Falling Backwards: A Memoir Read online

  Yes, falling, always falling. I fell off bikes (always keep your hands on the handlebars) and dressers and countertops and swing sets and merry-go-rounds. I fell into things like garbage cans. Well, I liked to play in garbage cans, for some strange reason, and I was in them a lot. There were hundreds of garbage cans lining the alley behind our white house, and I made sure that I stuck my head into every single one of them. No rotten apple core went unturned! There were treasures to be had, by gum! And probably gum to be had. I apparently didn’t know that garbage was garbage yet. Good thing, too.

  I got worms from playing in the garbage cans with my friend from across the alley, Davey Hayes. I am sure he talked me into it. I would never have thought something that terrible up by myself. Never! My mother said that Davey’s mother was a bit crazy and that Davey was a bit crazy too. That seemed like it would be a good thing to be, considering how hard life could be from time to time.

  My mom told me she’d take me into the bathroom in the middle of the night, wrap Scotch tape around her fingers and then stick the tape onto my wee bum hole. Then she’d throw the light switch on to see if she’d caught any worms. She said she caught many a worm poking out of my arse. True story—I swear on my mother’s life. The doctor actually told her to do the Scotch tape thing. (Thank God for universal health care.) I am sure that’s not something the Scotch tape people tout as one of the many handy uses for their product. De-worming? I should let the Scotch tape people know that it really works. My mother could be the spokesmodel. That whole experience with the worms was much worse for her than it was for me. You’d think a person could feel worms coming and going out of their bum hole. Disgusting, really. That’s what you get for eating garbage.

  I was also known to eat the odd dead fly off a windowsill, but that could just be an out-and-out lie. I can’t imagine that even at six years old I would have found that at all appetizing. I hate flies. I hate moths even more.

  There is a picture of me when I was two or three years old, next to my little pal Shelly. My shins are covered in bruises and Shelly doesn’t have a mark on her anywhere. I still bruise easily. All I have to do is bump ever so slightly into the corner of a table and I have a bruise the size of a small dog. I had a bruise once on my inner thigh that looked very much like the Virgin Mary and all the neighbours paid me a buck and a quarter to come and look at it. I am kidding—I never charged a red cent.

  I don’t know how I survived childhood. I don’t know how my parents survived my childhood, but we all did. Thinking back now, it was magical. It seemed like one long summer. It never ended. When you start counting your time on the planet by how many summers you have left, you realize how short life really is. My friend Jean said to me once that she hoped she had twenty summers left. It made me stop and think harder than usual. When the summers start feeling shorter, you know you’re over that middle of your life hump and well into becoming a senior with a pension and not a single tooth of your own in your head. I can honestly tell you that I don’t mind the thought of getting older at all. I am not thrilled about the tooth part, but I am quite relieved that I have the chance to get old, period. Youth can be vicious. I find that the older I get, the shorter my neck becomes, but the more I like myself.

  I think my mother was very relieved when I finally started school. She’d have at least four hours in a day in which to fix everything I’d broken. When I did break something, I’d always admit to it. I was a very honest child. She’d march into a room and say to us all, “Who broke this lamp?” And I’d say, “I did.” I guess it kind of took the steam out of her being mad at me. She says that I didn’t start telling lies until I was eighteen years old. (It was more like seventeen). She told me that when I turned eighteen I went bonkers; maybe I did go bonkers.

  I never had children that I am aware of and I think I am the reason why. I was my own really good reason to never, ever become pregnant. The thought of trying to raise a small version of myself is daunting, to say the least. Well, that and the fact that I am a spinster. Don’t worry, I am not the least bit worried about it except when I am awake or sleeping; then it kind of bothers me.

  chapter two

  FINGER ON A SPINNING GLOBE

  I started at Jennie Elliott Elementary School in 1967. My first grade teacher, Mrs. May, told my parents at their very first parent-teacher interview that I could very well be somewhat retarded. Political correctness did not exist then. Teachers could say things like that to a parent and not end up in jail. I obviously was not retarded, but, rather, a genius. I kid, but not really; no, seriously. Well, I was certainly somewhere between the two.

  I just couldn’t bear to sit at a desk. Is that retarded? I couldn’t stand the little metal bar that attached the chair to the desk. Why would anybody do that? Did they think that a first grade student could and would steal the chairs? And do what with them? They were the most uncomfortable chairs in the history of chairs. Imagine having your dining room chairs attached to your dining room table with a thick metal bar. I rest my case. I just could not sit in that desk with the chair attached. It made me feel so confined. I have never, ever liked being boxed in, although I did also crawl into very small spaces at various points in my childhood. Looking back, I realize what a polarized kid I was.

  My parents were horrified that Mrs. May thought I had mental problems of any kind. What parent wants to hear that news, especially on their very first parent-teacher interview? I am sure my mother thought it must have been all the falling off things I had done. Maybe I was brain damaged. My parents were nervous enough about my future. I mean, I was a handful at the best of times.

  After much discussion of my mental state with Mrs. May, it was decided that I would be allowed to stand beside my desk rather than sit in it. And that was the end of the retardation problem. Standing beside my desk seemed to solve most of my issues. I found it hard to write sitting down. The giant red HB pencils were six inches in diameter and I had hands the size of walnuts; sitting down, I could hardly hold on to a pencil. On my feet, I was able to at least utilize gravity. I still have one of those pencils in a trunk in my bedroom. It looks like a giant red and black suppository. Not that I would know what a suppository looks like, because I don’t.

  I was very happy to be standing beside my desk. I felt normal. Mrs. May kept a close eye on me from there on out, or is it in? At any rate, she kept me at the very front of the classroom, just to be sure I didn’t “go off.” I loved school. I couldn’t wait to get up and walk the two blocks to the elementary school. It was an adventure for sure. I loved all the chattering and the visiting. I wanted to be friends with everybody, and all the activity was intoxicating. I really did have fun, despite Mrs. May’s attempts at thwarting my creativity. One day she even thought it necessary to confiscate a plastic black spider that I had stuck onto the end of my pencil. She marched up to my desk, pulled it off without a word and threw it into a drawer in her desk that I am sure was filled with a bunch of other wonderful things she had taken from her students for hundreds of years. What I wouldn’t have done to get into that treasure drawer.

  I think she was the first “not nice” person I ever knew. She seemed grumpy and she acted like she hated us. Maybe she was in a terrible relationship, or just depressed. My mom says, “Mrs. May just did not like you, and I don’t know why.” I think she’d be almost seventy years old now. Well, at least sixty-five … It is weird to think about that. I hope to God she found a pound of happiness between then and now.

  Many years after I had completed grade one I wound up babysitting Mrs. May’s children. Well, my friend Sue was the actual babysitter, and I was just along for the snacks, but still. I didn’t know it was her and she didn’t know it was me, but I figured it out before she did. I think she must have been remarried because her name wasn’t Mrs. May anymore. I don’t think she would have let me co-babysit her beloved children had she known that I was the troubled little girl who stood by her desk at the front of the class in 1967.

  I h
ad been a babysitter very few times in my teenage life. I knew that whenever anyone called me to look after their kids I was their last resort. If they were calling me, there was nobody on the planet left to call. They were beyond desperate and I was in a position to make certain demands. Oh, the splendour of it all! Must have grape pop and must have Old Dutch salt and vinegar chips. Must have cable TV and a remote control. It was good to be the last resort. A colour TV set would be best, if possible.

  Sue and I both thought Mrs. May’s kids were little bastards, but perhaps I had been carrying around a grudge from my first grade mental illness debacle. All is forgiven now, and besides, Mrs. May, or whatever her name was, and her new husband had a bunch of beer stashed in their basement that we happily drank while on the job. (No children were harmed, I can assure you.) Beer was almost as good as—if not better than—grape pop, salt and vinegar chips and a remote control for a colour TV. If you drank the beer really fast it could create a feeling that was quite goofy. I thought it was really great to feel goofy from time to time. Who wouldn’t?

  My mother told me very early on that life was going to be hard. She also told me that we were all going to die eventually. My dad told me the universe was ever expanding.

  I had a lot on my mind, as you can well imagine. I found out that I would learn much more from failing than I would from succeeding. But I am jumping ahead …

  I liked elementary school even though the academic part of it often left me scratching my head. I really thought that I was just there in the classroom to meet people and have fun and play marbles and run around the schoolyard bruising every inch of every limb on our bodies. I loved recess. I would have been happy if school was nothing but recess. I know I wasn’t alone in this thought.

  I was glad and relieved to move out of Mrs. May’s miserable grade one class into the much happier, carefree second grade classroom of Ms. Hurst. She was a huge improvement. I began to think that I would survive elementary school after all.

  Ms. Hurst had big, brown eyes, giant piles of brunette hair stacked onto her head, and wore orange lipstick! Mrs. May just had a mess of iron-like red hair pinned like a magpie’s nest onto the top of her head. It was scary, to tell you the truth. I am sure there were things trapped in there. Things like first graders and plastic spiders and disgruntled parents of children she didn’t like.

  Ms. Hurst, on the other hand, seemed to glide to the chalkboard six inches off the ground. It was like she was made of pure magic and fairy sprinkles. It was, after all, the sixties, and Ms. Hurst was very groovy and far out. She talked to all of us like we were actual people, which was unbelievable at first because Mrs. May had yelled at us like we were the spawn of the Devil himself. Every single kid in my second grade class had a crush on Ms. Hurst. All the girls wanted to be just like her and all the boys wanted to hug her leg. (I don’t think humping legs had dawned on them at this point.)

  I looked forward to getting out of bed and running to school as fast as I could go, just to sit at the front of Ms. Hurst’s classroom to learn something. Learning how to print was beyond exciting, and subtraction—well, there was nothing like it! It didn’t feel like we were learning, it felt like we were being. It’s amazing what a caring, interested teacher can inspire in a young mind. For some strange reason I was able to sit at my desk in Ms. Hurst’s class without feeling like my own skin was eating me.

  Just waiting to see what she was going to wear on any given day was exciting. She had fabulous bell-bottomed jeans and macramé belts and tie-dyed T-shirts and head scarves made out of every imaginable colour and fabric. She also had lovely tailored two-piece suits with matching earrings and sheer pantyhose. I mean, pantyhose? I had never seen anybody wearing pantyhose. (At first I thought she had really brown legs and then I figured out that she just had very long, stretchy socks on.) She wore long, beaded necklaces and flower rings on her fingers and open-toed shoes and she always smelled good. A trail of her perfume followed her around the classroom and down the hallway.

  The second grade saved me from my previously diagnosed “mental problems” and brought me back into the light of childhood. I felt normal from the moment I entered Ms. Hurst’s classroom. And even when I didn’t feel normal in Ms. Hurst’s class, that was fine too. Mrs. May had kind of knocked the wind out of my personality sails but I also realized in the first grade how tenacious I was going to be, how determined, how steadfast. Elementary school was a battlefield, and I was ready to battle!

  I have such fond memories of Ms. Hurst reading to us in the mornings. We all sat in a big, happy circle and she’d pull out a pile of books and ask us what we wanted to hear that day. We each took turns picking our favourite books, although it didn’t matter what she read because it all sounded like candy to our little ears. Words poured out of her mouth like ice cream, each one of them fresh and cool and sweet.

  I think that’s where words took hold of my heart. I had never heard a poem before second grade. I didn’t even know that poems existed. Ms. Hurst read us a poem about rows of poppies in a field, and I never forgot it. I have heard that poem many times since then, and it always brings me back to her classroom, sitting in a circle with my arms folded. She’d also tell us stories about her life and her family. I felt like I had been given a glimpse of what it might be like to be a grown-up person. I suddenly wanted to get growing up immediately. A great teacher becomes part of the person you’re going to become. I wanted to be a teacher more than anything else in the world. I never quite got there. Sometimes the universe has very different plans for us.

  I can picture the faces of my teachers as plain as the watch on my wrist. I can picture myself at a little desk that I could now actually sit in and not have to stand beside, even though the chair was still attached to the desk with a bar. I can picture Ms. Hurst’s desk up at the front of the classroom, with her calendar propped up on it and her books piled up on either side and, of course, her beautiful green-and-blue globe of the world.

  I loved looking at all the different places on that globe. All those places I had never even heard of. All of the kids loved turning it about. We used to spin it around and try to pronounce the country that our sticky fingers would land on, Finland and Botswana and Turkey and Latvia and hundreds of other exotic, mysterious places. Canada seemed so small in my mind compared to everywhere else, but looking at the globe made me realize for the first time what a giant country I lived in.

  I remember my finger landing on Africa. It seemed the biggest continent of them all, and had the perfect shape of a strawberry. I can remember tracing its outline with the tip of my finger. The globe had bumps on it, the mountain ranges all built up and the coastlines slightly raised as well. It was a beautiful globe. When I started making a little bit of money, I bought one for myself. I look at it every day in my office. (I spin it around on occasion and land my finger on some far-off place and imagine going there.)

  I have been to Africa twice now. I have taken two trips to that giant red continent, indelible experiences which have reshaped my life. It seems so funny. A finger on a spinning globe and later you find yourself standing right there on the very spot where your finger landed forty-odd years before. You find yourself spinning as fast as that globe. You can’t even begin to understand where all the time has gone.

  I loved Ms. Hurst’s second grade class. She gave me the first glimpse of myself as a person. I don’t know how else to describe it. She was a wonderful teacher: inspiring and interesting and unendingly kind. I remember her, although I doubt very much that she remembers me. It doesn’t matter. She probably taught twenty thousand kids in her career and we’re all grateful; at least I am.

  Life is a series of flashes.

  Flash. Flash. Flash. And then you evaporate.

  I think we’re given glimpses of our futures all the time; we just never bother to pay attention. We’re too busy being busy. We’re too busy worrying about all the things we’ll never get done. We’re too busy looking into the mirror and counting the li
nes that are beginning to surround our mouths and eyes. So many people talk about just being in the moment. I don’t know if most of us can even begin to know how to do that. I am still learning. I think I am in the moment and then I realize that I am worrying about what I am going to be doing tomorrow. I haven’t mastered the art of now yet. I am still searching for the point.

  My mother told me early on that she didn’t know if there even was a point. I think you have to keep looking for the point—that’s the point. Everybody knows that. My dad has never really said all that much about the point. I think he is on to something.

  Flash. Flash. Flash.

  Leaving Ms. Hurst’s second grade class and moving ten feet down the hall to Mrs. McCrae’s third grade class was another giant leap forward for my newly developing character.

  Mrs. McCrae introduced me to the beautiful world of art and creativity. She was the teacher who expanded my soul into every corner of the universe. Yes, the ever-expanding one my dad had warned me about. That may sound a bit dramatic, but when you’re eight and you stumble onto something you didn’t even know existed, it’s big. I loved art. All of it! I loved drawing and painting and colouring and moulding and building. To this point, the most creative things about me were my climbing skills and being able to chew up pieces of Mr. Potato Head without choking to death.

  Mrs. McCrae seemed really old to me, but I am sure that probably means she was in her late thirties. I thought she looked to be a hundred. But I had just spent second grade with the coolest, most beautiful teacher in Jennie Elliott Elementary’s entire history of teachers. Ms. Hurst was barely twenty, I am sure, which made Mrs. McCrae seem even older. Ms. Hurst was not an easy act to follow, unless of course you were Farrah Fawcett or Olivia Newton-John. (Neither of whom existed for me yet, so I guess that’s not really worth mentioning.) It would have been so great having Olivia Newton-John as your music teacher, and Farrah Fawcett would have been a most excellent gym instructor. But Anne Murray could have kicked both of their arses in gym and music—that goes without saying.