“There are days, Barnaby, when I’m glad Phillip isn’t around to witness what’s going on.”
Phillip, Elsie’s late husband, dead and gone just over two years ago now. Two? Maybe three. Time does fly.
Elsie’s in town, down from her final summer at the family cottage before she lets that go too. A medical appointment. Nothing to worry about, she assures me. 
Just a routine checkup. Fit as fiddle, all things considered, all those things being age-related. Brittle bones. Arthritic joints. A bothersome matter of skittery balance. The usual suspects. Preferable, even in the aggregate, to the alternative.
“If the cancer hadn’t killed him,” Elsie says as we make our way to a nearby coffee shop, “the news certainly would have. Oooo boy!”
It is a litany of one thing after another these days, these long days of short news cycles. A non-stop assault of the senses, of common sense. Disbelief our default mode. That didn’t just happen, did it? He didn’t just say that, did he? A firehose of bullshit, as one of the architects of our current madness pithily put it, knocking us over and soaking us to the skin.
“What particular bit of recent news would’ve done Phillip in, do you think?”
Elsie brushes the question aside with a wave. Take your pick, I guess she’s signaling. All of it. Every last tidbit of it.
“Remember how Phillip considered himself quite the big L Pearsonian Liberal?”
Indeed.
Deep, deep red. Liberal Red.
And Phillip never tired, even on his deathbed, of telling how he met the man himself, Lester B., Canada’s 14th Prime Minister. When he was just a wee lad. Got to shake the man’s hand and joked about never washing it again. The colour stained for life. That deep, deep Liberal red.
“A deep, deep red,” Elsie says, probably absorbed in the exact same memory.
“Well,” I wonder aloud, “at least on that news front, Phillip would’ve been content, don’t you think?”
Judging by her muted reaction of a slight shrug, my statement may have fallen on fallow ground.
“Do you see much of Mike Pearson in our new Prime Minister, Barnaby?”
There is more than a passing physical resemblance between the two men but I figure that’s not the similarity Elsie’s referring to. Their politics, their liberalism, I guess is what’s on Elsie’s mind, and I think it’s a little too early to tell. It is a high bar, the Pearson measure, in a very short time for someone to clear.
“Do you remember that story Phillip love to tell?” Elsie asks.
“Which one? There were hundreds. Maybe thousands.”
Elsie laughs. She can do that now while batting around the memories of her husband. Phillip did love to talk. Considered himself a bit of a raconteur, in the Garrison Keillor mode when such a comparison hadn’t become fraught.
“The one about Pearson and LBJ. In one of the Caro books, I think.”
Indeed. I recall the story but not the source. Robert Caro would be the got-to for anything Lyndon Johnson related. Loved him some LBJ, Caro. Lots of LBJ. Four volumes? Five?
“Pearson delivered some speech,” Elsie remembers, “at the U.N., I want to say, but I’m not sure if it was.”
“Don’t remember either,” I say.
“Criticized the war in Vietnam.”
“A big no-no.”
“And during his subsequent visit to the White House, Johnson apparently picked up Pearson by the labels and yelled at him: Don’t come into my house and piss on the carpet!” Elsie laughs. “Something like that.”
Funny. I wonder if Pearson’s reaction to the incident was recorded? If the incident really took place. One of those that sound too good to be true.
“Can you imagine?” Elsie says. “A Nobel Peace prizewinner. And picking him up like a ragdoll.”
We arrive at the coffee shop, she holds the door open for me.
“Age before beauty,” she says.
“The same guy who’d call in cabinet members to give a dressing down to while he had a poop!”
“What?!?” Elsie replies.
Surely Phillip didn’t leave that story untold.
Although, that’s more a Johnson story than a Pearson one.
We make our way to the counter and place our orders while I explain the version of the tale I remember. Elsie has a hard time believing it, and I am in no position to confirm its veracity, having not been there in person. Gossip and rumour, perhaps, solidified into public fact.
“Apparently, he turned down no opportunity to put some of his well-endowed attributes on public display.”
“You mean… he, what?” Elsie says, as close to scandalized as I’ve ever seen her.
I can only shrug. Who knows of these things, ultimately. Attempts to humanize the historical project, maybe. Give the kids something to talk about, to grab their attention.
“Well, that puts a whole new perspective on his surname, doesn’t it,” Elsie says with a snicker. Lyndon B. Johnson, emphasis on the B.”
We take our coffees and scone, a delicious looking rhubarb scone, no less, and find ourselves a table to sit at, plopping our weary bones down into our chairs with the appropriate noises of the aged. Sipping our drinks, we both take a piece of the scone and eat in a brief respite from conversation, our conversation. There are other voices in the place, orders being placed and called out. Dings of payments approved. Computer keyboard clatter. The occasional clink of metal utensils on ceramic plates and glasses. A burst of laughter.
“I suppose there’s always been the sordid side of politics,” Elsie says eventually. “They just did a better job keeping it to themselves. Nowadays it just seems that the sordidness is entirely the point!”
Yeppers.
Our Sordid Age.
“But can you imagine our current Prime Minister being bold enough to public state something so, I don’t know, inflammatory about the United States that it would cause the President of the United States to pick him by the lapels and scream at him to not go pissing on his carpet?”
I take a moment to consider.
“I can’t imagine the President of the United States picking anyone up by the lapels without soiling his diaper,” I quip.
Elsie frowns. Another unpleasant visual she hadn’t expected. Or perhaps she’s unimpressed by the lack of seriousness in my response to her question.
“I don’t know, Els,” I retry. “I’m caught between thinking these are different times we live in, you know, it’s not the 60s anymore, and being dubious of our tendency to valorize the politicians from our youth. It’s not like Pearson put an end to the war with his comments.”
“But just the defiant statement itself then,” she asserts. “Do you see Carney doing such a thing to Trump’s face? Even in private, let alone publicly.”
I don’t. That doesn’t seem to be the Prime Minister’s style. And Trump’s not Johnson. The times we live in.
“To what end do you see kicking up a fuss with the President—”
“Just pushing back,” Elsie corrects me. “That’s all I’m talking about, Barnaby. I’m not talking about grandstanding. I’m talking about making a clear and unequivocal statement that we, as a country, are not aligned with the madness that’s engulfed America. That we do not support it. We do not condone it. We are not prepared to accommodate it. That’s all.”
Elsie’s as animated on a political level as I’ve ever witnessed. She’d always deferred to Phillip in these kind of discussions. “His bailiwick,” she called it. It’s as if she’s summoned his ghost now.
“I mean,” she continues. “You cannot reasonably expect not to be monstrously warped when doing business with a monster, can you?”
She finishes off our scone and sits back in her chair, looking at me, daring me to contradict her.
There’s surely some point between such extremes, I think. My natural inclination. Between complete capitulation and total rejection. Isn’t there? In every case? Even in these times we live in? Or is it impossible to deal in the darkness without getting any of it on you?
That feels like a sentiment from a song lyric.
Or maybe a Hannah Arendt snippet. Walter Benjamin, perhaps? Adorno?
What do I know?
Maybe I’m just too old and tired for such considerations.
Off to the glue factory for the likes of me.
“All I know,” Elsie says in the absence of any response on my part, my silent prevarication, “is that Phillip would’ve handed in his party membership rather than be part of such moral cowardice.”
Powerful words. Powerful sentiments. And who am I to argue?
“At least,” she adds, “I’d like to think he would.”
We both sigh into silence, hoping that there are better people out there, past, present and future.