chasing likes and loving it

by Bobbie Jean Huff

This essay appeared in The Globe and Mail in March of 2017

Yesterday, driving back from a doctor’s appointment, I found myself craving a hot dog. When I got home I checked my freezer. Packages of frozen vegetables, English muffins, some assorted sausages—both Italian and bangers—but no hot dogs. Everyone knows that a sausage, even one smothered in mustard and sauerkraut and inserted into an appropriate roll, will do nothing to quell a hot dog craving.

So I made myself tuna salad and, in a silly mood, posted on Facebook: Sometimes a girl just wants a hot dog. When I checked back later, there were several “likes”—always good—and, from my writer friend Lauren, a link to a salacious blues song, full of double entendres, called “I Want a Hot Dog for My Roll,” performed in the 1920’s by the Vaudeville husband-and-wife comedy duo Butterbeans and Susie.

My post received a few more likes and a while later there arrived from Bill, a friend from my Toronto days, a link to two more suggestive tunes, these from the 1930’s called “That Chick’s Too Young to Fry” and “You’re My Meat,” performed by singer and saxophonist Louis Jordan.

Facebook can take you anywhere, anytime.

Later I was at my son’s house babysitting my little granddaughter Lyla, and having put her to sleep, was lounging on the guestroom bed scrolling through Instagram. On the other side of the room was a chest I’d given my son years ago, when my husband and I downsized. Having just received the Facebook post from Bill, it occurred to me that the chest had originally come from him, when the group of people we were living with disbanded.

I took a picture of the chest, posted it below “You’re My Meat,” and received an instant response, which included a black and white photo of little Bill, seated in front of a Christmas tree with his mother and father and grandmother. Beside his grandmother was the chest.

“What was your grandmother holding in her lap?” I asked, online. “A metal toy gas station,” Bill responded. It was one of two gifts he received that Christmas. He still had the car that went with it. The other toy was a spinning top.

He went on to describe his Toronto neighbourhood. He lived on Gladstone Avenue, where the pinnacle of success was a waxed hardwood floor with a mock Oriental carpet from Honest Ed’s, the bargain emporium that only recently closed its doors.

Most families were in the same income bracket, which meant that Bill, happily, didn’t realize he was poor until his late teens. He described his jobs at the age of 8, the year the picture was taken: adding coal to the gravity-feed furnace on winter mornings, and culling the bags of onions and potatoes and carrots in the basement, looking for “rotters.”

His surprisingly long post continued. All the fathers in the neighbourhood had access to various materials through their jobs, using them liberally in their homes and on their properties. A Polish neighbour who worked in a siding warehouse used the metal siding for everything he could: roofing, fencing, shed, gate.

Bill’s first girlfriend, during his last year of high school, was from a different neighbourhood. Her house was completely carpeted, even the stairs. When he was introduced to her father, Bill asked him how long he’d been in the carpet business. The man, who turned out to be a colonel in the Canadian Armed Forces, made it clear he thought Bill an idiot.

As I drove back from my son’s place, I thought about how often social media can bring back the past.

Bill was the guy everyone in the house turned to when things needed fixing. He even invented a fail-safe cockroach trap. It involved a cup, a dinner plate and some Campbell’s chicken rice soup.

I remember biking back from a greenhouse with him one spring afternoon, the baskets of our bikes filled with clumps of pansies and petunias. That evening he knocked up three window boxes, painted them green and nailed them to the window ledges. I’ll never forget the expression on his face as he planted and watered the flowers.

I have friends who profess shock when I tell them I post frequently on Facebook, as if to say, “What’s a serious person like you doing chasing likes?” That makes me laugh, and I try to explain how it makes me feel to receive the responses and links and photos from so many of the people who’ve mattered to me over the years.

I tell them that for me, posting a joke or a picture or even a nasty political comment adds to my sense of well-being, like buying a latte every Saturday morning or picking up a cone of daffodils at the supermarket in April.

And that offhand message I posted about the hot dog, the one I never got to eat? Because of it, I received three really good blues songs from almost a century ago (one dirtier than all get-out), and a gift from my old friend Bill: a piece of his life, something I never knew.

And, oh yes, I also got 73 likes—a record, and surely enough of a reason to send me to my laptop at odd moments of the day, sharing parts of me with anyone I’ve known who’s happy to reciprocate.