Memories

Tuesday 25 March 1986

The house is ours!¹ That’s a nice house I tell ya!

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1. I remember him with the rumpled look of the time which has been captured in some photos. The thick beard. The lumberjack clothes. He comes in the door and says its ours and my sister and I rush to hug him. We were excited about moving for all the usual reasons. The calendar tells me it was a Tuesday; we’d come home from school, and he’d been out negotiating. Worked out the deal, got the papers signed or whatever. Twenty years later he makes a show of the slowness of the corn syrup, saying it’s like molasses in January, although we have central heating now and he never eats molasses anyway. Time has shaved off the beard and etched gray into the air, and taken away a healthy plumpness which never turned obese and which I think I’ve inherited. He fills the coffee mug with the ice cream, a chore since the block is frozen hard. Then the patience of the thick corn syrup, which he’s always enjoyed with ice-cream.

Wednesday 05 March 1986

Well I tell you every test I’m getting this week is nearly all F’s.^1. Bad you Tim, bad boy.

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1. I remember this was because of the commotion surrounding my grandfather’s death, when homework and studying was the least of my concerns.

Monday 03 March 1986

Really tired. All last week was up late – so no wonder. Had pretty much homework – I thought.

Sunday 02 March 1986

It was another good day. Was really tired today. Got lots of exercise.

Saturday 01 March 1986

Good day. Had lobster for super. Airwolf was good. Cob’s¹ was good to.

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1. I was quite a fan of Airwolf. Twenty years later, I find myself watching Battlestar Galactica on Saturday nights. I remember Cob’s to have been a television show, but I’ve been unable to find anything on it through Google, which probably means that I spelled the show’s name wrong, or that it wasn’t actually called Cob’s.

Friday 28 February 1986

Good day. Not very much homework. I played UNO with Michelle.

Wednesday 26 February 1986

Left school early. I cried at the funeral. Went in a limo! Went to bed at 12:00.¹

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1. I was up late because of the wake, in which many people got drunk. My specific memory is being under the dinning room table and laughing hard at the stories being told by my grandfather’s old friend and one time neighbor, Dr. Felix, who’d also served as the family doctor to my aunts and uncles. I remember finding one story particularyly funny, and that one being the tale of my uncle’s hunting injury, when he’d been shot in the leg as a young man.

This was the first and last time I’d been in a limosine, driven to the funeral from the funeral home with my parents. The funeral itself was a strange affair – the church was packed (as my grandfather had been prominent) and there’d been more than one priest presiding, one of whom was a large man with a loud voice, and more than one person said, ‘he didn’t need a microphone’. When my other grandfather died in 1993, that funeral was a even stranger affair, as we all sat in a room off to the side of the usual … the pews reserved for people who weren’t members of the family, sequestered as we were. I’d have to turn my head to see the orations, look through the partitions in the wall. However, at this point, 7 years earlier, I sat in the pews next to my relatives in the Catholic church, and at the end, when they were wheeling the casket out and down the aisle, I let myself cry as the full weight of ‘I’ll never see him again’ hit me.

Tuesday 25 February 1986

Same as Feb 24. Went to home. It snowed all day. He looks so good in that coffin.¹

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1. I can see that I wrote this after the fact, filling in the events of Monday and Tuesday in the past tense. Thus, ‘same as Feb 24’ – we went to Weymouth, we went to the funeral home, my father taught me that relatives might want to shake my hand and say ‘mes sympathie’. I forget if he taught me what, if any, my response should be. The day before, the discussion around the kitchen table, my uncle talking about how my Grandfather had a loathing for funerals three days after a death, and how this was nonetheless what was going to take place.

At the funeral home that evening, it was kind of boring, kind of strange. My dead grandfather in the open casket to my left as I sat there and watched all the old people come to pay their respects. All very solemn and weird in the way that life’s rituals are weird when you’re a kid and you don’t quite get it. Around this time there was a drive with my Mom, I sitting in the passenger seat ‘up front’ and she saying the usual, ‘you can be happy he’s in a better place’ and perhaps this was the time, because we were talking about death, that I told her that sometimes I’m so curious about Heaven I can’t wait to get there, which she found a little alarming, of course. Now I have no interest in any of it whatsoever.

A year ago, I had this diary out and my sister found it and read some of it, finding it funny. At dinner that night my mother read from it and this day’s entry in particular made her laugh: ‘he looks so good in that coffin’. What I remember is looking at the still face of my grandfather, the mystery of death, and lightly touching his face to experience it in some way. But then I felt weird, because death=germs and all that, and I had a spell as a germophobe at around this time, during the mid-80s, so afterward, at my grandmother’s, I couldn’t tell anyone that I’d touched my grandfather and felt gross, because it felt shameful, and I washed my hands more than once. What I do remember was the coolness, and that lingering feeling of uncleanliness, and how I should have a more respectful feeling for my dead grandpa than simply feeling he was now gross.

Sunday 23 February 1986

Good and bad. Pretty good at beginning and bad at end. Grandpa died today.¹

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1. Some notes:

The Buddha was born in 2777 (according to my standardized chronology) and was 12 years old when Confucius was born in 2789. Confucius, it is said, ‘enjoyed putting ritual vases on the sacrifice table.’ (Wikipedia). This would have been in the 2790s. The Buddha left home to go on his journey of Enlightenment in 2806 at age 29, two years after Confucius began studying in 2804, as it is said, ‘At fifteen, I set my mind upon learning’. The Buddha attained Enlightenment in 2812 at age 35, and Confucius tells us that in the year 2819 he took his stand. The Buddha died in 2857 at 80 and two years later, Confucius writes, ‘At seventy, I follow all the desires of my heart without breaking any rule.’ Two years after that, in 2861 he died at age 72. Or perhaps he died at 71, before reaching his birthday that year.

Two-thousand four hundred and sixty five years later, in 5326, (otherwise known as 1986) my grandfather died at age 71, a man whose name is unknown to history, another blip in that great span of time between those ancients and ourselves. He is memory to me now, more legend than human to my cousins born after him, one of whom will be twenty this year. My grandfather was born to a lumberjack and housewife a few weeks into the events we now call World War I. At 31, (my present age) he saw my father for the first time, a baby born two weeks after Easter and two weeks before Hitler would shoot himself in a Berlin basement. Thirty years after that, I would be born, and now I’m at the age when I should be (according to this pattern) producing the fellow whose child will remember me twenty years after my death. If I were to die at my grandfather’s age, that would put this grandchild’s memory in the year 2066. But this pattern appears to be broken, since there’s no chance I’ll be having children anytime soon, and perhaps this also means I have more than 40 years left to live.

My father was in Moncton, my mother called him to tell him the news. I’d been playing with my Lego boat, my sister near me. She recieved the phone call and sat on the couch in the living room, and when she hung up told us that he’d passed away. My sister, crouching to my right, sprang up and ran to my mother and begain sobbing. I had a quiet and stunned reaction, yet joined the hug happening on the couch. The phone call to my father, away in some motel, and so to this day I don’t know how he reacted to the news his father had died. It’s also something I don’t feel it’s any of my business to find out.

It was a bit of surprise, since the week previous he’d been on the mend. The previous Thursday, when I went to the doctor’s regarding my pencil-wound, my mother and he had talked about how he’d been getting better, because the doctor was in fact my uncle. And yet fate intervened on this weekend in February, and a lifetime of smoking and drinking had worn out a body not destined to live to the Canadian life-expectancy of the time, which was 75. That’s what I remember thinking, as I’d recently learned about those statistics – that he’d died three years short of when ‘he was supposed to’, and yet that three year measure would only have been acurate had he made it to his next birthday that September. Had he made it to that birthday, he would have met his latest Grandchild born that August, a boy, a cousin to myself, the first son of my uncle, the third of my grandfather’s sons. At the news of my cousin’s birth I was happy since the responsibility of carrying on the family line no longer rested solely with me.

Friday 21 February 1986

Fun day! A and S came. Had snowfall fight and played with computer.¹

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1. A was my sister’s best friend, but S I don’t remember at all. Apparantly it snowed twenty years ago today, and the computer refered to was a Commodore 64, which I still have in the basement, and it still works to. I set it all up last in 2002 because I was working on a project that used it.

Thursday 20 February 1986

Good day. School strike began. Had to wait a half hour at doc’s¹.

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1. I went to the doctor’s with regard to my pencil wound. He said it was no big deal. By this time it was already dark with mark of the lead, he said it might stay that way, or something to that effect. He may of used hydrogen peroxide on it, but I don’t really remember. At age 11, a half-hour seemed like a long time.

Last month, I waited 45 minutes for my dentist appointment, watching Paul Martin give one of his pathetic campaign speeches. When I got home, I casually noticed the note I’d made on the calendar, which read ‘11.30’, and here I’d thought it’d been for 11. ‘That’s why I waited so long!’ I said to myself.

Wednesday 19 February 1986

Good and bad. Michelle jammed a pencil in my arm.¹ Just math for homework. Had fun playing with “Missile Man”.

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1. Michelle, my sister, was doing her math homework on the floor in the living room. I was bugging her and she got so angry with me she stabbed me in my left arm with her pencil. Well, she was trying to hit me and forgot she was holding a pencil, I guess we could say. It didn’t hurt so much but it was kind of shocking to see the pencil hanging from this wound, it’s lead tip embedded beneath the skin. She got into a world of trouble which I appreciated, since it was usually I who was in trouble.

To this day, I have a mark there, a little gray spot. It’s the only type of tattoo I ever received.

Monday 17 February 1986

Good day but lots of homework. At end of day terrible. I didn’t want to do it. Saw end of movie.¹

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1. Didn’t want to do my homework, whatever that was. Probably math or French. Movie referred to was The Never Ending Story

Saturday 15 February 1986

Made Lego boat. Named it “Missile Man” Had miny lauchment. We thought Grandpa might die that night.¹ Made a spare on Bowling.²

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1.I built this boat out of Lego, wrote ‘Missile Man’ on a peice of paper, which I taped to it’s bow. I playfully held a launch with some lego bottle or something. I remember playing with this while Airwolf was on tv. During the time my mother got a phone call; one of the relatives in Kentville calling in with a report on my ill Grandfather’s condition.
2. I used to bowl on Saturday afternoons. I didn’t enjoy it too much, as waiting around for my turn I found boring.

Friday 14 February 1986

Valentines! Had fun at party. Movie was great!¹ Didn’t see it all of it.² I think I told D³ off.

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1.The movie (as previously mentioned) was The Never Ending Story which we watched on video as part of our Valentine’s day ‘party’ which meant time off of class and probably some sweets. I recall that The Never Ending Story excited both my imagination and touched me emotionally. At the time I had a total crush on the Princess, who I learned via Google is named Tami Stronach and is now a dancer in New York City. Now I look at her image from the time and see nothing more than a child, who was 2 years older than I was, and I find it strange to think I once imagined love based on this kid.
2. School ended before the movie did. We watched the rest at a later date.
3. D was the older brother of one of my classmates, who used to bully me. ‘Telling him off’ only meant that I stood up to him.

Wednesday 12 February 1986

Went to R’s on bus. Sliding again. Triple fun. L¹ was there. You know something, she is real dumb, dumb, dumb.

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1.L was a girl in my sister’s class who lived near the hill that we were sledding on. The ‘dumb dumb dumb’ comment referred to her statement about a plane – one was flying overhead and we could hear it, and I looked for it, and she said, ‘it’s in the sky!’ I was too young to know the expression, ‘no shit…’ and so was amazed by her general thick headedness. I look back now and think I was probably being unfair and too mean.

Sunday 09 February 1986

Went to see Grandpere. Real sick¹. Dad went up to see him again. Moved him to I.C.U

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1. My grandfather had fallen ill and had been taken by ambulance to the Kentville hospital. We went to see him there.

Saturday 08 February 1986

D. D. came over.¹ Went sliding.² Jumping on pond.³ Had tiny play.⁴ She slept over.

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1. D.D. was my sister’s friend.
2. Or sledding … our house at the time was built at the top of a gentle slope. During the day we slid into the brambles of the bushes. Later that evening, my Dad told me he’d been watching us and was glad to see that I instinctually covered my head with my arms. Why this was worth telling me I’m not sure.
3. We had a pond in the backyard which was frozen over. There were other times when we played a pathetic version of hockey on it, and times when I fell through the ice.
4. I remember nothing about this experiment in juvenile theatre.

Sunday 02 February 1986

Gunshow. Janitor was weird¹. Played with Greg and Joey². Went to store. Cashier said, ‘Cuse Me’.³ Went out for supper. Joey told funny stories.⁴

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1. I don’t recall exactly what was weird about the janitor, except that maybe he was annoyed to have all these people in the gym and kids like myself and the others playing Transformers on the steps when he needed to mop. But I’m bringing an adult understanding to the situation now. Or maybe he was retarded … that would have been something I’d have noted down, if it was a question of mental oddness. Take for example, note 3, where I write the cashier said ‘cuse me’.

2. Greg and Joey were two other kids who my sister and I would hang out with at gunshows. The odd thing about growing up this way was that we had friends in other parts of the province who we’d see every few months during these weekends. Greg was from Bible Hill, which is near Truro. Joey was from Syndey. Joey was the funniest person I knew, and he always taught me what the cool cartoons were that I should be watching. For example, because of him I started paying more attention to G.I. Joe and ninjas. I recall now that there was a ninja craze in the 1980s which I’d completely forgotten about.

3. We went to a corner store near the school where the gun show was being held. The situation was that the cashier was a little frazzled to have 5 near-ten-year-olds in her store, and as I recall the ‘cuse me’ came after one of us had paid or something, but she was all nervous thinking we were shop-lifting. In her accent, her ‘excuse me’ was heard as ‘kuse me’ (which is how I’d write it today). We all thought this was immensely funny and talked about it on the way back to the school, walking along the Dartmouth sidewalks bordered with snow.

4. As I said, Joey was the funniest kid I knew. On Sundays, after the show was over and the car was re-packed, we’d find some restaurant near the highway. I remember St. Huberts in this context, although I’m not sure if it was this particular weekend or another one. The kids would sit at their own table, where we would be entertained by Joey.

Saturday 01 February 1986

Went to Halifax!¹ Why exclamation mark – fun. I went with $102. Got for birthday.² Bought robot dog and Grimlock³. Went to Mother Tucker’s for supper.⁴

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1. As I mentioned the day before, we packed the car to go to the gunshow. As I said, my dad was a gunsmith … he sold guns out of the house. I later learned that the RCMP would tell him every once and a while they’d picked up some thugs who were planning to break in and steal them all, which must have been incredibly stressful. But part of the business involved travelling around the Maritimes to spend a weekend in some school’s gymnasium or a Legion hall, behind tables covered with old bed-spreads, with handguns laid out in rows and wired through the trigger guard. Fat men would examine them carefully.

I would wander around looking at the other displays, and usually found myself admiring the Nazi daggers, which prompted me to read some history. I learned of how the daggers were ceremonial rewards and based on an even older Teutonic design.That was actually one of the things I most appreciated about gunshows, was seeing these historical artifacts. The fact that perhaps they were being bought by skin-heads was over my head at the time. I always saw them as collectible for their part in making the story real. So there were Nazi armbands, the sawstika flag, all that shit. When, in 1999, I saw the movie American Beauty, I could understand the sinister aspect of the father owning a Nazi artifact, but I could also see how perhaps he was being misunderstood. The fact that he was a muderous homophobe was what made him evil, not that he owned this thing … what was it a plate or something?

The Halifax gun show was actually held in a school gym in Dartmouth. We always stayed at the motels in Bedford. Going to the malls, especially the Mic Mac Mall, was always the highlight of the trip.

2. I obviously hadn’t mastered the structure of a sentence yet. Yes, I recieved $102 for my birthday, which is $2 more than what I got this year.

3. The robot dog was the Tomy Spotbot. I found two today on eBay and almost completed the circle by bidding on the mint one. So that I could go back in time and tell myself that I’d be buying another one in exactly 20 years. I decided the circle shouldn’t be drawn. Nevertheless I set it to watch. The thing is, although I think this robot is around, somewhere in the basement, I’m not sure.And so, due to memory and a lifetime of consumerist training, I think it’s a reasonable expenditure to buy another one so that it can sit on my shelf. I have until Friday to convince myself either way, for or against buying it again. Probably against. No point really.

I thought the Grimlock was the robot arm I bought once on the Feb Gunshow trip with birthday money, but Google corrected my memory. It turns out Grimlock was the Tyranasaurus Rex Transformer.

4. On Saturday Nights during the gunshow weekend, my parents would get together with other sellers and we’d go out for a big supper. This night we went to Mother Tucker’s. During my time in Halifax going to university, I only went back there once, and that was 9 years later, for my 20th birthday, 31 Jan 1995. I was on a date with a girl whose name I no longer recall, who brought me there saying you eat free on your birthday. So that’s what I did. Then they sang Happy Birthday to me, which was embrassing. Then we went to see Before Sunrise at the Park Lane cinemas on Spring Garden Rd. While at Mother Tucker’s at age 20, I remembered being there before, but didn’t have this 1986 diary handy to give me the context of it being almost exactly nine years later. I remember it seeming to be a little run down by then, the decade having made it’s mark.

Wednesday 22 January 1986

Went to party¹. Danced with M². Enjoyed it. Didn’t mind doing it anymore.

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1. This was someone’s birthday party up the road from where I lived.
2. M was my girl next door, although she too lived up the road. We didn’t have neighborhoods like one does in a suburb or a city. We had roads. You have to drive everywhere. I could go to M’s house on the bicycle, or walk for ten minutes. But yes, my first dance. On a weeknight. Perhaps it was a snow day … I seem to recall having school off around this point. I certainly don’t remember going to school the next day.

The hug and the shuffle steps to bad 80s music. The budding of sexuality, and yet, like the trees of February, the bud was still undeveloped. M would turn into my first major crush, although even by this point I’d liked her since Grade 2. She was a girl that even the boys who later turned out to be gay fantasized about. My understanding is that she is now in Vancouver and is described as being ‘high maintenance’.

Throughout my adolescence, when I had this affection for her, she’d tell me I was ugly and made me feel unlovable, which gave me self-esteem issues into my early 20s. Those issues, or this fucked up emotional development, has in many ways damaged my relations with girls ever since, although I’d like to think that certain girls have helped me get past some of this baggage.

Occasionally I still dream of M, and am very curious as to how she turned out, what she’s like now in her early 30s. These dreams tend to reveal that deep down there’s a desire both for her approval, but also a desire to feel vindicated, to say, look what I became, so fuck you for all that teenage bullshit. Of course, by her standards, I still haven’t become much, and yet, twenty years later it has just become a story, and who cares if I ever see her again?

Sunday 19 January 1986

Went to see my Grandpere. He said this spring he???d teach me his tradition.¹

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1. I sat in the same chair, at the same desk at my grandmother’s house this past summer. The kitchen table is still to the left, the books on the shelves above the desk the same ones that were there then. In so many ways my grandmother’s house is untouched by change and style, so that this memory intermeshes with so many others. I would sit at that desk (as I did last summer) and write, or read, or draw. I was sitting there twenty years ago today, and heard my grandfather say that he would teach me his tradition in the spring. He was going to teach me how to make a flute or something. He said he’d have to do it before he goes, or something to that effect, and he said this sitting at the kitchen table, speaking mostly to my grandmother, who was standing next to him. The scene: he was was sitting in his chair, to the right. She was standing to the left. She’s wearing a flower print shirt. After he said this, about doing it before he goes, she slaps him playfully, communicating, don’t say such things. We’re supposed to pretend to be immortal until we breath our last.

In the car, on the way home, I began to worry that he might die before he could show me this thing. His joke became my concern. I didn’t tell anyone, kept it to myself. Thought I was being silly. I’ve always had a streak of paranoia, and even then a part of me knew that I was letting my thoughts get away with themselves. I used to think the creaks of the house settling, especially coming from the ceiling, were the bullies at school who hated me so much they snuck into the house to crawl around the attic and drop down through the ceiling, on top of my bed, to plunge pocket knives into my heart. My imagination was not always friendly and fun, but a source of nightmares and anxiety. That’s how I remember the mid-80s. Fears of being murdered. And fears that perhaps I was psychic and my grandfather would die before spring.

Saturday 18 January 1986

I had my birthday party early. Lots of fun. Got games, comics, slingshot. Had a bon-fire.¹

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1. This bon-fire was held in the backyard. A Saturday night bon-fire in mid-January is one of life’s pleasures and I miss it now in my city dwelling days. The slingshot I remember the most fondly and I believe is now located in a box in the basement.

This follows from the previous entry of the 12th, in which I see I made the decision to have my birthday party early on the Sunday, that is, I must have thought to myself, ‘I’ll have it next weekend, on Saturday’. Of course, this thought fragment is a reconstruction, and I look back now to see the fire burning, the chill in the air, myself huddled and sitting on logs or some such thing. I was smaller then too, given I was about to turn 11. So the fire was probably bigger to my perspective then than it would be now. A medium sized fire for a small boy, who had no idea that in 20 years time he’d find himself typing words into a computer, sharing this memory with god knows who.

Sunday 05 January 1986

Bad day. Didn’t want to go back to school. Went out for supper¹.

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1. As I recall, we went to the Chinese restaurant in Meteghan.

Thursday 02 January 1986

Working on picture.¹ Went to R.R???s.² Evette Volontaire came to interview Dad.³

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1. This was a drawing I began on New Year’s Day. I remember taping 8 x 11s together to make a large surface. The drawing disappeared within a month as I recall, but I remember it as a kind of magnum opus.
2. R.R. was my best friend in grade school. We grew apart before reaching Junior High School.
3. Evette Volontaire was a reporter for a local newspaper, and she came by the house and interviewed my father about something at the kitchen table.