*as mentioned elsewhere, last year I sarted to construct my life story. I’ve slowly been forcing myself to put some of the rudimentary writings, in all of its rough and unedited form, into this space so as to hold myself accountable to it. This is another entry:
As I’ve already mentioned, memory is a peculiar thing. Fleeting in its nature. Maleable. Manipulable. Yet any sense that we might have of our lives, at least as something real and tangible and coherent, remains rooted in our ability to formulate these memories into a narrative. A story. What we perceive of who we are begins and ends with our memories- who we remember ourselves to be within the story of our lives.
Thus memory is, at its heart, an act of imagining, or imagination. In remembering who we were we also discover who we are. Or more importantly, we begin to trust this story to say something true about ourselves, and therefore the world that we inhabit.
For me, one of the more fascinating aspects of this truth is the way it roots us in time and place. Thus, to remember is not an act of the mind but an act of embodiment. Or in theological terms, memory can be understood to be an act of incarnation. This is what makes memory trustworthy. This is what makes our lives more than mere data points that we can string together as a bunch of regurgitated, verifiable facts. To trust our memories is to learn how to tell our story in a way that finds us inhabiting time and space.
Time- it’s the early 1980’s.
Space- a north end neighborhood in Winnipeg, Manitoba.
One benefit of growing up in a family that moved no less than 8 times in the first 20 years of my life is the ability it gives me to travel these same physical roads back into the story of my life. These roads and the houses they lead to, are markers. Walking through these old neighborhoods that each defined a piece of my childhood might feel foreign to and disconnected from the changed landscape of my present, yet this is the birthing place for rebuildling the memory of who I was.
As things tend to go, its worth confesesing that I inherited this same sense of restlessness, moving no less than 6 times in a span of 10 years after I moved out of my parents home in 2004. It also remains deeply curious to me to ruminate on how my present location, nestled on the cusp of Winnipeg’s infamous north end (quite literally, as if we lived on the opposite side of the street- read: the north side- we would be in a different neighborhood entirely), is mere blocks (google has it as a 3 minute drive) from where I spent the earliest years of my life, close to the corner of Manitoba avenue and Arlington.
Sadly the iconic Arlington bridge, known for its steep incline, was officially closed off and decommissioned a few years back. Growing up in this neighborhood this was one of the main throughfares for getting from the north end of the city to downtown, and I have fond memories of my dad hitting the gas of that old station wagon on the way up the ramp, attempting to achieve record heights jumping the levelling road at the top.
The old mom and pop ice cream shop at the corner of Manitoba and Arlington is also gone. I spent many a day meandering over to that cream coloured neighborhood hang out, especially after becoming aquainted with one of its regular visitors- a dog whom resembled Mr. Mugs, the old English Sheepdog made famous in the 70’s and 80’s by Canadian children’s author Martha Kambeitz and Carol Roth.
He was a spitting image, an oversized dog with a thick double coat bristling in the sheen of its white and grey markings. People of course told me it wasn’t actually Mr. Mugs, but if you asked my 6 year old self I would have insisted he was the real deal. I wasn’t about to be duped by other people’s skepticism.
As far as I’m aware, our own dalmation cross never made his aquaintance, although he also wasn’t around for very long. He had a bad habit of running away, and on one occasion we weren’t able to track him down. In my childhood imagination I liked to imagine the two of them somehow making their way through the world together like a cast of character in one of those famed books.
Speaking of that old dalmation, it’s entirely possible this is where my love for animals began. Not just with our family dog, as my level of reponsibility at the time was admittedly near zero, but with my growing awareness of a life unlike my own. He was an outside dog. We had a doghouse pushed up against the house beside the side door where we he would greet us and we would spend time just hanging out. I have a faint memory of one of us brothers taking him for a walk and losing the leash in a panic (as I said, he loved to take off). Or, much more vividly, a memory of the historic snowstorm that not only locked us in our house but buried him in his doghouse, leaving my dad needing to dig him out. What is perhaps most ingrained in me is the tensions this early relationship would create, awkening me to those hard and difficult feelings that come from experiencing life in a world marked by suffering and death.
This also came from the stories I started consuming. What started with Mr Mugs turned into my consumption of Thornton Burgess’ The Bedtime Story Books, leading as well to novels like Charlotte’s Web, Beautiful Joe, and Where the Red Fern Grows. This part of my story wll come into play in some important ways later, but here I find the seedbed for a part of myself that remains just as apparent to me today as it did nearly 45 years ago as I began to become aware of the world I was inhabiting. That sense of needing to care for this life relegated to the yard outside our house, and that first sick feeling that accompanies his eventual loss.
Some of my fondest memories from this time in my life revolve around our perusing of the neighborood. All three of us boys made a past time hanging out with the kids down the street, a boy named Arnold and a girl named Brea. We would spend our days wondering the neighborhood together, under the grand shadow of the massive Ukrainian Catholic Church to the north of us, a mark of this once central bustling hub of Ukrainian and Polish immigrants, and to the South of us the open park where we spent copious amounts of time climbing this giant old tree and doing what young kids did at that age- racing our way to the top and hanging out on the hightest branches in a way that made us feel like we were on top of the world. We sold lemonade and we played hop scotch games with our rudimentary drawings on the concrete slabs of the sidewalks lining both sides of the street.
One of my favorite memories though is one that, to this day, no one believes. It remains seared into my brain as though it happened yesterday. I can replay every detail, from the cracks in the sidewalk to the countours of our neighbors house a little ways up the block with its front porch and iconic shapely posts. We were out playing and we had stopped over at Arnold’s place. While I’m not precisely sure what was occupying us at the time, although I can imagine we were coming back from playing in the park, what I do remember is remaining outside, lingering behind the others as they went around and inside to Arnold’s kitchen. That’s when I turned around and found myself face to face with what looked like a wasp the size of my shoe. Just sitting there on the banister of his front deck with what looked like monsterous demon eyes. There were legendary stories of killer bees kicking around at the time, and so the first thought that went through my head was that some version of such a thing had finally arrived in my corner of Winnipeg and it was now up to me to break the news to the world. So I did what any sensible kid might do- I ran back to our house and got my dad.
Of course, by the time I got back it was gone. And with it went the possibility of having someone else to corrobarate my memory of this monumental find. What I can confidently say is that there are few more scenes from this time in my life that I can recall with such clarity and immediacy. And sure, it’s a nice piece of lore to help the story of my childhood feel bigger than life.
All I can do is imagine. Or in this case, remember.
Whatever it was, it was abnormal enough to capture my attention. Perhaps more importantly, this was my first experience of needing to communicate something that people who would and could not understand. A moment of having something I believed must be true being met with the skepticism of the world around me. This would go on to shape my world moving forward.
Our house at the time was modest. A basic two story bungalo, the main floor containing a kitchen that, not inconsequentially, my dad almost burned down after being left alone to cook us dinner. I remember sitting on the couch and seeing this sudden flash of light, followed by the smoke alarm and, of course, the ensuing smoke. My dad came running out of the kitchen grabbed us (or it might have just been me), and brought us outside, me holding the one cherished possession of my childhood, a small old Linus sized blanket knitted by my grandma, and my dad moving around in a frenzied state. There would be a big black circle on the ceiling to mark the occasion. This might or might not be what led my mother to retire from her job as a nurse.
Upstairs there was a double room. The first section is where us boys slept on bunk beds, while the enclave, positioned just through a doorway, was where my parents slept, tying the two spaces together. Speaking of my childhood feeling larger than life, I suppose killer demon wasps the size of my shoe has a certain kind of dramatism befitting such a story. In its own way, and perhaps in a different and much more intuitive way, it was the years I spent in this house, and inparticular the nights I spent in this room, that give these memories its own kind of heightened presence. This is where my life long journey with existentialism really begins to manifest itself, in a very real way through what became a very real and very powerful struggle with chronic nightmares that carried me through the remaining years in this particular neighborhood.
The Stories of my Life 