Recollections

I stand on my front porch pausing before taking the first step towards my car. Earlier I debated taking the back steps, but it made no sense as the car is in the front and it puts unnecessary wear and tear on the steps. Now normally I have no problem doing things that make no sense, but this almost made sense and I am very black and white in regards to this area - things need to be either extra-ordinarily sensical or completely and ridiculously crazy. Taking the back steps is just too grey too do. Once I contemplated replacing my simple staircase with a more modern set of stairs that would make Escher proud and another time with a giant foam pit (the price of all of the soap alone made this too heavy a financial undertaking) as they would both add some beneficial gaiety to this challenging undertaking. Down the stairs step after step, it almost feels as if there are hundreds or thousands of them, in another, or in a more accurate way, ten. After many years away, I have decided to finally visit my old home town. Not sure what has taken me so long...As I sit in my car with the keys in the ignition, I am flooded with feelings, emotions and memories. Unsure as to whether this is a good decision or not (which is out of character for me as usually I throw caution to the wind), I start my car and begin the three hour drive back into the past.

I quickly exit the city after pausing briefly to pick up a newspaper to read the classified (alas no antique bird cages for sale once again), pick up a coffee (I don't drink coffee, I only buy it for the prestige and the chance of philosophical enlightenment), purchase a breakfast sandwich (I've made a promise to myself to eat more meals in sandwich form) and spend a good hour in the bathroom of the book store practicing witticisms, cracking my knuckles and rehearsing a wide array of facial expressions for complicated and often overlooked emotional states (including overwhelmed, cautiously optimistic and brazen - it is so hard to get the eyebrows correct for brazen. No matter how hard I try, my brows look more "bold" then "brazen" and sometimes people think they look more like caterpillars.). As I drive past the city limits, I call out at the top of my lungs "and now I enter the abyss!" While the initial lack of response is dishearteningly devoid of an answer. I quickly regroup and come to the conclusion that the silence is not only appropriate for the magnitude of the moment, but I also realize that I never rolled down the windows and I am driving past a small gathering of mimes. I should have sent the message by email.

The fields of grazing cows is almost hypnotic. Field after field of these proud, majestic and often-maligned beasts. Maligned by me, I have always seen them as just glorified buffalos and not deserving of all of their fame and good press. I have a strange and overwhelming desire to drink some milk and massage some cheese. But it doesn't stop there I also ponder, briefly, replacing much of my wardrobe with white clothes covered with large black and/or brown spots. I see one cow turn and we look eye-to-eye and the connection we make in that split second is incredibly overwhelming. I see within his sole and the message I receive is clear and strong - stop I should stop coveting my wife's shoes for the purposes of re-selling them and making a little money to spend on a new tree for my in-the-works miniature train set. Incredible how well we can send messages when total focus is achieved and when a cow is involved.

I pass through a small town called Ralph. Actually, I have no idea of the real name. We drove through this small, nondescript town every time my parents drove us to the big city to watch people lining up to watch a show (we aimed to be even one degree further away from watching the show ourselves, but couldn't find anyone - the show wasn't that good I guess nor were the people that thrilling. I often remember those days wishing that a really cool show could have come to town that attracted people worth watching enough that the people watching them were super interesting as well. In fact I promised my father once that I would create such a show and he patted me on the head mistaking me for our dog. A much too common occurrence, which continued for years until I got a significant hair cut upgrading my look from "collie" to "chihuahua" and finally stopped for good when I rashly gave our dog away). Why did I call the town Ralph? It's actually a funny story and remembering it causes a smile to cross my face. Our family dog's name was Ralph. Driving through the town and remembering the past was so powerful, I pulled over to the side of the road and patted myself on the head for twenty minutes and I had an odd desire to eat a milkbone.

The Cleveland Bridge is a pretty small, out-of-the-way bridge, but my friends and I used to bike to it and make a day of it in the summers. We would spend whole afternoons tossing pebbles into the babbling brook. One summer we graduated from pebbles to small rocks, mostly sedimentary ones. We discussed the logistics of using granite, or even moving up in the world to quartz, but we voted against it 3-2 and instead decided to spend more time in our hammocks. I would often pass the afternoons looking at the small river underneath the bridge. I used to watch the water and wonder if it was having any fun. I mean maybe some drops just wanted to stay where they were. Did they have a choice? I used to stare at the river, trying to "see" the individuals among the masses, wanting to help the oppressed, but also wanting to drink them. "Water is the wetness that we all desire" my friend Bob used to say cryptically. Bob was a little too close to the river specifically and all water in general - it made all of us partially jealous, but mostly it caused us to back away from him slowly.

I pulled over and sat beneath a giant oak tree. I often sat beneath this tree as a teenager. Planning for the future - dreaming big dreams. I would often daze off and I would see myself in the future...except it wasn't just me. I wasn't alone. All of my accomplishments - degrees from university, career moves, weddings, baby showers, the new house on Fifth...throughout it all the tree was always there by my side. Me and the giant oak tree. We were inseparable in my dreams. It got to the point that I often wished it could join me in reality. My parents didn't know what to do - should they encourage this passionate interest of mine by buying me models and puzzles of trees, giving me "tree-like" hugs every morning and evening or should they get me help. They eventually chose a middle ground which was to have me paint the basement. It worked, strangely curing me of my obsession of spending the rest of my life with that oak tree, but I still think they were only too cheap to hire someone to paint the basement. Incidentally I painted the walls with an intricately detailed pattern of black and white lines, so that if you were to spin on your back with your eyes open you would fall into a deep hypnotic trance where only the comfort of a fuzzy bunny and hearing the word "joust" would snap you out of it.

While other kids started experimenting with lighting fires (one friend in particular started burning everything to watch it melt - sticks, plastic bags, anything with the number 6 on it - he spent a week trying to win a bet by repeatedly trying to melt a rock), I built an intricate town out of sticks and stones. This town grew from a few houses and a store to a teeming, bustling town. After a long period of growth and happiness, the townspeople began to grow restless and this once idyllic society hung in the balance. After  much consternation, I decided to name myself dictator for life and I quashed all unrest. While I believed most people loved me (as evidenced by the twice-daily heavily-enforced ritual praying to an effigy of me that I hung in the town square) and I spent many an afternoon lying by the stick-and-stone town being fanned by palm leaves and fed grapes by my consorts, quietly a revolution was being planned. After the fact, I heard that the main issues were a lack of free choice, not enough mud to keep houses from collapsing and my absent-minded repetition of  the nursery rhyme "sticks and stones they may break my bones, but names will never hurt me" which led to mass confusion (to them, I mean they were sticks and stones after all - no mensa scholars here). The revolts were short, I was ousted and exiled. I still have the scratches and bruises left by those vermin-like, insolent sticks and stones. I remember that I heard that a flash flood had come through the area and washed the town away about five years ago. A small part of me felt the loss of a part of my childhood, but another, larger part, felt very very good.

Over on the right is the dirt field where we found the gigantic ant hill when we were all 11 (for much of his early adolescence Fred pretended he was 15 mostly for religious purposes. As an adult, after renouncing all religion, Fred tried to sue someone in court so that he could have years 11, 12,13 and 14 returned to him no questions asked). The ant hill was the source of a lot of good times until things went too far. It all started innocently enough - observing the ants led to keeping detailed journals of their habits which, of course, led to assigning them names and finally creating a three-act, rock opera, mockumentary entitled Ants: A Life On Da Hill. I played Charlie, a down-on-his luck worker with a heart of gold who dreamed of revolutionizing hill building (his "brilliant" outside-the-box thinking involved building the hill in the cubist style of Georges Braque, which led to the crowd-pleasing end-of-Act 2 musical number "Our Hill, Our Home, Where Is The Front Door At?" (Alternate Title: Why Can't We Have a Normal Hill Like Other Ants). My real problems started after the final show when I just couldn't break out of my character and started living the part off-stage (although I was acting as ant-like as I could, people often mistook my behaviour as more fitting of a pill bug.) I would cry and cry when friends burned ants with magnifying glasses- I felt the pain of my adopted brethren. When bothered and teased by my buddies for crying, I would explain I was just sweating from my eyes - one of many symptoms of my rare Shalk-Freeman Disease. To this day I'm not sure what was worse, my ant obsession gone too far or my stupid, gullible friends. Finally I was cured, quite by accident, when my parents sent me to a therapist. The therapy was waste of time and money as she was coincidentally an avid ant enthusiast herself. I was freed of my problems when I experienced my romantic awakening when her receptionist tried to swallow my right ear.

I catch myself driving too quickly as I am trying to make up time so I can get there by dinner. It's ironic as I was always such a slow, patient driver when I first learned to drive. My mom always taught me to do things slowly- drive, eat, climb the stairs, talk to Uncle "Jeb" (who hadn't been quite right since the Tomato Bludgeoning), write our family hate mail to the editor of Gourmet Magazine ("not print my recipe for butter tarts?" my mom would say, "I'll show them". We used to also write hate mail to Gourmet when they printed one of her other recipes- she just hated Gourmet Magazine) and paint the rocking horse (I learned the hard way not to ask why we painted that horse every Friday night). The only thing my mom did quickly was fire off snappy, stinging one-liners that seethed with a bitter sarcasm that was equal parts funny, embarrassing and, to this day, extremely hurtful.

Good ol' Farmer's Playground - lots of time spent there over the years - first as a small child taken there by my dad after lunch in the summer times, and later on as a high school student with my friends where we would do all the stereotypical things that teenagers got up to - building complex Czech marionettes, rehydrating huge bags of raisins (re-graping we called it) and constructing our own line of footwear out of twigs and branches. I stop the car and take a few slow steps towards the swing set. It still hurts after all of these years. When I was 14, I had my first kiss on that swing set with Susie (to call her "pretty" would reduce all of the money my father spent on thesauruses to a huge waste, so I will always remember her as "pulchritudinous". She was "pulchritudinous" almost to a fault, but not quite). We would share a single swing (which was super uncomfortable and permanently bruised my right hip) and sit there kissing and cooing for hours on end. Without telling my parents, I would slip out the back door and run to the playground to meet her. We'd laugh and kiss and kiss and kiss. This went on for a few months until one day, my dad drove by the park and saw me on the swing. "What are you doing!!!! That's disgusting and wrong, son!!!" his yelled startling me and made me fall and let go of Susie mid-embrace with lips puckered up. The lecture at home went on for, what seemed like, hours. I'm still confused and embarrassed about this. It seems that when my dad saw me, I was french kissing and hugging the actual swing and calling it Susie. I was always curious why her face was so metallic and her body so leathery. As you could imagine, this has had a lasting negative effect on my adult life as I often wish my girlfriends' skin was less smooth and more chain-like and at least one woman wanted nothing to do with me after I tried to sit on her and pump my legs up to the sky. As I drive away from the playground a single "Susie" floats out of mouth as if on a cloud (the recent onset of poetic language could be due to my skipping my morning rooibos chai tea, but just to be careful I've already booked off next February for a trip to a day spa - I plan to use it 28 straight days).

On my left, in the distance, is the beach with the towering, undulating sand dunes that were reminiscent of a foreign world. Me and my older sister spent our summers at those dunes rolling in the sand. Without a care in the world we would roll around in the scorching hot sand, burning our skin. The first contact between my foot and the sand would hurt so much, the second also burned quite badly, as did the third - pretty much every touch burned equally as much it never stopped hurting. And yet, we ventured forward - like two warriors out to slay the enemy (or in our case, two adolescents who scored poorly on government exams and had a high tolerance for burning sensations). After a time the combination of hot, skin-cracking sand and the sheer amount of exposure to the sun left us delirious. We would wander aimlessly in the dunes, faces covered in a thin layer of dry sand, looking like we hadn't had nary a sip of water in a very long time. After hours and hours of wandering we would begin imagining that we were looking for lost gold in the Egyptian dessert while being chased by hungry, slightly demonic camels who were being steered by our grade 2 teachers, who, incidentally, seemed quite well-hydrated. We would return home late at night and drink glass after glass of water and apply enough aloe vera to temper the pain so that we could return to the dunes once again the next sunny day. In the summer when I was 9, we learned the negative effect of sand-induced deliriousness, when, on our way home, we mistook a police horse for a water fountain. The officer took us back home to our parents and asked lots of questions about drug use and hygiene. While he was talking we decided to tie ourselves into an actual human knot - when this proved to difficult, we tried to fly his horse to Hawaii. I miss those carefree days of my youth.

Nearing my hometown, I pass by many fields of corn. I remember the time my friends and I decided to built a corn maze. We didn't know a thing about constructing mazes, but wanted to impress our teacher, Mr. Ashan, with a seemingly impossible maze. He was always teasing us about being unable to design mazes (an initially welcome reprieve from usual teasing topics). After a few years of his playful cajoling, we decided to prove him wrong. It wasn't a unanimous decision, two of the five of us wanted to go for frozen yogurt.  After weeks of planning, we set forth and somehow developed a maze that was so hard to get through that we became lost in our own design for a week. We were trapped in the middle square of our labyrinth, the corn plants thin and seemingly scraping the sky. We huddled together and kept ourselves company singing songs, telling ghost stories and eating a variety of preparations of corn. Fortunately we brought along our camping stove. The first night we had a fairly pedestrian corn on the cob and some steamed corn. Now I'm not sure if it was the full moon or the clean, fresh air, but very quickly our week's menu became a gastropod's fantasy. The second day we had truffle and porcini mushroom polenta with a corn beurre blanc; the third, we had a savory corn griddle cake served with a green, tomatillo and corn salsa and the fourth, we had corn served two ways -  a roasted corn salad with sugar snap peas and sun-dried tomatoes served along side a deconstructed corn dog. Good thing little Freddie decided to get back at his parents for not letting him practice his clarinet inside the house by raiding their pretentious yet, tasty pantry and fridge. Near the end of the week, we were torn between staying where we were and eating like kings or returning to our homes as our parents were probably worried. It was a tough decision but it was made a whole lot easier when a huge fight broke out over whose interpretation of a corn frittata was more classically Spanish. All good things have to end, but it wasn't all bad - the sheer amount of corn ingested was turning my insides into an amusement park (the kind which is not at all amusing). The first night home my parents celebrated my return by making corn fritters and I shrieked and ran upstairs to my room - where only listening to the smooth stylings of cool jazz could calm me down.

I pass through the city limits. Nearly there- my heart beat quickens from an already rapid military march to a pace more suited for a rave or excited electrons. I see the library and I'm whisked back in time to grade 11 when Boris, Glenda and I invented own fictitious language (sort of like Klingon or Latin) with no clear intent - I just had an upset stomach from a bad egg salad sandwich. We spent many an afternoon devising letters, words and phrases as well an overly annoying tone in which it had to be spoken with. One day an angry Boris got up and left after an exhaustive presentation that would put a doctoral student to shame on his selection and rationale for how to write lower case letters. Glenda just disagreed and wouldn't back down, so we continued as a duo until we realized our big oversight- we had 39 different, unique words meaning "happy" but no word for "dexterous" which had been the point all along. 

Finally a block from my family home. I can't put a finger on how I feel, so I pull over and try to figure out if I am more trepidatious or full of angst or possibly just over zealous. Then I realize what I am feeling is cold. I put on my jacket and continue on.

There is the forest across the street from the house. I spent much time as a young boy searching for hidden poisonous plants, running from poisonous snakes, and one weekend in grade 8 I built a make-shift chemistry lab with the sole purpose of inventing new poisons. The giant fern leaves that once provided a canopy for me on lonely days seemed to wave to me in the wind, or possibly they were saying "you can't go home again" or more likely something very pro-fern.

And then I arrived.