Rebecca, the heroine of this tale, has an intellectual disability. In the 1980s, when this book was written, the term was “retarded” – but she proudly says that she prefers the word, “simple”. To her, that means that she has fewer pieces than other people and is, therefore, more solid. She is certainly more grounded, and that gives her the ability to see things that others don’t: a baby flying squirrel leaping off the ledge of a skyscraper; the wisdom of a homeless lady who carries her possessions in a purloined grocery cart; the ghost that inhabits the university; the “littles” who populate the streets of Toronto and keep her apartment clean for her. Her life is richer than ours because of it – although her social worker still has to help her post daily reminders for things such as wearing shoes and eating dinner. And she creates rituals to help her get through the rest of the world: the words that her supervisor speaks to her each Friday, releasing her for the weekend at the cafeteria where she works, for example.

When darkness comes to Toronto and sacrifices the little who lives in the tree outside her apartment, she pulls in Roland, a street musician, to help. Together they conjure an adept of the light to battle the darkness, and with the social worker and the bag lady, they make a stand against the adept of darkness.

As a city-dweller, I enjoy urban fantasy. The idea that perhaps there are things beyond what we see, things that our minds are too cluttered to recognize, appeals to me. I know, if I look up at the hollow tubes that form the cross-bracing for traffic lights, the little brown birds nest there. Many people haven’t seen that. And it would be nice to think that there are other things we don’t notice, just because we don’t slow down enough and open our eyes. It takes someone like Rebecca, whose head isn’t full of what happened earlier at work or what might happen later, to truly live in the moment.

But this also serves as a disadvantage to her. The scene in this book that stands out to me the most, and is the one that I remember when I think of this book, comes in a later chapter. Rebecca is leaving work at the end of the week and, mid-ritual, the dark adept kills her supervisor. So now there is no one to finish the repetitive conversation that they have every Friday – Rebecca stands, frozen, taken out of action. The dark adept doesn’t have to kill her or injure her – he can just leave, knowing that she will be unable to function because the ritual words have not been spoken.

I used to attend a weekly meeting with a team of people that I was working on a project with for, oh, 3-4 years. We met in the same conference room every week, and took the same seats. One day, I arrived early and decided I would sit in a different seat. The next person to show up was the person who usually sat in the seat I had taken. They paused at the door, then took a different seat. Then a third person arrived, said, “Oh, are we doing this?” and took a different seat. One by one, people arrived and took different seats. The last person to arrive stopped dead in the doorway and looked around the room in confusion. Finally, he told us that he’d be unable to function if we were all in different seats, and we needed to return to our regular seats. He wouldn’t let the meeting start until we had all moved back to our usual seats.

Stopped, dead in our tracks, just like Rebecca.

But without her excuse of being “simple”.

Heuristics, the mental shortcuts we all take that enable us to complete things without thinking, can be helpful, but they can also make it challenging to think outside the box.

Our heuristic of always sitting in the same seat served us by letting us start quickly without figuring out where to sit. But it also was a weakness for us, because it kept us trapped in our same roles, our same places every week.

Here’s a suggestion: if you’re working with a team that can’t seem to get things done, are just spiraling through the same conversations meeting after meeting, try shaking things up a little bit. Make them sit in different chairs. Assign roles in the meeting – assign a person who over-participates to make sure everyone’s voice is heard; assign the person who always finds the negatives to highlight the positives – to shake things up. Or perhaps meet in the park. Or bring in new voices.

You can use this outside work, too. When my sweet father-in-law who was the most organized, down-to-earth, sane person, started failing in his memory, the kids reminded him of the facts. Oh yes, that’s right, he’d say and they’d all laugh. But now that it’s taken a turn to dementia, he calls and asks my husband’s advice about whether he has enough PTO left to stay home from work while his eye heals from a recent fall. At first, my husband tried correcting the record – you retired over 30 years ago! – but my father-in-law’s deafness combined with his belief that he was still working, made it impossible to get through to him.¹ Finally my husband joined him in his fantasy world and now, when asked questions about calling in sick, says something like, I’m glad you remembered that; I’ll call your boss for you. My FIL, grateful to his son, goes back to what he was doing; and so does his son. Problem solved.

Invite change into your life, and change will come into your life.

1. Even the best of us don’t understand what people are saying to us when it’s outside the context we’re expecting. Add to that, age-caused deafness, and it becomes nearly impossible to communicate. ↩︎