Friday 31 January 1986

Happy Birthday! Mine. Nobody tried to spank me.¹ Fun at night.² Packed the car for gunshow. Next day.³

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1.Getting spanked on your birthday was the tradition where I grew up, in addition to having butter put on your nose.

2. I don’t remember any of this actually. Oddly enough what I didn’t write down was seeing the space shuttle explode on television, blossoming into a cloud. This I remember most clearly, and when I heard grown-ups talking of the Kennedy assassination and where they were, at this point I could relate. I was in class, Grade 5, I sat in the third row from the right when facing the teacher. She walked in to say that the Principal’s secretary had just told her there’d been an explosion with the space shuttle. It had already been in the news due to the Christina McCaulif/teacher angle. (Note to memoralists: nothing better than public disaster to seer a name in memory). I imagined something similar to what was depicted eleven years later in the 1997 movie Contact, and at this time eleven years earlier I was about ready to be emerge from the caul. At this midpoint between two stretches of 11 years, I sat at my school desk with a vision of an explosion’s aftermath in my mind, my imagination already well trained by Hollywood movies: it had occurred within the Shuttle, which remained docked at the tower. The crew slumped in their seats overcome by shockwave and toxic gas. But back to math lessons or French grammar or whatever it was. Obviously there was a school bus ride home at the usual time. I got home, the disaster was on the television, my parents had the excitability one would expect on such a day. I took my seat at the drafting table, which my parents had bought for some unknown reason and completely unrelated to my developing talent. I worked on my drawing story, with the scenes to my right. I even molded a space shuttle out of playdoh and squished it into nothingness as I re-enacted the destruction I was seeing over and over again. It seems to me that there was a little bit of disappointment that it wasn’t more spectacular, after all those Hollywood movies…just this big cloud…you couldn’t see anything really.

I worked on my drawing story. As I recall it was about God and the Devil and the creation of life on Earth. I think it must have been around this time that I’d created characters out of the letters of the Alphabet. Gave the letter ‘A’ eyes in the triangle part, some arms, the legs obvious. My teachers and classmates had found this clever and noteworthy. What I remember most clearly, and have associated with this day was working on the drawing and having a comet come flying low over the Earth, pieces of it falling off and springing into Life. During the 90s this became a popular theory, and I remembered this and thought, ‘maybe I was onto something there?’

The only reason I was inspired to use a comet in my story was because of all the hype Halley’s Comet was receiving, 1986 being the last year of it’s return. Later in the year I thought I saw it but I now realize I’d only seen a satellite.

I sat at the drafting table, thinking of my maternal grandparents who’d recently visited, and drew my pictures of Alpha God and Zeta Satan with the television replaying disaster and news-anchor commentary. In three days I would be 11.

3. My dad was a gunsmith and gunshows were part of his trade.