A LONG TIME AGO, when my grade eight teacher got so fed up with my behaviour that she kicked me out of class, she had no idea-she was so knotted with anger she wouldn’t have cared-that her outburst of frustration would lead to a crime.
Mrs. Sykes was cursed with wide, wet rubbery lips. When she talked, water gathered in the corners of her mouth and her lips shone with moisture. If she was irritated, as she was that day, the spit machine went into high gear and produced a tiny rainstorm that made you feel as if you’d stuck your head out a car window on a drizzly day.
“Go away!” she shouted.
The classroom door slammed in my face. I shrugged my shoulders, wiped my cheeks and forehead on my sleeve, and ambled down the hall to the library. Mrs. Tanner greeted me with a sour, unsympathetic look and heaved her bulky body from her chair behind the checkout desk. Muttering that this was the third time in a month, she thrust an old book with a blue cloth cover into my hands and ordered me to sit in the corner farthest from her desk but still in her line of vision.
“Read,” she commanded. “Quietly.”
The collection of ancient Greek myths hooked me right away. I read until the end of the day, then checked out the book and took it home. I renewed it so many times that Mrs. Tanner eventually gave up trying to get it back. When I graduated and went on to high school, the blue volume remained on the shelf in my room.
I guess you could say that I stole the book, but since Sykes and Tanner were accomplices the theft wasn’t my fault. If Sykes hadn’t kicked me out of class, I wouldn’t have gone to the library. If Tanner had pressed a different, less interesting choice into my hands, I would have left it on the library chair when the end-of-day bell rang. You could say I was fated to read the book and like it enough to re-read it many times. Maybe Sykes, Tanner, and I were committing acts according to a plan we had no control over. We were like train cars pulled helplessly along tracks laid down by the gods long before we were born.
I found this notion in the blue book of myths. There were three old misshapen hags with ragged clothes and hearts as cold and spiky as icicles. They were called the Moirae, or Fates, and they controlled the destiny of every being on earth. The ancient Greeks seemed to swallow this idea calmly.
Not me. Even in grade eight I saw through the shabby excuse that the events in our lives are decided by semi-divine beings. I knew I had ended up in the library that day because I had pushed the grumpy Mrs. Sykes too far. I was bored by her tedious vocabulary exercises, and bugging her was a way to pass the time. I, not a warty trio of half-demented old crones, was responsible.
It’s true-life has its surprises. Sometimes the first link in a chain of events you’d never have imagined is forged by an ordinary routine action-like walking down Mississauga Street one morning, stepping into a cafe, and ordering a cup of coffee.