“I’ve never mentioned Biafra to them before in my life.”
“That’s obvious,” she said. “But don’t avoid the real issue. What I mean is, you’ve got to quit teaching them that misfortune, misery, even tragedy, is funny.”
“But it is,” I said.“Tragedy’s a basic building block of comedy. Stepping on a banana peel may be a cliché, but only through overuse; the concept itself is still hilarious.”
“Sure, unless you smash your brains out in the fall and leave behind a wheelchair-bound widow and two infants. It’s not so hilarious then, is it?”
“That,” I said,“would depend on the context.”
“No, that outcome could never be funny — like Biafran jokes told to the children at our well-stocked dinner table could never be funny.”
She spoke with what was becoming a familiar stiffness, one that implied that she was right and I was wrong and nothing I could say would change her mind. My last and only stratagem now had to be esoteric — victimless.
“What about those two masks,” I said, going for the big stretch. “You know, the ones for the theatre that signify comedy and tragedy; they’re always shown face to face — an inseparable pair. Come to think of it, don’t they always seem to be entwined somehow...?”
By this point in the conversation, though, any exchange of ideas with Maddy, esoteric, concrete, valid, or otherwise, was futile; she was pissed.
“Let me tell you something, hubby dear. We’re not going to wind up face to face tonight as an inseparable pair ... and we’re sure as hell not going to be entwined somehow.”
Luckily, my initial response of “Oh boy, doggy style” stayed in my head, because eventually she lifted that sanction, too, and we did wind up face to face, inseparable, and en-twined that evening.
But thinking back, I’d missed another sign; it was just a small precursor to the current situation, though, and sometimes the odd thing slips by you as you perform the complicated task of living your life.
To a large degree, when you’re born dictates how you’re going to live your life (genetics and locale being the two other main factors, I would think). Regardless of our present-day threats, enter the world during the fourteenth century, say, and life’s a far bigger gamble than it is now — maybe you’d hit sixty, or maybe appendicitis or a mouthful of gamy pheasant would take you out at age six. And whether a pauper or a noble, you wouldn’t stand in front of the toilet in your pullups, giggling with delight (as any sparkling-eyed three-year-old would these days) while you watched the porcelain portal magically whisk away your poo poo.You’d shit into a communal trench (the royal hole or the serf ’s ditch), gagging at the stench bubbling up between your pudgy thighs as you added to the rancid pile.
I was born in 1957 — right here in good old North America. With Enrico Fermi’s job complete and Jonas Salk just dusting off his hands, not a bad time and place.Yeah, threats existed, but the postwar economy chugged right along, and whatever came our way we sure as hell could handle. My parents, one a paper pusher and one a homemaker (as was the style at the time) were a pair of robust, mentally able WASPS who dealt reasonable hands to all three of their children. So, regarding those variables affecting quality and quantity of life, I had no right to complain.
I did grow up in another city, though, a government town, which meant I saw little in the way of industry or big business as a youth. To me, politicians were the norm — and most of them, if not on the take, were guilty of collusion or nepotism (if you heard the whispers), or just plain stupidity (if you heard them speak).
Their forefathers, mustachioed gents of old, had decreed that no building erected shall be taller than those buildings housing bodies of government, and a tower with a clock in it did dominate the stubby skyline (a pointy, phallocentric thing rising some 302 feet), an obvious self-tribute to the swaggering, belligerent dicks running the show.
Nevertheless, the city had its charm: in the summer it was lush and green, and a manmade canal — an impressive physical accomplishment for early-nineteenth-century engineers —wound through its centre. What the canal’s original function was meant to be, I couldn’t tell you, but its main twentieth-century duty appeared to be carrying armadas of sightseeing boats (with payloads of camera-toting tourists dropping their coffee cups, Wrigley’s wrappers, and Marlboro lungers into otherwise pristine waters) through some of the older, prettier residential sections of the city and into the downtown core.
In the winter (after the locks had been opened, draining vast amounts of water into the big river north of town) the canal transformed into a six-mile-long skating rink — touted as the longest in the world. With five-foot-high walls of cemented-over masonry now exposed on either side, and the walking path’s milky-globed lampposts casting silvery light from above, the ribbon of ice coursing through the city held a dreamlike quality on those cold, snowy evenings. And on the weekends, thousands of rosy-cheeked recreational skaters filled this rink, the adults gliding shoulder to shoulder, the children weaving in and out of traffic, engrossed in frenetic games of tag or snap the whip. Viewed from the path above, the masses seemed to perform an intricate, choreographed dance as they propelled themselves to the next hot chocolate kiosk or chuck wagon stand or port-o-potty.
The canal was one of the few highlights, physically or spiritually, of my birth city and childhood home. I grew up next to it (or, more correctly, to a small inlet called Richelieu Creek that jutted from it like an afterthought in the middle of town) and it’s what I remember best.
The inlet itself lay at the bottom of a shallow hollow between my street and Baymore Terrace and gave the impression, at first glance, of a natural waterway cutting through a miniature valley. But upon closer inspection you could see the original flag-stone mason work, almost two hundred years old, rising just above the waterline. It ran for six hundred feet and, over the years, as housing and roadways and civilization in general sprang up around it, necessitated two quaint arched bridges to link the sprouting thoroughfares. Cobblestone walkways and sprawling greenery lined both banks of the creek, and intricate wrought iron railings were added to it to keep the locals from falling in.
What never entered my mind as a youth (but always has when I’ve thought back on it as a shovel-wielding adult) was the amount of labour that must have gone into building such a beautiful but unnecessary elaboration. Even using draft horses and whatever hauling machinery they might have had back then, it must have taken fifty men at least two hundred days to produce something that held no real value to anyone; they’d even left a small island in the middle of it — a ten-by-thirty-foot oasis abounding with trees and wild foliage — as a kind of salute to its frivolity.
But whatever its original purpose, or lack thereof, the creek left me with a stunning hangout as a youth. Standing in that small strip of lush parkland at dusk and looking at the sprawling heritage homes of Baymore Terrace from beneath fairytale lighting almost took my breath away; well, maybe the view and the cigarette dangling from my twelve-year-old lips did that together.
I don’t know if you’d call it a parable that I can remember my first drag on a cigarette taking place in that Eden-like setting. Truthfully, I don’t remember my first cigarette at all, but the first cigarette I do remember (my first taste of the forbidden fruit), I sucked back in that very spot. I just didn’t have Eve by my side.
I partook of that particular mistake with a fellow preteen named Stanley Austen. Stanley was one of those saucer-eyed, floppy-eared, chinless marmots who looked like the subject of either a seventeenth-century English painting or a Jerry Springer episode on “Ozark Mountain love-tryst aftermaths.” You don’t seem to see as many of his type as you used to — the relatively recent advent of trains, planes, and automobiles has broadened the gene pool enormously over the decades — but he was a nice guy and my close friend back then.
That event, that premiere, I guess you could call it, took place in a what seems like a different life now — more than a hundred thousand cigarettes have passed my lips since