Falling Backwards: A Memoir (3 page)

I know we were very blessed. I realize that more now than ever. The sixties seemed abundant. In our house, no one ever really talked about people being poor. I’m sure there were lots of people struggling to make ends meet, but my parents protected me from anything unsavoury or sad. They were my magic dome, the two of them. They seemed to let only the good in. I never even remember them raising their voices to each other—which I know is hard to believe—but they didn’t … until some time later.

One of the most interesting features of our small white house on Louise Road was the milk chute. It was built right into the wall of our house, right by the back door. Everybody in our neighbourhood had one. Nobody bought milk at a store, they had it delivered by the milkman.

The milk chute was like a really fancy dog door, complete with handles. It was about four feet off the ground with the milkman’s little door on the outside of the house and our little door on the
inside. The doors were slightly askew, so he’d have to slide the bottles of milk over to our side, and then we’d grab them out of there like it was a pop machine. You never even had to step outside, which was great in the winter. I am sure that’s why people had milk chutes; the milk would have frozen sitting out on a front step in about two minutes. After all, it is winter in Alberta eleven and a half months out of the year. It feels that way, anyway.

I can remember one day waiting for our milkman to come with the homo milk and our whipping cream and, I hoped, our chocolate milk. We didn’t get chocolate milk that often, but when we did it was like Christmas and Halloween and Easter and May Day all at the same time, whatever May Day is.

I listened for the milk truck to pull up in front of our little white house and then I stuck my head into the milk chute and held my breath. I imagined he would open the milk chute and see my adorable freckled face grinning at him like the Cheshire cat and exclaim how desperately cute I was. Unfortunately, because the milk chute doors weren’t aligned, he actually couldn’t see me sitting there with my head in the tiny door grinning at him wildly, and so he began shoving the milk bottles into my invisible, now somewhat shocked, face. I tried pulling my head out of the milk chute, but it had become quite stuck. I mean
really
stuck. It was wedged in there like a marshmallow in a piggy bank, like a bowling ball in a frog’s mouth. Like thong underwear on a gymnast doing backflips. My dad had to come home from work to saw me out of that milk chute. Okay, that may be a bit dramatic, but he did have to break off some of the moulding around the opening to get access to my head. My mother reminds me that he had to get some Vaseline, smear it all over my face and pull me out of there like you would a fat finger out of a wedding ring. I remember being very scared and very embarrassed by the whole thing. I never did get to surprise that milkman.
I never saw him at all. And I am really glad now that he didn’t see me. I didn’t stick my head in the milk chute ever again, although I did look into it from time to time for no reason whatsoever.

The things a person remembers are so random and somehow so particular. Some events quite simply stick to your heart and never come loose. I obviously don’t recall all that much about my life until I started school, but I do recall many fragments, little Polaroids that drop out of some mysterious camera in my mind and get waved in front of my face while I’m thinking about something else entirely. Remember this? That’s what the Polaroids seem to say. They prompt me for some reason to recall, recall, recall. I can just be sitting quietly in a chair and some vivid picture of my past will shoot through my mind like a bullet, causing me to actually draw a breath between my teeth. What is that? I don’t know what it is until I can actually place the memory. Things I haven’t thought of in forty years sit themselves on my lap and look up at me like a tired dog. Some of the Polaroids are good and some of them are terrifying.

Flash. Flash. Flash.

The things I remember from before I went to school always seem to involve me crashing into or falling off or wedging myself in things. Nothing frightened me. Everything seemed possible. I was always moving in some direction, but never backwards. What I choose to remember shapes who I am every day. I know that. For the most part I control that. Every day I wake up and feel ever so slightly changed, and I can’t go back to who I was the day before. It’s simply not possible. The universe makes you fall constantly forward and I am glad that it does. We are renewed over and over again. But memories shape us all. My memories shape and reshape who I am. I draw on
them all the time to help me go forward in my life. They somehow guide me through what would otherwise be a very difficult maze. It could be a guiding principle as simple as “remember when you did this and it was really bad? Don’t do that again.”

Whenever I get together with old friends, we always end up talking about the past, and about things we did together. Places we went, things that happened. It never ceases to amaze me how differently we all recall the very same event. Our minds form our own versions of our lives that will never be the same as anybody else’s. I have had so many friends say to me, “Don’t you remember that?” No, I don’t remember that, or at least I don’t remember it the way they do. Maybe that’s why witnesses to crimes are considered very unreliable. He was tall; no, he was short; no, wait, he was a purple dog.

I think the universe knows what it’s doing in the memory department. Some things we forget out of self-defence, or I do anyway. I find it quite easy to put things into jars, screw on the “not now” lid and set them on a shelf in my brain. You can’t possibly carry an entire life around with you all the time. You have to look at it in sections so your mind doesn’t implode. I have certain days where I’ll take the jars down and have a good look around in them, but those days have become fewer and further in between as I get older. I don’t mind glancing in the rear-view mirror now and then, but I don’t want to stare.

You are not what you did, but what you will do.

Yes, memories are funny things. Do they make you up, or do you make them up? When I was a kid, I would feel sorry for God. I used to worry about how many of our thoughts he had to store in his own head. I pictured him sitting in his screened-in porch and watching the thoughts pouring in through the tiny squares of the screen and him swatting at them like flies. I pictured him hanging fly strips
by the thousands from the pale white ceiling to catch all the prayers that were streaming through every possible opening, trying to make their way to him. It made me feel so heavy hearted. I worried about God. I wondered who he prayed to. It made my little head hurt. I understood for a moment how “impossible” felt.

It’s good to remember, but you can’t let memories hurt you. Human beings are the only animals on the planet that punish themselves over and over again for something they’ve done in the past. A dog doesn’t punish himself for something he did an hour ago, but people? If we can beat ourselves up about something, we usually do. I try not to do that, but like most other people, I slam myself into a wall every now and then.

The things we choose to remember say a heck of a lot about us.

As far as I can remember as a kid, I always seemed to be crashing, falling, being wedged into or pulled out of one thing or another. There was the milk chute. Then one summer I had to be pulled out of a barbecue. I know you’re picturing a gas grill with a lid on it, but the barbecue that I was pulled out of when I was six was one that my dad had built himself from a kit. That in and of itself was probably the problem. It stood about eight feet high and was made out of concrete Lego-style blocks, stacked one on top of the other to form a fairly tall chimney. It seemed like it was a hundred feet tall but I am quite certain it was actually more like eight. There were shelves or wings off to each side where one could put plates and pots of beans or set down a cold beer. This was the barbecue to end all barbecues and I don’t know what possessed me to scale up to the very top and look down into that chimney, but I did. And I don’t know what possessed me to actually stick my head into the chimney and then wiggle down into it, but I did that too. So now I was upside-down inside an
eight-foot barbecue, looking down at the grill and wondering how I was going to get out. I did try to get out for some time, but I couldn’t reach to push myself off the bottom and I had no space in which to turn myself around. I hung there for a very long time. I don’t know if I was screaming or laughing, but our neighbour Betty Evans heard me from her kitchen window—or heard something, rather—and came out of her house to check. She obviously couldn’t see anything at first, because I was obscured in the barbecue, but she kept searching for where the sounds were coming from. She found me eventually and somehow managed to pull me out. Thank you, Betty. I might well still be in there if it weren’t for you. I haven’t crawled into a barbecue since, you’ll be happy to know, although I have really wanted to.

I was always climbing on things: on countertops to get into cupboards or on top of the refrigerator to get at a bag of cookies or onto retaining walls just to get up onto a retaining wall. I just wanted to climb; there was no purpose in it at all. Of course I fell off everything I climbed on. My mother says I was forever covered in bruises. I suffered one or two concussions and various split chins from numerous falls to the earth, and of course mom was mortified about what our family doctor, Dr. Turner, would think. Was I being beaten on a somewhat regular basis? Not at all, but you know how doctors can be—suspicious—and I don’t blame them.

I wasn’t afraid of anything. I should have been, but I wasn’t. Fearlessness wears off as you get older. Reality takes over eventually and replaces fearlessness with doubt. You start doubting everything you do. But in your youth? Ah, youth, teeming with bravado! There actually was a time in my life, albeit a short one, when I truly believed that I would never die and nothing terrible would ever happen to me or my family. I miss that feeling. Now it’s a constant fight to defend yourself from succumbing to the dark side. (I can hear Darth Vader breathing inside that black helmet of his.)

Yes, falling, always falling. I fell off bikes (always keep your hands on the handlebars) and dressers and countertops and swing sets and merry-go-rounds. I fell into things like garbage cans. Well, I liked to play in garbage cans, for some strange reason, and I was in them a
lot
. There were hundreds of garbage cans lining the alley behind our white house, and I made sure that I stuck my head into every single one of them. No rotten apple core went unturned! There were treasures to be had, by gum! And probably gum to be had. I apparently didn’t know that garbage was garbage yet. Good thing, too.

I got worms from playing in the garbage cans with my friend from across the alley, Davey Hayes. I am sure he talked me into it. I would never have thought something that terrible up by myself. Never! My mother said that Davey’s mother was a bit crazy and that Davey was a bit crazy too. That seemed like it would be a good thing to be, considering how hard life could be from time to time.

My mom told me she’d take me into the bathroom in the middle of the night, wrap Scotch tape around her fingers and then stick the tape onto my wee bum hole. Then she’d throw the light switch on to see if she’d caught any worms. She said she caught many a worm poking out of my arse. True story—I swear on my mother’s life. The doctor actually told her to do the Scotch tape thing. (Thank God for universal health care.) I am sure that’s not something the Scotch tape people tout as one of the many handy uses for their product. De-worming? I should let the Scotch tape people know that it really works. My mother could be the spokesmodel. That whole experience with the worms was much worse for her than it was for me. You’d think a person could feel worms coming and going out of their bum hole. Disgusting, really. That’s what you get for eating garbage.

I was also known to eat the odd dead fly off a windowsill, but that could just be an out-and-out lie. I can’t imagine that even at six
years old I would have found that at all appetizing. I hate flies. I hate moths even more.

There is a picture of me when I was two or three years old, next to my little pal Shelly. My shins are covered in bruises and Shelly doesn’t have a mark on her anywhere. I still bruise easily. All I have to do is bump ever so slightly into the corner of a table and I have a bruise the size of a small dog. I had a bruise once on my inner thigh that looked very much like the Virgin Mary and all the neighbours paid me a buck and a quarter to come and look at it. I am kidding—I never charged a red cent.

I don’t know how I survived childhood. I don’t know how my parents survived my childhood, but we all did. Thinking back now, it was magical. It seemed like one long summer. It never ended. When you start counting your time on the planet by how many summers you have left, you realize how short life really is. My friend Jean said to me once that she hoped she had twenty summers left. It made me stop and think harder than usual. When the summers start feeling shorter, you know you’re over that middle of your life hump and well into becoming a senior with a pension and not a single tooth of your own in your head. I can honestly tell you that I don’t mind the thought of getting older at all. I am not thrilled about the tooth part, but I am quite relieved that I have the chance to get old, period. Youth can be vicious. I find that the older I get, the shorter my neck becomes, but the more I like myself.

I think my mother was very relieved when I finally started school. She’d have at least four hours in a day in which to fix everything I’d broken. When I did break something, I’d always admit to it. I was a very honest child. She’d march into a room and say to us all, “Who broke this lamp?” And I’d say, “I did.” I guess it kind of took the steam out of her being mad at me. She says that I didn’t start telling lies until
I was eighteen years old. (It was more like seventeen). She told me that when I turned eighteen I went bonkers; maybe I did go bonkers.