She answered the front door when we came to look at the basement apartment. It was a good size, nicely done and very very cheap. She had a little girl, two years old, she was a single mother. Even though our first few contacts were tentative, even a bit officious in flavour, I found that I liked her right away. There was something very reserved and understated about her, but also a gentle and incisive intelligence. I hoped that we would be friends.
We did become friends, quickly, once I got rid of my destructive roommate and his sad lost friends and cleaned and restored the apartment and proved myself to be a responsible and coveted tenant. For the five years I was there we would chat and visit casually in her apartment upstairs or mine in the basement. Her child and her little cousin next door were also visitors and at times I babysat.
She was a journalist by training and when I lived downstairs from her she taught English as a second language. She was from Sweden but her English was flawless with but a hint of an accent. I had some rather unflattering nicknames for her little girl: Baby Storm Trooper, Little Miss Logging Boots, and Miss Six Point Eight On The Richter Scale. She was a very energetic toddler and play dates with her little cousin were for me akin to living downstairs from a very busy bowling alley, or perhaps an eternal buffalo stampede.
We otherwise got along well and learned more or less to co-exist with each other's noise. She liked my taste in music and my singing and I learned to appreciate the daily noises of her and her daughters as a kind of daily rhythm of normal life. I would hear Mommy go to the bathroom upstairs and pee with rather a robust piddle followed by her little girl with her little girl piddle. All part of normal life. I would hear in the evening Mommy's big gargle followed by her little girl's little gargle. One day when they were visiting me downstairs the little girl ran upstairs to use the bathroom. Little girl piddle followed by a flushing sound rather like being right underneath Niagara falls. My friend/landlady said with a shocked expression on her face, "You mean this is what you have to endure listening to every time we flush our toilet." I replied benignly "Oh, that's nothing. You should hear yourselves when you gargle!"
She came to appreciate and respect my spirituality and my active Christian faith and we had many long and meaningful conversations. I became to her a kind of spiritual adviser. Her mother, a glamorous sixty-something from Sweden, while visiting, thanked me in flawless English for being there and being supportive and in a sense protective of her daughter and granddaughter. I could only reply with an ironic smirk "Oh yes, Greg Greenlaw (my former name), guardian of female virtue."
The last year was less than idyllic. As sometimes happens with attractive single mothers she fell in love with a man and I found myself getting rather annoyed with the sound of their energetic rutting just upstairs from my living room. Her boyfriend was a churlish boor, apparently jealous of me (why, I still do not know) and began to threaten me. He moved in. I moved out.
Kanga came by to visit me several months later in my new apartment downtown. We had an enjoyable visit. She apologized on the late side for her awful boyfriend, whom she had recently dumped. We never saw each other again. I have always harboured the hope of seeing her again. She was a rare and pure soul and her kind are not common.
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