Three Junes, part 1.

In the spirit of one of my favourite books by Julia Glass, here’s the first in a series of June memoirs.

2010

Three years ago I was still in Kingston. Earlier that spring, the love of my life bought a little piece of the wooded Canadian Shield paradise that is South Frontenac County, and suddenly our weekends together shifted. There was work to be done, ground to clear, boxes to pack. He was going to live that first summer in a trailer, if he could get the goddamned excavator to come the hell out to his property line and dig up the fucking road (I am paraphrasing). For some reason every goddamned excavator in the County was overbooked that spring, and as the end of his lease at the old lake house wound down, things got a little bit hairy. He was not exactly a patient man, prone to panic and worry (two peas in that particular pod is a recipe for disaster; I see that now). It was an uncertain time. Every night I'd fall asleep praying that the goddamned excavator would arrive the next morning. He had his buddies coming the first weekend in June to help haul the trailer up the hill, and there was no way that would ever work without a road to haul it up.

That first Friday of the month, I took the day off work. I woke up to my phone ringing (when you are in love with a non-technologically-inclined hermit, you spend a lot of time talking on the phone. After years of internet dating and passive emails, I found it insanely refreshing).

"That motherfucker is here!" my one true love shouted into the phone. Obviously the goddamned excavator had risen up the ranks to motherfucker status. "I've got a fucking ROAD!" I nearly wept with joy. Small miracles come in strange places.

I drove up to his place later that afternoon and watched as two trucks and one trailer somehow caravanned up a road that was a road in the very loosest sense of the word. I did what I always seemed to do: provide moral support and CDs to listen to and ingeniously weird meals cooked over an open flame. It was nearly dark by the time the boys finally had the trailer situated. I'd been promised a trek to the lake, but it was too dark for that now. I didn't mind, though. We’d have all summer to go swimming. The trailer’s stereo only played tapes (and came, it is worth noting, with cassette copies of both the Smiths’ and the Monkees’ greatest hits), so instead we blasted our music from the truck and sat by the fire till late that Friday night.

The next morning we hiked the treacherous path from the clearing to the water, and I jumped in off the old dock. It wasn’t my first swim of the year, but it felt like it was. No one else was out on the lake and the water was still and cool and perfect. It felt like a balm after a day and night of hard labour and hard drinking. I felt the summer coming on that morning, the promise of so many more days like that one, so much more of the freedom and stillness and the quiet broken only by Gord Downie’s voice on the stereo. I felt myself come home.



I drove home to Charles Street later that afternoon, after a baking-hot trailer couch nap. Jammie and Freya arrived a few hours later. We had planned to run the Beat Beethoven race the next morning, but when Freya got out of her car and realized she’d only brought one running shoe along, we kiboshed that plan (probably not a bad idea, given our horrifying track record at that particular run, but that is a story for another day). That night we made our way out to Wolfe Island, where the Great Lake Swimmers played a fundraising concert for the Swim Drink Fish project. We crowded into an old town hall and drank sketchily-prepared vodka cranberries and took the late boat home.

Walking home from the ferry terminal, I thought to myself, how lucky am I, to have the ones I need so close by, to love a man who loves me back tenfold, to walk into the water just steps from both my front doors. I spent most of my time in Kingston falling in love with the place over and over again. No place has everything you need, but my lord, did that sweet town and the countryside around it ever come close.

affairs of the heart.

It's hard to be the Cool Girl, to pretend indifference. It's hard for me, anyway. I don't hide my emotions with even a modicum of grace, hard though I may try. Part of the problem is that I have too many feelings to hide. I wear my heart on my sleeve. Sometimes, really, I feel like my heart's wearing me. Which is good, I think. Hard, but good. More and more I'm realizing that I'd rather teeter on that heartbreaking edge, so full of love and nerves that I'm sure to fall right over, chest first. I'd rather feel too much than too little.

And that, in a nutshell, is why I am absolutely horrible at dating. I have no poker face, and I am an emotional fire cracker, and I REALLY hate it when people don't intuit all that super quickly. It never ends well.

When I started dating, I was a WHOLE lot worse. I gave everyone the benefit of the doubt. I was coming off a five year relationship that had ended badly, and naively hoped that the next dude I met would be the dude I would marry. I didn’t have time or energy for any other outcome. This could be--no, WILL be--the one, I'd always say to myself, though I never really meant it. But it's nice to hold out hope. I'd hold out hope, and I'd let people get away with a lot. Oh, you're in a 12 step program? That's okay, I am really happy that you're on the path to recovery. An ex accused you of date rape? Well, acknowledgement is the first step toward atonement. Sorry you forgot your wallet, no no, I've got this one. You're falling in love with me and telling me so on the third date? Great! Yeah, maybe we SHOULD move in together! In those days it was a very short path between the first date and my best friend coming over to help me change my locks. And yet, I pressed onward. Over the years I learned to steel myself against the inevitable insanity of riding in cars with boys, but it was all purely superficial. I could only hide my heart so much, and nine times out of ten I'd end up betraying my Cool Girl exterior, letting my utter excitement or complete disappointment shine through.

And here's the problem with that: in dating, it always seems like you end up feeling the exact opposite of how you ought to, in any given situation. It is a truth universally acknowledged that a man you really really like on the first date would probably prefer to be friends ("You're such a great girl, though.") and a man with whom you shared absolutely no chemistry would like to marry you ("I can't stop thinking about you, here is a terrible poem."). Affairs of the heart exist in a delicate balance, and the scales are perpetually tipped in the wrong direction. This is a really hard thing. It makes you feel like you don't really know what you're looking for in the first place. It makes you feel untethered and uncertain. And when the good things do come along, it makes you wonder if you can really trust that they are the good things. You start feeling like you need to play a version of yourself rather than trust your own instincts, like you need to protect yourself. And it is fucking exhausting.

I don't really have a great piece of advice to tie this one up. I'm pretty sure I'm going to be working on figuring it out for the rest of my life. But recently I was on retreat with my first teacher, and she told me something that amounts to this: if you feel firm in your own foundation, rooted down somehow, you'll be grounded enough to let things into and out of your heart. You'll be secure enough to open up. You'll know what's right. I really liked that. I'm not there yet, but I hope I will be someday.

So yeah, I still give everyone the benefit of the doubt. I'm a little more careful now, but I'm also a little more certain of who I am and what I need. As I get older, I get more and more comfortable with the fact that I might not get everything I need from one person. And yet, I foolishly still believe in soul mates. Granted, I'm pretty sure I'm never going to meet my own, but I bet he's out there, trimming his beard and thinking about writing a letter to the editor about community gardening, considering which version of Bob Dylan's Tonight I'll Be Staying Here With You he likes best (It would be great if he was into the one from the Rolling Thunder Revue recording, but I'm not picky, I'm really not). Knowing my track record, he's already married to someone else. Maybe I'll catch him on his second pass. Till then, I'll keep on looking. I'll let more people in. I'll take calls from boys I've never met, boys who live far away and yet seem to know me better than I know myself. I'll let the ones I have met drive me home and keep me warm. I'll keep promises and accept them from others too. I'll keep on looking. Something's out there for me, and I might not know exactly what it's supposed to look like, but damned if I'm not going to seek it out.


(Footnote: It's wicked hard to find ANY original version of Tonight I'll Be Staying Here with You on the internet, so here's a worthy substitute. Really, as long as he's into Nashville Skyline, he can stay on my soulmate roster.)

some nights.

Some nights you don't mean to be out till all hours, but it happens. You intend to just stay put, but then one of your oldest friends calls and tells you he's on his way past your house and is coming to collect you. You walk up to his place, taking alleys and shortcuts, sneaking cigarette drags. Spring fever looms large and it's easy to justify spending too long with people you don't see often enough, old friends and their girlfriends, husbands and wives. You walk home after midnight and can't get to sleep. You can't believe how long your trail spreads back behind you, how long your stories are getting.

Some nights you stay up too late after getting up too early. You go out for too many drinks before the evening's really begun. Someone who seems to be around a lot more these days picks you up, and you end up at a karaoke bar. Through a series of circumstances and uncertain steps in a new direction that do not warrant a public airing, you're feeling nervous and self-conscious and more than a little drunk. You cope the only way you know how, by singing your heart out. Your rendition of Midnight Train to Georgia impresses the table of well-intentioned and equally tipsy fiftysomething women next to you; you've always been good at making friends with people twice your age. Later, driving home, there's a Smashing Pumpkins song on the radio, and as you pull up to the house where you're spending the night, you try and remember the first time you ever heard it. You think to yourself that when you were young, you probably imagined that things would be simpler by the time you got to where you are now, that you would be certain of more. Granted, it is hard to be certain of much at 2:00 in the morning, other than the promise of sleep, the strength of arms wrapped around you, the relief that the night is over.

Some nights you can barely keep your eyes open till the sun sets. After spending a day outside, keeping busy in the garden in an attempt to stave off a creeping anxiety that too often takes hold, you feel spent, and yet you cannot bring yourself to relax. It takes the gentle prodding of someone you've never met, someone whose voice on the other end of the line always manages to make you laugh and calm you down, to set you straight. Go to sleep, he tells you, gently. Alright, you reply. How your heart can want so much, so many, so very far apart, is beyond you, and maybe it always will be. But sometimes you realize that's not for you to sort out right now. Sometimes you just need to be told what you already know.

And some nights you walk home from yoga and marvel at the fact that the sun's still up, that it's warm enough to wander without a jacket. You have that quiet, heart-full feeling that you get after you practice, sad and happy and opened right up. You listen to Wilco, because that's always what you feel like listening to on your way home from yoga. The streets are still bright, and you smile shyly at the people you pass, feeling vulnerable somehow, but also hopeful. When you get home, there's a message from your best friend that another member of your sweet karass is in the final stages of labour, about to push out her first beautiful baby. Welcome to the world, little girl, you think to yourself. It's smaller and bigger and harder and easier than you could ever imagine. It's a hell of a place.

back and forth, forever.

These days I work in the same neighbourhood I went to highschool in. It's a bit of a mindfuck, albeit a pleasant one. I love the feeling of bumping up against my past all the time, I really do. Walking streets I used to know, taking shortcuts and remembering classes missed, fears realized, hearts broken. I'm not one of those people who has a particular nostalgia for highschool itself (the opposite is true, in fact), but I sure do look back fondly on the emotional education I got during those years.

The neighbourhood I work in is also close to Hamilton's only university. There are student houses everywhere, couches on porches, pickup trucks full of beer parked nearly perpendicular across ill-paved driveways. It gives the streets a pleasantly anarchic feeling that I find comforting. Yesterday things were even more ridiculous and messy than usual--April 30th, move-out day. As I walked around on my lunch break, I saw countless U-Hauls, decimated Ikea shelves, frustrated mothers and methodical fathers, young adults hauling armloads of clothes and pillows down rickety front steps. I heard in their voices that particular mix of relief at the end of another school year, and resignation to the fact that they would be spending the next four months in a childhood bedroom, suddenly accountable again after a year of total independence. Those are strange times, liminal times. Times between times, when you're not really sure who or where you are. Are you a student, mature and thoughtful and On Your Way Somewhere, or are you a daughter, dependent and uncertain and skulking back home? You don't really know, not when you're filling a borrowed truck with all your worldly goods, saying goodbye to the best people you've ever met.

Watching it all unfold, I couldn't help but think back to the many move-homes I've known. The one that came to mind immediately was the very first, in May, 2000. I had spent a transformative, sketchy, unforgettable year living at St. Hilda's College, surrounded by amazing women and annoying girls (and some who were both at the same time), across the street from the boys' residence, where we'd go for meals and beers and general insanity. A few weeks before the end of term I'd started dating a boy who felt different than the others. We liked all the same bands. We read all the same books. For weeks before we even kissed we'd stay up nearly all night talking about everything and nothing. Sometimes he'd call me on the phone and we'd talk that way for hours, even though he lived right across the street. I was falling in love with him, just as I'd fallen in love with the friends I'd made and the life I'd somehow forged for myself. I did not want to go. The prospect of leaving him, leaving my friends, leaving the tiny basement room that was now my home, terrified me. I was heading back to my real home, a place so unfamiliar to me now that it might as well have been Siberia.

One quiet Friday night my dad drove in to haul home my last load. The boy I couldn't get enough of had left for his parents' house Oshawa earlier that day, and already I felt like I was missing a limb. Before he left I thought about telling him how deep my feelings for him went, but I couldn't get the words out. The uncertainty hung between us as he walked away, hovered around me as I finished packing up my room before Dad got there. I remember those last few minutes, bringing the final boxes upstairs, cramming them into the back of the car, and then just standing there crying. A handful of the girls with whom I'd shared the last eight months were still around, and we all hugged and bawled like a bunch of tweens leaving summer camp. The air was warm and the sun was setting. My dad waited patiently in the driver's seat as I sloppily bid farewell to the best year of my life. As we drove back to Hamilton, further from my Toronto life, further from my eastbound love, I sunk back into the passenger side, exhausted. Everything that mattered felt so far away. In hindsight, it was the end of the beginning.

Of course I didn't know it yet, but that absence would make the heart grow fonder. I'd spend that summer working at the library. Nearly every night I'd run off to one place or another, often ending up in one of the same parks I'd spent my highschool years running off to. I wasn't looking for trouble the way I had been when I was younger, just a soft place to land. Every weekend I'd find myself either getting on a train or meeting one, following the path to my secret heart. Each time we'd see each other we'd get closer; each time we said goodbye it would get harder. Every train ride away from him made me feel like I was living that last day in front of St. Hilda's over again, dying another death, letting another great and wonderful thing come to an end. Come September we'd land back in each other's arms and vow to stay there for the rest of our lives. It would be exhilarating and terrifying and I would feel more alive and more secure than I'd ever thought possible.

That part wouldn't last either. I guess the point is, nothing does. Like it or not, we're bound to spend much of our lives in these liminal states, between things, between stops, between homes and great loves and times both hard and good. The silver lining, I think, is that eventually you get it. Eventually you see the changes coming, see that they're part of something bigger than you, know that you are strong enough to handle them. Eventually you make yourself your own anchor, and just hold on.

grow up and blow away.

Lately I've been getting the sense that I'm not as much of an adult as I probably ought to be. For a world-weary girl who has been called mature for her age since she was ten, this is an extremely unusual way to feel. It's not necessarily a bad thing, just a foreign one. And it's probably better than the alternative--that is, feeling burdened and close to breaking under the weight of grown-up responsibility. Which isn't to say I don't sometimes get a wave of that, but it passes.

Part of it's a product of living alone. When you live alone, especially in a house (be it ever so humble), you've got a lot of space to rattle around in. I feel perpetually as though my parents are away for the weekend and hot DIGGETY, I get to eat popcorn for dinner and turn up the stereo and invite a boy over later on. Ah, sweet freedom. Sometimes I drive home from work feeling palpably excited about just hanging around the house on my own terms. This only gets worse as gardening season approaches and all I want to do is plant myself in the backyard and listen to leaves growing. Okay then, that’s ONE thing that’s changed--back when my parents used to go away and leave me in charge, I’d routinely kill something in the garden, or else refuse to clean out the koi pond on account of my crippling fear that one of the goldfish would touch my hand. Maybe I’ve grown up more than I thought. Although I still wouldn’t put my fingers in a fish pond for love or money.

Another part of it's the fundamental conflict at the root of where my life is these days. The thing about being single and in your thirties is that you've got the confidence and self-assuredness that comes with supporting yourself through thick and thin. It's exhausting, to be sure, but god DAMN if it isn't empowering, too. Running parallel to that confidence, though, is the creeping fear that you've somehow missed some crucial boat. It's a daily battle, I find, reminding yourself that you've done the right thing. Of course it's the right thing, because it's the thing you chose, the thing you made happen, your steps on the road. Sometimes it feels like they're steps backward. Don't forget to tell yourself they're not. It's never a bad thing to hold onto autonomy, to hold onto carelessness, to hold onto naive optimism.

There will still be moments of doubt, of course. So how to cope? By leaning into it, I guess. On a lunch break from work I put on rubber boots and a wooly hat I've owned since highschool, walk around the same neighbourhood I walked around when I was skipping classes fifteen or so years ago. I put my headphones on and lose myself in the same old songs (mostly the same old songs, anyway--there's always room in my heart for a new jam). There's something comforting about just putting one foot in front of the other, and listening, and letting go. All you have to do is keep walking. The ground will hold you up, the melody will pull you along. This part's easy.

Marching forth.

The winter flies past in a frozen heartbeat. It seems like you don't write anymore. Your evenings are filled with other things; things that seem inconsequential in isolation but together add up to form the bulk of your life. Going to yoga, talking to boys on the phone, getting halfway through the books you've been meaning to read and then abandoning them in favour of the shortest articles in the Atlantic Monthly and a Nora Ephron collection you've re-read a million times. Better than nothing, you figure.

As usual, spring fever hits early. Sadly, it manifests itself as a literal fever as well, and you spend ten days holed up in your living room, watching high quality television shows interspersed with season six of the Simpsons (arguably the finest season, or at least the one from which you've memorized the most lines), coughing until your lungs fall out, sleeping in long spurts. February's always the hardest month of the year. And somehow you survive it by spending the last half of it completely incapacitated. Not a bad plan, in hindsight.

And now it's March, that month of fickle weather and existential ambivalence. (Yes, yes, all months have that quality to you; no one's arguing with you on that one. We can come back to it later.) The clocks spring forward and you want your hour back. You can tell you're on the mend when you stop sleeping again--insomnia's almost a welcome friend at this point. There's this boy that you like and he's been writing these tiny quasi-memoir-y reviews of songs from the 90s and each one makes you cringe and grin as you learn more about him and think back on your own strange life and uncover more and more parallels between his road and yours. One night while you're talking to him on the phone you wander down to the basement and drag up an old box of your highschool mixtapes. I thought I'd lost these, you muse, thinking to yourself that sometimes things don't reveal themselves till you're really ready for them. (In some other universe this thought applies to something with much more gravitas than a box of mixtapes. That universe is not the one you're meant to inhabit.) You spend a few days listening to them, falling down the rabbit hole. Once more you feel the palpable uncertainty and strange exhilaration of your youth. You remember particular nights and particular roads, hands held and boys kissed and friends departed. There's a story in here, you think to yourself. One story, at least.

There's a lot you could write about, but you don't. Not yet. Usually when you're not writing it's because you're too far inside your own head to find a way out, but this time it feels different. This time it feels like, for the first time in a long time, you're all the way out, opened up and awake and tentatively ready. For what, you're not quite sure. There's a story out here, of that much you are certain. You just have to live through it first.

snow days.

Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
--Robert Frost

On this grey and quiet day, I'm thinking back to other snow days I have known.

January, 1999.

This was the year the mayor of Toronto frantically called in the army. Just down the road, we Hamiltonians kept calm and carried on. We had something like three snow days in a row that winter; it just kept on tumbling out of the sky all week. Friday was the third day, I think. It was only a couple of weeks before my final round of final exams. I was finishing highschool a semester early, theoretically to EXPLORE and GROW but realistically to sleep late and slack off and drive around aimlessly with my boyfriend. (For the record, I regret nothing.) I spent those couple of days hunkered down in my bedroom, studying. For all my slackerish posturing, I was fundamentally a do-gooder kid. I liked school, and I liked writing papers, and I liked doing well. I felt excited and somewhat existential about finishing highschool, and I took advantage of the extra study time with academic enthusiasm and mild melancholy. I'd wander down to the kitchen every couple of hours, sit at the island with my brother and my mom, then wander back up to piles of books and notes and a Joni Mitchell record on my recently inherited turntable. I have always been a top-drawer hunkerer.

By Friday night I was ready for a change of scene. My boyfriend was playing a concert that night--he was a drummer and percussionist in the city-wide youth orchestra, and every year the Hamilton Philharmonic would invite someone from each section to play in one of their performances. That January evening it was his turn. By some strange miracle the concert hadn't been cancelled and so I met his mom downtown in front of Hamilton Place and we sat together. I don't remember what pieces they played, but I remember where I was sitting--Orchestra level, stage left--because it was the same section I'd sat in with my parents through a million Sunday Symphony concerts. I remember watching him on that stage, a stage I'd played and sung on many times in choir concerts and mass string orchestra versions of the William Tell Overture. I felt proud of him and also personally relieved, for once a member of the audience instead of a part of the performance.

After the concert, his mom dropped us off at a friend's place in Westdale. Because of the snow and the treacherous roads and also, probably, the fact that we were the teenage equivalent of an old married couple, I was allowed to stay over at his house that night. Later on we walked home over the King Street bridge, down Dundurn to York and on to Inchbury. It was so quiet and still. We held hands and shuffled along and leaned into one another as we'd been leaning for the last two years. It's a good feeling, to feel so familiar with a person, to walk silently down streets you know well, to leave a trail of footprints behind you.