Ghosts of Clean Water Action

The stage: 7:45 p.m. Hubby and I are moving the new-new DVD player from the bedroom to the living room and the doorbell rings. I’m already in my pj’s so I hide in the hallway while he answers it.

“Hi,” I hear a chipper young voice say, “I’m from Clean Water Action …”

I leap from the hallway. “I used to canvas for Greenpeace, come on in,” I say.

In high school I canvassed for Greenpeace through the whole of a very Michigan winter and into the next early summer, about 6 months. I have had a persistent fantasy ever since of how I would treat a canvasser coming to my door. This is my first opportunity. And it was everything I ever dreampt it could be.

“Do you need something to drink?” I ask. “A Coke?” Cause you normally don’t carry water and you are thirsty, walking through neighborhoods and talking to strangers for four hours. She says she’s fine, but obviously grateful to be asked.

“Do you need to use the bathroom?” I offer. Cause women especially have a hard time with this in residential areas. When she demurs I tell her to feel free to come back if she has a hard time finding a bathroom later in the evening.

She does her standard sales pitch which starts at $60 and in the interests of being cool I don’t bat an eye, “I can do $60,” I say, all to impress the young canvasser. I write a check.

Hubby’s impressions of me later have me offering to bake her homemade bread, loan her our car to make her rounds, and give her my cell phone in case she needs to call me for anything I forgot to offer, like a place to sleep.

The most important thing is that, 20 years after I stopped canvassing myself, I finally had the opportunity to be good to a canvasser and lay to rest the demons of mean Detroit suburbanites who wouldn’t let me use their bathroom when it was ten degrees below zero and I’d been out in the snow for three hours.

Ah, my karma is good. Today is a good day to die.