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Be the one on the social committee who volunteers to make caramel popcorn for everyone. To make caramel popcorn for everyone. Served in mason jars. Reject your friend’s hint that Costco sells caramel popcorn in four-gallon buckets. You do not want your colleagues to eat Costco’s caramel popcorn. You want your colleagues to eat caramel popcorn made with your blood, sweat, and tears. You want your colleagues to ingest your DNA as they eat the popcorn you made. How can they not love you if your DNA is part of them? That’s why people make babies. And labour-intensive popcorn.
Walk to the grocery store and buy every stick of butter you can find. Then ask the 12-year-old stock clerk if there is more butter in the back room. While he goes to look, pretend you are shopping for kale and granola, not twenty kilograms of salted Gay Lea. Look at the muscular kale shopper in the North Face fleece. Pretend not to care when he allows you a tight smile and then starts pushing that cart over there, the one with the adorable three-year old perched in the seat.
When the 12-year-old stock clerk inexplicably returns with an armload of Shreddies, spare his feelings by pretending that you were looking for Shreddies all along. He did not volunteer to be part of this, after all. But you did. You idiot.
Go home and cry a little into an expensive lotioned Kleenex. Life is hard! Men are jerks! There is so much popcorn to make! What’s that sticky feeling on the bottom of your slippers! Cuddle your cat, because everyone knows that only painfully cool almost-thirty-one-year-olds have overweight, entitled felines warming their feet at night, instead of human beings.
Feel vaguely gratified that you’ve taken care of the tears. Now you just need some blood and sweat.
Start melting all that butter on the stove. Burn it immediately. Break the smoke alarm while trying to twist it off the wall. Chase the smoke alarm’s battery, which has skittered across the floor and under the couch. Find it lodged next to a book you were reading in your former, more innocent life, before you lost your mind and volunteered to make enough caramel sauce to keep a carnival kiosk in business for a whole afternoon. Feel nostalgia for your former book-reading, nap-taking, leisure-loving self.
Ignore all the small print in the online recipe you found, because ain’t nobody got time for that. Ruin the first batch. Read the small print after all. Discover that you were not supposed to place pans of popcorn directly over the heat source.
Make a batch that tastes just like your mom’s and looks like the photo in the recipe. Do a victory dance. Scare the cat. Spend ten minutes reassuring the cat that he is loved and that there is nothing to be afraid of. Understand that in some deep, zen master way you are mostly reassuring yourself.
Measure your first successful batch. It fills exactly seven mason jars. Do the math (relying (only sort of!) on a calculator) and realize you will need to make popcorn for the next eighty hours or so in order to fill fifty-five jars. Make a list of how many colleagues you actually like. Like, like like. The rest get Shreddies.
No, seriously. Consider cheating by filling half of every mason jar with Shreddies. Text your friend to see if that would be acceptable. Accept that it would not.
Spend thirty-five minutes searching for good podcasts. It’s going to be a long night.
Realize you have just eaten a mason jar of caramel popcorn for supper. Resist giving a fuck.
Spend another twelve minutes finding something good on Netflix because you’ve listened to all the podcasts in the whole universe.
Look at the time. Panic a little. Start typing “quick and easy caramel popcorn” into Google. Stop after “easy” and let auto-fill do the rest. Realize your mistake after twelve minutes of learning how to make money, shed belly fat, and die in a hurry.
Feel overtaken by a frenzy of productivity and make seven more mason jars’ worth of popcorn. Like a boss.
Realize it’s already twenty minutes past your think-about-getting-ready-for-bed time and you still have forty-two mason jars’ worth of popcorn to make. Do another Google search. Discover that Costco closed half an hour ago.
Start writing a blog post about it because you recently paid to retain your domain name for another year, so better get your money’s worth. Feel proud that you are taking the creative lead in your life, turning gloom into art. Notice the last post on the website, from more than a year ago. Fuck art! Where did those lotioned Kleenexes go?
Play really old songs with really old meanings in really loud ways. If your neighbours don’t like it, they can move. Seven more mason jars filled, just like that. You’re getting into a groove. Dance a little. Scare the cat again with your jerky scarecrow dance moves. Let him deal with it on his own; he’s seventy in human years, after all. He should be comforting you.
Another seven jars! Maybe you should quit and become a candy maker. Like Willy Wonka. Nothing bad ever happened to that guy.
Burn the next seven jars’ worth. Decide to let it go. Then decide to turn this into a proverb: Sometimes life needs more dancing and less popcorn!
You were never good at writing proverbs.
Seven more jars! This batch burned just a little. Try a few pieces and decide to include it in the mix anyway. If you don’t go to bed soon, you might die.
Realize you’ve been writing your new blog post instead of making your popcorn, and also that you’re talking to yourself like a crazy person. But maybe making this amount of popcorn already qualifies you as a crazy person, so the talking really doesn’t matter.
Seven more jars.
Seven more jars.
Seven more jars.
You’re a robot now. Void of all feeling. Pop the popcorn, make the caramel, dribble it together, shake it up, stick it in the oven, take a break.
Look frantically for the cat, like you do several times a day. Find him cowering in the boot closet. Reassure him that there will be no more dancing. Reach a tentative kind of truce. He affords you three licks and a bite. Another proverb? No – you are terrible at those.
Eat a handful of baby carrots and half a can of flaked albacore tuna as penance for all the scarfed caramel sauce. Feel a particular kind of roiling in your guts. Admonish yourself. If you were a true adult, you would be eating real meals. Or feeding real meals to a tribe of small children. Admonish yourself again—if you were a true feminist, you would not base your self-worth on making babies. Admonish yourself a third time: if you were true to yourself, you would have ordered Dominos. Why didn’t you order Dominos?
Seven more more jars and OMG is it possible you are DONE? Package it all up in a white garbage bag, the kind normally reserved for kitty litter. Stop to ponder this for a moment. Sometimes life gives you a bag of sweet, sweet candy, and sometimes it gives you a bag of shit.
Feel immoderately proud of yourself. (For the popcorn and the proverb.)
Resolve to imagine, for the time being, that you employ an enthusiastic maid who will have all of this cleaned up by morning.
Sleep. Dream. Wake with indigestion and a vague sense of things going wrong. Feel the cat shifting against your feet. Tell yourself that everything will be okay, and everyone will have popcorn, and you will never again have to listen to the reproachful whirr of an air popper.
Exhibit A: The neediness that began in Mme. Henry’s Grade 2 French Immersion class and has never really abated. Also, this might be the only time, in fiction or fact, when you will see a rendering of me in heels. TU AIMES MOI?
I started a new job two weeks ago and I am, as I’ve said to anyone who’s asked, dreamily suspended in the glowing, embryonic honeymoon stage of love.
The feeling around my new workplace is very “be who you are.” There is no sanding down the edges, no drinking from the same punch bowl. You identify as nerdball? Fly that flag, brother! Call yourself literary? Here’s the perfect spot for your vintage Olympia. We all grew up on the “you are special” curriculum and now, somehow, we’ve stumbled together into a workplace that lets us be as affectionately peculiar and obsessive and eclectic as our special A+ hearts desire. It’s wonderful. And, to borrow from the parlance of the industry, it drives results. Clients are happy. We are happy. Every day is like a long, rib-cracking, down-home group hug, with beer on Fridays.
But here’s the question: where do I fit into that?
Here is the question again, this time demonstrated visually:
Two empty shelves on the wall behind my desk. I have to decide what to put on these shelves. And whatever I decide – even if it’s nothing – will broadcast something about me.
I could be anyone to my new colleagues. Only a couple of them really know much about me personally, and what they know I’ve managed to control in the low-lit bars and plushy living rooms where we’ve hung out, in manageable chunks of time, over vessels of alcohol that help me sustain an aura of writerly pensiveness. But now we’re going to be together for forty-plus hours a week, and only a few of those will be fortified by vessels of any kind. I need to decide. Yes, of course, I will be myself. But which self should I be? And how should I express that on these three parallel plains, which will shout my identity (such as I curate it) to the whole office?
Current (and woefully predictable) shortlist of ideas:
1. A carefully selected mini-library. This presents its own agony: what do I want the chosen titles to say about me? Is Alice Munro too predictable? Victor Hugo too pretentious? What about Strunk and White? Too didactic? Or should I really commit to flying my flag, and include my boxed set of 90s-era YA and Degrassi DVDs? I am paralyzed by indecision.
2. Pug stuff, starting with a pug-shaped bookend that sat in place of pride in my last office. But even I am finding the fact of my pug love, contrasted by the lack of a pug of my own, increasingly tiresome. And there is the danger that I will give my new colleagues this one very plain, 2-dimensional fact about me and will forever receive pug paraphernalia at every occasion as punishment. (Not that such a state of affairs would be at all difficult to endure!)
3. Paris stuff.
Taken on its own, not one of these three themes really tells a complete story, and I am afraid of creating some kind of clichéd pigeonhole in which I’ll reside forever. Is that where I want to begin with these nice new people?
Seems to me that it was easier to have an identity when we were all little kids and no identify was expected of us. Our parents chose what was put on display in our bedrooms, our teachers chose the wall art in our school hallways, and all we had to do was learn to add and divide, turn bread mould into science, and spell ten new words a week. In that kind of environment, we really could be whatever the hell we wanted, and it was okay if we changed our minds daily. I went through the usual fluid succession of career identities that other girls my age went through (what the hell made us all want to be marine biologists in grade three?), but even then I sort of knew.
Well, not sort of. I knew very, very specifically. I was going to be a writer. It seemed as easy as that to me: this is what I am going to do, this is who I am going to be. After all, when you were a kid, it didn’t take much to “be” anything at all. Want to be a firefighter? Here, put on this red plastic helmet and bash these toy fire engines around. And if you wanted to be a writer, all you had to do – in my estimation, anyway – was announce the fact to your whole class during the sixth-grade public speaking competition. And because I was already cultivating the bad habits that still plague me today, I went several hundred feet too far and used that speech to give myself very specific context: I would not only be a writer, but I would be one who lived in Newfoundland (somehow lodged in my brain as a place of fog, friendship, and free-range seaside adventure, sort of a benign Lord of the Flies) in a house that would be half on the ground and half hanging out over the edge of a cliff (I never won any prizes for engineering).
These facts were all enthusiastic elements of that sixth-grade speech, along with some whole-grain details about Newfoundland’s natural history which I used to sneak the real message past the academic gatekeepers. And the real message was this: Whether you are twelve years old or twenty-nine, discovering the identity you want to broadcast to the world doesn’t have to be complicated. Just make it up and give it a mansion on a cliffside. Or three deep, wide shelves on the wall above your desk.
I got a mysterious phone call again. I hoped it was Katya, rescinding her abrupt dismissal from the last and only time we talked, but no: it was “Shannon.” And it was a voicemail. Shannon gets down to business.
“Hey Megan. I work at Al’s Diner. Your bus pass was found outside. I won’t mail it because it expires at the end of November, and it probably won’t reach you before then. So it’s at Al’s Diner at 834 Clyde Avenue. Just say that Shannon called you and it was behind the bar.”
TONE: Warm and understanding. Shannon has possibly been on the losing end of the bus pass life cycle herself, so she empathizes. I am touched by the small but not insignificant chain of events that led to this phone call, like a Rube Goldberg machine that is triggered when I characteristically fumble my bus pass to the ground without even noticing. Shannon has to pass at just the right place to see it; she has to not be distracted by the flotsam of life swimming through her mind at that moment; she has to bend down, pick it up, brush it off, locate my phone number, and call me.
“Hey Megan.”
Interpretation: Shannon is a keen observer. She could have just said “Hello.” But not Shannon! She used my name, and the familiar “Hey.” She probably deduced from my bus pass photo that I am a “Hey, [your name]” sort of person. I am not a “Good afternoon, madame” sort of person. I like Shannon right from those first three syllables.
“I work at Al’s Diner.”
My heart swells: she is like a John Cheever character. The romance of the working class. She has nothing to hide; in fact, she and Al maybe even be in cahoots. Do I detect a hint of intrigue in the way she rolls out the open vowel on “Al”?
“You bus pass was found outside.”
Shannon is humble. She does not seek credit for her nobless; she does not say, “I found your bus pass.” She is only a regular girl trying to do regular good in the world.
“I won’t mail it because it expires at the end of November, and it probably won’t reach you before then.”
I’ve had boyfriends who were less thoughtful than this stranger.
“So it’s at Al’s Diner at 834 Clyde Avenue. Just say that Shannon called you and it was behind the bar.”
Ten seconds earlier, I did not know that Shannon existed; now I am on a mission, and her name is the code-word.
I go to Al’s Diner on Monday morning. I pay for the bus with laundry change. As I weave unsteadily down the aisle of the 85, I begin to feel a familiar sense of painful self-awareness about my get-up. My only boots are the size of tractor tires and are really only suitable for the most blizzarding of days. Today, they are overkill by a long shot. The problem is that I always look out the window at the dog-walkers to gauge the weather, but the dog-walkers have become unreliable. After all, they are outside at 6am; who cares if they are wearing enormous overstuffed parkas and their castoff Sorrels. All fashion bets are off at that hour. By the time I am wrapped up in their image, they have deposited their dogs at home and have transitioned to pea coats and slender boots with artisanal stitching. I, donning my tractor tires and overstuffed parka, feel cruelly misled.
I find a seat on the 85 and begin the complicated process of unzipping and unraveling and untying my outermost layer so that I will not arrive at Al’s Diner like a perspiring Yeti. This makes me remember the two years I spent commuting to school on the metro in Montreal. To get to the metro platform, you had to descend miles and miles of escalators, and with each plunging foot the ambient temperature boiled one degree hotter. It was like descending into Hades. By the time you reached your train, you were lucky if you could still stand upright and string a sentence together in the heat. People shed clothes down there faster than a dancer on two-for-one night. Oh, Montreal. Thinking this way triggers a landslide of nostalgia for my old apartment, my old route around the city, my old friends. I look out at boring old Ottawa and sigh to myself.
But it’s the first wintry Monday of the year in this city, and as people shuffle around the bus to make room for one another, and as I stare out at a child’s first meager attempt at a snowman, a surge of generosity towards the city replaces that morose nostalgia for somewhere else. Look at all these good people putting their own small imprint on the world! Finding each other’s lost bus passes, and avoiding elbowing each other in the face when the bus stops, and generally looking out for each other’s welfare! It’s a good place, this world. It’s not a bad world after all.
I get off at my usual stop, Carling & Clyde. Pizza joints, a martial arts studio, a sprawling hardware store with slick, airlocked automatic doors. Al’s Diner is within sight. I jaywalk next to a guy who also got off the 85. He is thuggy and hooded. I marvel that we are sharing a common experience, even one so insignificant as jaywalking. I imagine that I get clipped by a U-turning minivan and he is the first one to reach my prone body. I imagine looking dazedly up at the sky, and then up at his face as he leans over me and shouts something. He is not thuggy after all. He is kind, and a leader. He orders someone to call 911 and he takes off his jacket and pillows it under my head.
We reach the other side of the road and I hurry off towards Al’s Diner without looking to see which way he goes. Sometimes I worry that my daydreams are intense enough to become visible to the people around me.
It’s quiet in the restaurant. A waitress – I can tell it’s not Shannon – nods to me. Somewhere a radio announcer says, “… and that’s not the only thing you’ll have if you subscribe today.” It’s still early, and all the tables are tossed in morning sunshine. Almost everyone is eating alone. Almost everyone is reading a newspaper. I remember the girl at my bus stop who hands out free copies of 24. She is not allowed to leave her post until all her issues of 24 have been distributed. When buses arrive and disgorge their passengers, she waves the paper over her head like it’s a white flag. Every other person plucks one away from her, and when that happens she leans down and takes another from her pile to wave around. The 97 bus is her best bet. She unloads at least a dozen papers each time one of those pulls up. I sometimes take one out of sympathy.
I sit alone at my little table in Al’s Diner. I see a solitary man eating blueberry pancakes just off to my left. Like me, he is without a prop. His hair is still damp and holds the track-marks of his comb. He has draped his coat over the chair opposite him. While he cuts his pancakes, he looks intently down at his plate. While he chews, he stares at his coat. He moves his head this way and that as though conducting an inquisitive, illuminating conversation with a companion who is visible only to him.
I sometimes worry that my friends are only my friends because we’ve been around each other for so long, and not because I am particularly likeable.
There’s a large-screen television hanging mutely over the dining room, tuned to TSN. I watch the Argos silently win the Grey Cup over and over. When the waitress comes – she is too old to be Shannon, surely – I order the Eggs Bennie for $9.99. The waitress is kind. She says “Cold, eh?” to every single customer as they come in, stamping their boots on the mat. She rests her hip against the table where the man with the comb tracks sits. She gestures with the coffee pot like it’s an extension of herself. I overhear her tell him that today is her Friday.
There are more people than cars in this neighbourhood of garages. I look out at the cars. Someone reverses a Dodge Caravan from the guts of a repair shop opposite Al’s Diner. For now, there is no other traffic. The driver turns onto Clyde Avenue and does a slow, lazy donut, then steers back into the garage, tracking a web of snow onto the clean pavement inside. The massive door rolls closed behind him.
My eggs arrive, and the man with the comb tracks plucks his jacket from the chair and leaves. After he’s gone I feel an odd sort of bereavement, like you do when you look one last time at the empty photo window of a wallet you’re about to toss away.
I don’t really believe what I thought just now about my friends. I remember that my bus pass is here somewhere, in the restaurant, and I feel even happier. I begin making to-do lists in my mind for the week ahead. It will be dark by the time I walk back along Clyde Avenue towards the bus stop that evening; I try to concentrate on everything that might happen between now and then, so I can be prepared.
The eggs aren’t bad. The night before, I had made pizza. All of it. I made the sauce, and the dough. D and I ate it until we almost burst. I think of the eggs sliding down and landing on top of the pizza and I experience a moment of queasy doubt about my breakfast, but that passes. I work out; I metabolize. I feel a rare surge of total self-reliance and I try to work out where it has come from, and how to reproduce it when it’s really necessary, in the more frightening moments of the Monday-to-Friday circus. The deadline moments, the Prove Thyself moments.
And then I see her: Shannon. She’s behind the bar. I know it’s her. She’s taking care of her section of tables efficiently and kindly, just like she took care of me.
I wait a long time for my waitress to bring the debit machine, and while I wait I watch Shannon. I look at the bar and think, the bus pass that was once on my bedside table is now behind the bar at Al’s Diner. When the debit machine comes, I leave an enormous tip, hoping some of it will spill over to Shannon, but also feeling some grandiosity for my own waitress who, for all I know, taught Shannon her good and giving ways.
At the bar I catch her eye. I say, “Shannon?”
She looks at my blankly. I falter. I explain quickly and inelegantly about the bus pass.
“Oh,” she says. “It’s Sharon, actually. Not Shannon.”
I try to affix this new name over the place where I’ve already got “Shannon” tattooed. She sees my struggle and says, “I mumble a lot.”
In the end, it’s an unceremonious event. She flips through some clutter on a shelf against the far wall, finds my bus pass, extends it towards me. I take it and say something like, “I’m always losing this thing.” It’s the wrong thing to say; she thinks I’m a twit. And she needs to get back to her tables. “Thank you,” I say, and at the very same moment she says, “No problem.”
In my overstuffed parka and tractor-tire boots, I push out of the restaurant turn towards my office and the waiting mystery of this new week.
Kelly and I (1989)
My dog Kelly got hit by a car on November 18th, 1991, just a few days after my eighth birthday. I watched through the family room window as my dad carried her away from the road and set her down on the lawn. She did that heartbreaking dog thing of thumping her tail on the grass, even though she could hardly lift her head. My dad rubbed her ear between his thumb and finger. I understood, even at age eight, the magnificence of the moment: the thump of her tail, the movement of my dad’s hand on her ear, the look on his face as he stared at the highway where she had been struck, like he was resigning himself to the calamities that life had already dispatched but that had not yet arrived. I understood, my nose pressed to the glass, that something very important was being decided. Our asthmatic old pug, Mim, chortled around at my feet, and I reached down and rubbed her ear between my thumb and finger, perhaps thinking that I might channel some of what my dad felt by mimicking that slow, sad gesture of his.
It is not true that farmers are used to death. It is only true that they are used to pragmatism, and it is this pragmatism that forces them to endure more loss and grief than the average person should be expected to face.
My mom had replaced my dad next to Kelly’s motionless body – motionless except for the thump, thump of her tail – while he ran to get the truck. I stared out the window and tried to imagine doing all the things I usually did with Kelly, but doing them alone. My “patrols” of the fields and the creek bed, my little jobs of stacking wood and feeding chickens, my daily walk to the foot of the driveway to wait for the school bus. We had many animals on our farm, but only one of these animals really felt like mine. My sister had the cats. My parents had the pug. I had Kelly. Or I did.
At the family room window, I felt myself accelerate from parodying the grief I’d seen displayed by adults to experiencing it for myself, and this was a new and alarming feeling. All of a sudden I saw, in some early, elementary way, that in addition to cartoons and chores and school and basketball, life would also involve loss. And that there was a special sort of loss attendant to watching a pet disappear. (This moment was big enough for me to remember it eight years later when I was reduced to hyperventilating sobs at a plastic table in the Dundalk Public Library, rubbing the last page of Where the Red Fern Grows between my thumb and finger.)
At some point after he came home from the vet’s without Kelly, my dad had likely sat down at his desk, selected one of his ever-ready needle-sharp pencils, and recorded the expense in our household ledger. I imagine him assigning it some circumspect category like PETS – OTHER EXPENSES. I made my own record of the event in my daily journal at school. I think, even at age eight, that I recognized the inadequacy of my teacher’s comments.
For the first time, I was experiencing the way that nonsensical tragedy can scrub your mind clear of all of life’s trivia, of everything you had mistakenly considered important until that moment. The day that Kelly was hit, my barely-eight-year-old brain abruptly demoted several items that had entirely absorbed me before that moment, like what to request for Christmas, and whether my dad would inspect the vacuuming job I had hastily completed that morning. It took my whole miniature brain to receive and process the unfathomable fact of Kelly’s sudden disappearance from my life.
It’s not like death was an entirely novel concept for me. I had seen my dad drive off to the abattoir with a truckload of pigs, and I had seen our freezer fill with packages wrapped in flesh-toned butcher paper, and I had completed the equation for myself. But, as we all know, there is death and then there is death. Understanding this was terrifying and lonely, but, like the first time in your life when you receive bad news on the telephone or attend to a skinned knee without any adult help, it also felt exhilarating and grown-up. I looked at our war-torn tabby farm cat, Zeeklink, and thought: You are going to die. I looked at Mim and thought, So are you. (Fortunately my family and I did not have to deal with those two certainties for quite some time, though Zeek would eventually meet her end the same way Kelly did, on the two-lane rural highway at the perimeter of our farm, the only part of the RR#3 landscape I was glad to leave behind when we moved.)
Maybe I’m making too much of this. It’s hard to know, from a journal written in third-grade English, if I really felt any of these depths I’m describing. I remember more distinctly how much I loved Kelly while she was alive than how much I grieved for her after she died. So maybe I’m missing the point: maybe this story is not about the end of innocence, but instead about innocence itself, and how a death that would be crippling to me now was somehow more manageable then. After all, the next day’s journal entry is about how much I liked Zoodles for lunch. Maybe we are able to let go more gently when we are children, to fold sadness and loss into our experience alongside happiness and canned delights. Maybe, as adults, we can draw some resilience from this fact.
But I remember standing in that family room window so well. I remember watching Kelly thump her tail while my mom and dad moved her onto a blanket and lifted her, like a baby in a sling, onto the seat of the waiting truck. A memory like that doesn’t stick around for nothing. It has lasted with me. So has Kelly, especially at this time of year.
Bronwyn and I with Kelly in 1989
With Grandma Findlay
Summer, 1991
Photo source: jkristofer
She calls when I am at my most vulnerable: I am cleaning the apartment, and therefore have an appetite for distraction. I hardly ever receive phone calls, and so when I do, it’s An Event. I get plenty of other things, so don’t worry about me. Emails, real mails, texts. More than I can keep up with. I am extremely popular, actually. I am at a party right this minute, in fact, and people are knocking pitifully on the door, saying “Please Megan, please stop typing and come back and join the party, life is terrible without you at its center.”
When the phone starts ringing, I am peeling a new Swiffer Wet from its case. I am uncertain for a moment. What is that odd pulsating noise coming from the device with the trendy camera filters? I already have the Swiffer Wet in my hand so I take it with me.
Suspicion: “Hello?”
Gusty enthusiasm that pins me to the wall: “HI IS THIS MEGAN!?”
More suspicion, with a glaze of admiration and more than a little flattery: “Um… yes?”
“IT’S KATYA.”
I search my faulty memory, which is running on pinot fumes. Cleaning is more tolerable if one hand holds a mop while the other holds a glass of wine.
Katya. Katya. Katya? Nothing. And yet: she clearly knows me, and is not shy about it.
“Oh. Hi?”
“I wasn’t sure it was you! You sound so different on the phone!”
I am frantically searching for a visual on this chick, an ID, anything. I must know her. After all, she knows me. She was very excited it was me. She said IS THIS MEGAN?! with more hope than anyone ever has. I am killing myself trying to remember who she might be. I feel like a terrible human being. I hide my befuddled embarrassment under the shade of my free hand. Unfortunately, my free hand is holding a Swiffer Wet. Not so free. My face is now glazed with a layer of lemon-scented bucketless mop chemicals. This only adds to my confusion.
“I just wanted to call and tell you I am really excited about Twilight.”
I remove the phone from my ear and look again at the incoming 613 number. Surely this is not someone I know. Surely. In the distance, I hear her say: “But how can I wait for November 16th?!”
I return the phone close to, but not upon, my ear. My interest in this uninvited puzzle has begun to wane.
“But: Megan!”
She pauses. I open my mouth to respond, because even Twilight-loving phone freaks deserve politeness. My mouth remains open but not speaking for a beat too long. Ladies and gentlemen: lemon-scented bucketless mop chemicals do NOT taste good.
“That’s not actually why I called you.” She lowers her voice. Something seductive and silky creeps into it. The phone reconnects with my ear. I am suddenly interested again.
“I just wanted to say…” She draws out each syllable, almost whispering them, almost like she can hardly believe herself. She is reliving something. She is re-tasting something. I have no idea what’s going on, but even my own heart does a little butterfly twirl. And then she comes out with: “I had a great day with you today. Like, really, really great.”
Are you ready? Here comes the moment I will never be able to get back. The moment when I could have gotten something in return for my role in this strange, confusing event. The moment when I could have cleared my throat, adjusted my expression, and said, “What did you like best about it?” or “It was so-so for me” or “Wait, my husband is listening!”
Instead, I said: “Um. Who did you want to talk to?”
Things ended pretty quickly after that. She was obviously mortified. I was obviously mortified. I had staggered right into the middle of something private and brand new. But only because she had given me a shove. We both fumbled through “Isn’t that weird? That’s so weird!” and “I hope you find the girl you’re looking for” and “zombies are better than vampires anyway” and then we hung up.
Now the only problem I have, besides a harassed facial complexion, is all this desperate curiosity about who the heck she was and what the heck kind of experience she’d had with Other Megan that day. Are they illicit lovers? Did they arrange for this time to call each other? Did they spend the day falling in love? Or does Katya just have a flare for the dramatic, and all they did was find a good sale on knock-offs at the local Payless? I’ll never, ever know. But I’ll never, ever stop speculating!
Friday night I saw Bruce Springsteen. We waited for what seemed like hours in the swampy traffic outside of Scotiabank Place, making loopy conversation and punching the radio buttons one after the other. Somewhere in the guts of the building, Bruce Springsteen was taking a piss, strumming a chord, limbering up. Calling his wife. Telling the same old E Street stories, getting ready for another stage, another night. What he delivered to us, though, was not just “another” anything. Granted, I have the sort of creative archivist memory that files ordinary experiences under L for “Legendary,” which is a fun way to live but means that people are less likely to take you seriously when something truly amazing happens. But this Springsteen show? Legendary. I got the tickets for Derek’s birthday, not because I love Bruce, but because I love Derek. In the end, though, it was a show for both of us, and I have not stopped looping “Waiting on a Sunny Day” since watching Bruce sing it with two six-year-olds from the audience almost seventy-two hours ago.
The day after the show, my old friend Jean-Marc, Montreal lifer and connoisseur of the live music performance, leaned over his plate of stylized food at the Manx and asked me what other shows I’d seen lately. I stalled by dabbing a napkin to my lips and counting the number of ironic hipster mustaches lingering in the “To Be Seated” line. I could not remember a single other specific show I had ever seen in my life. Bruce pushed the “reset” button on my memory. Every other musical performance was a vague shadow, like a lump in the dark. I remembered a snowy drive to the Black Sheep Inn for a show last winter. And I could remember that sudden awareness of all my body’s joints and mechanics after standing all night on the concrete floor in Montreal’s Metropolis. But I could not remember specifics.
So, to restore the synapses in my brain that were temporarily disabled when Bruce pointed at all 20,000 of us and said “I love every one of you,” I will return to ground zero of my concert-going experience, when I coveted the cool factor of a girl named Missy and a boozy, washed-up cover band with a name too explicit to repeat.
Missy, me, and Missy’s roommate Leila: Thursday night pre-drinking on B-Lower, circa 2001
This band, whose name we shall shorten to Ribbed, struck me at the time as the epitome of cool. I was fresh from the farm. This sounds like an exaggeration, but it was just about true. My university residence nearly eclipsed the entire population of my hometown. I was assigned a floor, a roommate, and an enormous loan from the government. The floor was B-Lower and the roommate was another Megan worthy of a blog post all her own. This one is not about “the other” Megan. It is about Missy, and about Ribbed, and about how and why I came to be huddled in a short skirt outside a dive-y bar for two hours every Thursday.
Missy with a fellow Blower
Ribbed played once a week at a bar called GTs, short for Good Times. In 2001-2002, it was very important to me that I spend every single Thursday night at GTs. Few things mattered more. I usually went with Missy, who lived four doors West of my own room on B-Lower. It did not matter that we had to wait upwards of an hour in the freezing winter night just so GTs could establish the cache of an outdoor line-up. It did not matter that I was plunging deeply into my student debt in order to fund a steady cascade of draft beer. All that mattered were Thursday nights at GTs.
Ribbed played Foo Fighters and Soundgarden covers in the low-ceilinged basement while we all got steadily drunk and happy. I stayed as close to Missy as I could, because she was as close to cool as I could get. She was adorably cute and popular, and often genuinely mistaken for Avril Levigne at the height of Avril’s fame, which we exploited to our advantage as often as we could. Boys always wanted to buy her drinks, and Ribbed always wanted to play her songs. I tagged along because some of that attention inevitably spilled over onto me, which was validating and addictive. Even when the new ride of university had nearly flattened me, I still went to GTs with Missy and shmoozed the hell out of that basement. Years later I would discover the word “networking” and all of the business acumen it implied, but at the time I only knew shmoozing: talking with anyone who happened to be an elbow’s width away at the bar, and then fist-pumping that friendly new stranger when Ribbed launched into a new song whose lyrics were projected on the cranial wall of every single person in that the bar. For hours at a time, we truly were as one.
Ribbed at GTs
Ribbed could play any 90s-era song you hurled at them (cool). They wanted to hang out with Missy and, by extension, with me (cool). They let us climb into the truck-bed of their pickup and ride that way through the nighttime city (cool and also retrospectively terrifying). And they played at a downtown bar where the whole university population wanted to hang out, or so I thought.
I realize now that the GTs was a narrow, smelly, firetrap basement with a floor so sticky from spilled beer that you could get drunk through the soles of your shoes. It was a step up from the Ridout, where people got stabbed in the eyeballs with pool cues and where anyone with breasts had to dance on a loudspeaker as price of admission, but it was also a long, undignified fall from the polo-shirt Top 40 hangouts closer to the university. All that mattered, though, was that it was ours. GTs, Ribbed, the sticky floor, the fist-pumps, the shredded morning-after vocal chords: it all belonged to Missy and I, and it was the first community that I belonged to after leaving home.
I turned 19 at GTs on a Ribbed night, with Missy and everyone else from Blower handing me cupfuls of beer and neon-blue shots of Something Gross. Almost exactly ten years later, three weeks shy of 29, I took Derek to see an epic, very non-basement show and, indirectly, revisit some ancient memories of slumming it in my undergrad years. I had no idea, in that dim basement full of shouting and cheering, where I would end up ten years hence. So here I am, with a much more refined taste in musical entertainment, though with the same penchant for bucking financial advice and dropping twenties on beer pitchers in sticky bars.
Like two people who were not meant to converge in the first place, Missy and I drifted serenely off in different directions after first year, though a single, perilous Facebook thread keeps us connected. I have no idea about Ribbed. Google tells me that Ribbed is still performing in London, which is impressive in a very strange way. I can hardly believe that the Megan who frequented GTs so faithfully has any relation to today’s Megan, though she does, and I do.
I almost forgot my running shoes. That would be me, wouldn’t it? The blogger who does not blog, and the runner who does not remember to bring her running shoes to the one and only race she will do this entire season. We were catching an afternoon Greyhound bus to Montreal. The race was scheduled for the next morning, up and down St. Joseph Boulevard with a loop under the armpit of the Olympic stadium. I had my book bag pinned under my arm. Leaving the house without my book bag would be like forgetting to take my little fingers, or my eyebrows. It was just a given.
But I do not have a “running bag” or the sensibility that having one might imply. All I have is the memory of the items that I grope for in the early mornings while trying to keep my eyes closed for the longest possible amount of time: sporty hat, sporty bra, sporty shirt with extra-sporty reflector stripe. It was at that point in my packing process that the cat came along and head-bumped me. A head-bumping cat cannot be ignored. A head-bumping cat is saying, “nothing in the world could possibly be more compelling than my teeny velvet ears.” So I stopped after that. I stopped with everything except running shoes.
Fortunately, divinity intervened. God (or whoever) put those running shoes in front of the door, where I tripped over them, scattering them in front of me. I thought, “Good one, God (or whoever).” I picked up the running shoes. I stuffed them in the book bag. And thus I was prevented from leveraging the last hope I had for finding a way out of this race.
D and I spent the night before the race with my fantastically great friends Val and Brendan, who live in a Montreal condo that is worthy of their greatness. They are the sort of friends who look for any old excuse to hug you, which is exactly the type of friend that I love. They are also the sort of friends who are enterprising and wise with their leisure time, so visiting them invariably tops up my reserves of self-reliance and imagination: they brew their own beer, knit their own scarves, create their own stunning wall art by framing impossibly ambitious jigsaw puzzles, and they use what time is left over to provide nourishing, delicious sorts of homemade food for us, the sort of food that fitness advice columnists decree as a serious runner’s best arsenal. As though this weren’t enough, they also provide a home to three gorgeous, head-bumping cats. All of our conversation that night was interrupted and punctuated and enhanced by lavish displays of affection from humans to cats and back again. It was a great night. The kind of night that makes a visit to Montreal feel entirely complete. So did I really need to run a race the next morning? Wasn’t simply seeing these two friends reward enough for the Greyhound ride? I put this question to Derek. He responded by pointedly setting the alarm for 6 a.m. the next morning.
The 10k race was scheduled to begin at 8:40am. We planned to meet Val’s sister Mel and her friend Alana, who would be running the event with us, at 7:30am outside the Laurier metro. We were panicked about traffic and parking, but it was one of those mornings that rolls out at your feet like a velvet carpet: except for a small, intense knot of activity around the race site, the city was serene and quiet, and we found a parking spot with almost suspicious ease. We waited outside the appointed metro station, hopping from foot to foot to stay warm, eyeing the other runners. Once united, we continued with our hopping and our eyeing, this time while standing in a long line trailing around a row of pungent, stoic outhouses in Laurier Park.
These outhouses, receptors of the waste of hundreds and hundreds of runners, were our last bid for procrastination; once through with them, there was nothing more between me and this race. After all of that waiting around, the final few minutes were a frenzy of activity: tearing off all the outer layers of clothes, mashing earbuds into place, last goodbye kisses and words of farewell from Brendan and Derek, our cheering squad, who waved to our retreating backs as though we were all about to go diving off a cliff, never to be seen again. And it felt as though, quite possibly, that’s just what we were doing.
The Corral
Here is where the intensity really builds. You’re assigned a starting corral based on your expected finish time. Val’s friend Alana is right in the starting blocks, coiled to spring the moment they fire the starter pistol. The rest of us have less glamorous prospects. I am in the 60-minute-to-finish corral, which is a mixed bag: lots of first-timers, lots of moms with their kids’ names painted on their fabric shirts, lots of basketball bellies mingling with the lean and muscular. I pretended to stretch my hamstrings. Because this is Montreal, everything is done sensibly: they let each corral get a head start, so that people aren’t crushing and tripping over each other for the first kilometer. By the time I’m actually running across the start line I’m already five minutes behind the starter pistol, but a small computer chip on the back of my race bib will faithfully (and cruelly) count the seconds between my foot crossing the start and my foot crossing the finish. For now, this is okay: I am one full minute into the race and I feel like a God. I am Pheidippides himself, never tiring, never waning. I breeze past the first water station at Kilometer One with scorn. I’ve got this race in the bag. I should’ve registered for the 50-minute start corral. My footfalls are synced with the beat of my music, which is programmed to 155 BPM, a good clip that feels effortless. I think of Derek and Brendan at the finish line, stunned when they see me rounding the last bend a full ten minutes before I’m expected.
Kilometer Five
Okay. That earlier Megan, the imaginary Pheidippidesian one, might still be flying somewhere up ahead, but I am stuck with the real thing: panting, aching, fumbling to lower the music’s BPM to somewhere within the realm of possibility. This is a “Rock ‘N Roll” race, which means runners are tormented every few kilometers by the sight of a rock band jamming at the side of the road, shouting things like “Keep going!” and “Don’t give up!” and other pitiless missives as we straggle past. I am entertained for a kilometer or so by the fantasy of smashing their flea-market guitars against the pavement. I am painfully aware of the computer chip attached to my race bib. It seems not to be counting the seconds so much as pinching them into my flesh. I think, as I always do at about this time, what a ridiculous idea this was. I think of everything else that might provide the sense of accomplishment and worthiness that I am after, without causing my lungs to explode: writing a blog, for example. While wrapped in a warm blanket. While breathing regularly. While stationary. While sipping gallons of cool, clear water.
I pass the water station at Kilometer 5.8 and, out of pure vanity, try to grab a Gatorade cup without breaking stride. The results are soggy and embarrassing. I slow down. Who am I kidding? I try to keep myself from gulping gallons of the stuff, which I know will only hit me like a sucker punch a few kilometers on. I sip reasonably. I do that runner’s thing of crushing the paper cup in my hand and tossing it savagely to the ground. The little thrill of permissible delinquency is enough to power me up again, and at Kilometer Six I’m back to 155 BPM, already imagining the plate of poutine that I have promised myself. I try not to think of the kilometers ahead. But, as these things go, trying not to think of them only makes them rear up like headless beasts.
This is one of those cruel looping courses where you are forced to retrace your steps in the race’s second half. I pass the place where I had been forty minutes earlier. I scoff at how full of light and naivety I was back then. Now I am a hardened veteran of the race. I grit my teeth. I am keeping my pace, dammit. Derek says there is no point in slowing down to appease a tired body, because it’s not as though you’re about to die. You’re just going to feel uncomfortable for a while, and then you’re going to cross the finish line and then you’re going to rest and be fine. But Derek is wrong. This is going to kill me! But I labour on: I have not been getting out of bed at 5:30 a.m. for the last two months for nothing. A shouting match wages in my mind between “FOR THE LOVE OF GOD STOP RUNNING HOLY SHIT” and “KEEP GOING KEEP GOING KEEP GOING.” Somehow, I keep going.
Kilometer Eight
For the last ten minutes I’ve been trailing a girl my age with a slogan on the back of her t-shirts that says “…Try to Keep Up.” This annoys me enough to leverage a burst of speed as we both pass the final water station. I allow myself a triumphant glance back at her. The front of her shirt says “I know I run like a girl…”. I feel a stirring of pride for our entire female species. I want to hug her. My emotions have clearly gone as haywire as my body.
Up ahead, I see runners pouring around the turn onto Brébeuf, which is truly the last leg of the race. I think of all those thousands and thousands of pairs of feet pounding over the pavement. I run like a girl who is running like hell. An eight-year-old boy maneuvers coolly past me. I shoot venom at him. I think of poutine. I run some more. I swear that the kilometers are getting longer and longer. Someone has not measured this course properly. Who investigates this kind of thing? I feel angry about a lack of accountability in race management. I round the final bend, and Parc Lafontaine appears. No oasis in the desert has ever been as welcome a sight as this park. When I lived in Montreal, this park was my neighbour. I have an affinity with this park. And now it throws its arms open to me. I can see the white banner that marks the finish line in the distance. I begin to relax. This is the best part, after all: the final burst of speed, the end in sight, the ecstatic, staggering deceleration after crossing the finish. They are handing out bananas and medals. I take one of each. I slip through the barriers meant to shepherd runners through the south side end of the park. I don’t go find Brendan and Derek yet; I just sort of fall to the ground like a pile of damp laundry. I think, in rapid sequence: I will never do this again. But of course I will! But I don’t want to. But I will! And then I think of all the pizza and poutine and wine that’s in my very near future, and as I begin to breathe normally again I feel like life has suddenly taken an upswing and everything everywhere is going to be okay.
In the end, it turns out I shaved a good handful of minutes off of my next-best race time. Alana, our friend in the starter blocks, finished in a blur and placed fourth in her age category with almost 700 contenders at her back. Val and her sister ran a strong race themselves, better than any they’ve done before. We were high as hippies when we all found each other at our appointed meeting spot, checking our chip times on Derek’s iPhone and shouting hoarsely to the marathon runners, who were now pouring into the park towards the finish line. I had already forgotten how annoying it is when people who are comfortably seated on the sidelines shout “Keep Going!” in your face as as you labour past, and I join in the din of cheerleading.
A few hours later, when we finally collapse into chairs under the heat lamps of the La Banquise patio, looking down into the glory of a plate full of fries and cheese and gravy, I feel that after-party mix of pride and emptiness: pride to have done this big , difficult thing, and emptiness because all the anticipation and preparation and nervous strategizing is now finished for another season. I consider the possibility of running through the winter; people do, after all. But I know almost right away that this is a ridiculous thought. I do not have the strength of will or the determination or whatever it takes to carry on running around like a maniac once the snow and cold arrive. I will go back into books and fireplaces and lazy mornings in bed until next spring. And that is 100% okay with me.
Sunrise at St. Peter’s Abbey, Saskatchewan
I went to a week-long writing workshop in Toronto while still an undergrad student. Unlike the retreat that I just finished attending in Saskatchewan, the one in Toronto was facilitated. Meaning: I experienced out-of-body joy at regular intervals because the CanLit elite, all giving workshops that week, had just sat down two tables from me and OMG DID ONE OF THEM JUST GLANCE IN MY DIRECTION. It’s hard for a girl who finds running her hands along a well-stocked bookshelf as erotic as running her hands along a well-maintained body to be around that kind of literary status for any length of time.
Here’s what happened, though: at some point early that week I was bitten in the face by a mutant Lake Ontario insect and my left eye went into an over-dramatic frenzy, swelling shut and looking like Margaret Atwood had just wound up and punched me one. People were too polite to comment, including my mentor Wayson Choy, who looked at me without a blink of his own two fully functional baby blues. But I felt as self-conscious as hell and one morning, in the pre-Smartphone era, I memorized a neighbourhood map on the wall of the campus cafeteria and then set out in search of a medical clinic. It just so happened that the one I found was staffed by a former high school acquaintance of my sister, but the fun and games more or less ended there. A scalpel was brandished, as well as enough gauze to stem the flow of the the Niagara River. Something yellow and custard-like was drawn forth from my brow. A new vocabulary tumbled from my mouth – vocabulary which, after a week of marinating in creative writing workshops, had become all the more inventive. I left the clinic looking like a pirate and weaving around the sidewalk like one, too. But the next day I could see again.
Cut to the week I just spent at a writing retreat of a very different sort, this time in rural Saskatchewan with nary a medical clinic for miles. Fortunately I did not need one. What I needed, with absolute desperation, was an esthetician. Here’s where I must clarify: I care about as much about make-up and the general business of beauty salons as my cat cares about the state of his ballooning underbelly. But I recently got my hair all lopped off, and such events can make even the most self-righteously “natural” woman feel a little twinge of obligation in the mug department. I felt newly exposed without my long hair to toss distractingly around. I was not suddenly crippled by Smashbox – I even found the inner integrity to scoff at a teen mag article wherein the writer had faced her editor’s challenge of going A WHOLE WEEK WITHOUT MAKE-UP OH MY GOSH and somehow, against herculean odds, managed to survive on her wits alone. Make-up? I don’t go near the stuff. But cut off my hair and I suddenly become fourteen years old, contorting my face in the bathroom mirror in order to discover all of its flaws.
And here’s what I discovered: my eyebrows.
I did not go near my eyebrows with any sort of grooming tool – tweezers, hot wax appliqué – until someone forced me into it. And that someone was Anne-Cécile Dewavrin, the glamorous older sister of my exchange partner in France. She took pity on me and organized an intervention with her equally glamorous friend, Camille. In a bedroom strewn with study notes (because French students never seem more than five minutes away from their next exam), she had me lie on my back and place my ungroomed cranium in her lap. Under the glare of a 100-watt French lightbulb, she and Camille plucked away. On that night, the bedragled, socially awkward butterfly emerged at last from her cocoon.
For the last twelve years, I have tried to achieve the standard towards which Anne-Cé and Camille pointed me. I was like a blindfolded six-year-old at a party who has just been shoved in the general direction of the donkey drawing, tail clenched in my hand, dizzy from a dozen wrong turns. I finally had eyebrows that did not inspire visions of a Sesame Street character. I was on the right path. Today, though, I have followed that path too fervently. I have not yielded to warnings. I have risked everything. I have been blinkered and blind. Ladies and gentleman, I have OVER PLUCKED.
I went to a spa just before leaving for Saskatchewan and begged them to save me from my own zealotry. The esthetician traced a DO NOT CROSS line under each brow with the razor’s edge of her fingernail. Half-heartedly, she invited me to visit the make-up counter. Half-heartedly, I declined. I left for Saskatchewan. I did not cross the DO NOT CROSS line. I felt confident from my feet right up to my eye-line. Everything above that was up for grabs. Because here is the thing: when you chop all your long hair off, people are shocked. They grope for the first thing they can think of. For most decent people, this thing is a complement. And so you find yourself showered in complements for the first few days after your plunge, and that becomes the norm. By the end of those few days, you have come to expect super-ego-inflation to kick off every encounter you have with people. But, of course, it peters off. And then you start to think. You suspect things. You contort your face in the mirror. You go see an esthetician for the first time in your life (you even look up how to spell the word). And she traces a line on your face and says, DO NOT CROSS. You must obey her, but the toll this takes on your already fragile ego – built so high, then neglected so roundly – hobbles you.
So. At one time, I was dealing with a swollen eye at a writing workshop. When I dared take on a similar writing experience, I was dealing with over-plucked brows that were slowly reasserting themselves in coarse patches, like razored-down hedgehog quills. I was sure that this was all people were seeing. Which, of course, was ludicrous. These were soulful, engaging writers. These were MY PEOPLE. What did they care for eyebrows? Not a lot. But I cared. And when I finally got back to Ontario, and back to the spa that had given me such grueling homework, I could not abide just any old esthetician. I needed Louise. I didn’t even know this at the time, but that’s the universe for you, eh? It waits until the very last minute, and then it shrugs and says, “Whatever. Here you go, pipsqueak.” Louise immediately told me I had radiant skin. She insisted that my hair colour could not possibly be natural. Complemented my five-year-old summer dress that I’d pulled, wrinkled and uncertain-smelling, from the closet just twenty minutes before. She made up for a drought of complements that had left me parched and gasping for the better part of two weeks. And she gave me an A+ on my eyebrow homework.
Now I have a new challenge: the underbelly of my brows seems to have been rescued, but I was scolded once more for overdoing it on the in-between section. I have to add about a centimeter to either side of my nose. Which is my favourite place to pluck. It’s good therapy, to pinch and yank that stubble one devilish thread at a time. But! No more! I am cultivating that little arena of over-pluckage, bringing it back to life, and I’m damning the self-consciousness that flares every time I lean close to the mirror. Because being self-conscious about my face does not feel like ME. Me, who doesn’t wear make-up, who loves her freckles, who flosses, who laughs at articles in beauty magazines. I am not meant to waste a singly moment on worrying about such superficial details at eyebrows.
All of this to say: I had an amazing time in Saskatchewan. I got so much written. And I gave and received so much love with the seven incredible writers who were there with me, people I hadn’t known until the day I walked into the abbey, and who I will never forget. Not a single person said a thing about my eyebrows.
“There is no moment of delight in any pilgrimage like the beginning of it.” – Charles Dudley Warner
Tomorrow, I board a train for Saskatoon. Thirty-four hours of being rocked in the satiny womb of a Via cabin car while endless miles of Group of Seven scenery whip past. And thirty-four hours of eating what VIA calls “flavours in motion,” which sounds like seasickness on a carnival ride but is actually code for “gourmet menu while you gaze at the prairies.” Somehow, I managed to book a cabin on the same train as my Aunt Susan and Uncle Jim. They may suspect me of deliberate interference on their romantic getaway (after all, I am more or less responsible for breaking their daughter’s arm when we were eight – the first of many transgressions), but the booking was made in innocence, and now I have rosy daydreams of seeding a healthy bill in the bar car while the three of us travel old memories together. I’ve done something similar with my Uncle Jim before, when his ecclesiastical duties – he is the world’s chillest Archdeacon, right down to playing bass in a jazz band – brought him to Montreal while I still lived there. Not used to being alone together without the dilution of a dozen other family members around the table, we defaulted to a bring-your-own-wine restaurant and proceeded to have a roaring good night on the shoulders of two bottomless glasses. Afterwards, we wedged ourselves into the crowd that had gathered for the Leonard Cohen open-air tribute concert at Place des Arts and sweated off our dinner calories in the hot Quebecois night.
This week, though, we will be on a train, and I will be sweating not from poutine-tainted breezes but from the nervousness already bouncing around in my stomach. I am taking the train to Saskatoon because the Saskatchewan Writers’ Guild has given me – and eight other writers – a bedroom in a country monastery where we are meant to sit in solitude and write the Next Great Canadian Thing(s). I have never done anything like this before. The closest I’ve ever come to that level of sustained focus are the weekends I have occasionally spent in the stacks of university libraries, eating contraband chocolate croissants while trying to learn Shakespearean sonnets by rote for the next week’s quiz. I’ve done two years of writing workshops in graduate school, and spent a week in residence at the Humber College Summer Writing Program, and have lingered in the corner of countless literary festivals, spending all day working up the courage to mutter a few words of bleeding-heart praise to Miriam Toews or Alistair MacLeod. But I have never spent an entire week alone, with no household chores or grocery lists or workplace deadlines or other adult responsibilities to deter me from the act of writing. The deal is that the monks provide expansive, delicious meals, a room of one’s own, and the serenity of a tree-lined estate, and the writer finds herself out of excuses. It’s enough to make me nauseous with anxiety. What if I go looney? What if the only decent thing I write all week is a note to the monks to restock their wine cabinet?
Five oft-spoken words must sustain me: Failure is not an option. There are three main reasons for this. People will think these are the wrong reasons. I think they are exactly right.
1. My colleagues. I am in the sort of progressive workplace where the bosses want to know what your personal and professional goals are so they can help you achieve them. This is fantastic for all the obvious reasons. It is also frightening because it requires you to have goals in the first place. And “being on the shelf next to Timothy Findley” is wonderful, but it does not help negotiate roles and responsibilities. Right now, I know that want to write. Really write. Which, in the context of my employment, means screenplays. It means getting into the big kids’ sandbox and showing what I can do. My colleagues have taken an enormous leap of faith. They have given me their blessing to absent myself from the office for longer than is reasonable in order to tackle this nebulous thing called “writing,” which is not always easy to convert into quantifiable revenue on the accounting ledger. I want to show them. I will state that out loud: I want to make them proud. They are my parents and my closest friends and my teachers and my skeptics all at the same time, and they will be with me at every step of this journey I’m about to take, whether they know it or not.
2. My more ( or “differently”) successful friends. I’m just going to drag this out into the open: I am envious of Laura Boudreau. Actually, no dragging is required, because to anyone who knows us, that’s the logical conclusion. We lived together throughout most of our undergrads. We were both MIT/English majors. We both applied to Concordia and U of T for Creative Writing. We both got admission to each school. She went to U of T. I went to Concordia. She slaved over a collection of short stories which now has favorable reviews everywhere. And me? What did I do? Published a chapbook. Went to France. Got envious. This is, of course, the two-dimensional version. When I say that Laura slaved, I mean she SLAVED. She understood in a way that I am only beginning to realize that writing is not an entitlement. That the compliments of friends and family will not get your manuscript read by the right person at the right publishing house. That to be a writer, you also have to be a businessperson. That you have to have the next letter stamped and addressed so that when the rejection notice inevitably comes, you are already on your way to the mailbox to post the next query letter. And that your writing has to be both specific to your own voice and universally available (if you want to know what I mean, pick up a copy of Suitable Precautions and read “Strange Pilgrims” or “Problem in the Hamburger Room”). You can’t be lazy. You can’t say, “That will probably do the trick,” and then go make yourself a cup of tea. Scariest of all: you can’t just show those who you know will praise you. You have to show the one person who will tear it to shreds. Who will demand better of you. Who will buy you a drink and then explain to you, with surgical precision, all the ways in which your story fails as a story. That is the person who will make you better. And, incidentally, I have found that person. Want to know who it is? Laura Boudreau.
3. Myself. This is starting to sound like a Mitch Albom story, but I had to give this point a glancing reference. The first book I ever wrote was called Tom. It was about an orphaned bird named …Tom. I wrote it using Word Perfect on our family’s first DOS computer. I knew all the command keys better than I knew my own postal code (SHIFT + F10 was Save Document, which I learned the hard way was essential to basic survival). My dad asked me every day if I would be finished soon so he could read it. But I figured I would never be finished. I was an intoxicated nine-year-old. I wanted to be doing this forever. Tom was eventually finished, of course, and the illustrated edition still lives in a Rubbermaid bin in my grandma’s basement. I owe something to that nine-year-old. Something more than what I have now. This Saskatoon retreat is the beginning of repaying that debt. Of coming out of the red and into the green. Not money: something else. I have so much to write about. I just need time. And now I have found it. It is waiting for me in Saskatchewan.
I am an inflationist. Inflation stews in my bone marrow. Not the economic kind, though. Could I care less about economic inflation? No, I could not.
What I trade in is emotional inflation. Everything is the most important event ever, all the time. And the stakes keep getting higher as I get older. This even works retroactively. Listening to all the famous convocation speeches at this time of year makes me inflate the emotional significance of graduating from university to a heart-swelling degree, even though crossing the stage after my own undergrad didn’t really change much for me at the time: I moved from a shared house to a single-bedroom apartment, but I kept the same job on the university campus, kept seeing the same people, and kept drinking the same beer on the same patios all summer long. Still, when the audience exploded into applause at the end of the Michael Enright commencement broadcast, I had to stop what I was doing (cleaning the bathroom), blindly grope for a kleenex, and fist-pump the air in communion with the radio sounds. That is inflation. And, quite often, it feels glorious and appropriately human.
Other times it is crushing. Like when I reach the end of something – a weekend, a conversation, even just a bowl of cereal – and believe, against all rationality, that it is not just the end: it is THE END. That weekend/conversation/bowl of cereal will NEVER HAPPEN AGAIN. Not the way it just had. Not exactly. It is irrevocably OVER. And don’t tell me that it will always live on in my heart, because I’ve heard that before, and turns to be quite flimsy comfort in a moment of need. A trivial but important example: last night I had one of the best nights of the month, just hanging out on a patio with a plate of nachos and three wonderful people, and this morning I woke under the crushing weight that that evening is now over forever. For twenty-eight years, it was in my future. Now, all of a sudden, it is in my past. See? Inflation.
I got thinking about this on Saturday morning. I had left my home in Ottawa to spend a night in Montreal, city of my graduate school, where many of my life’s VIPs still live and where buckets of wine and conversation and hugs and nostalgia are poured over my head at regular intervals. When I’m in Montreal with those guys, we always do the same thing: pile into VB’s apartment and hang out, old-school. Reminisce. Catch up. Spill a drink. Play Taboo. Tear some muscles from laughing so hard. It’s happened so often since I left Montreal that I have trained myself not to fall into that pattern of inflation as much. Each night in VB’s apartment eventually ends, but I always know there will another one, and I can trust that it will be equally good, equally warm, equally dosed in friendship. It staves off inflation to a certain degree.
Except! Maybe not this time. VB is leaving her apartment soon to move in with her lovely boyfriend. Other members of the gang are buying condos, moving around, rearranging their lives. I have no doubt we will all remain close. We have endured more than this together without losing ground. I will still board Greyhound buses to Montreal. They will still want to eat yesterday’s pizza for breakfast while we all watch 90s-era TV drama and medicate our hangovers. None of that will change. But: it also will change. We’ll all be older and more established and worried about more adult things, and we won’t be in Verdun anymore, and I will need someone to draw me a map to find VB’s new place because I won’t have the route scorched into my brain anymore. It won’t be what it was. It will be something new. And that barely even needs inflation, because it is already worrisome enough.
It was that level of thinking that drove me, when I woke in Montreal on Saturday morning, after not-necessarily-but-quite-possibly our last night of hanging out in VB’s apartment, to take the metro all the way out to my old stop and wander, like a little lost duckling, around my former ‘hood. I wanted to marinate in nostalgia. To get down on my knees outside of my old apartment building and commune with myself from four years ago. Four years is not so long. But it is also very, very long. And with emotional inflation involved, it’s centuries ago, barely reachable, certainly never reproduce-able. I walked around to the back of my building and looked at my old bedroom window, sealed up with my old set of blinds, and at my old stoop.
I thought about when my old stoop was full of my people.
And the inflation was doing its thing to me, except this time, it worked differently. I wasn’t crippled, like I often am, by ten-tonne nostalgia. Instead, I just felt intensely homesick. For that stoop and those friends, yes. But also: for my new stoop, and my new life in Ottawa, and the massive trees that that make me feel calm and cared for when I round the corner onto my street, and for DN, and the cat, and my job, and my home, and the sunlight that moves like the hand of a clock through these rooms. I was inflating how much I love it here. There are, of course, days when I need an escape. But on that Saturday, looking up at the deserted stoop and the apartment where such a significant two years of my life had been lived, I wanted only one thing. So I hustled to the Greyhound station and took the next bus home.
I will always love going to Montreal. I will always love coming home again. I am okay with that balance. I am okay with how inflation works on me, sometimes.
Limited Supervision 
What’s that you say?