I recently posted a rough draft of a personal project I have been working on for many years, which is simply an attempt to write my story. Why? For myself. So I can make sense of my story as it stands. Come to terms with it.
A therapeutic exercise.
In any case, I decided to upload the introduction of this rought draft to hold myself accountable. Because now something is somehwere where it can be contended with.
This was the other part of that, I suppose technically titled chapter 1. The story of the world I was born into.
Chapter 1
They say being born could be a traumatic experience.
Emphasis on the could.
And they being the scientists who have attempted to study it and throw out their competing theories. Although to be fair, when you actually imagine the data being weaved into a story told from the POV of the infant, it’s definitely most likely traumatic. If not the for the infant than for those of us who are imagining it.
The heavy compression of the birth canal. The plates of our malleable, softened skulls squishing together and overlapping like a mouse squeezing through those tiny spaces in your porous home, only to rearrange oneself into a recognizable shape once we reach the outside.
Bet you didn’t know you were once a shape shifter. Nobody chooses that on the list of superpowers when asked which one they would rather have.
The sensory overload that comes from moving so abruptly from the darkness of the womb to the light of the outside world. The shock of the sudden surge of oxygen meeting the lungs. Our organs kicking into gear and promptly ridding us of a body full of toxins.
All triggered by that calculated surge of hormones telling us to get out of that womb and into the world before we end up bursting straight out of the shell Alien style, because we are now ready to breathe on our own.
Deep breathes. That’s the first thing our bodies engage outside of the womb.
Recent science has also told us that every birth begins with a flash of light. Not only that, but everything that breathes similarly contains an aura, although its uncertain whether these two things are connected. That’s right, although we don’t realize it and can’t see it (or most of us can’t), we actually glow in the dark. And not in a heat sensitive manner either.
Another super power. Who knew.
They say being born is a traumatic experience.
What nobody told me was just how difficult this world my body was so desperate to fight its way into would actually end up being. I know this is reductive, but I wonder if part of the act of living is one long process of figuring out how to reconcile the trauma of that birthing process with what we find on the other side of that darkness. Because to be honest, even on my best days this who imaginative exercise from the POV of my infant self feels like a microcosm for how the rest of life actually seems to work. The birthing process just repeated over and over again as we struggle through life’s ebb and flow.
That’s a bit broad though. The world I was born into can also be described in more specific terms:
I was born in the year 1976 in the late evening hours on the fourth day of August at St Boniface hospital in Winnipeg, Manitoba. From my vantage point, any awareness I have of actually being alive begins somewhere around age 5, and yet, as is the case with all people, even those who can remember their birthing process (I actually know a few people who supposedly can) the world I was born into remains a significant and necessary part of who I would become.
I was born on the hottest day of the year. 31 degrees Celsius before humidity to be precise. But hey, it could have been worse. Part of my family came from England (my moms side, my dad’s side came from Ireland), and apparently 1976 was crowned the hottest summer ever in Britain back in 2013. If I had been born there it would have been 36 degrees
Speaking of that, 1976 was also the year Britain voted to stay in Europe. Oh how times have changed.
It’s funny. I actually encounter headlines all the time that seem to indicate 1976 was a uniquely pivotal and transitional year in the scope of world history. I think I’ve always just assumed that I’m picking up on that because, of course, it’s the year I came into existence. I mean, like everyone we are the star of our own story, and there’s a decent chance everyone thinks this about the year they were born. Maybe there’s some truth to that. And yet, even if that’s the case, being born in this particular year set in motion the stuff that would eventually come to define the world I would inherit and thus the world that would define me and shape me.
Like the birth of Apple Inc. along with the first super computer. Given that I graduated High School the year the internet became a thing (1994), effectively rendering me a Xennial (someone who knows what it is to grow up in a world without the internet and to come of age in a world with it), this feels relevant.
It was also the year VHS was invented, effectively solidifying me as part of the Blockbuster generation. Or more so a kid trained in the delicate art of the “collection.” Subsequently, it solidified me as part of the only generation who knows what it’s like to spend all our money on VHS, upgrade to DVD, then to Blu-ray, only to now be paying for monthly subscriptions so that we can access the things we either own or ended up tossing in the trash the last time we moved and purged.
But wait, physical media is having a come back. Why did I toss all of that stuff out again? Dang it.
Most important about the year 1976 is that I inherited my deep love and affection for the movies. This was the year of Rocky Balboa (I would run up those steps in 2010),Taxi Driver and Freaky Friday (had to throw that one in the mix), marking an age of cinema that was celebrated by grand single screen cathedrals and an era where heading out to a movie was always a prestige event (at relatively affordable pricing too). Some of my most cherished memories revolve around this part of my life where, as a young kid drawn to the power of a good story, I would venture out to the once populated Winnipeg downtown streets and join the line ups waiting and hoping to get their ticket for that evenings showing. The smells of the city streets meeting with the tantalizing allure of popcorn as we stood under the muted lights and oversized movie posters. Or a bit later frequenting the video story as the place to be on Friday and Saturday nights, wasting the hours away browsing through the many titles just waiting to be discovered on those nights when you weren’t heading out to the theater.
Understanding the simple joys of that discovery as an art form in and of itself. The thrill of taking a chance on a title you’d never heard of.
Yes, I know there exists a very real phenomenon of romanticizing the past, but there is a sense in which my generation stands uniquely qualified to speak with some degree of authority on the matter: we lived both worlds. And there is simply no way to speak of the past without genuinely reflecting on that which I miss so dearly about it. What made those things special simply aren’t a part of the general ethos of society today, and one could even make the argument that science tells us the loss of certain elements of this era has had a negative effect on society as a whole.
American evangelicalism had also invaded Canada at the time of my birth, effectively rooting me in all the wonders of that once lucrative Christian music scene. This was a time to be alive in this corner of the world for sure, translating into endless festival fever, led by the infamous Cornerstone located in the suburbs of Chicago and run by the Resurrection (or Rez) Band, and it was the age of the basement band and the good old home recording.
It was also the year U2 became a thing, effectively handing my generation our voice when we eventually became disillusioned with that version of corporate Christianity in our early twenties.
Good old 1976.
We made it to Mars.
The notion of dog ownership was beginning to become legalized around the world.
America made it to their bicentennial with Jimmy Carter at the helm.
There were historical shifts in the Republic of China and South Africa which would reshape the politics of that area forever, effectively standing as a genuine crossroads between the world before and the world after that still remain embedded in geopolitics today.
The Soviet Union was on its way to dissolution
The Gulf War was on the horizon (I have vivid memories of our home at Sharon Bay of planting myself in front of that old t.v. in our spare bedroom to watch the ongoing live news footage unfold in real time, looming thoughts about the impending end of the world and all).
This is the world I inherited.
And yet that cold hard data can be narrowed even more to my particular slice of this corner of the world- Winnipeg, Manitoba. As the Simpsons puts it, I was born in Winnipeg, what’s your excuse? A notorious punchline perhaps, but I do think the much better question would be, “I was born in Winnipeg, what’s your story?” I digress.
This, as it happens, is mine.
My story begins in a Winnipeg era once governed by Stephen Juba back in 1976. Still considered the greatest mayor of our eclectic existence as a modest sized mid-west Canadian city. That year my hometown was navigating what was known then as the Winnipeg Act, a series of policies and reforms and plans that would go on to shape the emerging city of my youth and become the true blueprint of its future. The meetings happening outside that hospital room in a downtown district then absent of its present skyline, were imagining and giving shape to the city I would inherent. It would dictate and make possible merging suburbs, including the North End where I have spent most of my adult years. It would draw up plans for incorporated districts, ambitious skyscrapers, and of course our most famous meeting place- The Forks.
It was called the Chicago of the North, the burgeoning and aspirational city that never came to be despite the decisions of the time to preserve our now cherished exchange district with its turn of the century bindings and old market charm (they say this might be one of the lucky outcomes of the cities failure to live up to its ambitions back then). Winnipeg would begin its slow march from a modest 578,000 to now approaching a million. Fun fact: the biggest surge in population in Winnipeg outside of its establishing years of 1881 and 1911 occurred between the years of 1971-1976. Hence the Winnipeg Act. It was now seen officially as a city that was growing. The city that never was was now coming to be on its own terms and, perhaps in a different way, and it’s then fresh and vibrant downtown would become my personal playground in the years to come.
A pivotal year indeed. This is the year I was born. On the hottest day of the year in the city of Winnipeg sitting on the cusp of the biggest transition in its history in the face of a global reality facing some of its most significant transitions in modern history, handing me a world that would shape who I was to become.
Here my own memories begin to catch up with my story, taking another 5 years to emerge.
The Stories of my Life 