Before I was born, both of my parents left the GTA (Greater Toronto Area) for Winnipeg, leaving the rest of my extended family behind. Being the only ones not living in the GTA, at least until my later years when we were joined by one of my cousins, meant that we grew up somewhat distanced from those relationships, and certainly from the drama and dynamics of being in close proximity. Distance, of course speaking geographically, but also, and more important, to lesser and greater degress in connection.
It might be more appropriate to say that it gave the relationship to our extended family a unique flavour, marked most notably by our annual trips Eastward, either to my grandparent’s cottage in the summer or to my cousin’s house at Christmas. It was rare for them to come our way, thus most of my memories come from those intentional trips, mainly by car, sometimes by train.
This is also likely why the strongest of those relationships was with this particular set of cousin’s. What made that unique was not simply that we spent the majority of our time with them, and they were closest in age to us, but that they consisted of three girls while we were three boys. Very different households, and yet this difference I think allowed us to form those bonds over the years. The distance would become greater once us three boys graduated, no longer having the anual traditions of heading East to depend upon. This would be something I would revisit over the years in different seasons of my life, be it through establishing a new-found routine when we got married, and once again when we adopted our son Sasha years later.
It’s interesting to note that, being older now I am far more aware of our specific cultural differences, coming as we do from different parts of Canada. It’s apparent in the accents. It’s also apparent in the lifestyles. Maybe one of the most prominent differences is the fact that when it comes to Ontario, they tend to be a lot more centralized in the way they think, live and function. It makes sense, as that whole “center of the universe” mentality emerges from the fact that very short drives puts them in any number of major city populations, not to mention never being far from the next city or town over. There is a sense in which Canada’s identity flows from the capital outwards. In contrast, the closest Canadian city of significance (sorry Brandon and Regina) to Winnipeg is a 14 hour drive one way, and a 24 hour drive the other way. Hence why for a Winnipeger the road trip is ingrained in our psyche. It is nothing for us to turn Calgary or Edmonton into a weekend trip. Equally so, it is a Manitoba tradition to head over the border, being situated 40 minutes from it, for anything from a day trip to a weekend to a week away in Fargo or Minneapolis.
And while we certainly know what it is to make our home in this river town, we tend to think with one foot grounded and in, and the other out exploring the greater world. If we are horrified over the thought of being stuck for hours on the 401 as a lifestyle, a cognitive disonnance created by our 20 minute commutes (this is changing, but forever and a day that is one of our calling cards, that you can get to the other side of the city from anywhere in 20 minutes), we do have this ingrained and in-born love for experiencing these other lifestyles as visitors and as learners. Just as long as we know we have our famliar community back home (and not inconsequentially, that community is what lends us a strong sense of culture, especially when it comes to the music scene).
I am well on the way to digressing here, but the reason I was bringing up my extended family, and in-particular my cousins, was to simply note that this absence of girls in our household changed dramatically during our time at Morningmeade with the arrival of our foster sisters. While I am using sisters in plural, some didn’t stay long (I remember one didn’t even last a day), while others were more permanent fictures as part of the family, travelling with us as we continued to move again, and again, and again. It’s interesting to note then, while I technically only have two siblings, both brothers two years apart on either side of me, it would also be true to say that those same formative years included my sisters in a very real way. And not unlike my three cousins, I always found it easier to connect with the girls. This would flow out into my young adult life, but here I think the presence of my sisters did afford me something of a reprieve from my experiences at school.
What’s significant about Morningmeade in particular is that this is where most of those relationships were initially established (including with the one whom would go on to marry my brother). In some ways, while my brother’s were out building their lives (or planting the seeds for where life was soon going to take them), I was spending time with these then strangers becomming more and more of a common fixture.
It would be when I aproached my later years at Calvin Christian School that we would eventually move again, this time a bit southward to a street called Sharon Bay, a smaller house in a still developing area (that I subsequently no longer recognize today). A single floor bungalo, with a fully finished basement, This is where I got my first job, delivering papers for the Winnipeg Free Press. This was back when they let younger kids work. It was also at a time when paper delivery happened in the afternoons rather than the mornings, making one of my routines coming straight home from school to complete my route.
Delivering papers would actually be a job I would return to at a few different junctures in my life, usually when I found myself between jobs. I would be lying if I said I didn’t enjoy it. When it eventually became an early morning gig, I came to cherish the early rising. It was quiet, and there was something about the nature of the job leaving you largely on your own that I appreciated and enjoyed, save for the brief period when they made you go house to house collecting your money from customers (that part I didn’t enjoy). Plenty of time to spend getting lost in thought. Saturday’s was it’s own special routine, racing to get it done so that i could make it back for what was 5 straight hours of Saturday morning cartoons. That was back when saturday mornings cartoons were still an institution.
Eventually those “early morning” hours transitioned into middle of the night hours, the paper trying to compete to get it’s news out first. Those 3 AM wake up calls were an extra special kind of quiet, that’s for sure.
Delivering papers in the afternoons did have it’s own set of perks, being out as I was in the light of day. Unbeknownst to me, I had a secret admirer for a while. At least until one day the girl finally decided to stop and talk to me. It was actually on a day when I was out collecting from my customers. Having knocked on one door and having no one answer, I turned around to come back to the sidewalk where I had left my bike. That’s when a younger girl had made her way over. Looking at me, she gestured behind her. “See that girl over there,” she says. I look, and see a girl who looks closer to my own age. “She likes you,” the younger girl says.
At this point I found myself frozen in place. I didn’t know what to say, and the more I stood there in silence the more the terror was building up inside me. It wasn’t particularly hot out, but I was starting to sweat like I had stepped straight into a sauna. “Well,” the younger girl speaks up again, breaking the silence. “Don’t you have anything to say?”
At that moment, panic finally taking over, I got back on my bike and raced off. I did run into her again at a later date. Suffice to say I was no longer getting a look of admiration.
I have mentioned the gradual and growing absence of my older brother in my early years already. While much of this had to do with that two year difference creating seperation between our social circles, and certainly him being in different schools for most of my life played a factor, there was also the fact that he found himself on his own path at this point in his life, wrestling with some of our handed down beliefs. In truth, this sort of questioning and wrestling is actually a quality that we have shared over the years, and something that has played a role in keeping some level of connection alive as the years have gone on. But, it was also a source of tension, both in the ways it created that distance and in the way I tried to make sense of it.
When we moved to Sharon Bay, this is when tensions between him and my dad were at their highest. I would have been 13/14 years old, my brother 16. My brother had gravitated towards staying out late, coming home at erratic times, or not coming home at all. And usually when he did he reeked of smoke or alcohol. There were encounters inside the house, one specific one which was capped off by the distinct and memorable phrase “if you don’t like the damn rules, there’s the damn door.” There were locked doors and signs out that night after my brother left, indicating that should he make his way back home he could find shelter in the garage instead. Eventually he disappeared altogether, having started a relationship with one of our foster sisters whom was a few years older than we were. All I knew at that time was that he had more or less disappeared from life at home, no longer around in the evenings and largely absent from family suppers. Definitely absent from church.
It was around this same time that my younger brother had moved to a different church, getting involved in a youth group that had bonded him to a new social circle. In a sense, while my one brother was moving in one direction, my younger brother was staking his claim in another, planting the seeds of what would become over 30 years in ministry work. Both shifting in their own ways meant the dynamic at home was changing, and I was left feeling somewhat lost in the middle (there’s that middle child syndrome again). Much of my time was spent at home alone with my favorite t.v. shows (back in the era of Full House and Perfect Strangers) in my room with my favorite books, spending time with my dog, who subsequently became my best friend over those years, or down in the basement banging away at the drums.
This is where I think my relationship with one of my longest standing and most consistent friendships, with a guy named Dan, also began to take a greater shape. While Dan had been a part of my life for as long as I could remember, the fact that they lived over an hour outside of the city meant that, up until this point, it was a relationship reliant on our parent’s planning. It was when we moved to Sharon Bay that they moved into the city, and thus he became something of an anchor during those years where more and more of the space at my house was becoming vacant. Sleepovers became a routine, wasting the hours away with our select role playing video games (back then it was the nintendo, and then eventually the super-nintendo). We were bonafide nerds, with one of our favorite choice of games called Uncharted Waters, which was modeled after the real world map, and in which we would promptly have our own large physical map unfolded and layed out on the floor beside the chips and cheesies, tracking our path and exploring the geography on screen.
As life would have it, at one point we eventully made a move all the way to the southern part of the North Kildonan/Elmwood area, to Johnson avenue, coming from the furtherst northern location we ever lived (Glenway Crescent). This was not only a change in social class, coming from a more upper class part of the city to a lower income area (it was actually one of our rental properties that my dad had been investing in over the years, now finding things stuck after the market crashed). it was a change in lifestyle. More importantly, as things went, we actually ended up moving right next door to Dan’s family, although it was somewhat short lived as they ended up moving again. And, much later I would find out that my future wife actually lived right across the street from us as well.
Sharon Bay is also where I transitioned from the old family drumset to an upgraded blue pearl set. This was around the time of my transitioning from Grade 9, then middle years, to Grade 10, the start of high school, a school that was actually a short walk from our Johnson avenue house. This would also mark a switch in schools, and with that came an opportunity to play. While I had been toying around with the guitar, an unfortunate fight with my dad resulted in him taking away my lessons. I can still see the disappointment on my teacher’s face as my dad yanked me out of there mid session. If I’m honest, this is still one of those “what if” moments, because I genuinely felt I had potential.
As life would move forward however, it became more and more centered around the drums, to the point where that ended up subsuming my musical aspirations. In these early years however, it would be starting to take the drums more seriously that would become an in-road back into my younger brother’s world, being invited to play in the worship band at church, and also the starting point of what would become a whole new social circle, connecting with a group of musicians that had been hanging out with my older brother jamming from time to time in the basement. As my brother disappeared, they became my new identity.
Reflecting back on this ever shifting dynamics, it seems to me that life is a constant interplay with both fixed and malleable or shaping realities. Might it be that a single different trajectory or circumstance would be telling a much different story? Without a doubt. And yet, it’s hard not to also feel that who I say I am, the person for whom those influences are interacting, remains visible. As though all of life is a process of figuring out who that is within such a relationship. These are interesting questions for me. Am I shaped by a perpetual wrestlessness and anxiety, a need to dwell on the big questions, because circumstance created this need or this response, or is that a product of my interaction with such a world. This is the stuff, as I would discover later on, philosophers have spent endless books and traditions fleshing out throughout history.
Either way, this is the shape of my reality. This is the shape of my experience. Had I been born and lived in the GTA, in relative close proximity to Toronto, my story certainly changes. But it’s pretty difficult to imagine a reality where I am not drawn to story, where I don’t have this strong sense of isolation and being misunderstood, where I haven’t fostered a genuine love for all God’s creatures, where I don’t find myself disenchanted with the modern world.
Where I am not that middle child, or that biological case prone to anxiety.
Less difficult I suppose to appreciate what my particular circumstnace did gift me with- a love for maps and travel, the slower pace of life, the drums, my particular friends, my wife, my dogs.
Thus I am prone to think in terms of both-and. It is the push and pull of those fixed and malleable qualities of my life and story, and thus who I am, that sets me in relationship to it. Which is precisely where I can come to know both myself and the reality that surrounds me. As time pushes forward, this is going to become more and more distinct, beginning to to see some of those more concrete directions taking shape. A different season of my life, but as part of that larger conversation nevertheless still part of that narrative whole. The stuff above might seem and sound like benign deteails, but all of it will come to play an important role in where my life heads.
The Stories of my Life 