Hey Nostradamus! By Douglas Coupland

I sat down, while Mom gave Joyce a nice rub. She said, "I don't think I can make it tonight, dear."
"That's okay. I'll let you know how it goes."
"It's a beautiful evening. Warm."
"It is."
She looked out the sliding doors. "I might go sit on the patio. Catch the last bit of sun."
"I'll come join you."
"No. You go."
"Joyce can stay with you tonight."
Mom and Joyce perked up at this. Joyce loves doing Mom duty: being a Seeing Eye dog is in her DNA,
and in the end, I'm not that much of a challenge for her. Mom fully engages Joyce's need to be needed,
and I let them be.
It was a warm night, August, the only guaranteed-good-weather month in Vancouver. Even after the sun
set, its light would linger well into the evening. The trees and shrubs along the roadside seemed hot and
fuzzy, as if microwaved, and the roads were as clean as any in a video game. On the highway, the
airborne pollen made the air look saliva syrupy, yet it felt like warm sand blowing on my arm. It struck
me that this was exactly the way the weather was the night Kent was killed.
As I headed toward Exit 2, it also struck me that I would have to pass Exit 5 on the way to Barb's
house. I rounded the corner, and there was my father, kneeling on the roadside in a wrinkled (I noticed
even at seventy miles an hour) sinless black suit. My father: born of a Fraser Valley Mennonite family of
daffodil farmers who apparently weren't strict enough for him, so he forged his own religious path,
marching purse-lipped through the 1970s, so lonely and screwed up he probably nearly gave himself
cancer from stress. He met my mother, who worked in a Nuffy's Donuts franchise in the same minimall as
the insurance firm that employed him, calculating the likelihood and time of death of strangers. Mom was
a suburban child from the flats of Richmond, now Vancouver's motherland of Tudor condominium units.
Her shift at the donut shop overlapped Dad's by three hours. I know that at first she found Dad's passion
and apparent clarity attractive - Mother Nature is cruel indeed - and I imagine my father found my
mother a blank canvas onto which he could spew his gunk.
I pulled over to watch him pray. This was about as interested as I'd been in praying since 1988. I could
barely see my father's white Taurus parked back from the highway, on a street in the adjoining suburb,
beside a small stand of Scotch broom. The absence of any other car on the highway made his presence
seem like that of a soul in pilgrimage. That poor dumb bastard. He'd scared or insulted away or betrayed
all the people who otherwise ought to have been in his life. He's a lonely, bitter, prideful crank, and I
really have to laugh when I consider the irony that I've become, of course, the exact same thing. Memo
to Mother Nature: Thanks.
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