not much to add about coming to Canada. As Owen and I had discovered: at the New Hampshire-Quebec border, there's little to see-just forests, for miles, and a thin road so beaten by the winter that it is bruised to the color of pencil lead and pockmarked with frost heaves. The border outpost, the so-called customs house, which I remembered as just a cabin, was not exactly as I'd remembered it; and I thought there'd been a gate that was raised-like a gate guarding a railroad crossing-but that was different, too. I was sure I remembered sitting on the tailgate of the tomato-red pickup, watching the fir trees on both sides of the border-but then I wondered if everything I'd done with Owen Meany was not as exact in my memory as I imagined. Perhaps Owen had even changed my memory. Anyway, I crossed the border without incident. A Canadian customs officer asked me about the granite doorstop-JULY, . He seemed surprised when I told him it was a wedding present. The customs officer also asked me if I was a draft dodger; although I might have appeared-to him-too old to be dodging the draft, they had been drafting people over twenty-six for more than a year. I answered the question by showing the officer my missing finger.
'I'm not worried about the war,' I told him, and he let me into Canada without any more questions. I might have ended up in Montreal; but too many people were pissy to me there, because I couldn't speak French. And I arrived in Ottawa on a rainy day; I just kept driving until I got to Toronto. I'd never seen a lake as large as Lake Ontario; I knew I was going to miss the view of the Atlantic Ocean from the breakwater at Rye Harbor, so the idea of a lake that looked as big as the sea was appealing to me. Not much else has happened to me. I'm a churchgoer and a schoolteacher. Those two devotions need not necessarily yield an unexciting life, but my life has been determinedly unexciting; my life is a reading list. I'm not complaining; I've had enough excitement. Owen Meany was enough excitement for a lifetime. How it must have disappointed Owen ... to discover that my father was such an insipid soup of a man. Lewis Merrill was so innocuous, how could I have remembered seeing him in those bleacher seats? Only Mr. Merrill could have escaped my attention. As many times as I searched the audience at the performances of The Gravesend Players (and the Rev. Mr. Merrill was always there), I always missed him, I never remembered him as he was in those bleacher seats, I simply overlooked him. In any gathering, not only did Mr. Merrill not stand out-he didn't even show up! How it has disappointed me ... to discover that my father was just another Joseph. I never dared tell Owen, but once I dreamed that JFK was my father; after all, my mother was just as beautiful as Marilyn Monroe! How it has disappointed me ... to discover that my father is just another man like me. As for my faith: I've become my father's son-that is, I've become the kind of believer that Pastor Merrill used to be. Doubt one minute, faith the next-sometimes inspired, sometimes in despair. Canon Campbell taught me to ask myself a question when the latter state settles upon me. Whom do I know who's alive whom I love? Good question-one that can bring you back to life. These days, I love Dan Needham and the Rev. Katherine Keeling; I know I love them because I worry about them-Dan should lose some weight, Katherine should gain some! What I feel for Hester isn't exactly love; I admire her-she's certainly been a more heroic survivor than I've been, and her kind of survival is admirable. And then there are those distant, family ties that pass for love-I'm talking about Noah and Simon, about Aunt Martha and Uncle Alfred. I look forward to seeing them every Christmas. I don't hate my father, I just don't think about him very much-and I haven't seen him since that day he committed Owen Meany's body to the ground. I hear from Dan that he's a whale of a preacher, and that there's not a trace of the slight stutter that once marred his speech. At times I envy Lewis Merrill; I wish someone could trick me the way I tricked him into having such absolute and unshakable faith. For although I believe I know what the real miracles are, my belief in God disturbs and unsettles me much more than not believing ever did; unbelief seems vastly harder to me now than belief does-but belief poses so many unanswerable questions'. How could Owen Meany have known what he 'knew'? It's no answer, of course, to believe in accidents, or in coincidences; but is God really a better answer? If God had a hand in
what Owen 'knew,' what a horrible question that poses! For how could God have let that happen to Owen Meany? Watch out for people who call themselves religious; make sure you know what they mean-make sure they know what they mean! It was more than a year after I came to Canada, when the town churches of Gravesend-and Hurd's Church, upon the urging of Lewis Merrill-organized a so-called Vietnam Moratorium. On a given day in October, all the church bells were rung at : A.M.-I'm sure that pissed some people off!-and services were held as early as :. Following the services, a parade then commenced from the town bandstand, marching up Front Street to assemble on the lawn in front of the Main Academy Building on the Gravesend campus; there followed a peaceful demonstration, so-called, and a few of the standard antiwar speeches. Typically, the town newspaper, The Gravesend News-Letter, did not editorialize on the event, except to say that a march against mayhem on the nation's highways would be a more significant use of such civilian zeal; as for the academy newspaper, The Grave reported that it was 'about time' the school and the town combined forces to demonstrate against the evil war. The News-Letter estimated the crowd was less than four hundred people-'and almost as many dogs.' The Grave claimed that the crowd swelled to at least six hundred 'well-behaved' people. Both papers reported the only counterdemonstration. As the parade swung up Front Street--just past the old Town Hall, where The Graves-end Players had for so long been entertaining both young and old-a former American Legion commander stepped off the sidewalk and waved a North Vietnamese flag in the face of a young tuba player in the Gravesend Academy marching band. Dan told me that the former American Legion commander was none other than Mr. Morrison, the cowardly mailman.
'I'd like to know how that idiot got his hands on a North Vietnamese flag!' my grandmother said. Thus, with precious little to interrupt them, the years have also swung up Front Street and marched on by. Owen Meany taught me to keep a diary; but my diary reflects my unexciting life, just as Owen's diary reflected the vastly more interesting things that happened to him. Here's a typical entry from my diary.
'Toronto: November ,-the Bishop Strachan greenhouse burned down today, and the faculty and students had to evacuate the school
