The Heist that Wasn't

Did I ever tell you about the time I nearly got arrested for attempted bank robbery?

It happened like this.

I grew up in a small town where there really wasn't much for young people to do. There was an arcade (which we all called "The Arcade" to such exclusion that I don't think I ever knew the actual name of it), but since only 1980's punks and losers hung out at it (much scarier than modern punks and losers), we never went there unless we had a spare period and it was broad, bright daylight.

We had a couple of video stores but those, too, were small, badly lit shops, most likely fronts for illegal activities, and choked with gritty pornography and scary horror movies on greasy, well-thumbed VHS. Anyway there are only so many times you can watch Ferris Bueller have a Day Off. Soon, you start looking for something to DO.

We were Christian kids. Christian kids attending a Christian school, which in those days didn't mean "We had to leave the school property to smoke." We really, truly, honestly were upstanding and ethical, with great morals and integrity. Which meant if we wanted something to Do, the answer would never be "drugs" or "each other".

By the time we were in our late teens, we were thoroughly bored.

After graduation, there was an ecstatic summer in which anything was possible. Graduation gave us the first sense of completion most of us had ever known. Those first jobs had given us a tiny taste of money and choice. Come the fall, with formerly-daunting local college classes suddenly feeling like "just more school", we looked around and realized we hadn't moved: we were still in our hometown, only with later curfews.

We were restless, with the shine still on our drivers' licenses, and gas at 59 cents a liter.


One Friday night, within 24 hours of finally doing the road test and earning the right to drive unattended, I borrowed the family car. It was a small-ish Pontiac station wagon, dating from sometime late 80's. It must have been the newest car we had ever had and was a dashing shade of navy blue. I drove to a friend's house in the gathering darkness, the road lit by the orange cast of intermittent streetlights and the warm glow of possibility.

In the basement of James' house, we began our Friday night question-and-answer ritual. The opening dialogue never varied.

Whaddya wanna do?
I dunno, what do YOU wanna do?

After that came a finely-tuned round of suggestions, coupled with vetoes. We ran through them all with the ease of long practice.

Wanna play Pictionary?
No.

Wanna go to the arcade?
Too many punks with concealed knives.
[Insert side conversation about someone's latest encounter with an arcade loser.]

Wanna watch a movie?
No. We've seen them all.

Wanna drive the logging roads?
I'm not allowed to take the car off pavement.
[Insert side story about getting stuck while four-wheel-driving 15 km up the Duncan Bay Main.]

Wanna have a beach fire?
The tide's in. Plus it's October.

By now it's close to 10 PM and the stir-crazy finally drives us out of the house. "Let's just go downtown and hang around." At the worst, on those nights, you could go to one of the two open restaurants -- you had your choice between truck-stop Patty Jo's, the all-night pie place where cigarette smoke made the ceiling more theory than certainty, or Boston Pizza, where we'd spend two hours and ten bucks (all together) on bottomless pop. (Waitresses just loved us.)

But this night, no one was thirsty, and anyway no one had any cash for bottomless pop. By now we were impatient and irritated. Feeling at loose ends, we proceeded in a sullen, hormonal motorcade to a parking lot near the Bingo Palace, just behind a 1960s strip mall with a mundane, rain-pooling, gravel-bearing flat roof.

We couldn't go in the Bingo Palace, of course, being too young. And even if we could, a lot of us were Baptists.

We parked in a little knot of pickups and station wagons, and all sat on the hoods of our cars and looked at each other. Just as we were beginning to wonder whether we should just go home, one of us spotted something interesting.

Facing us across the alley was a row of garbage cans and stairwells leading to basement back doors. But at the far right of the nearest shop, the second business from the end, was a little flat, gravelled roof just a few feet lower than the overhang of an even higher rooftop.

I feel like it might have been me who saw it, and made the suggestion. But it could have been anyone - most likely one of the thrill-seeking boys. Of course, in retrospect, I think of myself as a thrill-seeking boy. In any event, someone put it out there.

Hey -- we could easily climb up there and walk on the roof...in fact, we could jump from roof to roof and walk along this whole row of shops!

Instantly we were down off the cars, across the alleyway, and giving each other legs-up onto the flat roof. From there it was an easy climb and we were up! We strode along, grinning from ear to ear, laughing - I was exhilarated for the first time since graduation night. Boys started running, of course, and leaping up or down from shop to shop. These roofs were all connected - this was no death-defying feat. But man, it felt amazing.

We walked up to the edge of the roof, overlooking the main shopping street below. We could see over Shoppers' Row, past the Discovery Inn, across the Foreshore to the dark void of ocean - and beyond, to the Quadra Island lighthouse. The traffic at the intersection below, only a few meters lower than we were, looked small, powerless, and totally different than it did at street level in daylight. A few cars honked their horns at us, six teenagers silhouetted along a strip mall rooftop in the darkness and the pattering, invisible rain of a mid-October sky.

Spread out along the entire block, some running, some leaping, some just standing...we were all staring down - not across - at the streets of our childhood: we had gained a new perspective and it was a rush.

Of course, if we HAD been at street level, and not in the back alley, we might have read the signs on the building and remembered what we already knew: that the business at the end of the mall was, in fact, the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce.

Would it have stopped us? Well, it wouldn't have stopped the boys. But the girls might have sat this one out.

As fate would have it, none of us had the logic or foresight to put "Bank Roof" together with "Honking Horns". We were without guile. And being without guile, when the rooftop euphoria began to pall, we simply climbed down and resumed our car-hood seats in the alleyway.

There was a short silence.

"So.......whaddya wanna do now?"

A siren began, far off.

"I dunno. What do YOU want to do?"

The siren got a bit louder.

"I dunno. I might go home."

The siren stopped and a quiet, powerful engine approached slowly.

As one, we turned our heads to look at the entrance to the alley, as a police cruiser came around the corner. It stopped within ten feet or so of the nearest car.

A second car came around the other side of the alley. This one had a floodlight that immediately revealed us all, squinting, in a wash of glaring day.

"Huh," I thought, "They must be looking for someone."

You bet they were.

"Hey, guys," said the officer who emerged from the driver's seat bearing a MagLight that seemed to lay bare all my deepest thoughts, "Have you seen anyone around here climbing on the bank roof?"

Looking back, it must have been priceless to see our faces as his words sank in. You could see us all, frozen in merciless headlights, with the words "THE BANK" dawning in all of our teenaged minds at the exact same instant.

We were good, Christian kids. There was only one option.

"Yeah," I announced into the awful silence, "That was us."

The lights closed in as they moved forward. I wish I could relate word for word what followed in the next minute or two, but it's all a blur of dark-clad authority figures, questions, the digging out of shiny new IDs and the cool crackle of a woman's voice from their radios.

I do remember that they started by asking us if we had any alcohol or drugs. We laughed out loud, but they still checked our pupil dilation and our cars. At least we had the comfort of knowing they wouldn't find so much as a cigarette butt.

As they collected all our drivers' licenses and wrote down everything about us, including whether we still had our childhood teddy bears and how tall our dads were, they asked us the most inane question of all. And anger, at the sheer stupidity of it, brought me out of my fear.

The question was, "Why? Why did you do it?"

All the inaction, the flatness of life, the endless round of familiar streets and bus loop and the arcade and the classroom, the worn VHS, the be-kind-rewind...it all suddenly boiled over. "We were bored," I said loudly, an edge of defiance creeping into my voice. "We were really bored and we thought it would be fun."

And it WAS fun, I wanted to add. It was fantastic.

"Fun??" the officer repeated, as if I had said "It's fun to run red-hot wires into my eyeballs."
"Fun?? Surely there are other things you can do for fun."

"What are you, new in town?" I wanted to say, but instead I said "We've done everything."

"Well," he said as he took my license from me (my brand-new interim license, no photo), "What about renting a movie?"

I seriously wanted to punch him.

I settled for saying "We've seen everything."

"Everything?? Have you seen 'Glory'?"

I wanted to punch him again. He had managed to name the only damn movie I hadn't seen.

"No, I haven't seen 'Glory'," I said through clenched teeth.

"You should see it, it's good."

I had had enough of this big, tall, gun-toting police officer (I was still too young to feel the pull of police-officer attraction). I burst out in a frustrated cry, "You can only watch so many movies, y'know! This town has nothing interesting!!"

He didn't say anything for a moment. Then, "I know. There's not much for young people around here." I was completely taken off-guard. Obviously, he wasn't from around here. His was an outsider's perspective.

And a second later I realized that an awful lot of his job must involve this - giving warnings to groups of bored teenagers searching for purpose and settling for distraction. Scaring them away from the dangerous edge of a flat and featureless roof.

With one last glance at my interim driver's license, he handed it back to me. "Oh, by the way," he added, "Have a good birthday, tomorrow."

"Thank you." I took my license and folded it up. Just before they all got back in their cars, he turned back and called "Go find something else to do, guys."


And that's just what we did. Within six months I was dating my first boyfriend, and was packing to move to Victoria, university, and a new job. Two of my partners in near-crime had begun a relationship, that became a beautiful marriage, that is now in its 21st year and fifth child. Another travelled to Africa soon afterwards to live with and help a missionary family.

Next year will be our 25th high school reunion. Almost all of us are still in touch, and we like getting together to talk about old times. The Bank Roof story will be retold next year, and so will the one about the Stuck Truck. (Stuck Truck happened a lot.) And Window Jumping, and the one about Laura's Cat, and the one with the Substitute Teacher's Upside-Down Desk. And the Princess Bride Reenactment Era, the Double-Dutch Skipping Craze, and the one where my sister, finally fed up, Threw a 7-Year Old Bully down an entire 15-foot flight of stairs.

None of us knew how close we were to the end of that time. We were so busy staring down the road forward. We didn't know, didn't care, that in the getting there, everything we knew so intimately would retreat in our rearview mirrors.

Looking back now, I think our stories are all we've got to pass down, in the end - a way towards comradeship and common ground with the next generation. They make it possible to show someone the way things once were - they're photographs of a forest that used to be right where that hospital is now.

You wouldn't remember, we say, smiling. That was before you were born. There weren't as many streets then...all this was wilderness.

And the stories make me smile.

Thanks for reading.

532 1/2

I turned forty on Wednesday. Usually International Day of Shan is heralded by a certain amount of fanfare (by me) so it's impossible to miss. This time, I never got a chance to write a post.

My sister Gwen paid me the enormous compliment, and gave me the beautiful gift, of coming to see me for my birthday week. Between them, she and Mr HalfSoled Boots sorted out child-minding details, budgets, and travel plans, and she was able to whisk me away to Victoria overnight on my birthday, just the two of us. We left on the morning of the 16th, and checked into a downtown hotel. We walked around the city for a few hours, had a pint, then walked back and got dressed up for dinner at 8. (What a civilized hour for dinner! Family life dictates an earlier mealtime, and in the past 12 years I have missed the elegance of evening dining.)

Dinner was revelatory. Brasserie l'Ecole was everything Yelp told us it would be, and more. We spent three eternal hours there, and talked and drank and ate amazing food, and hugged a complete stranger (sitting behind me; Gwen spotted the candle on her dessert and I introduced myself as another birthday girl - she is exactly one year older than I). We unabashedly told the server our wine budget and asked her to give us something amazing, and she did. We had brandy, coffee, and crème brûlée. (The best we've ever had. And that's saying something.)

Victoria was my home for a little over a decade. Between the ages of 17 and 29 I lived in it, loved it, inhabited it in the best sense of the word. I never took it for granted, always let it amaze me. I kept myself close to the centre of it, 15 minutes' walk from the Inner Harbour downtown, so that I could feel its pulse and avoid falling prey to the negativity that comes from commuting and parking struggles. I knew a lot of people in Victoria who never went downtown just because they didn't like driving among the buses, noise, and crowds of pedestrians. But in a city, when you don't drive, you are like a little bee among a herd of elephants. You just rise gently above, and go your way at your own speed, while they jostle and bump up against each other and sit annoyed, waiting.

I used to spend a lot of time downtown on my own. I would set out from my apartment, and walk all over the place, with no destination and no schedule. I had nowhere I had to go, hardly any money, no watch, and (it was the early 1990s) no cell phone. On one particular afternoon, when I was about 19 or 20 years old, I found a wrought iron gate in the middle of a brick building in Chinatown. Wrought iron gates (full-height, as a regular door) are not unusual in historic districts, but they are generally closed and locked. This one was standing open, affording an alluring glimpse of a narrow, dark alley, at most a meter wide, leading into a sunlit courtyard.

There was no signage, no indication of whether or not this alley was open to the public. But an open door, I reasoned, was an open door, and so I walked through it.

The confined, cool dark of the brick alley was like an otherworldly transition from the noisy street. Just a few steps inside it, the damp age of the bricks muted the traffic noise and the airless, car-exhaust smells. It might have been about 50 feet through the little tunnel, and then I found myself blinking into sunlight in the silence of a court. There were corners and lamp posts, and small iron gates behind which bikes were chained up in little green gardens. Doors, and stairs, and more bricks, and yellow walls and black lamps, and sun filtering through leaves of tall bamboo and red maple. There were no offices, no shops, just these beautiful doors and gates and the wrapping quiet that ran over and around and between everything, and made my solitary moment go on and on.

I stood and watched it all, watched the nothing that was happening over and over, listened to the birds and the rush of distant cars - impossibly distant for how close they really were. I turned around and around, and took the whole place as far into my memory as I could, in those days before everyone had a camera with them at any moment. I stayed as long as I felt like I could stay. The faint sound of a radio, and the quiet clink of spoon in cup, told me that these were private homes, and I didn't want to intrude too long on the perfect, beautiful, zen-like paradise owned by someone else.

Returning to the street, I felt the refreshed, peaceful feeling of having been away from the world. I walked onwards up the street, my back to the harbour gulls, against the tide of tourists clutching pamphlets: their walking shoes tightly laced, their cameras full of film, their heads full of notable landmarks and bus timetables.

I don't know why, but I never found it again. Once or twice I thought I had, but the gate was locked, or the street didn't look quite the same. I had the beautiful memory of the place, but never had the sight of it.

On Wednesday, my birthday, Gwen and I walked and walked. We fell into the kind of quiet, pensive state in which things come to you: realizations, memories, epiphanies. Of course, because we were not looking, and I was not even remembering, we came upon a wrought iron door, standing open to a narrow, brick-lined alley.

I didn't even realize, until we emerged in the courtyard, exactly where we were. Firstly, we had come through the north side -- the court has two alleys, one leading north and one leading south. Twenty years ago I had both come and gone through the south alley, as the north gate was locked. And then, over the years I had subconsciously come to believe that this place was a chimera - my own private Narnia. I had walked hundreds of kilometers on Victoria streets since the day I found it, and no matter how far into the city I went, the wardrobe was always just a wardrobe.

The years have changed this place, as everywhere else, and now there are several businesses installed in the ground floors of the courtyard. The internet, in its mania for information and its boorish, insistent removal of mystery, has given us directories, city plans, maps and even street-views. A few seconds after I tell you the name of this place, you could be standing on the sidewalk outside, peering into the brick alleyway, and moving, virtually, meter by meter along the narrow way. You could view some posh photos, and real estate listings, check the property taxes, and order something from the Victoria Seed Bank.

But walking there again, 20 years or so after the last time, I was given a moment of emotional beauty that Google can't provide. It connected me with my former self. Those few brick-lined steps pushed back the veil that has gradually dropped over the long, free, walking days. That veil is made of family, marriage, children, distance, and money - the getting of it and the giving away - and it obscures everything until all I can see is layer on layer of obligation.

On my birthday, I stood there with my sister, my long life-companion, and remembered myself.

People make jokes about turning forty. For me, turning forty is not funny at all. It's not sad, and it's not comic; although it may turn out to be profound. My sister and I shared a tiny little journey in the midst of the longer, more complicated, joyous and painful one we've been on for 38 years together. It was momentous. It was a watershed week - full of realizations about time and love: the nature of love of all kinds.

It made me see that in many respects, I have some growing up to do. And it's been coming for a while. Parts of my life should be past and aren't - I should release them into the past. Some parts of my life that have been past, deserve to be brought forward again and dusted off. Some habits are not worthy of me and they can cease. Some things, which I know full well I should, I do not. And some I know I should not and yet I do.

Last time I turned over a new decade was significant, but it was subsumed in the newness of family...I had a 2 year old and was expecting a baby. It was hardly time to think of myself. This time, I have another ten years of hard-earned and painful experience which, if I allow it, can guide and inform my direction from this point on.

So I'm drawing myself up to my full height, and facing a new decade with a good set of tools. I'm looking forward to my forties, if not with the crazy self-centered happiness I had planned, at least with the confidence that the changes I need to make on myself, I am well able to make.

Whenever I'm in the garden, looking around at the hundreds of things that need attention, I often say to myself, "What needs money will have to wait, but what can be done with work, will be done." It took me a surprising amount of time to see that this philosophy doesn't only apply to the garden.

Gwen, thank you for the amazing gift. You gave me your time, your attention, and your care, and showed me love in tangible ways I'll never forget. Our birthday present visit ended up being a turning point for me, and I can't think of anyone who could have more perfectly shared the day.

I'd rather be half-done with you, than just starting out with anyone else.

Twang. Ow.

Guess what I got for Christmas?

That's right - I got a guitar!

It pretty much looks exactly like this one.

I do have a busy life, believe it or not, but I am managing to spend at least an hour a day, most days, noodling around on this thing. I break it up into 20 minute sessions, though, because of the intense pain. I find that the sound lets me know when to stop playing...when the bass strings start to twang and sound messy, it means my fingers are hurting too much to depress the string completely down onto the fret, and that means "Go do something else for a few hours."

When I was in Grade 9 we took guitar as part of Music class. It was a small school, so we all borrowed guitars, and Mr. Falk spent a couple of months teaching us C-A-G-E-D. I'm glad I'm not starting out from scratch. I've never had a guitar of my own, though, so it was a pretty exciting Christmas morning. I immediately downloaded Chord Free! for my phone, so no matter where I am, I can look up any chord  I don't know. Yay!

And, at about 11 AM on the 25th, I printed off a few sheets from my new favourite site. All I had to go was Google "folk guitar tabs" and look at the untold wealth I stumbled upon!

Actually, believe it or not, I got TWO guitars for Christmas -- the new western-style Yamaha from Mr HSBoots, and an ancient, vintage, beat-up classical model from my friend, who has spent the last two years listening to me moan and complain that I wanted a guitar to learn on, and take camping. "Free or cheap," I kept saying. "Keep an eye on the Buy & Sell for me."

The second-hand one is not in working order yet (needs to be restrung) but I am getting along okay on the Yamaha, which has great resonance and I suspect, in the hands of an actual Musician, would sound nice. In the hands of Me, though, it sounds like this:


Cool, huh?!

Only drawback is, with those fingers I can't knit lace anymore...for the time being, anyway.

Here is where I leave you.

It's Christmas Eve, and I think we are ready, as far as such a thing is possible.

I had a nice post planned for today, but I decided to write about something else that's on my mind. After this, I think it's time for me to retire from the internet for the remainder of the year.

Yesterday I went to see some neighbours of mine, from when I was a little kid. They lived next door and were sort of in between my parents' ages and my grandparents' ages. We have very fond memories of Mrs. Mullen, in particular, who used to invite my little sister, a preschooler alone at home, to come in and have a tea party with her while she sewed in her basement. She also gave us a key to her house while she was away on vacation so that we could come in and "feed the cat" -- translation: "watch cartoons" -- while she was away. She knew we didn't have a television and longed to see what all the fuss was about.

I ran into Mr. and Mrs. Mullen in the grocery store in November, right after my Dad's 75th birthday party. I hadn't seen them in decades and it was such a meaningful coincidence...I promised that I would come and visit them before Christmas.

The weeks went by and I was very busy getting ready for Christmas. I had half an eye on the calendar, thinking "I really must phone the Mullens. I really should. I'll do that this coming week." On December 21, I thought to myself, "I must phone them. I'll do it today when I get back from the grocery store." And again, in the same grocery store, wandering the same produce department, there they were.

If that's not writing on the wall, what is? I asked myself.

"I was just going to call you today!" I said as I hugged them. "How's Sunday for you? I'll bring cookies."

It was a lovely visit. It was happy and sad and a little bewildering to reflect on the time that has gone by. I was six weeks old when our family bought the house next door to them, and I was 14 when they moved away from the road. In April 1981, the day I fell and broke my knee cap, it was Mrs. Mullen who, hanging her laundry on the line, ran over with a flannel sheet to wrap the terrible cut that went halfway through my leg at the knee. I lay in the back seat of the car with my head on her lap while my mother drove to the hospital. Mr. Mullen arrived in time to carry me into Emergency.

I am now 39, and Mrs. Mullen is turning 88 this year. They remember that day, laughing about it all, and I laughed too and told them "That knee is better than the other one, now!" but inside I was marvelling at the way people wander into your life and out of it and, whether you ever see them again or not, they share some of your most formative memories.

Go out and see those people. Track them down and send them a Christmas card. Or a New Year's letter. They remember you, and they want to know that you remember them, too. They want to know that you remember the name of their cat, who died when Trudeau was finishing up his first term in office.

His name was Henry. He really liked barbecued salmon.

Someday I will be 88 years old. And I will probably wonder where it all went. I will probably think about the little girl who, right now in 2012, lives next door to me and can be a bit of a pleasant nuisance with her noisy singing. I will wonder whatever happened to her, and whether she had a good life, and is she married now and how old would she be?

I hope someday she looks me up in the phone book, and comes to see me. Maybe she'll tell me that she used to listen to me talking to my sister on the phone, out in the yard. Maybe she'll say "I remember that you used to come outside and hand us pizza, out of the blue." Or "I remember how nice it was in your living room at Christmas that time you invited me in to ice gingerbread cookies."

And I'll be so surprised and touched and I'll say "Fancy you remembering that!"

One day, we'll all look up from our screens and we'll realise that, while we were checking Facebook, the really important things about life have wandered away.

It's Christmas. I'll be spending it with my family and my friends. I wish you the very best, the very sweetest, the very most loving Christmas you've ever had. May it be a rest for you in these darkest days of the year - a time of peace and restoration.

Good Yule to you!

Mr and Mrs Mullen, December 2012

________________

-Names changed.

Stairway to Heaven

Once when I was a child, quite young -- maybe five or six -- we went to Victoria to visit my Uncle Bill, who is my Dad's youngest brother. He lived at the very top -- the servants' quarters, I suppose -- of one of Victoria's prized buildings. It was a single family house at one time, but had long since been converted to apartments, and Uncle Bill had what you'd call the attic flat. There was a discreet, narrow door off a hallway in the upper storey, and when you opened it you were standing on the bottom tread of a narrow staircase, more like a ladder, which took a sharp switchback at a tiny landing about ten steps up. Then you went up another five or six steps to another, narrower door. When you opened it, you stepped directly into Uncle Bill's living room. And you had to watch your head on the lintel.

Victoria was loaded with such places at the time...now, of course, rich people have bought up all these desirable properties in picturesque Fairfield (or Oak Bay, or James Bay, or Esquimalt), converted them back into single family homes, spent millions restoring them, and work all the hours God sends to pay for it. And, the world being what it is, they probably don't like it too much when passersby stop to take a photo of the beautiful architecture they now own.

Whereas my uncle, and many like him, paid pittance for his three low-ceilinged rooms, and loved to sit in the middle of them on worn futons, drinking strong coffee, and enjoying the atmosphere of the place. Soaking up the history.

On this occasion, it was near Christmas, and we had spent the afternoon at Uncle Bill's. He and my parents were talking, and we kids were amusing ourselves looking out the windows, playing a game I don't remember, and generally thrilling in the difference of the place.

I asked if I could go back down the staircase to the floors below. Could I explore the building a little? I wanted to go all the way to the bottom, back to the brass fronted mailboxes, the funny iron buttons for calling up, back to the plush carpets and potted ferns of the lobby. Then, the gleeful finding of my way, all the way back up to the top. There's a joy about this project...I see it in my own children. The fascination of one house that holds many houses - the mystery of the closed doors, each with a different number, and a different life going on behind it.

Having assured my family that I could perfectly remember how to get back, and would not, no never would I get lost, I was allowed to go back down the staircase. As I closed the white-painted, bevelled wooden door behind me, I remember my Uncle Bill's voice, remarking to my parents that I wasn't likely to come to any harm, since I was staying inside the building.

What fun it was to sneak and sidle along the hallways, looking at the way the thick, dark red carpets ran down the middle of the hallway, bound along their edges by dark, shining floorboards of the kind you never see in houses now. Unchaperoned by any parent, who would surely have stopped me, hurried me, I could touch the funny little brass grates leading I didn't know where, and the little handles on things that, nowadays, we don't think need handles. Small paned windows, little doors, deep baseboards thickly painted with the highest of glosses, layer on layer. The walls weren't flat - they were funny nubbly cream-coloured things. In our house there wasn't any textured plaster. And here, if you let your eyes go all the way up to the top of the wall, you'd see there wasn't a hard line where the ceiling came down; there was a lovely rounded cove, with a pretty line lower down on the wall, and another one inwards on the ceiling. There were ceiling lights, but they were nice ones, quite dim, with cut glass.

It was so quiet in the hallways, and the central staircase was so grand, and I was so deliciously alone, that it began to feel like quite a long time had passed. After I had swept up and down a few times, being queen of course, I started to think I had better get back.

Upwards is simple, but remember that little door leading off the upper storey?

It was not the only little door.

Arrived in that hallway, I stopped and looked, a little doubtfully. Is it left? Is it right? It's not straight ahead, is it? Back and forth I stepped, examining all the doors in turn.

I don't know what made me choose that door, but I finally stopped in front of one and, fearful, I knocked. Maybe it was that I could hear people talking behind it: behind all the other white-glossed doors I had passed, on all the other floors in the house, was only a cushioned and clock-ticking velvet silence.

A few footsteps, and the door opened to reveal not a staircase, but a room. I had a confused impression of voices raised in laughter, a strain of sophisticated music, and a woman calling "Who is it?" Standing in front of me, no doubt just as surprised as I, was a man in a blue shirt and black trousers, holding a glass of red wine in his left hand.

It was the wine that really threw me. My family at that time did not partake of alcohol, and I had somehow got the impression that people who did, were loose cannons. It may have had to do with a different uncle, this one a figure of fear, who was widely known in the family as a drunkard, and widely suspected of being violent.

"I think you have the wrong door."
Or maybe it was I who said "I think I have the wrong door."

"Are you looking for someone?"

"I thought this was Uncle Bill's house."

I was rooted to the spot, terrified that he would invite me in. The child I was couldn't have said no, if he had.

I think he gestured down the hall to my left, and he may have said "Bill lives in number 7," or "That's Bill's door there." But in fact I don't remember how I found the right door. I remember the upper flight of narrow stairs, and I remember coming through the second door back into the little, cramped living room, and being weak with relief at finding my family again. And I was amazed and a bit afraid at how, while I was gone, my family, and everything about them, just went on without me behind those little doors, and how everything in all the rest of the houses, just carried on happening behind their little doors.

But I didn't say any of that to my family. I just leaned against my mother and listened to their talk.

Today, a surprise came to me in the mail from my Uncle Bill. He had found some photos from visits of long ago, and decided to send them to me just in case, someday, him being a bachelor, they go astray and are thrown out.

I sat down on the couch with my daughter and, smiling and eager, opened the envelope. I only flipped through a few of them before I was overcome with tears. I couldn't understand, much less explain to her, why it was that I sat and sobbed, my glasses off, my face in my hands, over a few pictures from thirty or so years ago.

It wasn't the losing of the little door, and the finding of it again. It wasn't the glass of wine in a stranger's hand, or the vulnerable fear of a little child.

It's just that all these things have passed. The beautiful houses kept so lovely and quiet for the quiet tenants, their iron door keys and their crystal doorknobs and the layers of glossy white paint. The red carpets and the brass grates, and the way milk used to be delivered through the little doors near the front doors, and the way people used to care enough to put nice-looking, twisty iron knobs on light switches and blind cords.

The way my stocking feet sank into the deep red of the carpets and slipped lightly over the heavy floors, sometimes for a few seconds leaving sweaty small footprints. The way, when alone, I was utterly and terrifyingly alone. Thrillingly, enticingly alone.

The marvellous way that, when I found my family again, they didn't know how lost they had really been.

It has all passed.

It's not my turn anymore. Now, I'm the woman's voice calling "Who is it?" I'm the man who answers the door, his own door, holding a glass of wine. I'm the mother who talks to her brother-in-law while the children explore and, when they get back, I smile vaguely at them, and raise my elbow so they can crawl under my arm, but I don't stop my conversation.

I'm the mother. I can neither lose myself nor find myself. The ability to do it, the freedom to do it and the joy I once found in it, is another thing fallen away with the years.


And when my children come back through my front door damp with rain and shining with the adventure of having walked home in the half light of dusk, I'm the one who, thinking only of what's for dinner and whether I remembered to pay the phone bill, doesn't know how lost I've been.

Uncle Bill's apartment, Victoria - around 1979

My Inner World in Four Minutes and Nine Seconds

Gwen, this is our past...this is our future.



Shannon & Gwen, together forever.
XOXO

Gone Gone Gone I Been Gone So Long

16 days and thousands of miles later, I am back from Ontario. I didn't tell you I was going, because I didn't want one of you to come and burgle my house while I was gone. Maybe take my dog.

I bought the nose stud I was telling you about - and it has been six weeks, so I am finally able to take out the biker-chic BCR and put in the diamond....ta da!

I was startled to see this self-portrait, but my sister (who was on the other end of that headset phone line you see there) tells me that my nose is not that big. So, okay, good. Or maybe she said "Your nose isn't big", which could mean that this is really what my nose looks like and she's just used to looking at it.

Your comments on my roller-coaster post were funny. I have a deep and abiding passion for them, but I absolutely loathe and revile, and cannot stand the thought of, spinny rides. You know the kind of thing - whipping you around in circles while simultaneously turning you upside down/raising you in the air/tilting platforms beneath your helpless body. If I ride anything spinny, I get overwhelming nausea that can take up to 24 hours to subside. That famous Disneyland teacup-thing? sometimes I wake up from nightmares about that. And I haven't even been on it.

This weekend is my 20th high school graduation reunion. What do you know about that! Am I going? You bet. There were only 9 of us in our class, and we're (nearly) all still in touch. It'll be fun, even though it means I am old. "Too soon oldt, too late schmart" as my grandparents' plaque read in quaint germanic letters.

Here I was at my graduation, at the tender age of 16. The aforementioned grandmother stands proudly by my side. (Miss you Gramma.) Note my dress - post-French-Revolution in style, rose-pink in colour (YES momma!) and pouffy in habit. Made by Super-Mom according to my exacting specifications. ("It must look JUST like the cover of 'These Old Shades', only pink!")

It's a little unnerving to see a picture of my young self. I dread the thought of what 20 more years will do to my appearance.

I'll let you know how the reunion goes - too bad I don't still have that dress or I could put it on just for laughs (tears?) and see whether it will zip up.

FWIW

I was doing a bit of tidying up tonight, and while deleting old draft blog posts I came across this one. I wrote it two years ago, on April 22, 2008, but never posted it. I don't recall why - it seemed finished enough. Whatever my reason, come April 23, I didn't want to share it anymore.

The story is of something that happened to me when I was 34, and 6. It still amazes me, the clarity and sharpness of the vision I got that day: reading this post brought it all back.

I hope you like it.

Charlotte started Girl Guides in September. The meetings are held at a local elementary school - the oldest in the city. It's the school I went to for Grade One and the first half of Grade Two, before we transferred a few catchments over.

The first week I took Charlotte to her meeting, I spent the hour roaming around the halls, trying to remember exactly which classroom was Mrs. Flynn's (Grade One) and which was Ms. Decourbe's (Grade Two). It was fun to see the gym again, with the national anthem posted in French and English, above the ancient stage where we put on plays in which we starred as rainclouds, and animals, and maybe shrubbery. My memories of this school were vague, mostly pleasant, and involved things like the smell of the hallways and the height of the water fountains (pretty short).

In the following months I mostly spent the Guide hours sitting on a chair in the hallway, knitting. A month or so ago, I decided to use that time to run, taking advantage of the once-weekly guaranteed free hour to get some exercise in. One night I finished my run at the school, and walked around the outside for the remaining ten minutes, doing some stretching.

I wandered around the outside wall of the gymnasium. I turned a random corner, stepped up into "the covered area" and found myself face to face with one of my most powerful memories.

I was six years old. It was the first day of Grade One at a new school. I didn't know anyone there, except my brother who was a year ahead of me. In Kindergarten, they had had only one recess, during which you you ate your snack and played outside. So when the bell rang at my first recess in Grade One, I took my red nylon packsack outside to the covered area and looked for somewhere to sit. I spotted a door across from me, with an unoccupied concrete step underneath it. Clutching my bag, I made my way over to it through knots of playing students, almost all of them older than me. I opened my packsack, took out my lunch and ate it, trying not to catch anyone's eye, or stand out in any way.

I was finishing the last thing and putting all the waxed paper back in, when my brother ran over, breathless, holding a ball of some description. Several big boys trailed behind him. He said, "Shannon, it's only recess - you don't eat your lunch until next break."

He ran off again and I sat there frozen, hot embarrassment flushing my cheeks, almost immobilised with anxiety. What would I do at lunch? I had nothing left to eat. I looked around furtively and realised I was, in fact, the only kid who had brought her packsack outside. I tried to wad it up so no one would see it and realise my mistake, and carried it back inside when the bell rang.

I don't have any other memories from that day. I don't in fact know what happened at lunch, when I had no more food left.

When I came around the corner of that school a few weeks ago and my eyes fell on that step, I felt like I had been punched in the gut. I felt the anxiety again just the way I did twenty-eight years ago, even as my 34 year old self marvelled that it could be so - that a little doorway with a little concrete step could make me feel this way - bring it all back.

I stood there on the faded hopscotch, getting the memories back one by one.

Then, just around the corner must be the place where....yes, that's where I stepped on a nail and hopped all the way back to the office with it protruding out of both top and bottom of my foot.

And around that other way must be those big doors and the ramp where we played 'prison'. Yes, there they are...and the window - that's Ms Decourbe's classroom, it must be. I remember standing there looking down at them outside when I was kept in at noon to finish work.

I walked slowly around to all these places, surrounded by little children in bell-bottoms and bowl cuts, some whose names I could remember and some whose names I couldn't. I went back to the covered area and leaned against a railing, looked at the concrete step. There I was, little blonde child with a firm grip on her packsack, nervous, feeling more lonely than I ever had before.

All that fear made me cry. I don't remember whether I cried at six, but I cried at thirty four. It made me remember everything that has gone in between then and now. It made me think of all the things I never dreamed would happen...things I never thought to fear while I was worrying about having already eaten all my lunch. And I wanted to say to her how sorry I was for the way I made her life turn out.

I went back there last night. While Charlotte was in the gym with 17 other little Guides singing "Day is Done", I was in the covered area, photographing this place which is almost unchanged from the way it was in 1979. I know it looks empty to you, but to me it's a busy scene, full of kids I was having to constantly step around while shooting - kids who bumped me, ruined my focus, and ran off calling a careless, carefree Sorry, breathlessly.

Verklempt

I’ve just been on Facebook checking on my best friend. I lose track of her because she’s awesome and has better things to do than stay in her house wiping counters and noses and butts and obsessing about wool all day long.

My friend is a wilderness adventure kayak guide. If you’ve been to Antarctica to spend $10,000 on a weekend of camping on a polar ice cap and getting close to Emperor penguins and minke whales, you might have met her. She’d have been the tall blonde amazon who knows everything and can save your life any number of ways.

I’m sure a lot of people have friends like her (well, nobody’s LIKE her), who they met and had adventures with, back in the day. I guess you could say that much of my connection with her is a subconscious desire to be what I was, when we first met.

We were on the UVic women’s rowing team together…though she rowed in a different eight than I did. We used to eat huge amounts of food, laugh until my neighbours complained, and fall asleep while watching movies late at night. We had to get up at 4.45 to get to the boathouse by 5.30, but it didn’t matter because we were amazingly strong and hot and invincible.

Now, I’m tired and harried, stretch marked, and I have quite a bit of grey in my hair.

Whereas my friend, may she live forever (and if anyone could, she would), is this woman.

And also this one

Conquering Greenland, if you’re wondering.

Jealous – sure. Self-pitying – yeah, okay. Overwhelmed with gratitude and love, just that she’s still in my life – absolutely.

'S'all about you

Happy Birthday to my darling sister Gwen....




......wish we were here.

XOXO

Beyond The Horizon of The Place We Lived When We Were Young

I met Mr Half Soled Boots when I was 22 and he was 23, and we had both just been hired to a research project at the university.

We spent a lot of time that summer hanging out with people from the project - just as a group, nothing more than friends. I was seeing somebody else at that time, so wasn't on the lookout for a new person. As the months went on and my engagement was moved from serious condition to critical, showing signs of coming apart at the seams, I started to notice how much I liked this blond guy at work. He was funny.....really funny. Side-splitting. It was the kind of humor that a lot of people don't get - he's a laconic dude, from that day to this, and you have to be pretty quick to catch the remarks.

One night he had a friend visiting from out of town, and a group of us went out. We ended up back at his place and after an hour or two there were only three of us left: me, Mr HSBoots, and his best friend. We were all sitting around smoking (well, they were smoking...I was mostly trying not to cough too much) and listening to Pink Floyd. It was well into the night and getting on to the time when, if there had been a fire, we would have been staring into it. As it was, we just sat in the dark and listened, while the PULSE album, discarded on the floor, flashed its quiet heartbeat.

Where were you when I was burned and broken
When the days slipped by from my window watching

The weeks went by and my personal life went from bad to worse. It didn't matter, though - there was no way I was giving up on this relationship I had invested almost six years in. In retrospect I can see what I couldn't at the time: that he really didn't want to marry me. That the proposal and the ring and the engagement were a stalling tactic. And that in my heart I did not believe I could ever do better - find anyone else.

And where were you when I was hurt and I was helpless
Cause the things you say and the things you do surround me

On August 12 the project group went out again - this time to a beach about a half hour from the city, away from the lights, to see the Perseids. I had arranged with my roommate to borrow her vehicle and was going to drive everyone - all these carless UVic graduates - but by the time we got off work at 11.00 PM, three of the group had decided they wouldn't go after all.

Only two of us were left.

We were lying on blankets on the beach, heads on driftwood, surrounded by a crowd of recumbent strangers all chatting and gazing skyward, when Mr HalfSoledBoots took a deep breath and said he had something to tell me. He said he knew I was engaged, but he had a feeling I wasn't happy...and that he loved me. He wanted a chance to change that - to make me happy like he thought I deserved to be.

While you were hanging yourself on someone else's words
Dying to believe in what you heard
I was staring straight
into the shining sun

And three weeks after that, it was all done. The phone calls had been made, along with a few four-hour drives to and from the town my fiance was living in. The ring was returned, all three hearts were to various degrees broken.

On August 12, a year later, we were married. He moved in, carting boxes of CDs and headphones, speakers and amps. We sat on the floor listening to David Gilmour and Roger Waters and going through the CDs, tossing all the doubles onto a pile. Ten Summoner's Tales. The Wall: Live in Berlin. Cuts Like a Knife. The Tragically Hip. Jagged Little Pill. I laughed as I made room on the shelves for the his music - Grateful Dead, The Doors, Led Zeppelin, Carmina Burana - while he earnestly explained how I was supposed to pronounce Knebworth.

Eleven years later, I still haven't listened to it.

A lot of water has flowed under the bridge since we got married. There have been lots of victories, and more defeats than I like to admit. We've had the health, and we've had the sickness...we've had the richer and the poorer. We don't really listen to music anymore - it's hard with all the interruptions of a family. When I get into the car after Mr HSB has been driving, I just punch the power button to turn the stereo off, out of habit, before it even has a chance to get fully wound up - with the kids strapped into the back seat and talking a mile a minute, music is a bit overstimulating. If I let it play, though, I know what will fill the car - he takes all six CD slots and fills them up with concert bootlegs, Jimi Hendrix, U2, Robert Plant, Jerry Garcia.

Yesterday I sat in the corner of the couch, knitting. The kids were playing in the sprinkler outside, shrieking and laughing. And Mr Half Soled Boots was on the other end of the couch, laptop balanced on the arm, listening to David Gilmour on iTunes. He's not a singer-along, generally speaking, but ever since I met him there's one refrain he doesn't even try to resist. Usually I join in, compelled, as he is, by the song. As it approached I waited for it, smiling and trying not to smile, glad he was looking in the other direction and didn't know I was paying attention. The low-voiced verse ended, the music changed from minor to major, reaching resolution in a moment of pure beauty.

There is no pain - you are receding
A distant ship smoke on the horizon
You are only coming through in waves
Your lips move, but I can't hear what you're saying...

I have become
comfortably numb

It's the most he ever sings - ten or so lines of a surreal rock opera. Listening to him, the way he pauses - has always paused - along with David Gilmour in between "smoke" and "on the horizon", he became to me the same 23-year-old who had made me laugh all that long summer. He was the same funny, taciturn boy who played albums for me at night, turning up the guitar solos. I had been pushed back in time, just for a minute, to that night in 1996 when I sat in a smoky bachelor pad and heard the ringing of the Division Bell. Before my life was changed.

I took a heavenly ride through our silence
I knew the moment had arrived
For killing the past and coming back to life

Thanks, Ian. Thanks for loving me for eleven years, and for making good on your promise to make me happy. Thanks for saying what's important, even though, as a rule, you don't say much.

Thank you for my daughters.

I love you.

_____________________________________
High Hopes, from Division Bell 1994, by D.Gilmour, P.Samson
Coming Back to Life, from Division Bell, 1994, by D.Gilmour
Comfortably Numb, from The Wall, 1979, by D.Gilmour, R.Waters

Funny, the things you remember.

I come from what you could call honest, hard-working people. My grandparents on my mother's side are both gone now, but my grandfather - we called him "Bobo" - was one funny, funny guy. He drank a lot and got progressively more hilarious and good-humoured with every ounce. He played the harmonica like he was born with one in his mouth. He smoked constantly. He would fall asleep on the couch with the mohair throw over him, and when one of his daughters tiptoed up to remove his glasses he would say, without opening his eyes, "Leave them - when I wake up I'll need to know where I am."

He used to sing this song, that I sing to my kids now. Does anyone else, anyone not in my family, remember this song? *

I took my gal to the ball one night
It was a fancy hop
We stayed 'til it was over, and the music it did stop
Then I took her to a restaurant
The finest in the street
She said she wasn't hungry
But this is what she eat.

A dozen raw
A plate of slaw
A chicken and a roast
Applesauce and 'sparagraus and soft-shell crab on toast
Oyster stew and crackers too
Her appetite was immense
When she called for a pie I thought I'd die
'Cause I only had fifty cents

I gave the man the fifty cents
And this is what he did

He tore my clothes and mashed my nose
And kicked me in the jaw
Gave me a prize of a pair of black eyes
And with me swept the floor
Then he grabbed me where the pants hung loose
And threw me over the fence

Take my advice, don't try it twice
When you only have fifty cents.

They had plaques on their walls, with quaint little sayings on them. One read as follows:

We are making a debt for our children to pay
And economists groan as they say it
But we also seem to be finding a way
To create enough children to pay it.

There was an ancient newspaper clipping on their fridge, that said

It's not my place to run the train
The whistle I can't blow
It's not my place to say how fast
The train's allowed to go
I don't take tickets at the gate
Nor even ring the bell
But let the damn thing jump the track
And see who catches hell.

Half the time I had no idea what was going on, at their place. Didn't understand the queer sayings on the walls, was unnerved by the alcohol all over the place, and couldn't keep my eyes off the three-dimensional monkey-shaped ashtray made of hollowed-out coconuts. I think it might have said something like "Aloha from Hawaii" but I could be making that part up.

I'm thinking about learning to play the harmonica, so my children can hear it. Those were my favourite moments, when Bobo would play for us.

I'd like to have a word with Grandma and Bobo now. I miss them a lot. Bobo's been gone since I was 13, Grandma since I was 23. It's been a long time.


---------------------------
Five minutes, a little Google, and look what I found: provenance of "I took my gal to the ball one night". This is an old, old ditty - 1885. Who knew?