Instructions for Disposing of Your Past: Part II

On the last night of the full moon burn the last of your papers. Burn the box that you stored them in too. When the final coals have been reduced to ash say goodnight to the fireflies and sleep a dreamless sleep.

In the morning a cold but gentle rain will fall as you paddle to a part of the lake you often pass but never cross as there are no creeks or rivers or islands there. In your pocket is the inescapable ring.

Last summer, when your father lost his glasses in the lake, you had hoped it was lost for good. When the twin band had slipped off and settled on the mucky bottom you resurfaced and, slipping the remaining one off your finger had slapped it, angrily, on the dock. "Can you please look after this for me? I've already lost one," you say thinly veiling your anger in martyrdom, before diving back into the murky and, that year, frigid water.

Later that evening, glasses recovered and a sort of peace restored you laugh when your parents both admit that neither took the ring and it's been left on the dock.

"Don't worry, it's impossible to lose these rings. I wouldn't be surprised if the one in the lake found it's way back to me too." And, as predicted, while the one in the lake remained lost to the leaches, the one forgotten on the dock, the one in your pocket now, was still there in the morning.

Both were silver bands the Ex bought from a street vendor at a theater festival. You always wore them on your left hand though, after the divorce, when you lost all that weight, you had to wear them on your middle finger. You have never owned expensive jewelery because you are uncannily adept at losing or breaking it, yet, despite your best efforts, these rings have continued to find their way back to you. Over the years they've been lost for days, weeks, sometimes months at a time only to be discovered in a lint trap, under the claw foot bath tub, in the pocket of your grandfather's favourite blue cardigan. Once, after the spring melt, they reappeared in your back alley after having spent the entire winter under a blanket of snow.

Until last summer, your fingers and those rings remained, unlike you and your ex, inseparable. But the lake has proven greedy for treasure, and has never coughed up the first band so you will trust it with this one as well. Pressing the ring between your palms in a prayerful namaste you close your eyes and wish the Ex well before flinging it blindly into the water. Do not open your eyes until you hear the splash and are certain it has sunk without a trace.

Paddle to your island. Dive in to the water. Let the waves wash away the smokey scent of last night's fire; the proof that you are cured.

Wild Game

I went moose hunting today. I didn't see a moose but I did find a gorilla. The gorilla. That gorilla. In that picture, you know, the one of me and that gorilla. That you took. I've framed it in glass, part of a triptych in black and white. On the left is a marble statue at the top of the National Parliament Building in Havannah, Cuba. On the right side is a dead frog floating in a chlorine pool. And, between them both, is a picture of me, wearing your hat, in front of the highway monument gorilla. I am smiling at you, so naturally and easy, it, the smile looks real, even to me.

Before the picture, Jack, who hadn't smoked a day in his life until his divorce at forty, fell asleep with a lit cigarette between his lips and died in the ensuing fire at the age of forty three. You said, "Baby, baby, baby. What's it going to take to cheer you up?"

I said, "I need a road trip."

Forty-two hours before the picture we dropped off the Boy, the one I'd had a crush on since before you and I met, at his friend's campground. In fact, the night you and I met, I'd been at the pub telling my best friend all about him when he walked in with a girl.

"Huh," I said, watching the two of them walking hand in hand to the bar, "I hadn't considered that possibility at all." When my friend and I finished laughing we ordered another two rounds which is how I ended up pretending to french kiss you through the window pane before we ever spoke a word. (I like to blame the alcohol but you and I both know, I'd have probably done the same sober.) This, the pub and the kiss and the poem you recited when we stumbled out into the street after closing time, are all a years worth of hours before the road trip.

So after dropping off this boy whom I still had a crush on at the camper his friends dubbed the "The Silver Bullet" which, it turns out, was only a double entendre to you and me, after this but still before the gorilla, we spent a night in a nicotine coated cabin under linens that smelled like fermaldehyde and moss. when I couldn't sleep, you called me back to bed and, placing your lips beside my ear, told me the story, again, about your favourite snowboard run. When you got to the part about the unblemished powdery snow and made the swooshing noise that tickled my ear, the vibration made my toes curl for the third time that night.

Thirty-two hours earlier there was that small town with the best ever second hand store, where I had to buy the blue cowboy shirt with snaps and the brown wool sweater, the one like your ski sweater without all the holes, because both were too small on you. After that, any time I wore either one you'd say, "Man, it tears me that that's too small for me," and it made me happy to make you jealous over something so mundane.

Thirty hours prior was the 200 km side road that dead ended in a peculiar town with a two table coffee shop and a grocery store that sold only blighted vegetables and expired milk. The people in both establishments eyed us suspiciously but, while I have no patience for small talk, you quickly won them over with your rent-a-smile and bad jokes.

Twenty-two hours before we were caught in a pulp trailer checkstop by a trucker who went around us to park in front of us and so must have seen everything. "No, wait, c'mon who cares," you said but I was already back in the driver's seat. You smiled and made the airhorn gesture at the driver as we drove past, then you mooned him as we drove away. I ought to have been embarassed but I couldn't stop laughing.

Twenty hours before the photo there were hours of silence; just us and the road and motorized metal containers hurtling behind us like our blurry pasts or towards us like our even blurrier futures. You hit repeat to listen to Leonard Cohen's, "I'm Your Man." three times. After the second listen you said quietly, more to yourself than to me, "I think I'm starting to get it." I didn't know what "it" was and I didn't ask. We finally found relief in the guise of a hitchhiker. A tree planter. Money for school, he said. Was it to be a doctor? Or an engineer? Neither of us cared. He was glad for the ride, we were grateful for the company. He was not either of us. Nothing else was important.

Just eighteen hours before that photo we played pool and owned the juke box in a seedy bar in Thunder Bay, until a drunk girl in white hightops and a ZZ Top t-shirt challenged us to pool and tried to pick a fist fight with me.  You were disappointed I didn't take the bait. This after checking into the Art Deco 50's style hotel, and the steak dinner at the Casino that made you throw a tantrum which in turn made me laugh til I cried.

Four hours before you took that photo I tried telling you the story about the conversation I had with the old man in the Swiss Chalet parking lot only I got the sequence all wrong and somehow it sounded like I had told him I wanted you to propose. "OHHH," you said, "If that's what you want let's do it. Let's get married right now." I told you to fuck off.

After all of this, as if only to prove the absurdity of us, there is a black and white photo of me in front of a gorilla, wearing your straw cowboy hat and smiling at you like I mean every dimple of it. when I got the film developed I couldn't remember where the picture was taken. What remains vivid in my memory is the minute after you snapped the picture.

Three jeering pre-teen girls came walking down the highway, resentful of their tiny town and the tourists passing through to bigger cities with brighter lights and cooler, harder boys. You turned to watch them and I knew you saw your own daughter and wondered what she despised now. There you were, a grown man, wondering what they liked and what was the secret codeword to get into their club. And I, watching you, wanted to tell you, reassure you, there is no way to crack that clique when you are older than twenty, but I realized no matter how many miles we traveled together, the distance between us would always remain the same so I didn't say anything at all.

We got back in the rental car and drove away. We didn't stop again.

Singular

"Oh yes
there are worse things
than being alone
but it often takes
decades to realize this
and most often when you do
it's too late
and there's nothing worse
than too late"

-Charles Bukowski

The Mother Corp has come up with some interesting summer radio programming including an environmental show with, who else, David Suzuki, a show called "The Main Ingredient" about food and food issues (you know I'm all over that one) and another called "Asunder", a show about divorce. In a country where 40% of marriages end in divorce I think it's about time we started being able to talk about it.

The curious thing about divorce is that, despite how common it is, it still seems to be a taboo subject. In many ways the loss is similar to experiencing the death of your spouse but, while the recently widowed are granted understanding and empathy, it was my experience that the separated and divorced are shunned, reviled and blamed.

If you can't make a relationship work, it's your fault. There is something wrong with you. You have no right to feel sad, or angry or upset. After all, you chose to end the relationship and whatever your reasons might be, they're irrelevant because there are other people still in relationships, at this very moment, having the exact same problems or worse and they're toughing it out. Why do you get to quit and they don't? You shouldn't. You are a failure.

Your friends and family, the people you thought would support you, most of them will not want to discuss it. What happened is between you and your Ex, they don't want to know the gory details, they just want to judge you for it. Most of them will pick a side. You think it will be yours. It most likely will not be.

When I left the Ex after six years it was after three years of hoping things would get better. I'm certain it was the thousand tiny cuts in those years that bled the relationship dry until, by the seminole day when my world came crashing round about me, we were so brittle it was nothing to snap me in two. I came home from a doctor's appointment and walked up the creaky ninety year old stairs of our house to his office. He was in front of his computer, as he almost always was, playing a fishing game.

I hesitated in the doorway. Everything in the room, including him, seemed so fixed and secure and ordinary while I felt superfluous. Finally I announced, with all the stoic pragmatism I could muster, "Well, the good news is I'm not pregnant, the bad news is I have a cancer that needs to be removed. Tomorrow. I need someone to be at the hospital with me."

"You don't expect me to take a day off work just for that, do you?" He asked, without looking up from the screen.

In that moment, on what seemed, at the time, like the worst day of my life, with terror coursing through my veins and now my heart crushed in a care less second, there was no longer any hope. Obviously things were not going to get better.

Instructions for Disposing of Your Past: Part I

You will need:

Your own secluded island (or bathtub, any place with water will do)
A fire pit
A bottle of your favourite wine
A full moon
Lhasa de Sala discography

The method:

Strip naked. Let the sun warm, and the wind tickle, your skin, untouched now for so long the pleasure of it is almost excruciating. Close your eyes. Remember how you came to be here. Remember all the happy years, the difficult days, the eternal seconds. Remember the lovers, eager and bashful seducers. Remember the teachers, pedantic or wise. Remember your friends when you needed them. Remember your enemies when you needed them too. Remember your suffering, remember your joy. Remember you have not had an easy life, remember it was not hard.

When you have remembered every abandoned dream, every punchline and plot, slip quietly into the waves and swim. You will remember how and the water will remember you. Let the water take your memories. Let them feed the fish.

As the sun begins to set carry the box with all of the important papers - the A+ essays, the copyright poems, the love letters, the hate letters, the mortgage and first draft divorce papers- outside. Take some papers- do not read them- from the box and lay them in the pit, then stack the kindling around them, then the wood around that. Turn up the Lhasa, pour a glass of wine, light the match to the papers and let your gaze follow the fingers of the fire pointing towards the full moon rising in the heavens.

Notice

I took a lover the summer after you left. Or was it me who left? Can you leave without going anywhere? Of course you came back, you always came back, but that time, the last time, you had finally gone too far. I refused to answer the door, I unplugged the phone.

But the next summer I took another lover. He was fit and fine, especially when you factor in his age. He read newspapers. He collected art. He had two defunct families, three jobs to support them, tattoos and a personal library. If either of us had been inclined to spend the night, we’d have had plenty to discuss over breakfast. But, it was an arrangement of convenience; he did not have the time, and I had no desire, for anything more than a tumble and toss between the sheets. I thought this might make me feel alive again. I thought maybe, if nothing else, he’d fill the gap.

And it was amusing enough, I suppose, until one night when, afterwards, he said hesitatingly into the darkness, “I know your ex-boyfriend.”

“Oh yeah?” I said, sleepy and bored, thinking he meant the Ex, “How do you know him?”

“He hangs out at the bike shop. Ex snowboarder? Talks about you a lot. Says you dated for a long time.”

“Dated?” I exclaimed, realizing he meant you, then added quickly, hoping I sounded cynical and cavalier, “I wouldn’t call what we did dating.”

His laugh sounded relieved, “Yeah, so I gathered.”

I am instantly enraged with you, the ruinous romantic, still discussing me with strangers. But in the same moment , inexplicably, as though tricked into confession by either the shock or the wine, or the combination of both, I hear myself say, rawly, “Still, I don’t know if I’ll ever get over him. It still feels, every day, like I’ve had a limb amputated.”

“Yeah,” he says again, though biting and hard this time “so I gathered”.

That night I come to several conclusions:

First, as he tries to kiss me, gently, sweetly this time like never before, instead of feeling like love or caring or tenderness, it just tastes like pity on my lips and I feel like an invalid, I reach conclusion number one: I can never see him again.

Conclusion number two follows quickly thereafter, as he attempts to make love to me, instead of having sex like we used to or even just did only an hour before: I cannot do this anymore, with someone I do not love and who does not love me.

Which leads all too swiftly and frighteningly to conclusion number three: I am too broken, and human and wrong for anyone to ever actually love me.

On the cab ride home, watching the sun rise over the Osborne Bridge I remember the night we met at your favourite pub, the nights we spent in your van, illegally parked or otherwise, and all the fights we had on every street corner, restaurant, coffee shop and bar in the heart of the city. Conclusion number four: if my own heart is ever going to not ache again, I am going to have to leave.

I give notice to the Corporation, the landlord, the city and its streets.

I am done with this.

I am through with this.

This means you.

Lost Angels

Yesterday I finally sent off the piece I'd been working on and Mom and I celebrated with my very own creation, Zucchini Lasagna (recipe below) and a bottle of Lost Angel which is my new favourite wine. It's really intimidating cooking for Mom but I was pretty proud of this dinner.

Mom also took me to hear a piano quartet featuring the youngest daughter of my childhood voice teacher.
The last time I saw Maddy she was a toddler with a huge toothless grin. Now she's a married woman with her mother's musical talent and a beautiful well-dentafriced smile. I felt remarkably old. She played some Chopin, my favourite, and a delicate little piece at the end of the evening that I found enchanting.

 Watching her play though I was reminded of my best friend in high school who was also a pianist. She had the same haircut Sara had all those years ago and, from the back, it could have been her playing. I don't think of her often but last night, when I was reminded of her, for some reason I missed her intensely. Not her, per se, I know she's a different person now than she was then, as am I, but I was overwhelmed with nostalgia and wanted to be on one of our long walks talking about politics and religion and philosophy. In truth, I think she ruined me for future relationships with women, my expectations are impossibly high now, but how amazing to meet your kindred soul at all in this vast universe, even if you did only share a brief moment in time.

Zucchini Lasagna

Ingredients

1 Roma tomato
1 carrot
1/2 red onion
2-3 cloves garlic
1 lb ground meat
2 T Italian seasoning (Clubhouse)
1/2 jar pizza sauce (Catelli Spicy Garlic)
2 zucchinis
1 small container Ricotta cheese
1 1/2 tsp sage
chili flakes to taste

Method

1) Saute onions until soft. Add garlic. Add meat and brown.Grate carrot into meat. Add pizza sauce and Italian seasoning. Turn element down to low.

2) While sauce is simmering cut zucchini in half and then lengthwise into 1/4" slices. Drizzle with oil and grill for about 2-3 minutes on each side.

3) Mix sage, chili pepper flakes and ricotta cheese together. 

4) Place four zucchini slices on the bottom of the pan.

5) Layer meat sauce on top of zucchini slices.

6) Layer another four slices on top of the meat sauce

7) Layer on the ricotta cheese mixture and slices of roma tomatoes

8) Lay on the remaining zucchini slices and top with smoked gouda cheese

9)  Cover and bake in oven at 400 until cheese has melted approx. 10 mins.