Memory works in strange ways/cuts you down then makes you pay/one day you’ll be walking fine/the next day lightning hits you from behind…
Blue Rodeo, Last to Know
Look, listen. Forget about betting on football, politics, or the next move that you will make. Forget about the blunders and the calculations. Forget the bile and the choler. Forget about the sorrow, the twisting, the pain and the horror. There will be time for these things later in this life and in the next and the next. Perhaps the past is a shadow, empty, but at your heels. Perhaps it is like water, receding but sometimes flooding above the waterline. It may be the stuff of memory or the stuff of forecasts. It may be a black dog in the night. But never mind wondering about that for a moment and know that it is simply there, crystalline like sugar and salt: frozen perfection.
And so I find myself steeped in it this night of all nights. The fog hangs low on the city and some strange hand has clenched my brain, grasping with wispy fingers. Oh well. It will not relent, so I will. I have memories too, and most of the time I keep them at bay—cynicism works and when that fails there are more brutal remedies. But tonight I feel too tired to fight and maybe it is just and so that I do not. So I will indulge myself, my memories, and perhaps some things that are good and holy. I’m sure I told you there would be heroes; it may be that now is their time.
I remember driving across this country, East to West, roof racks loaded with the detritus of life much younger than this. I remember two girls curled up in the back seat while the sun set low over the green haze of a Northern Ontario forest cut by the grey ribbon of a road that unwound infinitely. I remember eyes and the lights in eyes and the lights in the lights of those eyes that shone like promises that could not be broken. Yes. I am slipping down a sentimental road, but hell, the night is dark and long and the fire burns low in everyone from time to time. Perhaps sentiment is not so bad when nothing else will do.
So I remember what my children can’t, and it teases my mind with the precision of a scalpel. There are photographs somewhere, but none are more real or honest than those in my brain. I prefer it this way; the colours are brighter and the lines more blurred. There can be everything if I can just piece it together. They were beautiful, self-contained and doubtless. Maybe I was too. Fear was just a number, and one that I had not yet been dealt. I remember the road and the long stretch of the sun on Lake Superior and the crooked cut of the rain in a sudden thunder headed cloud burst out above the Prairies. I remember the giant teepee and the truck stops and the cigarette smoke curling around my fingers. The cold in the night in Banff, when all the sleeping bags and winter coats and blankets and piles of sheets were barely enough, but the morning was a flashing of green on green of certain slants of light through the trees. Picnic tables, kindling, pajamas, mugs, sunglasses, roadmaps, and the incessant questions about if we would get a dog. Mountain passes, switchbacks, long arcing curves, the wheel sliding through my fingers, roadside stops, braided hair, and tired fists clenched in squinting eyes. Sagebrush in the sand, motels, gas stations, and more questions. Smiling faces. I see anticipation and expectation, hope in the wilderness. The dawn of the city. Good friends waiting. Cold bottles of beer. A warm heat rising from a street. A first home with a sunken living room and a slate fireplace. Sleep walking children. The first day of school. Pinatas in the park. I have a beard and then I don’t. My hair is long and then it isn’t. Jobs, ladders, the floor of a welder’s shop. Ground bits of steel. Daughters’ first friends. Laundry, waffles, neighbours across the fence. Tears. These parts of something from then transport themselves here on occasion. I do not ask, but time delivers.
I see memory in the face of my two children and for a moment all is good. And that is enough for today. I told you there would be heroes. And there will be tomorrows, but one day those will be less in number than the yesterdays. That is the sad tipping of life. The Hemingway moment. The laying on of impossible odds. But that day is not today. No. There are more windmills at which to tip and the knife of my brain is not dulled. But tonight, tonight the knife is sheathed and that is okay, I think. Pa liao, pa liao (let be, let be).
