(Image: Bell Island, Newfoundland from the ferry at Conception Bay)
I think that life is like that. When you’ve got it, you take the bigger chances. But those worlds–all worlds–leave. Then the church comes at you with open arms, the truest sign that you’ve hit rock bottom. They want you at the pot lucks and you don’t even have to bring anything. People love to save money, but they love to save souls even more. I’m not even kidding.
In those lost pixels between tomographic slices of deli meats and your crucified reputation, there is where you are a favourite guest, second only to the esteemed lady who in her cooking maximizes the product between obscurity and sheer volume. I’m shit at mathematics, so I bought a chocolate cake and hoped for the best.
I was always hoping for the best. I was hoping that the food would be good, that the next world would come up the queue at any moment, that I would be swallowed, and with any luck, warmed. I went to San Diego when I was eight, when my parents were still together, and returned with the distinct impression that the best worlds were hot by eight a.m.
On that morning the pastor accepted my cake with aplomb.
The pews were cold, of course.
*
Later I sat beside Seba. His bony legs dangled from the pier and played with the light over the water. He wore his old Vandy hoodie zipped up to the collar. It was still cold.
He was hunched over slightly and I couldn’t see his face. In his lap there were several business cards and a few phone numbers on post-its. He had been himself, brought nothing, and been an absolute hit. These were the spoils. He had told them he was agnostic.
I wasn’t angry. I was just tired. I was in love with Seba.
I squinted at Bell Island in the distance. The 6:50 ferry was chugging slowly across. It was called Beaumont Hamel, after the town in France that swallowed our boys in the Great War.
Seba seemed to want to fight the war today, so he spoke. “What are you doing?”
I smiled. “I’m writing you a letter.”
“What does it say?”
“Dearest Seba…” I found a redbug on my knee and scratched it. “Go fuck yourself. Why, what are you doing?”
He laughed and the pile of cards shook as he did. “Praying.”
“Praying,” I repeated.
“Praying.”
“For my soul?”
“For your soul.”
“Thank you.”
*
I really don’t think you think like I do
I really don’t think you could know that I’m in heaven when you smile.
– “Standing Here” by The Stone Roses
Miss you, gorgeous.
You roll out from underneath murder
And smear the blood between my breasts.
*
Here is where your heart goes
She laughs,
Just in case success has you forget
And I won’t.
*
a/n: To Hope. I listened to your tape again last night.
Who will love you?
Who will fight?
Who will fall far behind?
–“Skinny Love” by Bon Iver
*
She calls herself a superstar; she has the legs of a pre-pubescent track star. Skinny and chopstick-straight, yet with a tofu-like consistency around the knees, they jog around my neighbourhood below nylon shorts and the track jacket of her alma mater.
This happens every Sunday around 9:20 am. She’s not a churchgoer herself, but I have a taste for the hardness of early pews. Our punctualities necessitate that we brush shoulders at the intersection of Spadina and Dundas like clockwork.
We always exchange complicated pleasantries, for I’ve never been good at keeping it simple with the weather and things like that, and she is constantly preoccupied with the details of getting ahead. The results are colloquy of the type we both learned in endless undergraduate wine and cheeses, where freshmen mendicants suckled at the teats of faculty research grants, and the rest—the type of people who are supposed to know one another but really don’t give a fuck—took turns volleying at the ramparts of one another’s self-esteem. To her I exalt the tart flavour of still being in school, while she talks about the real world like it’s something I’ll encounter if I simply put my crayon over the black line.
“Out there, you’ve got to be a superstar,” she says firmly, and pats her knees as if to indicate that she jogs like so in order to improve their superstar quality.
“Oh, really?” I retort, and clutch the crayons to my palm with that much more urgency.
I often come to the conclusion that we must dislike each other enormously to go on like this. In the pale light, we both cast colossal shadows over the worn Chinatown pavement: hers, lithe with that strange interplay between femininity and warlord that caused the Greeks to worship their goddesses, and mine, stiff and ascetic. But I am reminded by her jacket logo that her alma mater was mine, that we cheered for the same last-place football team once, that our consistency of experience simply augments the fact that I am two years behind her in school, and that two years is a precipitous gap for two people who measure their lives in a tally of epochs and next-big-things.
So I make it easier for myself sometimes. I tell her that her legs deserve compliments, and she smiles with the thought that I’m making advances. Strange how women cover so much ground like that, especially the successful ones, who are all ambition and the expectation of reciprocity where none exists.
She is the most successful out of her graduating class, and the Tartarean expectations are how you can tell.
She is also the better version of me—the best, really–and when we part I must scurry to my hard pews so that I may pray she never does become like me, nor I like her. It’s not too late to hope, anyway.
Disclaimer: Alright, I still probably gave too much away and I’m too lazy to tag only grads, so cut me some slack. I just thought that it’s such a nice thing to have an iron ring, dontcha think??
–
The iron ring ceremony is supposed to be some kind of cult affair. We were discussing this. Dim lighting, robes, and secrecy. It wasn’t, by the way. It wasn’t perfect, but it was just as it ought to have been. If that makes sense.
This ring, this thin circlet on the little finger of my right hand, is already beginning to rust. Grads say that clear nail polish does a nice trick on that front. But this ring — it isn’t actually about the ring. Trust me — I’ve been thinking a bit about this.
When I was less than twelve, in a time when the de facto search engine of the day didn’t begin with a G, I went on dial-up internet and searched for the term “valedictorian speeches”. My favourite was by a girl who asked her audience to listen carefully to the sounds of the evening, for they were our link to the past and our key to the future. That speech has stayed with me consistently, even though by now I know that I will never be the valedictorian. I am not the valedictorian type. I can’t even begin to fathom being relevant to or representative of my graduating class. But that speech was so simple and so effective. Listen carefully to the sounds of the evening: just listen.
Without giving too much of this supposedly “secret” event away, the iron ring ceremony was, in the end, an exercise in listening. The first half of the ceremony was conducted in another room and was more instruction than ceremony. And I realized that you had to listen carefully to know where to stand, what to say, what to do. Not that you would walk out of there without an iron ring if you didn’t, but like with most things in life, you get out of it what you put in.
The oath we took was written by Rudyard Kipling — famous poet, misogynist, fascist, proponent of the White Man’s Burden, and Lord knows what else. But he hit the nail right on the head with this one, and it was by listening that I realized it.
I’ve been asked many, many times what professionalism is. I think that what it ends up meaning should be the result of lengthy personal reflection. During the iron ring ceremony, I reflected that professionalism meant nothing at all without the whole — without the individual pledges of the people in that room. That is, we are taught that a profession consists of a self-regulating body of skilled members, but what is self-regulation? I realized that it is when each member holds himself accountable to himself and to his fellows and to his profession and to the ideals of his profession. And who are the fellows? EVERYBODY.
I’m an emotional person by nature, and I definitely teared up a bit when I noted that Kipling emphasized over and over again that I was bearing witness in the presence of “my equals and my betters”. I think that if I remember anything, if anything ever drives me, it will be the memory of my equals and my betters. There’s a collective spirit in engineering — a zeitgeist, if you will — and I would liken it to something my equals and my betters understand all too well. The zeitgeist is a vector — something with not only magnitude, but DIRECTION. And that direction is UP and BETTER.
Up and better. If we could only be so lucky in all areas of our lives, to have such spirit among us.
And this spirit is most important of all when we fall. When we forget to listen. Forget to listen earnestly to the sounds of the evening and perhaps those of the community that we serve. Yes, I admit that I screwed up a bit. I couldn’t remember for the life of me where I was supposed to put the ring for presentation. And I would be lying if I said that I wasn’t worried during the entire oath that I would forget to lay the chain down gently — that it would just smack to the ground and take with it all my dignity. I know it’s stupid, but I actually THOUGHT that. It wasn’t until much later that I realized that there were too many of us holding it to ever let the iron fall. The most it could have done was go slightly slack in one place.
Well, our forefathers were clever, I guess. They planned for a factor of safety. And that is an important lesson, as we all learned in CIV 102.
So now what?
I don’t know what will happen tomorrow. Next month sounds like forever away. And in terms of stress points, it really is.
But the possibility that we might be professionals now. Professional livers of life, maybe. And even though failure may take its place many times as one of the sounds that invade our nights — that we have THIS success NOW.
That is a compelling thought.
And it makes me proud to be here with you.
I went to dinner with a skinny girl yesterday. Maybe there were two skinny girls. I can’t remember. One of the hypothetical two may have been a skinny boy. Like I said, I can’t remember. I remember that it didn’t matter. They were in love. And they could fit into each other’s jeans.
We had fries. I have a weakness for fries. They were supposed to have a weakness for each other, but that didn’t come across. My notebook was out. They were telling me stories. Or one was telling stories and the other one was constructing a probability function.
The talker had thick wrists for a skinny person. They rested on the table. She talked in a rasp, simultaneously powerful and whimsical, and the story was about ownership.
“So I was maybe eight. Saw some quarters on the ground in the parking lot. There didn’t seem to be anybody around who had lost them. I was saving for a toy watch, so I looked to Dad for advice.
‘Finders, keepers,’ he said with a shrug.
Next day, Nell, my little sister, was playing with a huge wad of bills. Where’d you get that, I asked her, and she said it was from Mom’s dresser.
‘Finders, keepers,’ she reasoned. And I had to exclaim that ‘finders, keepers’ only works when you don’t know the person…”
The talker started to laugh. I wrote in the margin FINDERS, KEEPERS, and underlined it. Then she turned to the other – the figment – or our figment, I guess it must have been. The figment had his hands under the table.
“What about you, hun? Your sister: what’s she like? She says funny things?”
“Dunno,” came the reply. “She’s honest. She’s important. I think. To somebody. Funny things? Maybe. She said something like, ‘I love you, but life is busy.’ So we just left it at that.”
I love you, but life is busy.
I love you, but life is busy.
I love you, but life is busy.
I liked that. So I wrote it down. No fucking wonder they were so skinny. Too many stories, and not enough fries.
My Aunt Jimmy prays on her best behaviour. There is never anyone around to attend, but she chooses her diction with sedulous care. Conjunctions are axed for they reek of desperation, while optimism, the detached sort which I am continually encouraged to sprinkle in my research funding proposals, reigns supreme.
I wouldn’t be able to tell you who taught her to pray, but the observation that she does is not in the least ambiguous. She bends her body, bows her head, and holds her hands together in a manner that touches the broad circlet of gold on her left into the palm of the right. Beside her, she keeps well-thumbed Bibles – the NIV for everyday, the King James for added piety, the Good News for, well, days when she feels unequal to the bad news – with post-its marking her favourite Psalms. All this effort to look like she cares what God thinks, but I know better.
Old habits die hard, and this cabaret is no habit of old.
This is the religion that Jimmy married into. It gives little credence to the supernatural, which most markedly differentiates it from the one with which she grew up – the one that insisted on portents, legends, transfigurations, and the overarching belief that everything had to mean something or else nothing at all. Under the latter’s influence she and her sisters had been stupidly devout – at least that’s what Uncle Jack said: she was, however, not coerced to accept the former in any way, which I believe struck her fancy, and so she did.
Uncle Jack took her to the church and married her to God, the law, and himself on a day in August. He said that as far as he could tell, she did not protest. Four months later, my mother’s birth canal erupted, Jimmy became Aunt Jimmy, and again, she did not protest.
In quiet moments my aunt used this remembrance to evidence her love for me: “Do you know that out of all this family’s children, I made the least fuss over you?”
“Really, Jimmy!”
By my mother’s ubiquitous reaction I knew that it did not sound like a compliment. Yet I tacitly believed that it was – for I was always Aunt Jimmy’s favourite. She would sit in her chair while my cousins and I, as part of many childish presumptions, took turns asking her over and over again where she got her name. My school friends were dismissive of the idea: they insisted she must be a Jinny and perhaps it had been an error in cursive, and had a G also been perverted along the way? Then with reddening cheeks – we had had the fear of God and slandered relations beaten into us from a young age – Alice, Benji, Julian, and I swore that we would get to the bottom of it and ran immediately after school to confront her.
She answered only to me and in one run-on sentence, but it was enough.
My cousins were content to have their curiosities satisfied: Alice exclaimed that it was picturesque to have been named after a screen legend like Jimmy Stewart, even if he was a man and therefore possessed of unfortunate appendages. Julian, the aspiring author who had also been for some months aspiring to the middle name Roscoe (to Aunt Lila’s great chagrin) so he could one day publish under J. R. Court, remarked that he was happy to have such a story in the family.
I was content to have Aunt Jimmy and to be her favourite.
I suppose my parents were satisfactory enough growing up, but if I ever am regarded as interesting, I should attribute it to the words of Aunt Jimmy. Cursed with mean looks — eyes that looked rather than twinkled, swamp-brown stick-straight hair that had to be twisted into braids in order to assume any morphology at all, limbs that neither moved with elegance nor aspired to glory via bruises and fractures – and a chronic inability to think for myself, I was labeled by most folks who were made to bear my introduction as “boring”.
But not Jimmy. She always said that there was no such fault as “boring” – only “boredom” – and that even that could not be said to be my fault exactly.
Then she would ask me to pray with her.
She said that prayer would teach us to find our knees. And that when I had found my knees, well, that would be the end of boredom as I knew it.
