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Illustration by Marley Allen-Ash
It’s my daughter-in-law who draws it to our attention; she leans in to talk to my son. “You get it from your mom. Look.” Four of us squeezed around a bistro table. My husband studies the menu, the wine list. Me? My body slides to the back of my chair, tilts on an angle that enables me to hear the conversation at the next table. Victoria’s comment confirms that in addition to brown eyes and a passion for cycling, my son is the beneficiary of my habit of eavesdropping. And while this behaviour may be advantageous in slow-moving lines, it can be annoying, even infuriating to partners who expect their words, rather than the words of random strangers, to be the focus of attention.
A recent incident suggests that their child also carries the gene. At the park, on the swings, a parent follows the “five-minutes-left” warning to his toddler with an enthusiastic outline of the day. When they leave, my 2 ½ year old granddaughter watches their buggy go up the ramp and into the recreation centre. “He doesn’t want to go to Nana’s. She’ll take him to a splash pad. His dada has a meeting.” My radar? Same.
“And he has to pee.” Yup, that too.
Perhaps Scout, born in 2020, is making up for lost time. She has an excuse for this intense curiosity; her life began with a 10-foot chasm between her and the rest of the mask-wearing, hand-sanitizing world. She is finally free to listen, to watch and to gather data now that parents have returned to slathering on sunscreen and checking for ticks instead of lining up for COVID shots and administering rapid tests.
Eavesdropping is the original streaming service. Comedies, dramas, police procedurals all unfold around us. With no monthly fee. With no subtitles either, through body language and clipped speech helped me decode a romantic tiff taking place at an international airport beside the luggage carousel. At the gym, two women compare notes about their mothers’ declines. They are relieved to discover they’ve chosen the same long-term care facility, and that they’ll pass each other in the hall during the difficult transitions ahead. I say nothing. They’ll find out soon enough that Shalom Village and Shalom Manor are separated by a distance of 35 kilometres. And that only one of them will spend hours on a gridlocked highway to visit their ailing parent.
Sometimes, I hate my grandmother even though I know that’s wrong
Scout is back at daycare. I’m back at my desk, stuck between the final edit of one essay and the first sentence of the next; a gap filled with the sludge of self-doubt. I head to my bookshelf and flip through one of many guides for writers; published, I suspect, by well-established authors whose agents devise projects for similar periods of fallow. They include lists of writing prompts: describe what’s happening outside your window, the events of your 10th summer, your first broken heart. These are cups of water to prime the linguistic pump. I try but get nothing. A 90-minute drought.
The dog needs a walk; this aligns me with others whose pets provide an excuse for arriving late, for leaving early, for stepping away from incomplete documents to grab a leash. Most of the joggers and cyclists we meet wear headphones, but when they do talk to each other, my body slows, my head inclines. Scattered among the unremarkable yeah-well-you-know-like-so fillers are sound bites that intrigue me. Once home, I write down the phrases I remember. “Doesn’t mink oil change the colour of leather?” “She didn’t want to jinx it by telling me his name.” “Pretty sure the bear was after the cherry-scented air freshener.” In addition to releasing endorphins and improving bone density, walking, okay eavesdropping, has provided a path of crumbs to my ears. Morsels and fragments to tuck away for later inspiration.
My confession of this habit garners little judgment. Friends cite similar incidents on transit, in coffee shops with most preferring the term curious to nosy. A student of anatomy shares a code, “the eighth,” that she and her spouse use in public places since it’s the eighth cranial nerve that is responsible for hearing. A quick “on the 8th of the month” or “an 8th of a cup,” slipped into their conversation allows both of them to shift their attention to an adjoining one.
My husband joins us for the evening walk. An enthusiastic gardener, he describes how he gathers seeds from nicotiana sylvestris. He repeats the Latin name until I stop watching the people waiting at the bus stop. And listen to him. “The pods look like acorns and the seeds? So tiny. But look what they produce?” He points to one of the pots that line our driveway. Clusters of trumpet-shaped flowers, on a five-foot plant with 15-inch leaves. Abundance. From a speck of dust. Late summer, he will brush the powder from these nightshade plants into labelled envelopes, place them in a shoe box on a high shelf. And wait. Should I borrow this strategy, find more envelopes, another shoe box? Store my pilfered snippets from overheard banter on a high shelf? Seeds, ideas. Most require a period of dormancy where it looks like nothing is happening. Then, some germinate and others wilt. Consider Harper Lee. Her impulse to tell a difficult story through the eyes of a young girl resulted in To Kill a Mockingbird, and after that, a significant lull.
Our Scout turns three. In my disdain for gift-wrapped plastic, I offer tickets to an open-air museum where she can run through out-of-service rail cars and eat ice-cream. I suspect she will spend much of the excursion watching other families. Observing, absorbing. Perhaps for her next birthday, I’ll walk to a store I like to call “DollarGramma” and buy a notebook that includes both lined paper and a drawing box; a place for her to make sense of what she sees. Using images, colours, shapes like her artist-mother. Or words, like me.
Marg Heidebrecht lives in Dundas, Ont.