Excavation

About two years ago, Lady Gallis and I bumped into each other in a line up at the grocery store. The funny thing was that she had always popped in and out of my mind in the years following high school. I had wondered what had become of her and what she was doing. We’ve tried to get together for coffee on a regular basis since, despite the fact that planning these excursions is at times only slightly less complicated than D-Day.

Yesterday, we managed to make it happen in our spiritual home of Brampton, Ontario. I have always had a twinge of ambivalence every time I go despite the fact that my parents are there. It was always a place I thought I’d leave behind and instead, the opposite has happened. Still, needs must when the devil drives, and Starbucks in Brampton it was as we were both in town for Father’s Day.

Just prior to meeting, I had an episode of what I have come to term as “Scooby Paranoia.” It essentially means that my Subaru Forester makes some weird rumbling noise and I immediately envision repair bills of epic proportions. I think the rumble I heard and felt when turning to park was just the surface of the parking lot. At least I hope so. The car was fine when I drove it later, however, it an act of ultimate irony, Fate decided that the Marine’s car would break down on his way up to Brampton. I had to go pick him up.

While we were waiting for the CAA tow truck to arrive, he hooked up his Sony discman to some portable speakers and cranked Burt Bacharach which was rather hilarious. I myself, did an impromptu lyrical improvisation as follows:

[to be sung to the tune of I'll Never Fall In Love Again]

What do you get when you buy a Ford?
You end up stranded at the McDonald’s
In the middle of Brampton, Ontario

Ahll!!!!

Nevah buy a Ford agaaaaaaaaaaaaaain ya ya yain!
Doncha ya know that

Ahll!!!!

Nevah buy a Ford agaaaaaaaaaiiiinnnnn.

Ahem. But back to coffee.

I made the fatal mistake of recommending Starbucks' new vegan chocolate brownies. They would have been good if they hadn’t been sitting in a brickyard for 2 days. Does Starbucks not know about the concept of staleness?? In an act of supreme bravery, Lady Gallis ordered a red tea latte. I got an iced green tea lemonade that completely sucked ass. Seriously, DO NOT get this beverage. You have been warned.

In fairness to Starbucks though, they did give me a mocha frappacino at no additional charge, or as I like to call them, mocha frappa wuppa sugahs.

As my distress was soothed by the chocolaty icy goodness, Lady Gallis and I gabbed and got caught up on our respective lives. She has a calming quality that I can’t explain. She shows such faith in me and after we meet, I feel like I can do anything. I derive all this from the crazy red haired chick on my high school bus who I admired because she brazenly wore Poison by Christian Dior and did a killer imitation of Pierre Trudeau. She’s suggested we go to a Buddhist place she knows next time. Can my freakish and restless mind handle it? We shall see.

Afterwards I did something I’ve been wanting to do for months. I went to the elementary school I started at in grade four. I remember my transition to this school was difficult after we moved. I went walking through the grounds of my old school with the Dumbarton mob one time and felt incredibly sad as I looked mournfully through the glass at my old grade three classroom. When I told my father about this experience, he said I had something called Nostalgia. For a while, I wondered how I had caught this and what medicine I could take to get rid of it. If I felt under the weather, I put it down to “nostalgia” and expunged my melancholy by sighing over my colouring books or taking my stuffed toys on long epic journeys in which they struggled against the bitter elements of nature and infamy of circumstance to get home.

I’ve had a memory rolling around in my brain from around the time I was 10 years old. In grade five, I went through this phase where I was drawing a lot. It’s one of the few times in my life where I genuinely felt I’d discovered a real new talent and I relished being good at it. I haven’t been able to find these drawings since, but no matter. It’s the feeling that counts. My memory is of an outdoor art class where we could wander the school grounds and draw anything we liked. It was approaching the end of the school year and I remember sitting against the wall of the school on a muggy day, drawing the back of two houses that overlooked the soccer pitch. I wanted to see those houses again.

As I drove south through Brampton, I started to see areas that were familiar to me. Shops have changed and trees have grown, but it’s all essentially the same. What struck me about my school when I arrived was how small it was. The hill up to it seemed incredibly steep and long to me as a child, the building itself was cavernous and the baseball pitch was of an infinite width. But with adult eyes, the hill is more of a slope, the school looks like it’s made out of lego and the baseball pitch is a postage stamp.

I went to the courtyard and it smelled exactly the same. You know that “end of school” smell? It’s warmth and alfalfa, cut grass and rain. I sat down, in the same spot, and for a long time just looked at the back of those two houses I had drawn all those years ago.

I got back in the car and swung by my old house, then parked on a side street to go visit the park. It had barely changed in over twenty years. It doesn’t look like the asphalt has been replaced in that long either. I walked over the creek bridge, stood on the path and burst into tears. All I could think about was my dog Gussie, how many times we had walked in that park and what a lovely dog she was. Part of me just needed to have her beside me in that place. I decided enough was enough and headed back to my car.

Other seasons always bring back variations of themselves, but it occurred to me as I walked back, that summer has its own sense of timelessness. It arrives and departs year after year essentially unchanged. For too brief a moment, the world’s pause button is pressed, and your soul can sigh and stretch like a sleepy cat. You can go back to parks and schools you haven’t visited in over 20 years, see the passage of time all around you and yet feel like you’ve never left.

But I think what yesterday brought home to me was that these places in my home town had, in their own unique ways, changed and moved on. I finally realized, despite feeling for so long that I've been spinning my wheels, that I really have changed. I've got somewhere I need to get to and I've got to find it. I need to move on too.