other peril of running a boarding
house: you find out the ways in which
you are a tool.
One thing Sara didn’t arrive with
was a knowledge of daily practicalities.
My son and I have secretly wondered
if she is perhaps an Iranian princess.
She once asked if she could put gold-
gilded china in the oven at 350 F, and
another time started a small kitchen
fire after she put her dinner to boil on
the gas stovetop and wandered off to
think. She has a lot to think about. Her
doctoral specialty is the interconnec-
tivity of brain tissue.
“What have you learned?” I asked
her early on.
“Nothing,” she said, and hid her face
in her hands, ever modest. “Imagine
standing in the vast ocean with a tea-
spoon of water in your hand. That
teaspoon is how much we know about
the brain.”
“Well, it’s kind of like a computer,”
Kelly said, and I imagined carrying
around the latest Apple upgrade on my
shoulders. “The brain is nothing like
a computer,” said Sara. “You can’t find
a storage bank in a brain, for example.”
She and Kelly would discuss this for
the next hour.I GAVE UP a few things taking in board-
ers: having the bathroom to myself,
blaring Leonard Cohen at full blast,
and my own space, which turns out to
be less valuable than I once thought it
was. But as I have come to know Sara,
I understand how much more she’s left
behind. She never watches The Hand-
maid’s Tale, for example, because it is
too much like modern-day Iran. “My
friends and I lived this.”
She swam in the Caspian Sea as a
girl, and longs to swim in a northern
Ontario lake. One weekend she rented
a car and drove north with her mask
and snorkel, turning down road after
road on Lake Joseph in Muskoka only
to end up at the bottom of another
cottager’s driveway. She came home
defeated, unable to find a public place
for a swim. I was terribly hurt by her
disappointment, and I began to under-
stand her isolation. Being Mrs. Brad-
bury of the boarding house, my first
impulse was to fix it.
But some things don’t fix easily, and
Sara understands this better than me.
When she is homesick she brings out
her bag of Cheetos—and I mean one
bag. She unfailingly offers to share it.
“It’s console eating?” she says. “Con-
solation eating,” I say. It was Kelly who
noticed that, in the first few months of
her stay, she never ate more than threeMY BOARDERS HAVE
MADE ME BETTER—
MORE AWARE OF
THE WAYS I TAKE MY
WORLD FOR GRANTED.rd.ca 61