Trapped in amber

Some news events are like amber; what we were doing on a particular day is trapped and preserved by the golden sticky resin of a catastrophe.  

I'm hardly the first person to make this comparison, but when the setting sun of late August/early September throws amber light, divided by lengthening shadows, it comes to mind.

I was thinking about it this evening, although the particular memories stalking me through the streets in our neighbourhood are actually from August 30th, not August 31st, 1997, because here in Victoria, we're nine hours behind Paris, and eight hours behind London.

It was a particularly early Labour Day long weekend, because September 1st fell on a Monday that year, and elder daughter, then aged five, would be going to school for the first time on the Tuesday.

After dinner, I made my way down to the local shops, on an evening much like this one, albeit slightly warmer.  I can't remember why.  Perhaps to pick up ice cream for dessert?  We were forever running out of things, with two young daughters.  The news reports about an accident in a tunnel in Paris were just starting to filter through.  They were vague, suggesting that Diana, Princess of Wales, had broken her leg.  

As I walked through the alternating light and shadows, I mused that this had been a close call:  Just imagine how awkward it would be for the Royal Family if the difficult Diana actually died.  

By my daughters' bedtime, the reports were becoming grimmer.  I was braiding elder daughter's hair when the confirming newsflash came through.

And yes, it was a shock.  She was so damn famous, so omnipresent.  As the United Kingdom awoke to the bulletin, we went wondering to bed.  I arose the next morning, thinking I might have dreamt it and slipped downstairs, so as not disturb my sleeping family, turning on CBC, and seeing the coffin being unloaded off a private plane, draped in the royal standard.

During the surreal week that followed, we settled into the brand-new rhythm of a school year, watching in snatches scenes that were sometimes touching, sometimes maudlin, and often way over the top.  

I found the sardonic words of the opening song of Evita playing, unbidden, in my mind:  "Falling over ourselves to get all of the misery right . . . quite a sunset, and good for the country in a roundabout way/We've made the front pages of all the world's papers today . . . . why all this howling, hysterical sorrow?  What kind of goddess has lived amongst us?  How will we ever get by without her?"

I wasn't unmoved by the tragedy, you must understand.  However, four people had been in that car, and the one person who had survived had also been the one person wearing a seatbelt, and he'd been in the front passenger seat, apparently the worst place to be.

Yet, the questions kept repeating:  "How could this have happened?  What will we do in honour of her?"

I don't think it's facetious to suggest a suitable gesture would be to wear your seatbelt.  It would be fitting, in every sense.

Moving through the amber, I find myself returning, not to the old house on the street with no west exit, but to our condo.  I pass chalk drawings on the sidewalks.  The neighbourhood children have been busy this summer.  And because I'm feeling 1997 so keenly, each rainbow stroke drags on my heart.

It's been twenty-five years.  So much has gone.

But I have still have loved ones, so I check before crossing the street.

(Wear your seatbelt.)

Drumming out Christmas

Since we moved, one shortcut into town takes me past our old house on Collinson, a fine opportunity to torture myself with nostalgia. It was the one home I truly loved; I was reasonably fond of our other homes, but this one had my heart. Our daughters were young in it, and I adored the size, shape, and location of it.

The people who live there now ring the portico with lights, much as we did, and seeing the familiar shape and glow from Quadra Street nearly did me in.

In Victoria, it's very common to take the tree down a day or so after New Year's Day, although we cling to the tradition of leaving it up for the Twelfth Day of Christmas, which is today.

I'm frantically cleaning and pulling a dinner together for the friends who come and help us ease through this rather depressing chore.

On our old street, in our old house, the tree was being dismantled on the second day of the new year. Oh well. It's their house, now.

The road not taken

Walking home from the drug store, I decide to incorporate my route to my former home with my present home, descending into Fairfield via tree-lined and still leafy Vancouver Street.

I'm somewhere behind the cathedral, when I hear an exchange taking place behind me, between a child and a man: high voice/deep voice, high voice/deep voice:
"Guess what?"
"What?"
"Guess what?"
"What?"

This continues as they overtake me, a young dad and his colt-legged daughter, clad in a hoodie and leggings, dragging a long stick along the pavement.

Pang.

Two decades ago, elder daughter was seven, and would have come down this hill with her dad countless times, and much in this vein.

I'm rather relieved when this current-day pair lope past the turning which leads to our old house.

That might break my heart.

Flower children

I was an ESL (English as a Second Language - they call it something else now) teacher in my young adulthood, before second daughter arrived, and I discovered my ESL training would come in handy, even if I couldn't figure out what her first language was.

During one of the sessions in which I was an instructor, there was a 1960s theme dance. Instead of my usual bun - pinned up primly for my students, who were only a few years' my junior, yet thought I was as old as the hills (I didn't disabuse them of this notion) - I wore my hair down and donned one of those floaty, Indian-made frocks that usually sway on racks in front of the funkier shops.

I was standing with a fellow-teacher, when two Québecois students (not, thankfully, mine) approached.

"You look good," remarked one. "But then, it's your epoch, no?"

For the record, the sixties were not my era.

Last Sunday, we decided to support my Friend Who Sings and Gardens by attending a concert being given by her community choir.  This too was a Sixties theme, featuring lots of favourites from the late sixties and early seventies.

Most of the choir members had chosen to wear flower-power clothes.  The Resident Fan Boy joked that they had raided the backs of their closets - they looked pretty authentic - but, oh, it really hit me as I gazed at them, that these clothes celebrating the cult of youth make older people look ancient.

We've seen the choir several times; the members are on the mature side, but, dressed in evening wear, it's not the first thing you think of.  The tie-dyes, colourful prints, and scarves wrapped around their foreheads merely emphasized the years that have rocked and rolled away.

After intermission, they returned, dressed in circus garb, which, oddly, was more flattering.

This performance was in aid of a kids' choir programme set up some twenty years ago in the elementary schools.  Before that, most schools had their own glee clubs, run by teachers, and there was class time set aside for singing, even if a school pageant wasn't planned.  I know, from following both daughters through the school system, that this is no longer the case. You only get arts education if someone funds it.

So, in contrast to the aging hippies in the risers, several dozen children in gauzy white tops and dresses, looking to be mostly in the six-to-seven-year-old range, were guided on to the stage.  It really looked like herding kittens.

Once all the kids -- from the four elementary schools where the programme is run - had been shoe-horned into place, they sang three songs, and there was something to watch wherever you looked.

Three girls clutched hands, looking for all the world like a high school clique in bud. While many of the ankle-biters zoned in and out of concentration, one girl focussed on the director determinedly, singing as if the world depended on it.  Another had a similar focus, but on the audience on one side.  She stepped away from the others, angled her body to that section of the auditorium, and sang loudly and expressively.

It was a helluvan act to follow.  No wonder the grown-ups dressed up.

Family matter

I guess it was a good day to visit the museum.

Younger daughter was having one of her "on" days, when the sliding doors of her brain are open, and she is comfortable and functioning.

She was delighted by the transformation of the First Nations section, which now opens with columns and buttons which allow you to hear the vanishing indigenous languages of British Columbia, and to see where they used to be spoken.

She dove into this year's Terry Fox exhibit, and painstakingly read through every item in every display.  The Resident Fan Boy found comfortable places to sit while she did so, while I learned the ins and outs of the access elevator to accommodate Demeter's walker.  It involves finding the correct button with a bright light on the dashboard to blind you, holding said button for the correct length of time while the platform finds the correct level, then releasing the button at the correct time so that the door will open and let you out or in, releasing you from the embarrassment of hollering and banging for a patient RBCM staff member.

However, I had come for the Family Bond and Belonging exhibit, a sort of three-dimensional album.  Families from all over British Columbia have contributed film and videos of days at the beach, in the living room, in the backyard.  Some of these films look very old indeed -- from the 1920's and thirties, at least.

There's a sort of 1970s-style living room where you can plop down and watch snippets of these, ricocheting back and forth through the years.

There are galleries of photos, some from the Royal BC Archives, some from contributing families.  They represent a myriad of experience:  being First Nation, British, Chinese, Indian, or gay in British Columbia.  Having a family of blood relations, or chosen friends.  Living now, or a century and a half ago.

My very favourite display is at the very centre of the exhibit -- a dazzling collection of costumes: historical, cultural, military, occupational, again, many contributed by families, with stories attached.

I want to go back, of course, but repeated Victorian summers have taught me what Thomas Wolfe always knew -- that you really can't go home again.