undead like me

"Rumours of my death have been greatly exaggerated."  

Mark Twain.

I used to publish the local paper. In fact, I started the Harbour Spiel and ran it for 15 years before selling it to my friend Brian Lee in 2006.

The Spiel was, and remains, pretty much a one-man show, which is about the only way a small-town publication can survive.

The publisher is also the editor, reporter, photographer, ad designer, layout artist, bookkeeper, salesperson, janitor and bill collector. You can see how the line blurs between the person and the paper.

Brian and I agree that the Spiel is a big part of Pender Harbour, and for a long while now he's wanted to do a story on its early history. Last month we got together in my living room for The Interview, conducted with the tape recorder rolling while we ate pizza and drank wine. It was fun, as a visit with Brian always is.

He titled the story, "The Myrtle Years," and made it the main feature of this month's issue. I have to admit I'm pleased with the story. Like the photographer who never has their picture taken, I've never had anything written about me before. Well, there was that item in the Police Report a few years ago, but we don't need to bring that up.

Brian concluded the article with a mercifully unsentimental mention that I have cancer an am documenting the experience in (this) blog.

Today I met a woman I'd not seen in some months, and the first thing she said was how great I looked. I thanked her.
"But you look so good, you look so healthy!"
I thanked her again.
"I thought you were dead," she said, somewhat accusingly.

That would most surely explain why I looked healthy to her. Few corpses have any colour in their face (okay, I was wearing makeup), never mind drinking coffee and bopping around Madeira Park in the sunshine. We all know The Vampire Diaries is fiction.

"I read the article about you in the Harbour Spiel," she said.
I expected her to say that's how she knew I had cancer, and maybe someone had mistakenly thought they heard, and repeated, that I'd died. You know how small-town gossip goes, like the Chinese whisper game.

But, no, she wasn't going to let herself off that easily.
"I thought it was your obituary. It said 'The Myrtle Years'."

Right. Well, the whole exchange really was quite comical, and I know how it is with writing. No matter how hard you try to second-guess how someone might misinterpret something, there will always be one reader who will entirely miss the point or come to a seriously incorrect conclusion. No big deal, and it's a funny story to tell at the pub.

Which I did, later this evening, sitting with a few people I know. Everyone laughed. Everyone except for one woman (I'd known her for years) who looked me straight in the eye, directly across the table, unsmiling.

"I read the title and put it down. I couldn't read the rest. I thought you were dead."
Her chilly tone made it clear that I had quite some nerve to be sitting there in front of her, breathing and talking, eating nachos and drinking wine and, well... being alive, after my obituary was published in the Harbour Spiel.

I won't be telling the funny story, any more, of how someone assumed the early history of the Harbour Spiel was my obituary. At least not to anyone who reads the Harbour Spiel.

If you're wondering about that article, you can download the .pdf file to read the May edition of the Harbour Spiel. "The Myrtle Years" starts on Page 14. And, no, I'm not dead.