25 Years Is a Lifetime

Twenty five years is a lifetime. Years enough to grow up, or think that you have become an adult, finish school, get married, start a family and settle into the welcomed routines and expectations that we embrace as we watch our life unfold. When I try to remember who I was in 1985, the summer I graduated from high school, I see who most of us were at eighteen, someone with more to learn than I was ready to admit. I doubt that I could have considered what life would hold and more importantly what it would feel like. Love, work, failure, laughter, luck, satisfaction and grief filled up the next twenty five years of my life. What did I know when I was eighteen? Now it is seldom, really only once a year, on June 23rd that I ever think back on that last summer, how much time has past and how far I have come.

It was the summer that I graduated from high school and moved from Sudbury to Toronto. From a place that I had spent most of my life to the shining centre of the universe, a place that I would start university and start my life. So obsessed with moving forward and moving on, I skipped my high school graduation. I gave up the chance to say goodbye to the people of that place and time in my life.

Had I gone to graduation, I would have seen Brinda one last time. I wish that I remembered more about Brinda. I wish that we had been friends. I remember her shining black hair and her perfect pronunciation in French class and her grace, if it is possible for someone to be graceful at seventeen and Brinda was. She was wickedly smart and funny and kind, something that I remember as astoundingly rare in the awful awkwardness and solitude of my high school experience. I remember her younger sister Arte was always laughing, walking down the hallway, past the lockers, with her head thrown back, just laughing.

I remember the news on television and hearing about Air India on the radio and then a call from one of my friends but even before the phone call, knowing that Brinda, Arte and her father had been on that same plane. There were no doubts that they were gone. I don’t think that I cried but I do remember trying to figure out why it should be that plane, on that night, going to India, a place so far from Northern Ontario that was a world away. When you are eighteen years old you believe that everything must have a reason.

I am forty three years old and every year, on June 23rd, I think of how Brinda would be and should be my age. She should have been a doctor or an artist or a grandmother. I should be able to see her name on Facebook and ask her if she remembers how much we despised our grey polyester Marymount school uniforms.

I didn’t keep in touch with any of the girls who graduated from Marymount College with me in 1985. They have moved from Sudbury and stayed in Sudbury. They have married, divorced, given birth, buried parents, held public office, and watched their children make them proud. I doubt that any of them have ever forgotten Brinda Pada.

The Stand In Birthday Girl

I got a birthday call last week despite the fact that my birthday isn't until August. It wasn't unexpected though and I knew that it was Daria as soon as I heard the phone ring. I was half on my way to bed but I picked up the phone because Daria is a special lady and her annual call means a great deal to me and I know that it means just as much to her. Daria was my mother's best and longest friendship. They met shortly after WWII as displaced youngsters in the strangeness and cold of Northern Ontario. My mother came from England and Daria from the Ukraine, they probably felt equally lost and foreign and maybe for that reason became best of friends. Years later my mother said that Daria looked like a little Russian doll with her long golden braids and her pink cheeks. Daria said that she found a protector in my mother who would stand up to teachers with a heavy rod and classmates who were ready to poke fun at her cabbage sandwiches.

Daria and my mom remained good friends. They moved away from each other. Marriage, children, travel and life in general separated them over the next fifty years but years ago, when I took mom out for dinner to celebrate her fifty fifth birthday Daria surprised her by meeting us at the restaurant. I remember that night very well. I remember drinking cognac with them, back at my apartment and listening to them talk about Billie Holiday and Chet Baker and Mary Quant and watching them evaporate all the years spent apart. It was lovely to watch. I don't think that I fully appreciated the kind of friendship that did not require maintenance to survive and prosper.

When my mother died, Daria was, apart from relatives, the only person I called.

So every year on my mother's birthday I know that I will get a call from Daria and her voice makes me feel that we are, for a short time, joined by the real birthday girl.

A Cold Place Called Home

Sudbury is a cold, cold place. And if you think you have some knowledge of cold then visit Sudbury in January and live the experience: the pain of frozen cilia stabbing your nostrils until you wince in astonished distress. I spent a few days in Northern Ontario last week -- for work -- not pleasure. I grew up in Sudbury but I'm not a Northerner. It's one of those funny places that chooses to reserve and bestow the distinction of citizenship only upon those born there and I wasn't. My first memories in life are of miles of blindingly blue snow, mixed with sunshine and squinting faces. Snow, sunshine, cold, lots of coats and sweaters, mittens and the excessive swaddling blankets of an eskimo baby or a saviour. I grew up in Sudbury but I can't say that it is home. I wasn't born there and about 30 seconds after graduating from high school I gleefully succumbed to the magnetic pull of the big city south, everything was south -- Toronto.
More than half of my life has been spent away from the North. Still over the past twenty years, on no less than three occasions, I have returned to live in Sudbury. Jobs, lack of jobs, family, friends, shelter have all factored into decisions to return to a place that once was the only home I knew. I grew up I moved away. I moved back. I moved away. I moved back to my family's house. I remember being twelve years old and pressing my nose against the screen window in my Holly Hobbie bedroom, listening to Blondie and trying to be patient as I waited for my real life to begin. A real life that would, I imagined, include cool friends, a crazy cool apartment, the perfect clothes, the perfect everything, all to drop into my lap by the time I was old -- 25! Ofcourse the perfect life and the perfect home would be in Toronto and I would never, ever return to Sudbury. The land of ice and smokestacks would one day be a distant memory.
When you are twelve years old the world is black and white. Even when I was twenty five years old I saw the world through a pretty simplified two tone lens. I finally left Sudbury three years ago selling the little bungalow that my grandparents had built, the house I grew up in, the house that was left to me. Home isn't a cool apartment -- it's the place, wherever it is and in whatever city, with the people and animals and memories and hopes that make you feel lucky and loved. My family is gone. Friends from childhood have long since moved or I have just lost touch.I'm old enough now to see that Sudbury wasn't such a bad place to grow up, just very, very cold.

The Beautiful Hour

I lived through Blue Monday. I don't think that today has been categorized or colourized or pre-ordained to hold anything in particular. It's just a day. My day starts barnyard early with dogs yipping for breakfast at 5:30 am. At the core of the life of every commuter are the concepts of sleep and light. It's not so much the length of the train ride into work each day and back again that starts to gnaw at your sanity. It's sleep and light. The sleep issue is non-negotiable: bed by 10:00 pm or I am screwed. Yes, sleep is a necessity but light is something much more. For those who leave home in the cat hours of fumbling darkness and return as the last sliver of day is on it's way out, the degree of daylight that you are afforded is a measure of hope. It's a wonderful gift.
I've started to notice a ray of grey, on the homeward journey and it makes me very happy. As I am taking the train home, half restless with the desire to get to my husband and my animals and my house and my "life" and half snoozing with a constant physical need for just a little bit more sleep, I know that soon, in the next few weeks there will indeed be light. And it's not just the symbolic meaning or psychological effects of the light. There is a time, minutes stretching out and ushering in the end of day, when pink and pearl and blue and gold seem to join together if only for a very little while. I always think of it as the beautiful hour. I have moved alot in my life and lived in some plain jane ugly towns: Sudbury, Tacoma, Toronto...I don't think anyone has ever written a poem or won a photography contest while trying to capture the sun setting over Sudbury. Still, it doesn't seem to matter where you are in the world, there is a luxuriantly brief time of certain evenings when everything is beautiful. Maybe it's some chemical effect, ozone layers shifting, I would rather think about how it reminds me of summer and throwing my bike on the front lawn in happy exhaustion and being told that it's time to come in and go to bed.

January 18th is the Cruellest Day

I thought that it was just me but apparently January 18th is called Blue Monday and is said to be the most miserable day of the year. Seems some cheery soul with a mind for equations whipped up a methodology for determining what day of the year lined up the perfect storm of lousy elements including debt, weather, lack of sunshine, post holiday pudge, affliction of SAD, etc.
I kept checking the lunar calendar last week and wondering why I felt so down, depleted and outright depressed. On the bright side of misery ( shadenfruede:)) I was not alone. I noticed that just about everyone else around me was in a crotchety mood. Public transportation commuters -- crankier than usual, sideswiping backpacks and bitching away on the Blackberry. Toronto Transit Commission employees -- this doesn't count -- it's part of their job description: they have to be miserable or they don't get paid. Usually benign co-workers -- not a laugh in sight. Even the happiest of non-chemically induced happy optimists, man with the rose coloured glasses (my darlin' husband) was pretty down...though to be fair he did discover, by week's end, that most of his woe was due to an infected root canal. More than enough to get most folks knickers in a knot.
I guess it didn't help matters this weekend that we're still anxious over Hank, canine son # 2, who is working through seasonal aches and pains, arthritis, etc. He's no youngin' and I worry about him constantly. Then there is the debt retirement issue in our house (this is somewhat connected to the previous issue and I wonder if I should just keep our veterinarian on a retainer)....we are living plastic free and it's an adjustment to be shaken by the constant reality that you can only buy what you can afford. Really? I haven't lived without a credit card since high school and nowadays there's nowhere to go when you need an advance on your allowance. Finally, my mood was not greatly improved by the selection of movies that we rented this weekend: The Hurt Locker and Moon. Great movie and good movie respectively but not exactly The Sound of Music. I wonder if they could be re-written as musicals?
I'm going to do some research into the science of Blue Monday and find out if I really have to wait until June 23rd (supposedly the happiest day of the year) to smile.