How I Went Out Of The Saviour Business

I suppose I should start by explaining how I got into the saviour business in the first place. It may or may not have had something to do with my mother telling me at an early age not to be like my father, and not to be like other men either for that matter, but it really started because of a short, dark-haired girl that I fell in love with in grade one–Wendy Wiffen. She was the smartest girl in Meadowlands Public School, and also the cutest, but I would never have even known of her existence if it hadn't been for the school's secretary accidentally booking the gymn­asium for two different classes at the same time. Our teachers agreed to share the large room and lined us up at opposite ends of it for some kind of game that I don't remember. What I do remember, quite vividly, is Wendy standing in the middle of the opposite row of children, wearing a white linen dress with navy blue trim around the collar, cuffs and hem. It was love at first site, and that afternoon I waited for her outside the back door of the school to follow her home and play kiss-tag in the backyard of her house while her twin sister Laura watched.

From that moment on, I thought of Wendy as my girlfriend, and even though I was never brave enough to broach the subject, I'm sure she knew how I felt about her. What I'm sure she didn't know about was that I would day-dream about her in class anytime my teacher started going on and on about something of absolutely no interest to anyone but herself. At those moments, I would gaze out the window and picture Wendy tied to a palm tree on a desert island somewhere in the South Pacific Ocean, having been taken captive by pirates. It was up to me, of course, to come to her rescue and set her free. And that is how I first got into the saviour business. Unfortunately, it wasn't exactly a going concern as businesses go. The last time I saw Wendy was at the McDonald's on Merivale Road. She was sixteen and engaged to a construction worker who had gotten her knocked up. The last thing she ever said to me was, “Well, at least my father likes him.”

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This book is 64,500 words long.