Great Things Have Happened

by Alden Nowlan

We were talking about the great things that have happened in our lifetimes and I said, “Oh, I suppose the moon landing was the greatest thing that has happened in my time.” But, of course, we were all lying. The truth is the moon landing didn’t mean one-tenth as much to me as one night in 1963 when we lived in a three-room flat in what once had been the mansion of some Victorian merchant prince (our kitchen had been a clothes closet, I’m sure), on a street where by now nobody lived who could afford to live anywhere else. That night the three of us, Claudine, Johnnie and me, woke up at half-past four in the morning and ate cinnamon toast together.   “Is that all?” I hear somebody ask.   Oh, but we were silly with sleepiness and, under our windows, the street-cleaners were working their machines and conversing in Italian, and everything was strange without being threatening, even the tea-kettle whistled differently than in the daytime: it was like the feeling you get sometimes in a country you’ve never visited before, when the bread doesn’t taste quite the same, the butter is a small adventure, and they put paprika on the table instead of pepper, except that there was nobody in this country except the three of us, half-tipsy with the wonder of being alive, and wholly enveloped in love.

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From What Happened When He Went to the Store for Bread, Ally Press, 1993. ALDEN NOWLAN was one of Canada’s most popular 20th-century poets. He was awarded the Governor General’s Award for Bread, Wine and Salt (1967) and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He was writer-in-residence at the University of New Brunswick in Fredericton from 1968 until his death in 1983.

Painting: Luncheon of the Boating Party, 1881, Pierre-Auguste Renoir.

Why I Chose This Poem I was sitting at my writing desk, working on a poem that stubbornly refused to cooperate with me, when my two boys came inside after a long snowball fight and asked for some hot chocolate. As I stood at the stove I thought, pay attention. Pure happiness is paying you a rare visit.