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Tala’s Gift
By Paul Nicholas Mason
The year 1993 was a challenging one for me. My first wife and I separated, and I found myself living in Kingston with our two young daughters, Rachael and Nina, and studying for my Bachelor of Education at Queen’s University.
Teaching candidates at that time were required to spend three sets of three week sessions practice-teaching in high schools across Ontario. Because I had already spent some time teaching at a private school, I chose to do my practice rounds at schools in relatively poor neighbourhoods — so I could get a sense of the spectrum of teaching opportunities. It was, for me, a revelatory experience.
In December of 1993 I was in the midst of my first teaching round. My placement wasn’t in a conventional high school: it was a storefront operation in a commercial strip mall, and our students — who we were encouraged to call clients — were people in their twenties, thirties, forties, and fifties. Pretty well all of them were collecting social assistance, and a few were recent immigrants. None of them had yet earned their high school diplomas.
We did not hold regular classes, but our days followed a pattern. Students came in when their family commitments allowed, or when the spirit moved them, or, sometimes, when their hangovers wore off. They’d give completed written assignments to a teacher for marking, then they’d pick up new assignments and, perhaps, talk for a while about what they had to do. If their teacher had already marked a previous assignment, they’d probably spend some time going over it with him or her. Teaching, then, was low-key and one-on-one. I think it worked.
Sometimes students would opt to stay in the office working on their assignments. Several of them told me, matter-of-factly, that their homes were never quiet, and that this was the one place where a television wasn’t blaring or people screaming or rock music thumping through the walls. Most of them had difficulty reading, and had to read their texts aloud to make sense of them. For that reason there was often a low buzz of voices in the room, even when clients were working independently.
Here are a few generalizations about the people I met. Many of them were smokers; most of them wore clothes inadequate for winter weather; all of them looked older than I knew them to be. Poor nutrition, smoking, and general demoralization exact a real toll.
None of this surprised me: I’d known in advance that, the immigrants aside, these people were dropouts, and that many had seen some pretty rough times. What surprised me, and relieved me too, was that many of them were very gentle with each other and with the staff. They seemed genuinely happy to be there.
Coffee and smoke breaks were a very important part of the social landscape of the school. At regular points through the course of the day most of our clients would exit the building en masse to have a smoke on the freezing and windswept sidewalk outside the door, then many would return to pay twenty-five cents for a cup of truly awful coffee. They’d sit and chat quietly with each other, and occasionally, too, staff and students would mix.
I came to know two clients better than the others. One was a young native man, but he doesn’t figure in this narrative. The other was Tala, a Filipino lady in her early fifties. I was then in my mid-thirties and from a very different cultural background, but I was drawn by her gentleness and quiet good humour. We were also both tea rather than coffee drinkers, and the small bond made while we waited for the ancient kettle to boil grew into something that, while not a friendship, was at least a comfortable companionship.
Tala told me a little about herself. She had three grown-up children, all in Canada. The daughters were doing well — both married with children and working part time — but the son had run afoul of the law in some small way. She missed her extended family back home, and she missed the heat. She’d left the Philippines to escape a violent husband. She loved her children and grandchildren desperately, and saw them as often as she possibly could.
I told her about my failed marriage and about my daughters — the stars in my firmament. And I said a little about the strain of attending university and looking after two little girls. I joked that I could bathe them, read to them, clothe them, and feed them, but cleaning the apartment more than twice a month was more than I could handle.
Tala was a very Christian lady. Her church was important to her. Her faith was central to her life. I was a churchgoer and took my children, but I didn’t have the same passion, the same commitment.
Anyway, on the last day of my placement, I did a small kindness for Tala. She was preparing to walk home in a snow storm, and I offered her a ride. I had to pick up some milk on my way to collect my children from their after-school program, and I asked if she minded me stopping en route. She hesitantly asked if she could use the opportunity of the ride to pick up a few groceries herself, and of course I said yes. At the cash register she was hugely embarrassed to find herself sixty-five cents short, and I provided the extra coins. For me, you understand, this cost almost literally nothing: her home was just a few blocks past the girls’ school, and sixty- five cents is pocket change. This was the tiniest, the most trivial, of favours.
But when you don’t have a car, and when your coat is inadequate for winter, and when sixty-five cents is what it costs you to make lunch, I guess things look a little different. Tala was grateful to the point of tears. I was at once moved and embarrassed by her gratitude, but after I’d delivered her to her home the incident soon disappeared from my mind. My daughters were full of excitement at the approach of Christmas, and there was much to do on every front.
Anyway, a few days slipped by, and on the morning of December 23 my girls and I came downstairs into the lobby of my apartment, and I was surprised to find Tala sitting on the couch.
“Hallo, Tala,” I said; “Let me introduce my daughters,” and I did so. Then I added, “Are you waiting for someone?”
“I’m waiting for you, Mr. Paul,” she said. “Do you trust me?”
Now, the question “Do you trust me?” can be a loaded one — especially when you don’t know the person asking very well. “Yes,” I replied, though cautiously.
“You are going out?” she said.
“Yes,” I said again. “We’re going Christmas shopping.”
“May I borrow your apartment key?” she asked.
At that moment, I confess, all my senses went to red alert. The one thing my teacher education program hammered at most insistently was the need to maintain proper boundaries between teachers and students. I would go so far as to say that my professors seemed obsessed with the subject. And yet . . . and yet . . . Tala seemed the furthest thing imaginable from a schemer. And, after all, she was no longer my student. And I liked her. So I hesitated just a moment, then took the key off my ring and handed it to her.
“Where shall I leave it?” she asked.
“With the superintendent,” I answered, and then parted from her, taking my round-eyed and curious daughters with me out into the slippery parking lot — “Why does she want our key, daddy? What’s she going do in our apartment?” I had to tell them that I didn’t know, but that I was sure she would be very respectful of our home.
So Rachael and Nina and I did our shopping, and we ate lunch at an English-style pub — a place where the girls could play table soccer while we waited for our meal — and then we drove home. And I sought out the superintendent with some apprehension.
“You shouldn’t go giving your key to coloured ladies,” was the super’s one comment. And then, as a magnanimous and Christmassy afterthought: “She was polite, though.”
We took the elevator upstairs, and I unlocked the door . . . and my apartment had been cleaned as it had never been cleaned before. The carpets had been vacuumed, the kitchen floor mopped, the counters disinfected, the bathroom scrubbed, and the beds had been made up beautifully, hospital corners and all. The dishwasher had been emptied, and the breakfast dishes washed up and dried by hand. A day later I discovered that my shirts and my daughters’ dresses had been ironed.
But the pièce de résistance sat on the small dining room table. There we found a plate of dessert covered in plastic wrap. Next to it sat a little note: “This is Bibingka,” it said. “Filipino treat. Made from rice, coconut, brown sugar, banana leaves. Do not eat if you have sickness from the coconut. Wishing you a Christmas filled with the spirit of the baby Jesus.”
 After Christmas I called the storefront school and was able, after some difficulty, to get Tala’s phone number. I called her, thanked her for her kindness, but said I must give her something for her time and trouble. “You were too generous, Tala,” I said. “I feel hopelessly in your debt.”
There was a brief silence at the other end, then: “Please allow me this small dignity, Mr. Paul,” Tala said quietly. And I thought about that for a moment, and I decided, I think rightly, that I should heed her. So I thanked her, warmly, and we said goodbye.
I’ve waited a good many years to write this story down, and I’m not sure why. I suspect it’s partly bound up in a certain liberal discomfort with the image of a lady of a darker-skinned race doing my housecleaning. At this time, in this place, that’s something we feel conflicted about.
But, you know, it was a gift, and when I’ve thought about it, in these after-years, I’ve often thought of the gospel story of the widow’s mite. You probably know it. It’s about the elderly woman who put two tiny coins into the offering plate, and how Jesus said that she had given more than anyone else because that sum cost her more than it cost the rich to make their significantly larger offerings. Tala’s gift, by contrast, had value not only on that set of scales, but also in the sense that it had value in this world, too.
Gifts of time. Gifts of labour. Gifts of skill. Generosity out of empty hands. In the world to come, I suspect, Tala and her sisters will wear the fine, warm clothes, and I — and many others — may be hitching rides in the storm, hunting for coins at the cash register, tearfully grateful for small kindnesses. If there is justice, that’s how things will work. Let us hope there is mercy too. And I pray that the Talas of this world will have a kind word for those of us who have done so much less than we should.
Paul Nicholas Mason is the author of a novel, Battered Soles, which is reviewed here, and which you can purchase from the publisher here. He has also written three plays: The Discipline Committee, Circles of Grace, and Sister Camille's Kaleidoscopic Cabaret, which took first prize in an international competition sponsored by Christians in Theatre Arts. He lives in Peterborough, Ontario, where he teaches English and Drama, and his next novel, The Red Dress, is forthcoming from Turnstone Press.
Copyright © 2007 by Paul Nicholas Mason. All Rights Reserved.
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