It is curious how events of the past can come unbidden into our minds without any obvious connection with our thoughts or actions at the time. The older we get, the more events we have experienced, so the frequency of their unexpected arrivals is perhaps more easily explained. I am now 76. One of my more recent reminders took place a few days ago.
In my Grade 9 English class more than thirty years ago, I briefly had an Israeli student whom I shall call Ariel, if only because I cannot now recall her real name. She seemed misplaced in a class of ‘general’ level students, but I assumed she had been placed there because I had English as a Second Language teaching experience, and her first language was not English. She was attentive, polite, and uncommonly alert. She enjoyed reading, presumably because it helped develop linguistic proficiency. Before semester’s end, however, she came to say that she was moving back to Israel with her family. I wished her well. In schools, they come and then they go.
About ten years ago, well into my retirement, I received an e-mail from her, out of the blue. How she had managed to contact me I do not know, but she had since become a filmmaker, and remembered a story we had read together in class from a forgettable short story anthology called ‘Spacesuits and Gumshoes.’ I no longer recall what the title of the story was, but it was in part about time travel, and it had plainly made more of an impact on her than it had on me. All I could recall of it was its narrator’s boredom. He was a reporter, apparently, who had, it appears, grown tired of reporting on activities in “the bars on Mars,” so the story must have been set in the remote future when space travel had become as routine as a bus trip downtown. Ariel was making an Israeli science fiction film about travel in time and space and wanted to acknowledge the debt she had to the writer’s imagination, but needed the story’s title and its author’s name. Surprised to hear from her after so many years, and impressed by her desire to credit the writer, I volunteered to find these for her. It was not easy.
In the first place, the school no longer possessed any copies of the book. The local library did not have it, neither did used-book stores. I rummaged through my teaching files in the basement to no avail. I decided to call a much larger library in downtown Toronto, located a single copy of it in one of the city’s branches, and took a bus there myself, enjoying the chance to see my sons, then both living in Toronto. A friendly librarian at the front desk I had spoken to on the phone was keenly interested in my mission. She had found the book but told me I could not take it out as I lived in Ottawa. I said I did not need to re-read it, only to note some information from one of its stories. The search took longer than expected, but finally I discovered what Ariel needed, returned the book, went home, and forwarded her the details.
She wrote to thank me, but told me nothing more about herself. I never heard from her again, but often wonder what became of her and her film. Perhaps it was never made. I will probably never know, but every time I have seen an Israeli film, I have wondered if she had a hand in it. Of such brief encounters is life made. However, I have yet to visit any ‘bars on Mars’ myself but then, no-one else has, either…
