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i am thirty-six years old.

i have been now, actually, for almost two weeks.  the birthday was ushered in at the Queen’s Hotel in Leeds, art deco palace extraordinaire, with the queer early-morning wakefulness of jet lag.

off kilter and groggy, but curious about hotel lobbies and the  wet shadows of English streetscapes at 5:30 am, i went downstairs and had porridge.

oatmeal.  before dawn.  i am so totally ready for middle age.
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i was always the youngest in my group of friends, just a bit younger in times when age was measured in quarter-years rather than decades, a January baby in a province where the cut-off date for starting school demanded you be 5 by January 31st of your kindergarten year.  i was 5 on January 24th.  i was 17 when i graduated and moved away.

i always felt like i was running double fast just to get old enough to count, to do something interesting, to be heard.  to be worthy of being heard, to have enough life under my belt to stop being treated like an ingenue.  i never felt like an ingenue, not inside.  under the chipmunk cheeks that got me carded until i was 25, i was an old soul afraid i’d miss some corner of the human experience, trying to suck out all the marrow of life…right now.

funny, but after a couple of decades of marrow and human experience, some self-inflicted and some totally random, like train wrecks, i’m full up.  i am weary.  more raw than i like to admit.  sitting there on the morning of my birthday, sedately spooning up my porridge and looking back over my neglected but beloved journal as i dribbled cream all over the fancy linen tablecloth, i realized that if i could look ahead and see no more loss, no more despair, or grief, or desparation…only quiet, domestic pleasures and a unglamourous, undramatic life ahead of me for the rest of my days until i fade gently into that good night with my affairs all in place (and preferably a few grandchildren), oh my god i would be so fucking grateful.

i used to want to be a rock star.   i used to want to be older and more experienced.  i was young and stupid.

now, i’m thirty-six years old and terrified.  that there’s more.  i just want to hide under that linen tablecloth, with my live baby boy and my other blessings, and pray to all that’s holy and unholy for Passover.

Friday night and Dave & i got to talking, reminiscing about this guy we both used to know long before we were a couple, this guy who was loud and funny and brash and shameless. and since we knew him mostly at different times we were swapping stories and i, of course, won because this guy once passed out on my couch and – literally piss drunk – had a little accident and then fled into the night, a fact which came to my attention the following morning when the new potential sublet people came over to see the apartment and perched themselves on the couch and said, with an odd nervous look creeping over their faces, “it’s wet.”

old friends, they’re golden. and because i am a sentimental sort and wanted to see that guy’s goofy face again i beetled upstairs and dug out the old photo albums, the ones i kept faithfully pretty much from junior high straight through until about my 30th birthday, when a year of backpacking and the advent of the digital camera killed my fetish for the photo collection stone cold dead. flipping through the pages of the albums looking for the one with goofy friend and the giant bouquet of daisies he brought over the day after the piss couch incident, order and layout all coming back to me faintly because i once spent hours arranging all these photos just so…i was, suddenly, overcome with sadness.

i don’t scrapbook. i barely print my photos anymore. but up in the den are close to fifteen thick albums of my former life in pictures, me trapped forever in huge pink Coke-bottle glasses and a “Frankie Says Relax” tshirt, drunken shots of the college rugby team, of New Year’s Eve parties from 1987 through 2000, photos of my grandmother in her last days, kids i taught up North who later committed suicide, me holding babies who are now in high school, and my wedding, and Dave’s a year later. all so real at the time, and all so long ago. the albums are catalogues of a life that looks so linear laid out in pictures like that, a life that seems to have receded utterly into the past along with the people who populate the sticky, yellowing pages.

but what made me sad was that the albums themselves seemed as anachronistic as the smiling photos of me and First Husband. they are dead media just as what once was a “we” is now a relationship i peer at through the cellophane covering the pictures and try, in vain, to remember. they are antiques, artifacts of another time. in my world, at least, video never did kill the radio star, but flickr has annihilated the once-cherished medium of the physical, tangible album.

Oscar has never shown any interest in the photo albums in the den, though they’re brightly coloured and stored at his eye level. this morning when he and i got up, the old album with the photos of the piss couch guy was still sitting on the coffee table where Dave & i’d left it. after three rounds of “Hop on Pop,” it finally caught his eye, and so i hoisted it up onto our laps and opened it. and my son was floored. this was not a book! this was pictures of mama! and other people! and cats he hadn’t met yet! he looked for pictures of his father and seemed comforted when i was able to scrounge up one or two toward the end. he displayed a curious interest in photos of First Husband, even when i didn’t show up in them. he seemed amenable to the medium of the photo album overall, if quizzical about a collection of pictures that included none of him. but when we came to the end, he promptly slammed the heavy book shut, turned to the laptop beside us, and shouted “more!” he wanted to look at flickr.

in the old folk tale Chicken Little, an acorn falls on the head of a naive and gullible chicken, who jumps to the conclusion that the sky is falling. in a tizzy, she runs about the town shouting about imminent disaster, and whips the populace into mass hysteria…which an unscrupulous fox uses to manipulate the chicken and her fellow citizens to his own benefit. in other words, he eats them.
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it has come to my attention that i am a colossal, erm, fake.

i started the month – and the fresh new year – full of good, fine intentions. everything was coming up green. we were going to become more healthy hereabouts at the crib, and more earth-friendly, too. we were going to make a difference in our own lives and the world’s by eating less meat and more local foods, buying nothing that we didn’t actually, genuinely need (say, um, a helmet for Oscar’s premier venture on bob skates), using up what lurks in our freezer, and walking and generally exercising more. plus i was going to start a clothing exchange for kids’ stuff, or at least in my own mind, i was…i don’t think that plan ever made it to the public stage. but i was going to harness the power of teh internets, see, and bring people together and, you know, divide loaves and fishes and generally create a rainbow connection that would result in global harmony, a halt to climate change, and thinner thighs.

we are now approaching the end of month one of this fine venture. the community-building and clothing-exchanging end of the plan never even got verbalized properly. the exercycle saw a few minutes’ work but is now gathering dust once more. we flew to England and back, burning loads of jet fuel for half-empty planes both ways, and ate nothing but poor dead cows and lambs encased in pastry the entire time we were there. our deep freeze did get divested of some of its long-term inhabitants (yesterday’s near-province-wide power outage almost got them all out, and for good) and we have managed to eat the majority of the vegetables we bought this month, but i’ve also personally consumed about three boxes of leftover Christmas chocolates. Dave’s started leaving all the lights on again. yeh yeh. it ain’t easy being green.

and sometimes, with these kicks of better living i go on sporadically, i start to feel like the boy who cried wolf…shouting out “getting healthy! going greener!” and then, um, sitting down on my squishy butt and opening another bag of individually plastic-wrapped candies made out of pesticides and corn syrup. and worse, i begin to suspect that my green guilt and half-hearted efforts are the cornerstone of something even darker: that every time i fail to put my money where my mouth is i not only condone the illogic of rampant consumerism and blind, short-term societal self-satisfaction, but feed it and benefit from it like the fox in Chicken Little. every time i give in, i add to the chorus of cynical disbelief. every time i give up, i weigh in on the side of how hard it is to really be green, to live an earth-friendly life in this day and age. so i not only get to then enjoy the fruits of my unsustainable lifestyle whilst feeling virtuous for having made such a noble effort, but i lend my virtual voice to the general idea that this is all just to big and too hard for any of us to make a difference about, and that trying is just running around like Henny Penny, squawking foolishly.

but i do not believe that. and i do not want to give up. and so, with each new month, i will start again…Sisyphus pushing uphill, perhaps…but every so often, i may gain ground. and dear readers, you will keep me honest, whether you care about my personal Chicken Little saga or not. just because you’re there. and because i would hate for you to think i was a manipulative fake, even more than i hate to, erm, admit it to myself occasionally.
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one of the reasons i think i’m attracted to flights of fancy about my cyclically impending personal green revolutions is that i spent a great deal of my childhood in a family deeply governed by the Protestant work ethic and the scarcity mentality of the Great Depression. in my home, saving mattered. money was hard to save because it was hard to come by, but food and resources were carefully planned and accounted for, time was well used, and the act of making something “go a little further” was inculcated in me as an inherent pleasure more delightful than sunshine. we were frugal in a way that would have made every stereotypical Scottish ancestor in our clan lineage just bust with pride. saving was not just economic, it was moral. and waste was a source of shame that luckily, given our financial limitations, my mother and i simply did not have to stagger under in the way that others more burdened by excess did.

it does not take a psychologist to see how, in my banal middle-class adulthood, a part of me thrills to the idea of tightening my bootstraps and taking on the fine (ie. moral) challenge of reducing waste on all fronts, both commercial and environmental. i’m deeply attracted to the romance of scarcity, you see. when i was a kid i used to put myself to sleep imagining that i was trapped on a boat for a year and had to creatively, cheaply, and nutritiously stock the pantry with just the right number of tin cans. i like to imagine if any lard-ass North American can survive the projected apocalypses of oil crashing and seas rising…well, it’s gotta be me, right? i could make a case of beans last a year and Like It, at least in my own addled mind.

but a few things happened over the past week or so to point out to me what a crock of shit that little childhood hangover is. first, we spent three days last week in York, England. beautiful, historical, totally flooded York. i’ve never been witness to a flood before, not in person. and it struck me, standing on a stone bridge abutted by an 800-ish year old tower, well aware from my earlier trip through the Yorkminster crypts that the street level of the town has actually risen by at least six feet over the last millenium or two, that the fact that the water was completely covering the park benches on the riverbank really couldn’t be a good sign. and i noted that i don’t know how to swim. especially in sewage.

my survivalist daydreams were further disrupted yesterday when 90% of my province lost power for a couple of hours in the wake of an ice storm. i was at work. it was 12:0-something-or-other and i was really getting hungry and preparing to head to the campus cafeteria for pizza when the lights went out. by the time i dug my way out from the sudden blackout in the windowless, airless hole that is my office, it became clear that the cafeterias had, erm, shut. so i thought gamely, hell, i’ll drive to the sandwich shop! they have cold food! (note, i did not consider walking. but it was icy, so i excuse myself). Dave & i met up, got in the car, and drove to where the campus exits onto one of Charlottetown’s main arteries, which is still only a two-lane stree…normally pretty scantily populated by traffic at lunchtime. but yesterday, the whole city was on the move. lines of traffic snaked both ways as far as the eye could see, half the population piled into cars, aimlessly and lunchlessly steering towards where they hoped food might be. but nearly everything had closed and locked its doors, cold food or not…because all the cash registers are electronic.

it was like an eerie vision of a future i hope never comes. never before have i had hammered home to me how clearly dependent we all are on the constructions and fictions that make up this society…all of us like soft helpless sheep, driving in our little tin cans, using gas, money in our pockets…totally unable to feed ourselves as we steer towards the empty promise of open doors and possible hamburgers, unattainable.

i went home and ate rice chips and cheese, and watered my plants, and realized how odd it really is to be growing things in my home that i cannot eat.  because those plastic cards in my wallet?  untasty.

there are castles here, and it is green even in the winter, pansies blooming in the city flowerbeds.  things are far older than they are where we live, with medieval fortifications and giant hewn Tudor beams and 300 year old pubs to wither my notion of Canada having any history whatsoever, and yet the place feels way more hip, too…i could take up residence over a Marks & Spencer grocery with its unlimited supply of wee bocconcini salads and organic food options and local roasts and puddings and seriously never cook again.   we climbed the 275 steps of Yorkminster tower this morning, an age ago already, time inflated and bloated by the strange vivid circuitousness of travelling, of watching, of waiting for schedules and rushing for trains.  but from the top of the tower under the low, gray sky, removed from the immediacy of being a sycophantic tourist and holding my trusty pink hat tight to my head, all i wanted to see was over the hills way way west to my boy, and way into the future when we could bring him here and he too would be old enough to find these narrow, winding staircases magical.

and while i was laughing at myself and thinking about how we all seem to want to give our children our own personal versions of a happy childhood, Oscar was at Emergency with his grandmothers with a fever of 102.

he has an ear infection.

and suddenly the pansies just look out of place and out of season, and i am wishing we were home, wishing for the dullness of our small, provincial town where nothing is terribly old or cool, but where a small sick boy has a sore ear and might be wanting his mama.

we leave tomorrow for five days, off to Blighty for work, both of us. without Oscar.

i am excited – any chance to travel is cool by me, especially to historic parts of Britain previously unvisited by my Anglophilish self. even if they do make me work while i’m there.

while we took Oscar with us when we went to England last spring, i’m not entirely sorry he won’t be accompanying us this time around. the flying wasn’t a gay old time, to say the least. i also wasn’t working on that sojourn, just tagging along on long-saved airmiles so O and i could wander the streets of London with our transplanted friend Elise, which was grand. that first trip, though, planted seeds that have recently blossomed into this work trip, and since i’m officially part of the work bit this time around, the whole deal would probably be somewhat less effective and productive with the charming ankle-biter along. i’m still a little amazed (um, read, frantically ill-prepared) about this journey really happening…certainly two trips in a year to England is the sort of thing i fantasized about throughout a childhood when i very literally never went anywhere.

but i have these monsters that live deep in the cellars of my heart. i keep them muzzled most of the time, but the upcoming trip has unleashed their voices. weak voices, but shrill, insistent. they’re nothing special, i assume, these monsters, nothing that any of you who aren’t parents or even just children of parents yourself wouldn’t recognize. and they’re tamer than many…but they scare me. i don’t worry about my boy in the loving, generous care of his grandparents while we’re gone…in that i am blessed. but i fear planes falling out of the sky. i fear terrible, random horrors.

i fear not coming back.

i cringe in shame at the half-finished will kit in our desk drawer, given up because the complications of trying to sort out the proper language for bestowing custodial rights to others on our own. i kick myself for not having made that lawyer’s appointment to clarify precisely those things, now that it is too late to do so. mostly i stick my head in the sand and mutter the quiet litany of “we’ll be back soon, love” over and over in my semi-conscious, willing it to be true because really, the stark truth is that Dave & i want to be here to love and raise our child and we’ve been too chicken to contemplate any other possibility in all its naked, monstrous ugliness.

and yet, you can’t hide from living because there are monsters under your bed, or in your heart. it is as true now as it was when i was six.

in her less touristy and far more courageous way, Whymommy has been staring down those same monsters over the last seven months, since her diagnosis of inflammatory breast cancer in June. she’s been fierce with them and their terrible whispers of weakness and statistics. she’s looked them straight in the eye through months of chemo and nausea and pain, and refused to look away. she’s been fierce because she too is unwilling to contemplate any other possibility than being here to see her two little boys grow up.

tomorrow, while we drag our bags to the airport, Whymommy goes to the hospital for a double mastectomy. she has spent nearly the last three weeks counting down to this surgery…day by day, staring the monsters straight in the eye and telling us all why she’s looking forward to an event that in itself would scare the living bejesus out of most of us…and many, many of her reasons come down to two primary, precious things: her boys.

i wish you godspeed in healing, Whymommy, friend, and the continued strength to keep fighting. with each day, you not only beat cancer, but doubt and fear.  and i thank you, for your fierce hope, your reminders these last many days of all the things that make a life rich and joyful and worth living.  for the grace and honesty you’ve shown us all as you face the monsters down.

may Sunday bring us both safely home to the boys we love.

he is getting so big.  and i see him so little when the days are washed and measured; so little time, really, for catching his eye and smiling, for playing, for holding him close while he still fits in my lap.

Saturday and this hits me, you see, right before we leave him for days to fly across an ocean, because the brain is a guilty, sentimental kind of muscle.  Saturday when he and i are mostly alone from 5:45 am on because Dave is working, and though that kind of early always finds me incompetent and staggering through the first few hours, it is still one of those sun-pours-in-like-butterscotch mornings that have been all too rare lately, gray days with flurries being the norm of the season this year.  the sun brings me back, suddenly, to last year’s cold, crisp winter when i was at home with a boy just learning to play, and just as suddenly the open rhythm of those cold, long, repetitive days seems utopian.  lately our days home alone, just O and i, have been storm days or sick days or just altogether draining days, me trying to catch up on the multitude of things to be done while a toddler wreaks havoc around me.  but Saturday, with the shafts of light beaming in on the floor, Oscar and i race toy horses round his train track, and line up Thomas the Tank Engine (and friends) all through his farmhouse in every possible permutation, and i can see through time to a Saturday someday when this playroom will be a dining room again, and the baby who will be 21 months tomorrow will be 21 for real and gone and grown.  and the two of us on the floor, huddled in pajamas on brightly-coloured playmats, laughing, are suddenly a snapshot to me, ghostly and precious and impossible to recapture.

we go for a walk a little later in the morning, O bundled within an inch of his life in the stroller, and we browse and window shop but mostly stay outdoors because it is a Great Affront to my opinionated young sir if i should try to remove the plastic windcover from his stroller or his hat or mittens from his person inside a store, despite the fact that i suspect he will melt if i do not.  and thus we bounce along the icy, crusty, slush-bound sidewalks, more flashbacks from the winter before and our daily walks to break the monotony of being housebound, and i had forgotten what a great workout pushing a stroller can be this time of year and i am happy and O is happy but the sun is in our eyes all the way back and between closing his eyes against the glare and all that bouncing, bouncing, by the time we arrive home he is fast asleep.

one of the visions i had of motherhood that never really came to pass was the one where i would sit, adoringly, with my sleeping offspring in my arms…or slip in by his bedside to watch him in the night.  O started life early and colicky, and sleep was a battle for a long time and one that no amount of rocking ever won, though i tried, and Dave tried.  he goes down easily, now, most nights, lies peaceably with his baby and his stuffed rabbit and his sippy cup of water after multiple stories, and we say goodnight and he says “bye bye!” and we seldom see him before, erm, 5:45 am…but slipping into his room is an urge i gave up on awhile ago, when my attempts resulted in dire regret.  so it’s rare that i get to watch him while he sleeps, this boy almost out of babyhood.

i drag the stroller up into the porch and remove the windcover and his boots and still he stays knocked flat out, snoring a little, lashes fluttering on his cheeks.  and i sit for a minute, smiling at him quietly.  i am joined by the cat, the two of us keeping vigil…one for novelty and love and one because the stroller is her preferred porch perch and i believe she was trying to stare him into wakefulness.

as i watch him, time slips for me again to the permutations of possible futures, and i can see in the shape of those still-baby-fat cheeks the stubble that will come, and the harsher planes of bone, and i am struck with the realization that someday someone else, perhaps, will watch him sleep like this, drifting, lashes fluttering, on a pillow probably far away from here.  and i remember mornings of my own past, waking next to those chosen or ill-chosen few who suddenly, in sleep, seemed impossibly beautiful to me and how i was filled with tenderness and knew that i was in trouble, or love, if the two are ever different.

the same tenderness filled me Saturday morning, watching my boy asleep in his stroller, understanding that i am in love in a way that swallows me whole and that this one i cannot even wish to have grow old with me, because such is not the way of things.

he will grow, and he will – i hope – find his own way, his own loves, his own sun-filled mornings with lovers or with children.  but this time i caught the snapshot – two, actually – for later, for the time when these moments are only memory.

it’s been three years.

three years since we got up at 5 am on a frosty morning and rushed by cab to the bus station and then across the street to the other bus station, dragging luggage like a wedding train, because we could never remember which place sold the Express Bus tickets. and then i found out that the Express Bus was sold out and was flabbergasted because it was 5 in the bloody morning and i’d never seen an Express Bus sold out but hey, there was a tour group and all my righteous indignation wasn’t going nowhere. so we caught another cab to the train station, Plan B…you lugging the bags and stuffing them in and out, bless you, and then you put me on the train bound for Seoul and by transfer to Incheon airport and i made it in time and changed plans at Narita outside Tokyo and then Vancouver, i think, or Toronto, and diverted to Montreal in a snowstorm and all the while i had an ultrasound photo stuffed in my passport just in case the opportunity arose to show it off and maybe get myself bumped up to a seat that reclined – hey, i’m pregnant, you know, and isn’t that special and just out of my first trimester, this trip is 36 hours door-to-door and getting longer all the time, any chance of an extra blanket and getting my pillow plumped? – and i was moving home, coming home, prodigal returns and kill the fatted calf.

my mother came out in that snowstorm by cab at 1 in the morning just to make sure i had someone to meet me. i had been gone almost sixteen years.

but i was coming home to make good and i had sent so many resumes on ahead and you would follow two weeks later when your contract got tied up and we were going to have a baby, a baby, a baby finally, and for the first time in my life i felt like i’d made choices rather than just being buoyed about by opportunity or lack thereof and i was so goddam happy and filled with possibility and grateful that you were willing to risk this small, insular place, this place where you’ll always be “from away” even though “away” is a four hour drive, in your case, and not really so foreign. and i woke up that first morning on the hide-a-bed in my mother’s apartment to a world that was snow white and blanketed three feet deep and i felt young again, surrounded by the childhood things of home, and safe.

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it has been three years, and you made it but so much else didn’t that i thought for a long time we’d drown in the water under the bridge. and yet here we are, still here, with this house and that blond boy upstairs sleeping and tonight it is snowing again. and i am happy and filled with possibility again and grateful just to have you with me, the two of you…father and son.

but the memory of that morning is like a snapshot i revisit every year, when its anniversary comes up…when i remember all that hope, that fleeting glimpse of a simple, steady life, for a second, for a season. and i wonder who the girl in that picture was and why i feel so dead inside when i try to look at her, to imagine being her again, on that first morning. it is her naivete that i find so incomprehensible, an affront to my eyes. i can see her glee and her relief and her tentative sense that surely if we just put our minds to it and work and endure, from here, it will come together, because we’ve got the important things in place, you see.

and i do not know if it is her that i feel so sorry for, knowing how the pages of that story unfold…her or me…who will never feel safe like that again.

we have stayed longer than i ever thought we would. we are peaceful here, i think, for now. nothing has been as i’d thought it would be…and yet, i am glad we came. and i would not go back to that morning for anything. i cannot imagine what it would be like to live in that time, anymore, everything open and possible still.

i’m always surprised, startled even, by the occasional intersection of my own small part of the planet with The Big World, with fame or notoriety or the evening news. i remember struggling, as a kid, to truly grasp the idea that people far, far away read Anne of Green Gables and actually took it seriously, thought of it as a good book. not because i didn’t – at that age the only judgement i had for Anne was sycophantic, heart-singing adoration – but because it’s set on little old PEI, the mundane backwater setting for my own, erm, slightly less poignantly uplifting story. i knew i thought the world of Anne and her impish, earnest shenanigans. i just couldn’t believe anybody else – out there, you know, in the real world – had actually heard of her.

i’ve been in a bit of the same state of shock this past couple of days, as every time i turn on the radio CBC news tells me again, on national broadcasts, about the tragedy in Bathurst, New Brunswick this past weekend. those of you outside Canadian borders may not have heard…late Friday night, on the way back home from a basketball game, a van of high school basketball players and their coach and family hit some ice on the highway and slid straight into the path of an oncoming tractor trailer. seven of the players are dead. so is the coach’s wife, who was a teacher at the school. the coach, who was driving, survived, along with his daughter and two players, so far as i can make out. they were nearly home, minutes from the exit that would have seen them safely off the highway.

it is a terrible story, and of pretty epic proportions, though i’m still shocked to see it at the top of Newsworld every hour. this is a part of the country that tends to get rather minimal news coverage outside of our own insular regional broadcasting, and doesn’t factor much in the national picture other Canadians seem to carry in their heads. when i lived in Vancouver, briefly, at twenty-two, desperately homesick, i took up daytime smoking mostly to have reason to congregate outside with the other smokers at the market where i worked, and at least twice heard people say they were from “out east” only to have my pitiful crows of “oh my god, really!?! i’m from PEI!” met with raised eyebrows and the blase comeback, “i’m from Guelph.”

Guelph is two hours from Toronto. in the middle of the country. but people seem to forget we’re out here.

i first heard about the accident early Saturday morning, before the details had even come in about where it had occurred, only that a van of high school athletes had crashed on the way back from some game and there had been multiple deaths. and i was struck, teacher as i once was, with what a shock wave this would send over the school, whatever school it might be. i had visions of adolescent grief and mourning that made me cringe against the rawness, the open wound of it all. one of the schools i work with here on the Island just went through its own heartbreaking accident a week ago, with one student killed and others hurt, still in recovery, and i know that entire community is still struggling to assimilate the reality. having the fabric of things torn open by death is a weird kind of shock at any age, but in adolescence there’s a particular vulnerability and confusion and instinct for the grandiose that makes it especially cruel. high school is bad enough without death.

i am not an adolescent anymore, at least on my better days. i’ve been up close to death and having the fabric of things torn open a few times now, and though the shock always takes me out at the knees, i like to think i’ve gotten beyond my base, juvenile instinct for making more of it than i have right to…and particularly for connecting myself, maudlin-like, to sorrow that is not my own.

yet the sorrow of the Bathurst High School boys’ basketball team has been living in my house the past few days. tears well in my eyes whenever i hear yet another story about it, and along with the disbelief that this has really made the national news and that the Prime Minister may attend the funerals on Wednesday, is something else there…something very personal, though ephemeral. i am not grieving those boys exactly, or the teacher who died, much as i have seen their names and faces now and looked, hard. i am in grief over proximity. i am grieving, for once, having been passed over…the exultant, fearful sorrow of those who, if destruction comes close, expect that something will smite them over the head, and are left shaken when it doesn’t. i am grieving the twenty-years-hence that will never happen for those boys.

because Dave went to Bathurst High School. he graduated as Male Athlete of the Year. he spent his high school years in those vans, on those roads, with that same poor surviving soul for a coach. there’s a Bathurst Phantoms rugby tshirt, almost a rag, still in our bureau. he still has his red and black hockey jacket, though it lives down at his parents’ cottage, a castoff brought out only on cold summer nights. the glory of the high school athlete was something he didn’t find hard to leave behind, i don’t think, and yet it is a part of him i barely know, hardly recognize, because i was so not an athlete and so not an athlete’s kind of girl that it isn’t a topic of conversation that, erm, comes up often.

but he wrote a post yesterday, trying to clear out some of the weight, to bear witness. Dave’s older brother, Stephen, died suddenly at 22 the week after Dave started high school at BHS. Dave wasn’t quite 15. he’d just made the hockey team, been given Stephen’s old number. he never got to tell him. and it was in those team vans, crowded, with tunes playing, pinging everywhere across the province late at night no matter the road conditions, that Dave found his way through the loss of his brother, found his feet despite that gaping hole. i think the vans were a kind of sanctuary for him, in those high school years that are hard enough in the first place.

and i think in my tears each time i hear about the Bathurst Phantoms are guilt and thanks, in the shock of proximity, that he made it through safe and largely unharmed, to me, this man now so far removed from the boy he was.

and my tears are sorrow, too, for those boys who will never get to find their way past high school to the maybe someones who might have loved them, chosen them, raised children with them, and looked at their old treasures in the closet and said, “oh yeh? did you use to play basketball?”

i am shocked, you see, that you might have heard of them, these boys from the little town of Bathurst, population 16,000ish. because to me they are all just Daves, in other incarnations.

there’s been a birthing, folks. a really amazing birthing of community spirit and volunteerism, in celebration of a year of Just Posts in the blogosphere.

i couldn’t quite figure out what to bring to the baby shower. i thunk and thunk ’til my thinker was sore, but everything i could make or do seemed a size too small for this here baby Huey, this call to local action in our offline lives. i got daunted. and yet, i wanted to contribute (though somehow avoid leaving my house)…so i decided, heck, we all have our gifts. one of mine, thanks to Dave and his crew of merry webcasters, is drinking hospitality, of a virtual sort. so i decided to throw this shower a real, live party!

welcome to the baby shower, the first cribcast in a long, long time, and the first ever to involve the blogging community on a grand scale. see? here’s a paper plate bedecked with ribbons for your head…now enjoy.

if you don’t know what on earth i’m babbling about with all this baby shower nonsense, click over to webcastacademy.net/studio here to find out, live at 9 pm EST this evening. and if you’re already a fan of Mad & Jen, their marriage of true minds in the social justice sphere, and their Maid of Honour (and shower instigator) Andrea…then get on over and give them some love. pull up a chair and raise a glass, and join us in the chatroom as we celebrate our online community making a difference in our many real worlds.

but watch the punch…i think it’s spiked. :)

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the party was a success, and it was amazing to actually talk to Mad, Andrea, & Jen, live and (almost) in the flesh.

it was like old time radio…a community experience.

we had a rollicking time, with the host only steamrolling over her guests a few times, and the conviviality in the chat room was most entertaining. Jen’s phone lost power before we managed to get her to sing, but – right at the beginning – i prove every claim i’ve ever made that i am, truly, tone-deaf.

thanks to all who showed.  and if you couldn’t make it, or didn’t know…just click above to listen in.

i think we’ll do it again – new people, new conversation – in a couple of weeks.

dear David Bowie,

dude, your birthday again…many happy returns.

because this little torch i carry for you is a flame of true and undying fidelity, and because some small, secret part of me still believes that one of these days you’re actually going to show up on my doorstep and beg relentlessly for my charms (note: i go to bed earlier these days, so if you could kindly start the anticipated wooing production before eleven whenever you’re coming, that’d be great, thanks), i wanted to let you know that we did something really special here at my house for your birthday this year.

nope, i didn’t eat an entire cake for you this time…much as that was a very good year in our relationship, David, the old college-era stomach just ain’t what she used to be. sorry.

no, i didn’t sing you my own acoustic version of Ziggy Stardust on guitar. my neighbours threatened to call the authorities if they caught me ‘making a joyful noise’ ever again. apparently, when you do come to woo me, you should bring voice lessons.

nah, didn’t go to school in my best imitation of you from the Blue Jean video. dude, i was thirteen. and makeup’s never been my strong suit…looks better on you. let us never speak of this again, ‘kay?

actually i got the whole family in on the present for you this year, David. more of a ‘shower’ present than a usual birthday present, i suppose, but you’re an unusual guy. and i bet nobody else has honoured you in quite the same way, at least in recent decades, so really we’re all quite proud of ourselves here at Chez Crib.

Oscar tinkled in the potty tonight, in honour of that most special of holidays, David Bowie’s birthday.

it was a pretty random bit of business, methinks…but kismet and the generous heart of a child, they’re like that, surprising you with joy and firsts when you least expect them. :)

probably won’t happen again ’til next year. mama don’t care. mama just wants to offer up the gift.happy birthday, o celebrity boyfriend. in the nearly twenty-four years i’ve been faithfully stalking venerating you, i can’t say i’ve ever clapped more on your birthday.
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and in other shower news, less tinkly but still celebratory, i’m totally heartened and excited by all the willing responses to my shout-out for potential co-cribcasters. i will call. if you said yes, then i will call. um, as soon as i set up a schedule and stuff. and get your numbers. and, uh, learn to webcast properly. yeh, that. topics for conversation? suggest at will.

but we’re going to start with a shower. i’ll bite the bullet by starting this up waaaay earlier than i’d ever planned, in honour of another special upcoming holiday. this Thursday marks the thirteen-month anniversary of the Just Posts, and Jen & Mad are being thrown a social justice “baby shower” of sorts, brainchild of their Maid of Honour, Andrea.i’m going to webcast the party. 9 pm EST, Thursday January 10th, you can listen live here…and join us in the chat room to talk about social justice and non-consumption and community and volunteerism and, erm, probably kids. there will be virtual wine, i promise.

you are so welcome. you too, Mr. Bowie. you know you want to.