarify, that's B-U-R-D. We recorded that story at Migration Hall in Kingsville, Ontario in 2010. I'll never forget that trip. We went down to Kingsville about a week before we recorded the show. That's usually what we did. That's how we wrote, especially how we wrote those opening essays about the place we were in. Stuart and I would

arrive in town about a week before the show to research and just sort of hang out and get a feel for the place. We would always come armed with a binder full of research, and we hit the ground running every morning. He'd go one way, I'd go the other, and we'd connect at night and start piecing together a story about the place. I usually rent us a little house or apartment or something so that we could have a kitchen and so that we'd have somewhere to gather at night and talk about what we learned. And usually, the story would just sort of reveal itself to us. We were lucky. It just kind of happened. Like, he would have one experience, and I would have a totally different one, but they usually added up to something similar. You know, they usually sort of mean the same thing or illustrate the same thing and tell the same story. That's how we'd

start connecting the dots to paint a picture of the place that we were in, the town that we were talking about. That did not happen in Kingsville. Stuart had one experience, and I had a completely different one. We were in Kingsville to write about birds and bird migration. If you know the area, you won't be surprised to hear that. Point Pelee is like nirvana for birds and birders. It's like a strip of land, kind of like a landing strip. That's how they use it, these birds. They're exhausted from migration, and they see the strip of land, and they just come in for a soft landing.

And the birders are there waiting for them. They flock to Point Pelee in droves to watch them. When we started researching our trip, I learned that Point Pelee was the same latitude as Northern California. I also learned that most of the birders bike from location to location because bikes are nimble and they're quiet and less likely to spook the birds. This sounded like heaven. Biking around a tropical point in search of rare birds. It was not that. It was rainy and cold and birding was much less about biking and more about standing around waiting quietly.

I am not good at waiting. I am really not good at being quiet. So I got back to our hotel that night, soggy and freezing and ready to write a script about how nutty this entire thing was. Stuart got back to the hotel, heart thumping, cheeks flush. He looked like a boy in love. And it turns out he was. He was enthralled. He caught the birding bug. He loved birds. He loved birders. He loved birding. He loved standing in the rain. He loved being quiet. He loved everything about this. He even made me download a birding app on my phone. And for years after,

every single time we'd hear a bird chirp, I'd pull out my phone. So I guess, in a way, we never really left Point Pelee. Like so many of our trips, it stayed with us. I still have that app on my phone, and sometimes I take it out when I hear a bird song I don't recognize. And of course, it always makes me think of Stuart. And for that, I am grateful. But that is the only thing about that trip that I'm grateful for. All right, time for a word from our sponsors.

Hopefully it's not the Burning Association of Canada. We'll be back in a couple of minutes with another story. And this one's one of my favorites. It's a funny story, but the ending makes me tear up every time. That's coming up in a few minutes, so stick around. Welcome back. Story time. This is Tree of Heaven.

Summer arrived during the second week of June. The week began hot and sticky and the temperature kept rising. The sky had settled into a gloomy opaqueness that wasn't blue, but wasn't gray either. It was just heavy and thick. One morning in the middle of the hot spell, Dave met Susan Thompson pushing her daughter Jennifer down the street. Susan and her husband Bob moved into the Gillingham house during the winter. Susan looked distracted and harassed. Oh, she said, glancing up and down the street, the babysitter didn't show up.

Susan was only doing local errands, the bank and the grocery store. She was going to be gone a half an hour, 45 minutes at the most. Dave said, give me Jennifer. You can pick her up on your way home. And that's how Dave came to be standing on his front porch the other day, holding a baby girl in his arms and ringing his own doorbell. When Morley answered, he tried to look concerned. She followed me home, he said. Can we keep her? Dave arrived home with Jennifer again a week later. This time it was a Saturday afternoon and Morley wasn't home. The kids neither. This time Dave sat happily on the front stoop while Jennifer slept in her stroller.

When she woke up and started to cry, he had a flare of panic, but he went inside and fetched a popsicle from the freezer, and the two of them shared the popsicle. By the time Susan arrived to pick up her daughter, Dave and Jennifer were fast friends. Dave waved goodbye using the baby method, opening and closing his hand as if he were squeezing a ball. Bye-bye, he said. Bye-bye. When they were gone, Dave surveyed the mess that Jennifer had left behind. There was popsicle juice everywhere, on his pants and his shirt and his hands, for starters, and on the porch and in little puddles on the walk where Jennifer's stroller had been parked. Dave had forgotten what it was like to live with little children. He went inside to change, and as he walked across the living room,

he remembered that there was once a time when he had to kick a path through the toys to get from one side of this room to the other, a time when fatigue was such a constant companion that to do something as simple as putting the Lego away required more energy than he thought he'd ever see again. There was a time when eating even seemed impossible, when he and Morley had to eat in shifts if they went somewhere with the kids. He remembered the night he had paced the sidewalk in front of a Chinese restaurant

with Stephanie howling in her snuggly while Morley ate anxiously in the restaurant window. Now, at 3 o'clock on this Saturday afternoon, he didn't even know where his teenage daughter was. There was a certain relief in that, a relief that he no longer had to be on constant kid patrol, that if they were left alone for five minutes, his children wouldn't necessarily stick their fingers in an electric socket or fall down a flight of stairs

or crawl across the room and help themselves to a bowl of cat food. But there was a certain loneliness, too. Dave poked at his cheese sandwich, and he thought that the mess of childhood was gone from his life forever. He'd had two cracks at it, his childhood and theirs, but it was over now, the end of childhood, a melancholy thought. And lost in melancholy, Dave couldn't even say for certain if his children would remember their childhood as the best of times. He'd always thought he had had a happy childhood, but on this melancholy afternoon, he couldn't even be sure of that.

When Dave woke up on Sunday morning, his first conscious thought was he should clean the car. He used to do this every Sunday morning. He used to do the exterior one week and the interior the next, rotating. And this was years ago when he bought his first new car and there were no children messing up his life, when having a clean car seemed important. Back in the days when Dave thought he would keep the car maybe three years, four tops, and then he would trade it in and get a new one, trade it up. Now he knew he was never going to trade up. He wasn't even going to trade in.

He was going to be the last person on earth to drive this car. As he lay there in bed, being careful not to move abruptly, being careful not to wake his wife, Dave remembered the summer he had stopped cleaning his car each week. careful not to wake his wife, Dave remembered the summer he had stopped cleaning his car each week. It was the summer. Stephanie was, what, six, maybe seven? They drove to Detroit one Saturday to have dinner with Mark Knopfler and then watch his concert at the Olympia. And on the way home, somewhere around Leamington, Stephanie leaned forward from the back seat and said quietly, I feel sick. And before Morley had even turned completely around, Stephanie threw up.

It was a disgorgement of heroic proportions. Erupting out of her with freight train fury, she opened her mouth and delivered a spout that cleared the front seat and splattered against the dashboard. Most of it with painful and pinpoint accuracy disappearing into the heating vent. When they got home, Dave scrubbed the car within an inch of its life. He used detergents and disinfectants, scrub brushes and toothbrushes, and all that winter, the sour smell of vomit returned every time he turned on the heater. Even now, even after all these years,

even after he had emptied bottles of air freshener and jars of essential oils into the heater, he was still convinced the odor hovered for a few moments whenever he switched on the heat. The Schellenbergs who live next door have a smell in their car. Every time the Schellenbergs start their car, it fills with a distinctive odor of lamb curry. It just started one day out of the blue. Arnie Schellenberger will explain if you should notice it. Arnie took his car to three mechanics before he found one who could explain it to him. Some belt in the bowels of his engine was rubbing against some block.

He could have it repaired for $400 or he could live with the five minutes of lamb curry. It's a kind of a pleasant smell, Arnie decided. The smell of Stephanie's misadventure was otherwise, and its incessant presence had gradually worn away at Dave's pride of ownership. Over the years, Dave's car fell into inexorable decline. He hardly noticed the mess anymore. For years, there was a constant dusting of goldfish crackers on all of the seats, and raisins, little black pellets,

as if he was sharing his car with a warren or rabbit. Or perhaps a family of elk. One morning when he looked at the mess of his car, he wondered if while he slept, a family of elk didn't munch their nightly way along the shadows of his laneway. And when the mood sees them nudge his car doors open and take it for a spin, leaving their little piles of pellets behind. So on this Sunday morning, when Dave woke up early and was seized with this unfamiliar urge to clean his car, he slipped out of bed quietly and he went downstairs.

And on a shelf in the basement, he found a yellow bucket with an old chamois so hard and stiff he couldn't imagine it being of any use to anyone. He brought the chamois upstairs and filled the sink with hot water, and he let it soak while he made coffee. And when he reached into the water and found the deerskin slippery and soft, he felt a surge of satisfaction that he had even found it was good, that he could renew it like that with hot water made him feel mildly competent. He was a man.

He knew about things like chamois. He was about to do things to a car. Things were pretty all right. These were the melancholy thoughts that Dave carried with his yellow bucket and his damp deer skin into the driveway that Sunday morning. And it was with this lingering sense of sadness that Dave got down on his hands and his knees and he began to empty the car of the detritus of the years, thinking as he pulled candy wrappers and old pencil stubs from under the passenger seat of how the generations that bracketed his had grown too old. Both his mother and his father and his son and his daughter had deserted him, abandoned him. No one needed him anymore.

He filled a small plastic bag and he went inside for another. He found a bleached rayon scarf on the back window ledge that looked like it had been lying in the sun for years and a pot of congealed lip gloss and a pair of sunglasses he had never seen before and wizened apple cores and a leathery hard plug of something that he first thought was a cigar and then realized was a mummified banana. He found a cucumber under the front seat, and when he reached out to pick it up, his hand went right through it.

It had been over a week since Morley had been shopping. The cucumber reminded him of the summer afternoon. Something had distracted Morley while she was unpacking groceries, and she had forgotten a bag of meat in the trunk. The babysitter had found the meat three days later and phoned Dave at work to ask if he thought the hot dogs would still be all right. I don't think so, said Dave. How do they smell? They smell disgusting, said the babysitter, but I was going to boil them. With growing despondency, Dave realized he would never be able to return his car to its pre-child state,

and in a way it no longer mattered. Once there was a time when he cared, but he didn't care anymore. He was on his knees by the back door on the driver's side trying to pluck a reluctant pencil out of a crevice when he noticed a slight haze of green between the driver's seat and the front door. When he reached out to wipe the haze, it felt soft and fluttery, not sticky like he expected,

and he leant forward and he squinted, and then he leant forward more and blinked in amazement when he realized that something had taken root in the sand in the bottom of his car. There was a tiny plantlet growing there. Dave's first impulse was to pluck the little green thing off the floor, but he hesitated for a moment, and in the moment of hesitation he was overcome with the miracle of it. Somehow a seed had landed on the floor of his car

and it had found enough dirt and sand and decomposing organic matter to germinate. It amazed him. A flower in the desert. Life affirming life. It was reproduction, and it was happening in his car. He took the chamois and dripped some water into the well by the door, and he frowned. There was dirt and sand there, but hardly a medium for healthy growth. He went to the front garden and came back with a handful of soil. And he patted it carefully around the seedling. It took him over an hour to finish cleaning the car.

He kept coming back to the driver's side door to examine the plant. Before he went in for breakfast, he jockeyed the car in the driveway so the rays of the early morning sun caught the side door. And he left the door open so they caught his seedling. Morley was up and about. I have to go in, she said, I'll be home, I don't know, three, maybe four. And she breezed out the side door and she climbed into the car. When she saw how clean it was, she smiled and gave Dave the thumbs up, and then she drove away.

Dave was left in the driveway looking horrified. He'd heard a story on the radio once about a little girl. She was, what, two years old, and she had climbed onto the back of her father's delivery truck just as he was leaving for work. David imagined when he had heard this story that her father worked for FedEx, and the little girl was standing on the back step of one of those big FedEx delivery vans. This was in the country and he traveled for several kilometers up hills and around sharp corners before anyone could stop him. When someone asked the little girl what she was thinking during the ride, she said,

hold on, hold on. As Dave stood in his driveway watching Morley leave, he was muttering the same words to his plant. He didn't have time to warn her, or he was reluctant to warn her. He was worried what Morley might do if he told her something was growing in the car. He was worried that she might not understand. Morley didn't come home until supper, and when she pulled into the driveway, Dave ran out to meet her. How was your day, he asked. He was staring at her feet as she opened the door, not her face.

She almost put her heel down right on top of his seedling. Look out, Dave bellowed. Morley looked at him as if he were crazy. What is the matter, she said. I thought, and that was the moment of truth. That was the moment he could have said, there's a seedling in the car and I don't want you to kill it. Because it's not just a seedling, it's the struggle of life itself.

But he didn't say it. He didn't say it because, well, it's hard to know, isn't it? It's hard to know why we say or don't say anything. Maybe he didn't say anything because in his heart he knew Morley felt no insecurity about her role as a nurturing human being. All Dave had ever done was gone to work. And he didn't want anything to harm this plant, this life that had fallen under his care, and he had no confidence in his ability to explain this. He found excuses all that week to use the car every day. This was something he hardly ever did. He would invent lunchtime errands that

required the car. He would drive to a quiet lane that bordered some railroad tracks and he'd park in a sunny spot with a door open and he'd sit and eat his lunch. He bought bottled water every day, amusing himself by changing the brands. Today, he told his seedling, you're drinking from a French glacier. The first day he did this, he poured out so much water that he almost washed the seedling, you're drinking from a French glacier. The first day he did this,

he poured out so much water that he almost washed the seedling away. He had to scratch a handful of earth from the hill by the railroad tracks and add it to his little garden to soak up the flood. The next day, he tried using a styrofoam coffee cup, and he had the same disastrous flood, but this time he was prepared. He'd bought a small bag of potting soil at the hardware store, and he had it open and ready. For the rest of the week, he filled his mouth with water, and he carefully measured the water out squirt by squirt, squirt by squirt, life to life. By Friday, his seedling had grown an inch. That night he dreamed it was summer and he was driving his car along a winding mountain road, like down some Mediterranean

mountain toward the sea. Maybe it was in Monaco. It was hard to tell exactly because his plant, was in Monaco. It was hard to tell exactly because his plant, which must have been jungle ivy or something, had filled the car in his dream. It had twisted around the handbrake and up the steering column and onto the mirror in front of the windshield. And sitting in the driver's seat was like sitting in a jungle. Dave kept trying to brush leaves away from his face, and the car kept going faster and faster, and suddenly Dave realized he wasn't driving anymore. The plant was driving. The ivy had the wheel, and it was driving too damn fast. And there was a corner coming, and they were going too fast for the corner, and they were drifting into the oncoming lane, and there was a truck coming the other way, just like in a James Bond movie. It was a FedEx truck, and it was laughing

at him. And as it passed, Dave spotted Morley and the kids. They were standing on a ledge on the back of the truck, and they were screaming, hold on, hold on. He woke up sweating with his heart pounding. And he went downstairs, and he made himself a cup of tea and added a shot of brandy. And he sat in the backyard and watched a raccoon the size of an industrial vacuum cleaner waddle along his neighbor's fence. When he finished the tea, he went inside and got his car keys and he opened the car door. It was hard to see in that light. car keys and he opened the car door. It was hard to see in that light. So he went back inside and he got a flashlight. His seedling was over an inch tall now, an inch and a half of wobbly green stem that looked entrancing in the yellow spotlight of the night. It had begun to branch out. The fresh

green leaves mysteriously serrated and much too well formed for something so small. It looked like a miniature shrub. Dave was enchanted. He was also terrified that someone was going to see it and pull it up or worse, not see it and step on it. There was no time like the present, he thought. Looking up at the moon, he reached down and tugged at his plant, and he carried it to the back of his yard like you might carry a baby chick, to a corner by the fence, and he broke the grass, and he placed the little seedling there, and he said, there, there. And he went back

to bed, and he forgot about it. And he will not remember it for three more weeks. And when he does, he will go to the corner of his yard by the fence, and to his great surprise, he will find that his plant will have grown as high as his knees. He will not show it to Morley for two more weeks after that. He will show it to her at the beginning of August, and when he does, it will be higher than his waist. He will tell her he found the seed in the car, and that one night he planted it in this corner, and look what came. It's an Ailanthus, known also as the Tree of Heaven, a persistent and resourceful little tree that was brought to New York years ago from Asia and thrives in urban environments, a tree that can sprout in a crack of

the pavement and under porches and decks and apparently in cars. Dave's plant will keep growing until it is nearly 60 feet tall, and at the end of every summer it will produce small yellow-green flowers, and in the early fall the flowers will be followed by beautiful ready fruit bearing seeds with little wings like maple keys. Its leaves will come late in the spring, and every spring Dave will think his tree has died until suddenly it comes alive, every spring a miracle. And every spring when the leaves finally come, Dave will stand in his backyard and think of this summer and the tiny seedling he found in his car.

And he will look at his tree and think that things survive. Even without his presence, even without him, life goes on. Life has a will of its own and he needn't worry. His job isn't to worry or do things. His job is to watch and wonder. Thank you very much. That ending gets me every time. And wow, way more now than it used to. You know, Stuart used to have a

way of capturing moments like this. He used to say, big feelings, and I'm having big feelings right now. There are some stories like that one that make me miss Stuart so much. The way he saw the world and the way he watched and wondered and, I don't know, shared those wonderings with us. I miss him. But it makes me happy to be able to share them with you here. So thanks for listening. Okay, we're going to take a short break, but we'll be back in a minute,

and I'll have a clip for you from next week's episode. So come back with me, will you? Well, that's it for this week. We'll be back here next week with two more Dave and Morley stories, including this one. Okay, she said, reaching out and turning the music down. It says to make the following turns. Gauche, gauche, droite. Dave said, huh? Morley said, that means left, left, right. Right?

Right, said Dave. Right, said Morley, but not right away. Gauche, gauche, then right. Right, said Dave. But first left, left, said Morley. Then right. Right, said Dave. Right, said Morley. That's next week. Keep in touch. Until then, you can find us on VinylCafe.com or Facebook or Instagram. 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.