Blurry Memories

In my prairie hometown, on a Saturday night, there was often not much going on, and we teenagers sometimes crashed wedding parties. These festivities usually had open bars stocked with rye distilled by an enterprising uncle of the bride. There were several unwritten rules: you made a cash donation to cover the freight; you could drink and dance, but not partake of the meal; and you couldn’t throw up more often than the groom. Such a bacchanal was where I mastered the polka at high speed, and ingested sufficient moonshine to suffer the first and worst hangover of my life.

Inspired by Building Community Through Dance. Image by Moyocoyaani.

Positive Negative

Edvard Munch, The sick child 1896

Once, on his way to the plant, Papa brought gladioli, and always a honey on white, a summer sausage on rye, because she was on strike against the hospital food and its strange gravies. The biggest plus was him explaining about the negative numbers. Subtract two from two, that’s zero. Two from zero? Huh.
     She came out at 48 pounds. That made her . . . 12 below when she’d gone in. Yup, cold weather. She bragged that her 105 had been the highest-ever temperature in the entire house. Somehow Papa snapped right then: what did she think the oven dial numbers meant? Huh.

Image: Buergertum

+ Sizing

Everything’s getting downsized these days, even clothing.  People feel better about themselves in a smaller size, even though they’re deluding themselves.  It’s a mind game, and studies show that manufacturers accommodate it along socio-economic lines:  expensive brands are sized smaller than cheaper brands.  A woman may be a 0 or a 2, depending on what she paid for her jeans.
     I’ve been a 32 waist all my life (save for when I got back from Africa, where I shrank to 29; dysentery, like black, can be slimming). But now, I can’t help wonder if I too (just possibly) am deluded.

The Bull and the Hiker

Frontal, Broccoli, and Comfort: the first passwords Jacqui, Lisa, and I were assigned at Waterloo and – in those careless days – our loudly-proclaimed nicknames. In 1983, in labs overlooking the Red Room, stately housing for the University mainframes, we wrote late-night Pascal programs such as “The Bull and the Hiker.” If your hiker went lurching away from the bull at every turn, he’d never make sanctuary. If he strove resolutely for the tree, he’d be safe. And if, instead of code, you waved a bleary red nano-flag and typed “Fuck you” onto your screen, you’d receive a prim little programmed reprimand.

Image: Collage by K. Bischoping.

Vent

As the daughter who can't tell her left hand from her right, I’m unlikely to get how to construct a Molotov cocktail and throw it in the air intake vent of an oncoming tank. But my father’s instructions sounds so urgent that I pretend to understand to calm him down.  
     Years later, on a first date, this guy Paul turns out to be a soldier. I ask him about the air intake vent. He says he thinks a grill covers the vent nowadays. He thinks? What kind of soldier doesn't know? Paul flinches. Mostly, he says, he does community relations.

Image: Wikimedia Commons.

Veterans

They are old now, and dying off, men who only reluctantly acknowledge who they were in their youths: a teenaged stoker on a sea-tossed corvette, an air-sick tail gunner over Hamburg, a starving POW in Yokohama. These are men who stand when a woman enters the room, whose strongest curse is “damn” or “hell”. They offer details shyly, as if they could not possibly matter and you, a kid, could not possibly be interested. They never dwelt upon themselves, nor needed a reality TV show to demonstrate their worth. They did so early on, then got on with their lives.

Urban Park

In spring the air is redolent of thawing turds. At the playground, green glass glitters in the bright morning sun. Exotic labels cling to shards, attesting to the good taste of last night’s revellers. Food wrappers tumble on a soft breeze, and in the pond, lazy iridescent rainbows stream from discarded oil cans. “What’s that, Daddy?” asks the child, pointing in the water. Something floats, like a ring of calamari with a translucent tail. “Why, it’s an octopus with one tentacle,” he replies, hustling her away, on to other marvels. Beauty, mystery and romance are everywhere in an urban park.

Rectitude

Comes a time in a man’s life when he must face a digital exam. I don’t mean one involving bits and bytes. This one involves an old fashioned digit. And you don’t exactly face your examiner.
     The undignified circumstances call for brave manly humour.
     “I’ll just close my eyes and think of England,” I grumble before it begins.
     “While you’re looking,” I gasp, “I lost a set of keys...”
     “Next time,” I mutter when it’s done, “buy me a drink first.”
     “Look,” I say at the door, “this doesn’t mean we’re going steady.” At last, she allows a small smile.

Little Houses

What’s a mass-a-cre? Mama stops ironing and asks what am I reading. Little House on the Prairie. I have to know what it is before the Indians do it to the Ingalls. They don’t, but then there’s The Long Winter. Monique Lebel and I fight over who gets to be Blind Mary, floundering through the drifts, hanging on Laura’s arm. Monique’s other game has us all trample out the floor plan of a convent in the snow. She says she’s the bad nun, who wants to do it with the priest. Do what, I wonder, dreamily mitten-polishing my little cell.

Image: Wikimedia Commons.

Interrogation Bang Bang We Love You

My father grew up under Nazism, my mother got the best deals on the black market because she cried the saddest. Their notions of age-appropriate were hit-and-miss; their efforts to modulate our reading by placing the loftier stuff on temptingly-higher shelves, convoluted and desultory. I didn’t finish the upper-shelf Genet or de Sade. By 12, I’d torn through the lower-shelf Ian Flemings. Thunderball had a hole in the cover. James Bond got tractioned. Interrogation was torture. That Chitty Chitty Bang Bang sprang from the same pen amazed my mother. Regarding atmosphere, she was rightly interrobanged; plotwise, there was little difference.

Image: 1.bp.blogspot.com

ι5

Green letters, 10″ screen, a keyboard overlaid with Greek, written and compiled from right to left, and you say geeks don’t dream?
     A programming language named APL for (drumroll) A Programming Language. ι, that’s a vector; ι5, there’s (1, 2, 3, 4, 5).
     For a Waterloo mathie, steeped in jokes like “Why can’t Typhoid Mary bear Sir Edmund Hillary’s children?”,* ι5 was a subroutine’s worth of Cobol in two characters, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis’ QED, the universe in a grain of sand. Häagen-Dazs in a tuck shop full of stale fudgsicles.  

* Ya can’t cross a vector with a scalar.

Image: Wikimedia Commons.

Yeti, the secret scent

Floating, driving, missing a flight? Common enough. Finding extra rooms? Probably the result of melancholic, maternally-guided sojourns into the sawdust of the rooms above the basement in which she’d grown up. “This would’ve been the sewing room.” (Huh? You hated sewing, Mama.) A street with beautiful shops? Her mother dreamt it too, not truly an explanation. But unique to her were the white fur-covered people. They arrived in dreams after her first Coke (age eight), and Cokes thereafter. As if her cells were deeply programmed to cry “Yeti!” whenever neroli and nutmeg, coriander and lime let slip across their campfires.

Image: www.mcclean.org

Uffish

At my grade school, we laugh at youse guys. Youse Southern Ontarians. Youse take the Snow Train up to Chapleau to look at snow. We heard one a youse asked a farmer what AI meant. And we heard youse live on Yonge Street, a bad place where a shoeshine boy got killed. Shoeshine boy? At the plant where our dads work, they wear safety boots and no one shines them. Shoeshine boy, that's like out of A Christmas Carol we did in Grade 7 for the play. A girl was Tiny Tim and Scrooge was David Douville in a nightie.

Image: Collage by K. Bischoping

Christian

My sister nudged me and said Linda Halonen – the Pentecostal on the school bus – was right. We weren’t Christians.
     Sure, I knew I didn't believe in God soon as I got home from kindergarten the day of the dead bird and got my mother to explain what Laura meant about Jesus taking care of it in heaven. Recesses, I’d debate with Jeannette, the Jehovah's.  (Cool, she's brought me The Watchtower!)  Miss Neill, who'd come teach parables with a felt board, said I’d be going to hell. (She's so old.)
     Till Linda in high school, though, I never thought I wasn’t Christian.

Image: sitfu.com

Barbie

Gainesville, 1999. She came in a red jersey, not white like Brandi Chastaine's. Not so red anymore. We’d been kneeling an hour on the edge of the deck with a pan of water. 

     “Soccer Barbie, your hair is sooooo dirty!” Ella would pronounce.
     We’d give her another swish through the muddy pan, then grind her head into the dirt again. “Oh, Soccer Barbie!”

     Heyden, north of the Soo, 1970-something. I'd had to agitate for my first. She’d come at Christmas too, in a homemade silver-and-cream brocade tube dress. I’d lopped her hair off, markered on navy eyeshadow, and forgotten her.  

Image: www.tvweek.com