Falling Backwards: A Memoir Read online

  The home-visiting nurse did get me to eat on my own eventually. My mother will often talk about how terrible that woman was. But not once in my life since have I ever had trouble eating. She must have cured me. It’s a miracle.

  I grew up on a quiet little street in southwest Calgary. We lived in a very modest house with a cracked concrete driveway that my mother scrubbed on her hands and knees with soap and water and I am not kidding. My mom is the cleanest person in Canada, if not the world. This is a woman who used to vacuum the dog. (The dog loved it.) She has worn out vacuum attachments with simple friction. Metal against rug. Rug always wins. I am surprised any of us kids had skin on our bodies. We were scrubbed into bright pink beings every night of our young lives. My mother was very proud of how clean our house was. You could seriously make Jell-O in any toilet in our house on any day of the week, and then eat it out of there. She was clean and we were all grateful for it.

  We lived in the perfect neighbourhood. We had good neighbours and there were lots of other kids racing around on any given day, so I was in my glory. I was social, to say the least. My mom said I was like the Pied Piper. I sought out new people to charm at every possible opportunity and brought them home with me. I always wanted to be liked. Not much has changed in that way—being liked is important to me. I wish I didn’t care what people thought, but I always have and I always will. I didn’t even know who or what the Pied Piper was when my mother said that to me. She also told me that I was just like a whirling dervish. I didn’t have a clue what that was, either. I finally saw a whirling dervish on TV about ten years ago. They are men in lengthy white outfits who certainly do whirl around like crazy people, but I am definitely not like a whirling dervish. I don’t know what my mother was thinking. Yes, maybe I was like a Pied Piper, but that’s as far as I am willing to go. Anyway …

  The neighbourhood looked like a spread in Better Homes and Gardens. I don’t remember anybody on our block ever being robbed or shot. Kids could walk to school in the sixties and not have to have a parent drive them the two blocks there (in their giant SUVs, no less). There were lovely trees and flowers everywhere, and people waved at you from their front lawns. Sprinklers waved back and forth over perfectly groomed lawns while the proud owner stood with his hands on his hips admiring his mowing job. Everybody looked out for everybody, or maybe they were just completely nosy. Either way, Neighbourhood Watch was in full swing on our street. People didn’t lock their doors every hour of the day. They actually left them wide open with just the screen door shut. No one was scared of being mugged in the middle of a Tuesday afternoon. The world wasn’t quite the paranoid mess it is now.

  I just remember being happy. I didn’t have a worry in the world. Nobody ever died in that world. No one got sick. Everybody had a job they went to, and they seemed to love every minute of it. (Little did I know.) If you’ve ever seen the movie Pleasantville, that was us. Houses all lined up and painted perfectly. Bicycles lying out in the front yards with pink baskets attached. Swing sets and monkey bars in the backyards with eight kids hanging off them. I was healthy and sun-kissed and innocent. I was beyond lucky. My childhood memories are like panes of glass, sunlit and clear.

  It’s amazing to me how life eventually begins to wear you down, but in a good way. There is such value in loss. There is so much to learn from failure. You just don’t realize it at the time. Every blow you take makes you that much taller and stronger. Like I’ve said before, it’s hard being a person, and I was a busy little person. I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t thinking about things: big things, grown-up things. I wondered why I was here at all, and where I came from and how my hands knew to move when my brain told them to. I had so many questions running around in my head. Nothing seemed simple to me. Sometimes I made myself physically dizzy from thinking too hard. Everything I thought had some cosmic attachment to it. I had been briefed briefly about God by the church we went to, that he loved me and that he knew everything that I was thinking about, good or bad. That was a bit disconcerting to me. I didn’t like to think that God could see me in the bathroom wiping my little white bum. I didn’t like to think that God was able to see me picking my nose on the rare occasion I did it. I didn’t want God to know one single thing that I was thinking. He would think I was crazy. I was told that God was everywhere, and that he was a very good God, and that if a person were good, they would be rewarded in heaven. How about rewarding me now, I thought to myself? I was pretty darn good today, God! You find out early on that life is not based on a system of punishment and reward. Bad people often get ahead and good people can and will die of cancer. There is no sense to be made of any of it. You just have to get up and deal with the day.

  When I was six or seven one of our neighbours died of a heart attack. I wondered how a heart could attack anybody. My mother said that it was a shame that a good person had to die so young. It would have been easier had he been a bad person, I guess. That makes more sense to all of us. I felt sorry for God having to make all those hard decisions. I knew for sure I would never want to be God. I could mark that off my to-do list. Whew.

  I was a short, small person, always the smallest in the class, but I was a big thinker. I preferred thinking to pretty much doing anything else. When I was really young, like six or seven, I did love being social, but as I got a little bit older, I was more or less happy being on my own whenever possible. My mother always said that I could entertain myself for hours on end. I am sure I could. I could doodle on a piece of paper for three or four hours and not notice a single second going by. I didn’t mind being by myself at all, although my mother tells me that I was seldom, if ever, alone. I think you can be alone even when you’re with someone else—you can be alone together. Even when I was playing with other kids, I was in some far-off place making up my own version of things. Daydreaming was my specialty.

  My parents were very practical. They are still very no-nonsense people. They always told me that things happen to you in life and you just throw your shoulders back and keep going. I have learned so much from them over the years, invaluable things that have saved me a hundred times over. Persistence is more important than anything else—that’s one of the lessons. Another one: the harder you work, the luckier you get. Both of them have served me well countless times.

  Things at 6307 Louise Road were easy and breezy and pretty much devoid of any kind of worry. The days were simple and organized. My family seemed to be really very normal. We fit in with everybody else. My parents were very present to me then, and they always seemed to be around. My dad worked hard at his job and I didn’t see much of him during the day, but the lot of us always had dinner together in the evening. Dad was usually home on weekends and his specialty was Saturday morning breakfasts. Eggs over easy and crunchy dark-brown bacon that was cooked beyond recognition and—my personal favourite—his home-fried potatoes. They were so crispy and salty. No one could make them they way he did. The nearly black pieces of potato were worth fighting over. We sat at our round white table with the white plastic swivel chairs in the kitchen with the sheer yellow curtains that my mom had made with her very own hands, and always fought over the last piece of burnt bacon and the last crispy potato. If I were to go to my parents’ house, right this very minute, they would have a side plate covered with a paper towel on the counter with leftover bacon sitting on it. They would also be having potatoes of some kind, no matter what meal of the day it was, breakfast, lunch or dinner. I think we ate more potatoes than the country of Ireland before the great famine.

  I know we were very blessed. I realize that more now than ever. The sixties seemed abundant. In our house, no one ever really talked about people being poor. I’m sure there were lots of people struggling to make ends meet, but my parents protected me from anything unsavoury or sad. They were my magic dome, the two of them. They seemed to let only the good in. I never even remember them raising their voices to each other—which I know is hard to believe—but they didn’t … until some time
later.

  One of the most interesting features of our small white house on Louise Road was the milk chute. It was built right into the wall of our house, right by the back door. Everybody in our neighbourhood had one. Nobody bought milk at a store, they had it delivered by the milkman.

  The milk chute was like a really fancy dog door, complete with handles. It was about four feet off the ground with the milkman’s little door on the outside of the house and our little door on the inside. The doors were slightly askew, so he’d have to slide the bottles of milk over to our side, and then we’d grab them out of there like it was a pop machine. You never even had to step outside, which was great in the winter. I am sure that’s why people had milk chutes; the milk would have frozen sitting out on a front step in about two minutes. After all, it is winter in Alberta eleven and a half months out of the year. It feels that way, anyway.

  I can remember one day waiting for our milkman to come with the homo milk and our whipping cream and, I hoped, our chocolate milk. We didn’t get chocolate milk that often, but when we did it was like Christmas and Halloween and Easter and May Day all at the same time, whatever May Day is.

  I listened for the milk truck to pull up in front of our little white house and then I stuck my head into the milk chute and held my breath. I imagined he would open the milk chute and see my adorable freckled face grinning at him like the Cheshire cat and exclaim how desperately cute I was. Unfortunately, because the milk chute doors weren’t aligned, he actually couldn’t see me sitting there with my head in the tiny door grinning at him wildly, and so he began shoving the milk bottles into my invisible, now somewhat shocked, face. I tried pulling my head out of the milk chute, but it had become quite stuck. I mean really stuck. It was wedged in there like a marshmallow in a piggy bank, like a bowling ball in a frog’s mouth. Like thong underwear on a gymnast doing backflips. My dad had to come home from work to saw me out of that milk chute. Okay, that may be a bit dramatic, but he did have to break off some of the moulding around the opening to get access to my head. My mother reminds me that he had to get some Vaseline, smear it all over my face and pull me out of there like you would a fat finger out of a wedding ring. I remember being very scared and very embarrassed by the whole thing. I never did get to surprise that milkman. I never saw him at all. And I am really glad now that he didn’t see me. I didn’t stick my head in the milk chute ever again, although I did look into it from time to time for no reason whatsoever.

  The things a person remembers are so random and somehow so particular. Some events quite simply stick to your heart and never come loose. I obviously don’t recall all that much about my life until I started school, but I do recall many fragments, little Polaroids that drop out of some mysterious camera in my mind and get waved in front of my face while I’m thinking about something else entirely. Remember this? That’s what the Polaroids seem to say. They prompt me for some reason to recall, recall, recall. I can just be sitting quietly in a chair and some vivid picture of my past will shoot through my mind like a bullet, causing me to actually draw a breath between my teeth. What is that? I don’t know what it is until I can actually place the memory. Things I haven’t thought of in forty years sit themselves on my lap and look up at me like a tired dog. Some of the Polaroids are good and some of them are terrifying.

  Flash. Flash. Flash.

  The things I remember from before I went to school always seem to involve me crashing into or falling off or wedging myself in things. Nothing frightened me. Everything seemed possible. I was always moving in some direction, but never backwards. What I choose to remember shapes who I am every day. I know that. For the most part I control that. Every day I wake up and feel ever so slightly changed, and I can’t go back to who I was the day before. It’s simply not possible. The universe makes you fall constantly forward and I am glad that it does. We are renewed over and over again. But memories shape us all. My memories shape and reshape who I am. I draw on them all the time to help me go forward in my life. They somehow guide me through what would otherwise be a very difficult maze. It could be a guiding principle as simple as “remember when you did this and it was really bad? Don’t do that again.”

  Whenever I get together with old friends, we always end up talking about the past, and about things we did together. Places we went, things that happened. It never ceases to amaze me how differently we all recall the very same event. Our minds form our own versions of our lives that will never be the same as anybody else’s. I have had so many friends say to me, “Don’t you remember that?” No, I don’t remember that, or at least I don’t remember it the way they do. Maybe that’s why witnesses to crimes are considered very unreliable. He was tall; no, he was short; no, wait, he was a purple dog.

  I think the universe knows what it’s doing in the memory department. Some things we forget out of self-defence, or I do anyway. I find it quite easy to put things into jars, screw on the “not now” lid and set them on a shelf in my brain. You can’t possibly carry an entire life around with you all the time. You have to look at it in sections so your mind doesn’t implode. I have certain days where I’ll take the jars down and have a good look around in them, but those days have become fewer and further in between as I get older. I don’t mind glancing in the rear-view mirror now and then, but I don’t want to stare.

  You are not what you did, but what you will do.

  Yes, memories are funny things. Do they make you up, or do you make them up? When I was a kid, I would feel sorry for God. I used to worry about how many of our thoughts he had to store in his own head. I pictured him sitting in his screened-in porch and watching the thoughts pouring in through the tiny squares of the screen and him swatting at them like flies. I pictured him hanging fly strips by the thousands from the pale white ceiling to catch all the prayers that were streaming through every possible opening, trying to make their way to him. It made me feel so heavy hearted. I worried about God. I wondered who he prayed to. It made my little head hurt. I understood for a moment how “impossible” felt.

  It’s good to remember, but you can’t let memories hurt you. Human beings are the only animals on the planet that punish themselves over and over again for something they’ve done in the past. A dog doesn’t punish himself for something he did an hour ago, but people? If we can beat ourselves up about something, we usually do. I try not to do that, but like most other people, I slam myself into a wall every now and then.

  The things we choose to remember say a heck of a lot about us.

  As far as I can remember as a kid, I always seemed to be crashing, falling, being wedged into or pulled out of one thing or another. There was the milk chute. Then one summer I had to be pulled out of a barbecue. I know you’re picturing a gas grill with a lid on it, but the barbecue that I was pulled out of when I was six was one that my dad had built himself from a kit. That in and of itself was probably the problem. It stood about eight feet high and was made out of concrete Lego-style blocks, stacked one on top of the other to form a fairly tall chimney. It seemed like it was a hundred feet tall but I am quite certain it was actually more like eight. There were shelves or wings off to each side where one could put plates and pots of beans or set down a cold beer. This was the barbecue to end all barbecues and I don’t know what possessed me to scale up to the very top and look down into that chimney, but I did. And I don’t know what possessed me to actually stick my head into the chimney and then wiggle down into it, but I did that too. So now I was upside-down inside an eight-foot barbecue, looking down at the grill and wondering how I was going to get out. I did try to get out for some time, but I couldn’t reach to push myself off the bottom and I had no space in which to turn myself around. I hung there for a very long time. I don’t know if I was screaming or laughing, but our neighbour Betty Evans heard me from her kitchen window—or heard something, rather—and came out of her house to check. She obviously couldn’t see anything at first, because I was obscured in the barbecue, but she kept searching for
where the sounds were coming from. She found me eventually and somehow managed to pull me out. Thank you, Betty. I might well still be in there if it weren’t for you. I haven’t crawled into a barbecue since, you’ll be happy to know, although I have really wanted to.

  I was always climbing on things: on countertops to get into cupboards or on top of the refrigerator to get at a bag of cookies or onto retaining walls just to get up onto a retaining wall. I just wanted to climb; there was no purpose in it at all. Of course I fell off everything I climbed on. My mother says I was forever covered in bruises. I suffered one or two concussions and various split chins from numerous falls to the earth, and of course mom was mortified about what our family doctor, Dr. Turner, would think. Was I being beaten on a somewhat regular basis? Not at all, but you know how doctors can be—suspicious—and I don’t blame them.

  I wasn’t afraid of anything. I should have been, but I wasn’t. Fearlessness wears off as you get older. Reality takes over eventually and replaces fearlessness with doubt. You start doubting everything you do. But in your youth? Ah, youth, teeming with bravado! There actually was a time in my life, albeit a short one, when I truly believed that I would never die and nothing terrible would ever happen to me or my family. I miss that feeling. Now it’s a constant fight to defend yourself from succumbing to the dark side. (I can hear Darth Vader breathing inside that black helmet of his.)