Tag Archives: Friends

Castle

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Just the other day, I was walking back to around my old stomping grounds, where, finally having only four years between me and a real life, a real career, and owning some real estate, was very imminent.  I could spend those four years partying and celebrating my imminent status, or, I could spend my time, studying, and eventually, buying my way into some status.

The truth is, no student is every the “perfect student.”  As soon as you get the letter in the mail, you immediately start ranking the courses, and the classes.  There will be those that I will spend an hour a week on, outside of the three hour lecture, and there are those, where, I will go to every lecture, do every essay, write every exam, and even send my Professor email about.  Which is of course the equivalent to waiting, preying, and pouncing on the poor Professor at the end of lecture.

Well, this is how it starts, and it is, I guess, a plan that should work, but then, facing reality, I never really attended every lecture, I only listened to what I wanted to listen to, and I only wrote what I thought was the truth, or, should be the truth.  Why?  Because I was “partying for four years” my just accepted, imminent status.  To this day, I am unsure what it is that should come from a four-year-degree.  I am appreciative of my status, as it is a sieve and a sorting machine to everyone, including those who do not attend college and university.  How true?  Maybe true.

As long as I am not dependent on the public to garnish my wages, which is dependant on my ability to look beautiful to the general public, then , I consider myself lucky.  Having people who are the educated, the qualified, to hire and fire me, makes me assured, and confident, that “yes” I do have a job, I do, have talent and enough brains, and smarts, to be worthy of it all.

So, back to the other day.  I just happened to have to meet a client near the University, just off-campus.  As I was leaving and walking back to my car, I happened to notice a new cafe lounge. I was in the place where a cheap dive was.  This place used to attract students in the area almost every night of the week.  Lots of bands, and sometimes just a DJ, so, Rave-like, anyone could spend $5 and dance the entire night.  Well, now, there was a place called “Castle.”  On the sign, was the “subtitle,” Board Game Cafe and Lounge.  It seemed to me that some student, like me, who used to hang out at the students’ lounge on campus, like me, thought it would be cooler to walk off the grounds and visit a place that could offer board games.  My question, immediately, is … “I can play a board game while drunk?”

As I was in a hurry that day, I did not open the door and walk in.  But, in my imagination, is that two possible things can happen…..  The interior could be completely quiet, much like a library, where gamers will play with each other on the board games, whispering all their moves, muffling their cries of victory, or there could be nice “lounge music,” a darkened interior, and a sea of voices, a clink of glasses, and the sounds of gamers playing with each other at a board game.  Both can fact the same result: not enough of either type of student.  I am not sure I can make it off-campus in, let’s say, the extra two or three hours I have between classes.  And Saturdays, back in my day, were the best day to rush my homework, so that I could drink myself drunk that evening and sleep in the next day.  There were times I even consistently invested in Sunday Brunch for a semester with one of my other classmates. So, in any case, I feel “Castle” is caught in between two groups of students.  Those who are quiet and those who want to get drunk doing something different, like cow-tipping while drunk, if you’re in the country.  The people who truly have the time and money to just “drop by” Castle, are those who are newly graduated.  Those, perhaps, not quite into the starter-job, yet, but still have some money, and time, and are sill keen on that student-single-fun lifestyle.

As for myself, I saw this store front, and felt nostalgia for that two-storey dance pad.  I loved leaving all the books, all the paper, the computer, and the laptop at home, in my rented room.  The thing I would love to go to Castle for, is any drink I can’t have at home.  But, nowadays, this place has come too late for me.  I am owning a car that I cart my kids and husband around in.  All those extra hundreds that could be spent if I were more frugal?  I buy trinkets–jewellery, cute-toy hangars, a chocolate bar, appetizers, desert, and the prettier body wash and body lotion.

I wonder, when there will be no more babies born, what will happen to these “Board Game Cafe and Lounges?”  I have curiosity to go in, but i also have the experiences to know that these novelty, niche, experiences, tend to disappear.  It is too quiet or too much activity.  I move slowly now, and even in my middle age, I will only move at any speed, if I am not distracted by silence.  It’s funny.  I have yelled at my kids so often, to be quiet, and here I am admitting that I don’t work, that I don’t do anything, if all I have is silence.  The radio will always be on.  The typing from the next cubicle keeps up pace.  The phone rings.  And what I call silence falls in between.  This is a world I work in, and I have found, it is a world that I love.  So, kids and husband!  Keep it down!!

My Memory of the Most Fun

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The most fun I have ever had was a very, very long time ago.  We were at the theme park, not for the first time that summer… probably it was our third or fourth time there.  The fun was that I had the whole map of the park in my head… Not just where the front entrance was of where the Smurf Village was… but detailed locations of each ride and the direction of the water rides and the baby rides too.  It was amazing, to command such personal power.  I felt I could go anywhere, without feeling like I was guessing and getting myself lost.

I still remember that day.  I traveled the whole park and had fun knowing where I was going to meet up with so-and-so, or him, or her.  We did not have cells phones, and no one actually bought walkie-talkies.  After playing with toys like connected phones, batteried walkie-talkies, and anything as fun and futuristic, we knew the real thing was worth waiting for.  So, in this dark age, we had our maps, our watches to tell time, and the promise to be back at the main gates, if, God forbid, we were to get lost.

What mad this “routine day at the park” the most fun, was that our parents let us run free.  Nowadays, with cell phones, there is no way to recreate the “free feeling” coupled with the “a sense of fear and excitement” from the possibility of becoming lost and never found again except as a chopped up corpse at the back of the theme park where a swampy forest grew.

The real fun, of course, was being out of sight and getting on the “best” rides, again and again, if we were so enamored.  We could also buy all the funnel cakes with double ice cream and strawberry sauce with nuts and pieces of chocolate cookies as well… Without our parents warning that we would never be able to eat dinner.  For some reason, this was before my first job (I got one as soon as I could lawfully be paid), and I think my mom was generous on this day.  So, with what I thought was enough money to ransom a mouse from a cat, I had fun all day…  Getting lost, buying everything I wanted, and staying until the sky got dark and the crickets and the stars came out.

I feel lucky that I have a memory of fun that is actually officially sanctioned by adults and by the law.  I now look for fun things with a mind much more attentive to how slow things go rather than how fast things go.  I wander the liquor stores to find “Vintage” rather than “50 Proof.”  I pay money to watch athletes, professional acrobats, and other people pushing the limits of living, so that I can laugh at them.  And sometimes, the laughs don’t come until the final score is made.

So,  as the height of summer approaches, I am going to slowly sit in my Muskoka Chair by the lake, and sip a cocktail that I hand make from several bottles of beer and liquor, and enjoy the fact that it will take the sun several hours to set. I won’t go back into the cottage until I hear the lonely, forlorn, cry of the loon for its mate.

Going Drinking

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It was evening, and one of my friends had got the four of us together to go to mid-town to what he said was a party at his friend’s house.  We took the subway down and met just at the entrance.  We were barely sixteen, being all in the same grade at the same school.  When we got there, he said that he wasn’t sure of the exact house, but he knew the street.  So, with full confidence in the situation and in our friend, we began to walk towards the side streets.  As we turned a few corners, we noticed that the houses took on a certain air.  They were on large plots of land, with long driveways, green lawns, neatly manicured, and the houses themselves were a beautiful Tudor style and color.  I began to wonder if I had dressed well enough.  At sixteen, I didn’t have enough in my paid job to dress like I came from money.  But, my friend had never actually been wrong in anything, and I trusted that I wouldn’t be a pariah at the party.

Before we left the station, when all of us had arrived, our friend announced that he had brought a few bottles of beer with him, so that we wouldn’t have to worry about bringing something to the party.  Again, I trusted my friend.  I felt as if we were doing the right things and that there would not be sudden embarrassment and trouble, with anyone, let alone the police.

It was summer and the evening was turning to dusk, and we were excited, talking about the things that just jumped to mind.  We had been to parties with our friend before and there was definitely, always, bound to be alcohol and some marijuana.  We were the type to usually just arrive with nothing much, let alone a few bottles of beer.  So, being the mooches, we relied on our friend to cover for us.

So, this time we were excited, anticipating, hopeful, and imagining the rest of the night.  Because we were in such an affluent neighborhood, I think we were imagining bar service, a separate room where you would go to smoke up, and just about everything else including a pool out in the back that would be lit for the night.  The strange thing, however, was our friend.  He said, every now and then during conversation, that he couldn’t remember the address, but that he could recognize the house.  This was worrying me a little, as all the houses looked the same to me.  But, the excitement of being in such a rich place, in summer, with a few bottles of beer rattling in the backpack of our friend, at the age of sixteen, made the worry less and the excitement more.

As time was passing, the sky was dimming, and the dusk was turning to a darker night.  Some of the houses had front lights that were turned on, now.  The street had been quiet since we had walked into the neighborhood, and for the whole time we were there.  I noticed, because we were practically walking in the middle of the asphalt road since there were no sidewalks.  It felt unusual that there was no car traffic, or bicycles, or other pedestrians, or people around the houses, at all.  We were all, as a collective conscious, becoming aware of the strangeness of the situation and we were becoming worried.  We all had already said to our friend that we thought it would be alright if we didn’t show up at the party.  I think we felt that the neighborhood had a fakeness about it.

At about this time, our friend changed the direction of our intent.  He suggested that we just stop by at the playground he knew was nearby and just hang out on the jungle gym and playsets.  With the added incentive of drinking a bottle of beer.  We, as a collective, became discouraged. The reason for a house party was being able to avoid the police, and now, our friend was suggesting exactly the opposite.  He wanted to go to the playground where the police would for sure come and question us.  So, we began to suggest just forgetting everything and going back to the subway and all just going home again.

As we turned a few more corners and got close to the subway entrance again, we stopped in a partly empty parking lot. WE sat on the raised curbs and just started the last talk.  We were partly disappointed as we thought we could’ve had fun that night, and in the height of summer on a beautiful night.  Our friend rattled the bottles of beer in his backpack again, but we didn’t take.

Soon as night was on us, we thanked our friend, anyway, for just being the one to do everything.  He said he was sorry, but that next time he would make sure he knew the address.  In disappointment, although with a light heart, we all parted ways, hugging each other, and promising to call.  As I was leaving, I couldn’t decide if I was disappointed, as I would’ve liked being at such a cool place at such a cool party.  I also knew that I was only surviving in this world.

I still remember this particular night, though.  It was one of the few nights where we never made it to the party.  Usually, we could find our way to having fun, as the more people having fun, the more fun everything is, which is why when there is a party, people just invite everyone.  I think of this night as one of the missed opportunities.  It was a rich and beautiful neighborhood, which signified safety.  It was somewhere where we would fit, as sixteen year olds.  And we were already “baptized” in the vices of the underworld, so, we knew we would have fun, and that we would fit in.  So, missing the house, missing the party, and missing the “amenities” at the party, made us feel like losers.  We didn’t know whether we should blame our friend for not remembering the address, or the phone number, or for creating this particular situation where we felt like “losers.”

As we sat in the partly filled parking lot, and the street lights all came on, we all said our goodbyes to each other.  We promised to call.  Next week.  And everyone just left.  As for me, I just planned to go home, which I did.  I knew that even the end of the world would not be something I missed.  So, cheers to that night, and cheers to summer parties that happen in the warm dark, being surrounded by friends and a beautiful house.

Her Fearful Symmetry

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The first time I saw beauty in the most fearful place, I held my gaze and could only turn away when I started to breathe again, my shallow breath only allowed in when my muscles around my chest and neck could work once again.  I took a deep swallow, and asked an odd question, “Why is there two of that girl?”

Identical people puzzle me.  They look like each other, and often tail each other closely, starting and finishing each other’s word to the complete agreement of each other.  They dress in the same dress, and for some reason become completely lost and awol when the other disappears.  They tail each other from the time they are born to the time they pass on.  They are completely famous without the fame.  In public, people recognize their existence, albeit, only from the point of view of being in the presence of two beautiful and exceptional people, but they are recognized.  It seems, twins, and being a twin, makes for interesting gossip and talk and fulfills the need in some people to have confirmation of the extra-ordinariness of life. The very bodily existence of twins is very strong and loud evidence of life.  It is confirmation without true proof as to what life is.  Is it a brain?  Is it the beauty of models’ bodies?  Is it the strength and accuracy of athlete’s muscles?  Is it our ability to talk?  Our ability to create fictions, and stories and plan for the future? Is it our ability to create and rate and fall in love?  Do we create love?  And if so, do we create life?  Is life and love a very spontaneous accident?  Or is there a scientific method and law as to how it all happens?

I am looking at a conversation that two people are having.  One of them keeps insisting that twins are better off than all other kinds of human beings.  To have a bond that never breaks because there is nothing that is the match of that bond….  no words, no actions, no ideas, no love…  This is a very deep thing to say and think!  That being a twin for life literally means neither will ever be alone, even if one passes on, or if they find someone to marry, the twins to each other are never truly alone.  They would share that love as well!

I imagine this situation, the one in the overheard conversation….  To say that if I am in trouble, that there will be someone who will be there to save me…..  This, too, is very deep…  Any girl would like to be in this situation!  To have security forever!  I imagine this situation, and I think, I would be very satisfied!  Perhaps, twins are better off than any other type of human being!

Unfortunately, I was not born a twin.  I am single, and I am this way for my entire life.  I have learned to live with this “difficulty” in a way that makes me more willing to try my luck and to try to make friends, even in an unlikely situation.  I am often in a lonely job, as writers tend to have to do their work in isolation, and in quiet, and in full concentration of brain work  so that they can hear their own thoughts.  Writing is messy, and if you don’t catch your thoughts and ideas quickly… they will fly off and disappear!  So, this is how I feel secure….  Hearing myself and editing myself and creating word-filled pages that work and feel like magic!

So, am I resigned to this life?  Well, of course.  There is nothing that  I would wish undone.  There is nothing that I would wish redone….  (Sometimes when I am angry, or feeling jealous, I do wish that my entire life were redone… but that is a situation that even twins cannot outwit.  Being angry and /or jealous is natural even if your twin is perfect evidence of what the situation is.)

So, here is my life.  Summer is just starting, and I am becoming very busy with all the plans that are floating around the house.  My husband wants this….  My kids want that….  And then, do we have time to visit grandma?  Will there be time enough to buy a season’s pass to the theme park?  And, are the kids ready to take on over night camp?

These are not necessarily easy decisions to make.  Being bad and getting slightly poor grades are not conducive to going out to play at the waterpark…  It is more likely that summer school will be the result and consequence of that!

Life is not easy….  As the anthem of my generation states, “Life is a mystery, and we must stand alone.”  It is tragically beautiful, and, I bet, this is one thing that twins do not understand!

Hanging Out With Friends

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Look in the distance, do you see the car driving on the hills?  It’s like seeing the roller coaster when it’s far away–the train of cars travel the track–the noise clicking and clacking.  The ride down the hill is a rush of noise and wind.  The screamers have no qualm and scream.

I think the roller coaster is like the popping corn machine at the movie theatre.  Irrisistible.

The hills are beautiful.  Come hang out with me there.  It’s as far as you can see, and then, it just drops….  Into the valley on the other side.  It’s a place in suburbia, surprisingly.  No need to drive for two hours for this fun.  We can make it there in summer or in winter.  It’s just a big hill, so, you have to bring your own picnic.

The hills are on top of each other, building up, climbing higher, and the mounds can be seen, following them, up, into the horizon.  They change colour with each season…  white with a blanket of snow in winter, the greyish green of regeneration in spring, the bright, bright green of healthy growth in summer, and the yellow of dying grass in fall.  It is beautiful here.  And, I do have to travel to get here, but not like when I want to find myself skiing on a hill.

I miss the days when the roller coaster was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.  It was complete and utter beauty.  Strength, power, noise, propelled movement, and the thrust and rust o wind.  I saw the engineers sitting at their drafting tables, perhaps their hands on a keyboard and a mouse, as they made the ability of flight come alive.  I loved that riding the hill downward gave me a reason to scream.

I miss that all of my friends and I could just go, on a bus, out to a whole bunch of wild rides…, our favourite one being the Wild Beast.  It was rickety because it was built when wood was cheaper than reinforced steel, and we loved imagining the possible catastrophy of the wood cracking and ripping and just collapsing beneath the weight of the cars with us in it, flying.  Part of my scream was a dare to the inanimate wood to just collapse!

Today, I am more likely to become motion sick on those rides.  I get off, feeling nauseas, and wishing that good things could last forever.  Why is it roller coasters only exist in my memory?  Anything that they are now, are just illness-causing games…  I gamble with myself, with my children, and with my younger cousins and my new nephews saying…  “The next one….  I’ll get on the next one….  I’m not too sick yet!!!”

Do we only go on these rides because we imagine what it is first, before ever, ever, even approaching close to one?  Do we hear the words, “roller coaster,” and know what it is?  Or is the sight of a train of cars running on a track and making a rhythmic beat all the way to the top, …  and we’ve already decided?  Do we watch the cars follow the round about tracks until the end, making sure no one dies, and then, fearlessly, make our decision to go on it?

I tease my nephews, they are young, and fearless, and will attack anything that even sounds remotely fun.  It is a rite of passage towards the time when riding… a hill, a board, or a car, involves more than just daring.  It involves responsibility…., and more importantly, the ability to take control, which is the ability to use the power in your hands.  At what point does all of this make sense?  So, it’s not about booking with mom and dad about borrowing the car for the weekend…., or even for just a few hours…., it’s about filling it up with gas, it’s about parking it in an appropriate place, not only to save on the parking ticket, but so that the car just doesn’t get lifted.  There’s also not putting too many friends into the car, as that makes the car go fast–and the friends screaming their approval about making the car go fast, will make it go fast.  This is a trap for instant car accident if not instant paralysis from getting hurt in the accident.

I miss the days when friends were easy to find and easy to entertain… now, going out with friends, there is a minimum investment of a few hundred dollars just to start the evening.  We leave the kids at home, with a babysitter….  We take the car….  We go a little earlier for drinks….  Then, there is dinner, and, if it is in the evening, sometimes there is a show we can catch.  Lunch is similar…  Cheaper, but difficult to do, is the shopping trip with the girlfriends.  Everyone is on a different schedule, and this makes spending an afternoon together difficult to plan into happening.  But, as human beings always are, when there’s something that we can take advantage of, and, gain from, we will probably plan it into happening.

So,  from the days of  “riding the rails,” when my heart hit the quick beat, now, just driving the safely back from a trip and seeing the house up the drive and getting into the garage, is a true treat, making my heart hit that quick beat.

My First Fiction

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The first time I wrote, I used pencil, thinking to erase everything wrong and making it perfect.  It was on ruled paper with the red line for a margin on the left hand side.  It is easy to feel creative when what is objectionable on the paper can be replaced with something real and beautiful.

I was a child whose hands could not span the space of the keys on a computer, or, even on a typewriter.  I was, nonetheless excited about writing something called a “story” or what is called “fiction.”  It was a simple story about going home after school.

It didn’t even take up for than a page, and I was “skipping lines,” or, as is the computer-speak, I was “double-spacing.”  I loved the story.  It was fun for me to write about one of the things that always made me happy….  And excited.   It was about home.  It was about change of time.  It was about having the control for myself to decide that I’d be leaving school and walking home.  It felt like I was making the decision.  It felt like the absolute right thing to do.

I handed it in to the teacher.  She had given us class time to write it….  The idea of homework in those olden times was objectionable.  It wouldn’t be until we were at least in grade five or six that there would be an hour of homework a night  and sorts of projects that parents were supposed to help out with.

We didn’t know what our teacher would really do with the stories, but, surprise, the next day, she returned them to us, fully marked with red pen and encouraging words written to support all the markings.  She told us to bring them home for our parents to read!  We were completely excited.  At least I felt like that, as I had always loved books and the stories that teachers read out loud to us, and story tellers told us.

In addition to the sweet,  sweet, chance to have my mom read it and tell me she loved it, was the chance the teacher surprised a few of us with.  Myself and three others were asked to read our stories out loud to the rest of the class!  I was in “Writer’s Heaven!”  Not only did I have the satisfaction of writing something fictional….  But I was going to have people hear (and if I included my teacher, people would read) my work, and I would have the glow of feedback.  These were my friends.  These were my peers.  And….  It was like an International Juried Fiction Prize had been awarded with the authority of my teacher all over the page I wrote!

At this age, I was not a good speller.  And, truly, it was not always the first thought on my mind.  Nonetheless, I knew what the words were. even though they were mis-spelt, so there was no difficulty in creating understanding when I read it out loud.  However, from this high and excitement of class, and then going home, I had quite a great fall.  I showed my mom the page, and she praised me for the work, creating agreement between my mom’s and my teacher’s points of view.  My mom even asked me to read it out loud….  And just like in class, I read it out loud.

We handily clipped this precious page to the fridge.  My pride swelled.  And, now, I was waiting for my dad to get home, and see it too!

As soon as I heard my dad unlock the door and come into the foyer, I happily ran to greet him.  He was excited to see me too!  I quickly told him to go look at the fridge and read my work!!!!

Within minutes, he called to me to come into the kitchen.  “Elissa,” he said, “Do you know something?”  And I was confused, and shook my head as a “No.”

“Well,” my dad said, “I think you have made a spelling mistake…  In fact two spelling mistakes!”

I confusedly shook my head…  “It looks like you don’t know how to spell ‘Arthur’ or ‘light’, “my dad said.”  “Arthur” was our dog’s name, and I had mis-spelled  “streetlight.”  My dad continued, “It is not perfect.  So, the ‘A+++’ your teacher gave you is not real…  You only made an ‘A’.”

My disappointment was great.  I think even at that time, when I was so young, I already thought of myself as a writer.  I was sure that I would always write.  I took a deep breath, and swallowed up my pride, being unable to try to counter argue with my dad.

Even now, when I am so lucky to have ‘Spell Check’ and an ability to read dictionaries, I find the need to double check all my spellings very important.  Sometimes, I nonchalantly disregard the highlighted red markings on the computer screen, but, I am never truly satisfied until I have “fixed” the spelling.