My life changed the day Mel pulled me into his office and sat me down. Correction. It had begun to change long before that, maybe a year or more. I can’t pinpoint it exactly. But when Mel brought me in, that was a turning point. I began to see the big picture.

My grandmother used to say hindsight is twenty-twenty. Whenever anything went wrong or things just didn’t seem to go my way, she’d look at me and say, “Hindsight is twenty-twenty, Hal. You may not see it today, but when you look back years from now, it will all be clear.” Then she’d put the kettle on and prepare the teapot or water her plants on the windowsill. Somehow that always made me feel better, to know she could go on and do the simple things when life seemed so uncertain. She didn’t care so much about seeing as I did. She could wait. I guess you have to be older to develop that kind of discipline. Faith either comes or goes with age.

Talking about hindsight, I can still see the painting I was working on when Mel called me in. I remember it so well because it was one of the ugliest pieces of work we had ever been asked to frame in all the years I worked in the store. Mel had a saying, “People will frame anything.” I used to kid him that he should put this on his business card. “Mel Howard’s Framing - Because people will frame anything.” He’d laugh when I’d suggest this but Mel never did it. He had too much respect for the customer. “Who are we to tell people what to look at?” he’d say. That was another one of his lines. Back then, I’d feel a surge to argue with him but now I understand what he meant. Hindsight is indeed twenty-twenty.

It was not a regular customer who brought in the painting. We had regular customers then, just as we do now, clients who have offices and homes around the store and buy prints or original artwork for visitors to stare at. It was Mel’s contention that most people never buy artwork for themselves. They buy it for their friends, to give the right impression. It takes real guts to put up what turns your crank.

She was not a regular customer. We knew the regulars by name and we knew what they wanted, whether it was frosted, gold trim or how tight they liked a print cropped. They could just drop the art with us and we’d do the work, just as they asked. It was a nice relationship. It still is, though I find these days, the regulars stop less and less to talk. There used to be days when Charlie Ming who owned the jewelry shop on the corner, or Dr. Griffith, the dentist in the office building across the street, would stand at the counter with a cup of cardboard coffee and chat up Mel or whoever was working the register that day. They’d look at the artwork that was in the rack waiting to be framed and discuss it. Charlie Ming always liked the impressionists- Van Gogh, Cezanne. The doctor, he was more of the contemporary flavour. He pushed the limits somewhat. He’d support anything that was outrageous, anything that he couldn’t understand. I saw Mel cringe once or twice when he and the doctor discussed a new piece in the rack. I know Mel had his own views on art. He often didn’t share them and he was always tolerant of other viewpoints. “We see it how you see it.” That was another line he could have put on his business card.

Yet, even the doctor agreed that this piece, the painting I was working on when my life changed, was one fine ugly piece of creativity. “Lordy,” he’d said. “What happened there?”

It was a lady who bought in the painting. She carried it through the front door, banging the bell that hung on the door handle with one corner of the canvas. She wasn’t too careful with the artwork for someone who wanted to frame and hang it. She had her daughter with her, ten, maybe eleven years old. The kid was one of those kids who never say anything in front of strangers, only glare at you as if to say, “Look at the parents I got stuck with.” The daughter’s name was Jesse and it looked as if her mother had cut her hair. She had freshly pierced ears. Her new studs shone under the store fluorescents.

The mother handed the painting to Mel and asked him to put a frame on it. Mel suggested a few woods that may have improved the painting, some heavy framing that softened the look within, but the mother ignored his advice and chose what she wanted. I could tell Mel was unimpressed. He wrote the order on the sheet quickly. He did that when he was struggling with something.

“I was so happy to find this,” the mother continued as Mel wrote. “This artist, he’s going to be big. I can feel it. You know how you can just feel those things?” she asked Mel. She waited for an answer.

“Yes, I do,” he said. “Address?”

She gave her address and admired the painting some more. She swept her hand over the violent reds in the corner. “Amazing. Where does it come from?”

She expected no answer this time, satisfying the question herself wherever her head was. She handed the painting to me to be put in the rack. I took it and did so. I turned the artwork so it faced the wall and only the back of the stretched canvas showed. Give us a week, Mel told the lady. “We’ll need at least a week.”

We had to order in the framing in those days. Now, we have a large warehouse and keep most of the framing we carry in stock. But, back then, Mel liked to keep only what we needed right away, so we’d order in our framing and then wait three or four days while it was delivered. There was no rush. Most people today, they drop off a print in the morning, they want to pick it up mounted and framed on the way home that night. We can do it. We charge you for it, but we can do it. Back then, there was no rush. People would give you a week, sometimes longer.

The framing for the ugly painting took a little longer to arrive. Five days. Mel was getting a bit anxious that we wouldn’t have the work done in time, but I think he just wanted the painting out of the store. He knew there was something not right about it. The fact that even the doctor couldn’t wrap his head around it, that confirmed things for him. It was truly ugly.

“Hal, come in here for a minute.” The framing had arrived via courier late on Friday and Mel had asked me to do the job of cutting it and bordering the painting. I had been working at the store for just over a year, passing the time between school and a career framing art and trying not to think too much of the future. I had begun to write during this time, just a few short stories, and I knew it had rattled something deep within me. I dreamt about it. It was a direction I wanted to further explore and working for Mel allowed my head to be free. You don’t have to think too much once you get the knack for framing. You just let go and do it, leaving space for speculation to get into your head. I enjoyed having the time to work things out, prepare them to be put down on paper later. It was a good job. Not a career, but a good job.

“Leave that piece of shit and come in here.” Mel sounded almost angry with me. He rarely swore, finding four letter words to be lazy and crass. By this point, late in the evening and rush hour traffic heading home on the street outside, I’d cut the framing and was beginning to attach it to the edges of the painting. I’d placed the artwork face down on the table as I worked. You aren’t supposed to do that but Mel never said anything to me. He just told me to leave it be and come into his office.

From the way I describe things, you might think Mel and I were good friends back then, that we got along. Now, I can see that we did, but at the time I’d never tell you that. We were polite to each other and I liked to joke with him. I was always cracking jokes when I was younger. These days, I like to pick my moments, but when I was younger, I always seemed to have my sharp wit on the tip of my tongue.

There was an uneasiness between us, Mel and I. My father had arranged the framing job for me. There was a staff of about eight back then and I made nine when Dad asked Mel to take me on the summer after I graduated from university. Dad knew I didn’t have my head together yet. He didn’t like it, but he knew it. He and Mel had gone to school together, that’s how they knew each other. They’d gone to business school together and Dad had landed a job with IBM when he graduated. Mel decided to go into business himself. He bought into a company that made patio furniture but it went bust and Mel lost almost everything- everything but a small inheritance which paid for the framing shop. Dad said Mel never had much business sense. He can’t focus on the moment, the today, said Dad once to me. He got caught with his pants down.

Dad never took work to Mel to be framed. He was too embarrassed.

He did ask Mel to give me a job that summer and for reasons which I only understand now, Mel gave me one. I learned pretty quickly and did good work, probably better than most of the other framers who’d been there longer. Mel knew if he asked me to do something, it would get done, even if it meant staying a little later or coming in on a Sunday. I was solid. I’d learned that much by that point in my life. Do what you say you’re going to do.

Mel could be distant when he wanted to and often that came across when he was around me. He’d laugh or spend time talking quietly with the customers, even with the employees who’d been working there longer than me. I’d always assumed you had to pay your dues, put in your time before Mel would open up to you, but he never did around me. I joked with him and he’d joke with me but he never let me into his head, let me see what he was really thinking. He was guarded, guarded around all people, but particularly so around me. I like to think that it never bothered me much, but it did. I felt like he didn’t like me, that he didn’t take me seriously. I was the big joker in the business. Everything’s a joke with Hal.

“He doesn’t know me at all,” I would tell myself. “ He has no idea who I am and what I think.” I could never figure out what it was about me that made others so nervous.

So when Mel called me into his office on that Friday, I thought he was going to let me go. Business had tailed off since Easter and Mel never asked to speak to me alone in his office. I figured I was history.

Which was okay. He was doing me a favour, I reasoned. I knew I wanted to be a writer and if I could have my days free to focus on that, the faster I would get there. I was going to be a writer and spend my days in front of my laptop, working, recording, making money, being known. It was a fabulous dream.

Still is. Things have changed somewhat, but it’s still a pretty great dream.

“You and I don’t always see eye to eye, do we?” said Mel to me that night. I was seated on one of the hard chairs in his tiny office. Most of his office consisted of this monstrous painting which was curiously unframed and hung on the wall facing the doorway. The artist is unknown to me, though when I stare at the name in the corner I can make out Jacob or Kanof, something like that. It’s a magnificent painting. Mel had exquisite taste for art. It would have looked better hanging somewhere with more room and light, where the colors could run and play with the eyes, but Mel stuffed it in his office and kept it there. That’s what he wanted and no one questioned it.

I sat on the chair next to the door where I could see the painting in full view, though it was hard not to see it from anywhere you sat. Mel was behind his desk and he had his back to me, looking at a fax that had ground out of the printer as I sat down. I was nervous. I had no idea what he wanted.

He turned and as if realizing that I was there, sat quickly in his chair and pushed some of the papers on his desk to one side. He folded his arms and tried to seem unconcerned.

“Is there a problem, Mel?” I asked him. I wanted to see where this was leading.

“Oh, there’s no problem. Did I give the impression that there was?” He seemed surprised by my line of questioning. “I’m feeling a bit nervous about all this. It’s a bit of a leap.”

I looked at him and said nothing. I wanted to go back to the ugly painting, finish it and go home. There was a story I wanted to finish. Mel looked at the clipboard of orders on his desk. I tried to think of something witty to say but for once, found my mouth dry and my humour drier.

“I know we don’t talk much, Hal,” he said. “I’ve never been one to reveal much, I’ll admit. I admit that. I think you make me feel a bit uneasy. You stir things up in me.”

“Yes,” I said. Mel was freaking me out but I could relate to what he was saying.

“Anyway, well.... this may sound a bit crazy but you remind me of someone I’m sort of close to. Which would be me.”

“You?”

“You’ll realize as you get older that the people who most make you feel uncomfortable are most like you. It’s a little creepy to run into yourself at some stage of your life, whether it be the past or the future. I hope you can forgive me for being the way I am. I’d like to be more to you, I just find it difficult.”

Again, I had no response. I let him continue.

“Sometimes things happen and we don’t understand why they do. We don’t look to see how they fit or where they fit. Maybe we don’t look to see the big picture because we’re afraid to, afraid to see how little control we have over our lives. All we can do is have faith, faith that someone or something is guiding us in a good direction.”

“You been eating that granola in the mornings again, Mel?” It was time for a joke. I’d told better ones.

But he smiled. It was a candid smile and I’d never seen it before. “Maybe I have. Yeah.” He picked up the clipboard and lay it on the pile of papers beside the filing cabinet. “You’re a writer, aren’t you?”

I was taken aback by the question. “Yeah, well... I’ve been working on some stuff.”

“I wrote a bit, back when I was in business school. So did your father, did you know that?”

“My dad was a writer?” I laughed. “Get out of town.”

“He did some stuff. He let me read one or two things, some short stories and poems.”

“Okay, now you’re just being ridiculous. My old man has never written a poem in his life. He writes reports and form letters to companies that try to screw over the computer business.”

Mel bit his lower lip. “He’d never admit to you that he did. But, he did. I read it.”

“How did you know I was a writer?” I could feel sweat gathering on the back of my neck. This was a stupid conversation to be having when I had work to finish. Later, sure, whatever- but, not now.

“Your dad mentioned it to me. He told me you spend your free time in your room banging away on a keyboard. You ever tell him what you’re doing?”

I thought about it. “I think he knows how I feel.”

“Yeah,” said Mel. It looked as if he was finished with the whole conversation.

I thought some more about the ugly painting and found myself saying, “I don’t always write that way. I keep some notes, you know, with a pen.”

“In a notebook. Yeah, I’ve read some of it.”

“Pardon me?”

“I read some of the passages in your notes. I’m sorry. It was hard to resist and then I’d had this, well... I don’t know what you’d call it, an epiphany maybe or something, and I had to check you out.”

“Check me out?” I was fuming.

“You’re angry, aren’t you?”

“No. No, I’m not.”

Mel smiled once more and this just made me angrier. “You see,” he said. “Eye to eye. We’re not always there.”

We sat in silence for a few moments, me wrestling with my insides- Mel with his words. He chose carefully.

“I’m sorry I looked at your work. Truly I am. I have to believe in time that you’ll forgive me, maybe in some strange way even thank me. I had to see the big picture.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Don’t make this any harder than it is. You’re making me doubt myself and believe me, I’ve done enough of that lately.” He sighed as if he’d just endured a long spasm of stomach pain. “You’re pretty good, the stuff you write. You got something. There’s a long way to go, but you got something.”

Suddenly, I found I was less interested in framing the ugly painting. I looked at Mel for more.

“That’s why I think you should stay here, work at the store. In a few years, I’m going to have had enough of all this, and, well... maybe you should think about taking it over. I’ll give it to you at a good price.”

I laughed. It was a tremendous joke, greater and more complex than anything I had ever told.

“You’re kidding me, right?”

“No. No, I’m not at all.”

I laughed some more. “Why would I want to take over a framing business, Mel? No offense, man, but it’s pretty dry. I want to do more than this with my life.”

“You can do whatever you want. You say you want to be a writer. So do that.”

“Mel, writers write. They don’t work in framing stores, recommending brass or silver frames. They sit at a desk and write. That’s their job. That’s what I want to do. I want... I think I want to write stories and maybe even a book. I’m hoping I can support myself that way.”

Mel leaned into his desk. “I’m sure you will be able to. I just think you’d be better off staying here and working out of the store.”

“What is this, Mel?” My patience was thin. “Is this about you, the fact that you never made it in the business world. I know you went bust, man. I’m sorry about that but...”

“Your dad tell you that?”

“Yeah, he told me. Is this you trying to drag me down with you, exact some sort of sick revenge on your college buddy by taking in his son and then twisting his dreams?”

“Probably seems that way, doesn’t it?” Mel let out another sigh and stretched the fingers on his hands. “I don’t know exactly what it is I’m doing, Hal. I don’t know. I’m just trying to finish the painting, if you’ll follow the metaphor, and big surprise to me, you’re part of the picture. So, I gotta let you in.”

I didn’t understand him. It all makes such perfect sense now, as I write this, but at that point, he was rambling and incoherent.

“I’m going to go and finish up,” I said, rising. “I wish you would have asked to see my writing, but I’m glad you liked it. I have to admit, I’m flattered.”

“Then sit down and listen. This goes somewhere.” There were bricks in his voice and I sat back down in a hurry. Mel said, “You aren’t going to learn anything being a writer for hire. Sure, you’ll pay the bills and keep yourself in good clothes, maybe even make a name for yourself. But you’ll never get to the core of it. There will be too much else to worry about. You’ll have to write what your editor wants, what the public wants, what everyone else wants but you. That voice in your head that dreams up all those words you put down, you’ll stop listening to it because there will be all these other voices telling you what to do. You’ll have to do this and then you’ll have to do that and then there’s always Part 2 when that becomes a monster seller and you’ll be so busy playing the role of the writer that you’ll forget to be a human being, which ironically is what you have to be in order to be a writer. You catch my drift?”

It was sinking in. I didn’t know what to do with it all, but it was sinking in. I let him go on.

“All these people who come in here, their artwork clutched in their hands, their little pieces that they think best tell who they are, you see them for who they really are. You aren’t fooled. Me neither. I can see it. It’s taken me a long time, but I can see it now. You, you’re ten times better at it than I am. Look how young you are and you can see stuff now I’ve only just begun to realize.” He looked over at his painting, smothering the entire left wall. “Stay here. Trust me. This is a great place to be a human being. You will learn and see things here you’ll never have an opportunity to see if you become a full time writer. You’ll see the big picture. And that, my friend, is the only thing worth writing about.”

I was stunned. He was serious. Mel wanted me to be a framer for the rest of my life.

“Think about it,” he said with the wave of his hand. “It sounds crazy. Hell I know, I’ve rehearsed this speech long enough to know it sounds crazy to me. But if you live with it for a bit, you’ll begin to see what I’m talking about. Think about hanging on for another year, even, That will probably be enough.”

“Mel...” I said. “This...”

“Just go and think about it. Don’t worry so much.”

I shook my head. I shook it once more and smiled. I rose and pulled the door of the office wider to leave.

“Was the stuff my dad wrote any good?” I turned and waited for Mel to answer. He looked me in the eye.

“Unfortunately, yes, it was. It was pretty good.”

I left without another word.

I didn’t finish the ugly painting that night. I went back to it but found my thoughts too heavy to continue framing and left it to complete in the morning. Mel never came out of his office and I left him there, alone, the lights dimmed in the store. For all I know, he stayed there all night long.

The lady came for her painting early on Saturday, minutes after I had finished the entire job. She was unaccompanied and she carried herself with much less self purpose this time. Her voice was decibels lower.

“I left a painting to be framed. “

That was all she said and perhaps she sensed it was all she needed to say, that we knew exactly what she was talking about. The ugly painting. She was embarrassed.

I went to the back and lifted the framed work from the counter, carrying it over my head. Had Mel seen me carry it, he would have disapproved. Artwork is not a sack of flour, he’d said to several of us over the years. Don’t treat it like that. This time, with this painting, I don’t know what he would have said. Probably nothing.

I carried it out and laid the canvas face up on the large counter so the client could see. I held it just as Mel had shown us to do it, so the special lights he had chosen above the desk shone on the work. It showed our handiwork in the best light and gave the client a new perspective on their choice, or so Mel hoped. “If we can help them see something new in their choice, a different way of looking at things, then we’ve done our job.” Mel could have had a new business card for every day of the year.

“It looks good.” The lady gave only a cursory glance at the painting. She didn’t even look at the framing and I could tell she was disappointed. She waved it away with her hand and I took it down and began to wrap it in flat brown paper.

“My son painted that.” She watched me as I covered the face of the painting. “It’s not very good, is it?”

I looked at her and then continued to wrap. It was best to say nothing.

“You can say it is. I know it.” She wanted to go further.

“We don’t have any opinions on the artwork, ma’am. We just try to do our best and frame it.”

“That’s a crock. Tell me what you think of it.” She stood in front of me, waiting for an answer.

“Ma’am, I’d rather not....”

“Please.” Her voice trembled.

I finished putting the last piece of tape over the back edges. There was nothing else left to do. “It’s not the greatest work I’ve ever framed. I’m sorry.”

She sighed heavily. “Oh, don’t be sorry. My heart knew what you were going to say. I’m glad you told me the truth. At least someone did...” She trailed off and went into her own headspace.

I pushed the work forward to awaken her. “Well, we all see different things. I’m sure you’ll enjoy it.”

“My son died six months ago.”

“Pardon me?”

“My son. He died. He had AIDS. He was only twenty-five.”

My heart dropped. There was no joke on my lips. There was nothing.

“He didn’t really know what he wanted to do with his life. My husband and I, we pushed him in directions we thought he’d like, but nothing ever caught on. Then he got sick, and well, it all went to hell then, to be honest.” She had tears on her cheeks. “He ran away from me. He just ran away.”

The store was quiet. No one came or went. The other framers in the back had stopped their work and I knew they were listening. She continued.

“He always wanted to be a painter. As a boy, he used to bring me paintings from school and make me hang them on the refrigerator. I should have kept those... you know? I should have kept them just in case....” I could see her banging her fists into her head. She held them still, but she wanted to bang.

“His friend brought us this.” She stared at the wrapped painting. “He drove all the way from Vancouver to give me Richard’s painting.”

I lifted the edges of my taping work with a finger. I looked at the floor. “I’m really sorry, ma’am.”

She caught herself then, in some invisible mirror, and saw the openings she had made. She wiped her eyes and turned for her painting, her son’s painting. “Thank you for doing that. You do good work. You care.”

I nodded and she pulled the painting from the counter, held it with two hands at her side.

“I know it’s ugly,” she said. “But, it’s beautiful. It’s all I have.”

She left without looking back. Across the street, Dr. Griffith came out of his building and lit a cigarette. He walked to get a coffee. Behind me, I could hear the framers go back to their work. There was not a lot of conversation.

Around noon, Mel came in and when he was sifting through papers at his desk I poked my head in and told him I would like to stay on for another year. He nodded as if it was no real surprise.

About six years ago, Mel passed away. He died in his sleep, which I guess is a peaceful way to go, unless you’re having a nightmare. I try not to think about it too much.

I’ve been at the framing store for nineteen years now. I own it, along with the other two stores we have uptown. Business is good. There will always be artwork to frame.

I miss Mel a great deal, almost as much as I miss my father, who died just last year. We became great friends, Mel and I. It took some time, but we were patient and once we got past the things within us that we resisted, we relaxed and found in each other a great comfort and understanding. Mel was my brother, the one I never had. Nothing made him happier than the day I signed on the dotted line and bought the business from him. He wept. Hell, we both did. We knew what it all meant.

I have completed volumes of work over the years. Some of it has been published. Most of it has not. My name is known in the literature circles, always mentioned as, “The promising writer, Hal Burnsby...” Promising? I’m in my forties, for Christ sake. How much promise can one have at that age?

Never mind. I know something none of them know. I know about me. I know I’m good. Maybe they don’t fully see the pictures I describe, but I do. And they grow more beautiful with each one I write.

After dad died, my mother and I faced the great ordeal of cleaning out his belongings, boxing and sorting. I asked her if she’d mind if I tackled his office, the room at the back of the house where as a boy on Saturday mornings, I would watch him as I watched cartoons, working on his papers, filing reports and budgets. Mom said that was fine.

It took me several weekends to get through everything. I spent a lot of time reading the reports he’d written over the years, watching how he used words, how he slipped his own ideas in amongst the rows of numbers. I met a whole new person on those weekends, sitting on the floor, reading the things my dad wrote. On the top of one report, scribbled lightly in the corner, I found this:

I know it isn’t the greatest thing ever written, but I keep it in my head and stored in a very safe place.

It’s all I have.