I will give you a few now and a few tomorrow and a few the day after...keep you wanting more, maybe...
I wander a bit, like our trip did, but it's ok. I think.
Enjoy: Episode 1
I so desperately wanted to daily record answers to
these questions as I roamed the land that made me. I so desperately needed to be present to the
whispers and roars of me in those places that shaped me…so did my father. In the end, the post I wanted to break up
into several will be one.
Perhaps that is the most appropriate. Bring together all of those pieces into the
mosaic that is me now, 51 years old, fragments mortared together with Prairie
dust and river water, hail and rain and sweat; sweetgrass, wheat, and
grasshopper legs…and the blood of slapped mosquitoes.
Honestly, I just wanted everything to be as I
remembered it. Needed everything to be as I remembered it because then I knew,
somehow, I would find my mother there whole and hearty – smiling at the many
kitchen tables, laughing in the many “rumpus rooms,” drink and cigarette in
hand, filling the house with the parts of her I wanted to remember. I needed there to be a place where I was,
where I existed, that held me before the now, before the miles had been put on
that wore holes in my heart and made my skin thin and threadbare in patches,
belying the wear of the corduroy roads on my frame. I needed the places that carry me and I
needed them to be *exactly* as I remembered them.
I needed that.
That is not what happened.
In true Stones fashion I didn’t get what I wanted but
I found I got what I needed. And there
lies the teachings. As usual. And, as usual, it took some distance from the
places and the visits to gain some perspective…if any can really be had from
such an emotional place.
If I remember correctly, the last place my last post
left off was our arrival into Regina.
The Queen city is, like our current regent, a little
in need of updates and, like our current regent, is in the act of trying
desperately to bring itself, slowly, into the current century. We were greeted by massive construction on
the highways leading into the city which, in the rising blood moon, was
disorienting and did nothing to help my memories locate the places I remembered
until we got to the Parliament buildings, half way down Albert St. Even then I barely remembered the buildings
or streets…30 years create fog banks to make recognition of places and faces
nearly impossible. The darkness didn’t really help either…take that how you
will.
In the morning, we decided we would partake in the
local coffee establishment: Robin’s Doughnuts as an homage to the days before
“Timmy’s” and set the plan for the day.
Robin’s held many a high school conversation between myself and my
friends: plans for the weekend, plans
for grad, plans for what came after all of that. Stress about homework, relationships, sex…all
of it hovered in the mocha-scented air of these gritty coffee joints.
As for me and dad, we really didn’t need to plan the
day. We knew we were going to be
stopping at all of the houses we lived in, maybe not in chronological order,
but however we happened upon them. The
order ended up being chronological. Dad
remembered them all. This impressed me
to no end. I hardly remembered the most
recent place I lived in with them as a family.
It did not look the same to me at all and I probably would have been
able to emotionally buttress myself better for that realisation had we not
started at the Fine Arts building…the old Fine Arts building – the place we
(those of us who attended before the upgrades) affectionately referred to as
the “old campus.”
Walking up to the one hundred year old steps softened
me in a way I had not expected. I wanted
to weep walking around the front of a building I had given so many hours of my
early adulthood to – hours which I see now had a tremendous hand in forming the
foundation of the person I was to become.
I thought of all of the people I loved and lost, all of the projects which
had come to fruition, and the many wonderful teachers I learned from…not merely
about theatre but also about how to be a thoughtful, compassionate, passionate
human being. If I had had any tobacco on
my person, I would have left some for Kerry, for Bill, for Jake, for Denise,
for Michael, for David, for Trish, and even for Gregson (who turned out to be a
total fraud…faked his credentials to get the gig. We didn’t know until the following year –
thought all of Jake’s grumbling about this was just bitchiness). These were people who recognised me as an
individual – strong and passionate and a bit of a pain in the ass. Bill Dixon called me out as his “answering
machine” in Drama 100 (essentially a drama lit class in the lecture theatres on
the main campus) in the early days. I
did not see this as an insult at all.
Being his teacher’s pet was the best thing I could have ever done for my
blossoming intellectual ego. As it turns
out, he and I became quite good friends.
I am sure he has passed by now. I
loved him very much.
The same story could be said for my theatre history
prof Kerry, from my grad year. He was
one of the top three teachers I have ever had.
He recognised my passion for dramaturgy and how I was underappreciated
as an acting talent in the department, and encouraged me to boycott my
obligatory audition in my final semester of my fourth year because I would not
be cast in the roles I deserved due to departmental politics. No one had ever addressed the politics
before. He could. He was an “outsider.”
I took his advice and never regretted it. We remained friends until his death in
1997.
How do I carry that place? In my fiber.
In my marrow.
I remember walking past the entrance to the SIFC
(Saskatchewan Indian Federated College) during my years in the “main
buildings,” before the FA campus claimed me full-time, wishing I could go
there, too. I didn’t know who I was
then. I only felt this magnetic tug and
envy of those who got to go to that school.
I wanted to know what they were learning.
How do I carry that place? In the resonance of my heart beat – the halls
of both campuses stamped on me the mark of the first grandchild, on both sides
of my family, to attend university. No
pressure. Literally…no pressure. I don’t think anyone really gave a shit. I defined myself as separate from my family
unit in those halls. My sister dropped
out after one semester, my dad didn’t graduate, and my mom took an extra
year. School wasn’t really a priority
for them. They did, however, support my
love of school and helped to ease my pressure by paying for my tuition, letting
me live in the house rent free, and giving me a car and gas. I had it pretty damned good.
This place was love for me. Pure and simple. I got to do everything I loved with the
people I loved most in that place. I had
a short, torrid affair with a married man; I had a short, torrid affair with a
sculpting major; I had a short, torrid affair with theatre which would haunt me
for decades after, like ghost pains of amputated lovers.
That first stop that day would be the only place that
hadn’t changed. It was the only place
that still remembered me in any recognisable way. It was the only place where I could recognise
the parts of me still haunting the spaces.
I could see myself in the hallways and window panes. Having said that, I did not go inside to
witness the changes brought to the spaces.
The building now houses film production companies and the classrooms and
acting spaces have been converted into offices.
I don’t even know if the theatre is still intact. It’s a good thing, for sure, that I didn’t go
inside.
We moved on to the main campus book store where I
dropped some significant cash on poetry, indigenous history, and indigenous
research methodology texts. I held back
from dropping even more cash on Cree language resources and so much more
poetry. I felt the familiar pangs of jealousy
of being on the outside of all that I wanted to learn, this time feeling the
total weight of the passage of time and how there would never be enough time to
learn what I long to learn.
Driving away from the campus, I felt the pull of
memory to the icy winter nights spent on top of the science building, star
gazing for my astronomy class…the air so cold as to freeze the ink in our pens
when we tried to take notes on our observations. Fingers became achingly cold in seconds. More time was spent going back and forth
between blue-lit rooms to warm our hands and our pens that was actually spent
outside in observation of the sky. I
smiled to recall the sense of pride at surviving that lab class. Biology or
Chem students didn’t have to deal with that.
A different breed of person took astronomy…one with math skills, evidently
(that is a whole other blog post).
:)
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