Tag Archives: specific memories

You’re Smart. No, You’re Not.

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When I was a kid, a group of teachers decided that I should skip Grade Three. Mr. Fleming took me down the hall to his Grade Four class. I didn’t understand what was going on, just that I was suddenly in another grade. There was a writing exercise, maybe a math test too. I don’t remember much about what happened, except that I didn’t spell something right – the word “sheep” keeps coming to mind – or maybe my e’s looked like a’s. I don’t remember. But before the day was over, Mr. Fleming escorted me back. I was in Grade Three after all.

I now do some work as an external grader, which means that I assess student work from schools outside my district. My grading has been considered consistently accurate over the years, so much so that they had recently doubled my work load, including re-assessing those who they thought failed to meet their standards. Recently I was promoted to team leader, an assignment that lasted less than a week when they informed me that my grading was now unacceptable. We’re sorry to inform you that you will not be able to continue your grading. We are sure you will appreciate that our first concern must always be for the integrity of these assessments.

There was no recourse, no means of questioning or challenging the decision. It was my Grade Three/Grade Four experience all over again. I had been exceptional or whatever for a day and then I wasn’t. Institutional gaslighting at its finest.

Memory’s Inside Passage

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I find these inside passages to who I was when I was a kid, half Deja Vu. It’ll be a song or a flash of a color or a smell. It puts me in my kid head, sitting on my bed, looking over the garage roof at the neighbor’s backyard. It’s a nothing moment but it’s real.

That’s what time travel is, suddenly there, but we spend all of our time distracting ourselves with phones and shows and movies, trying to get somewhere, not where we are, and none of that works.

All you need is the trigger, holding a glass or your foot slipping off the edge of the chair, and you’re back as a tiny person realizing this world. We’ve turned those triggers off. We’re charging headfirst into the fucking bots and bits, thinking that that is the way, not thinking, but going ahead like automatons doing our lowest of the low’s bidding.

U Turn Memory

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I have a memory, if it can be called that, a moving image that bubbles up when I’m writing.

It is of a stretch of road called Marine Drive, connecting North and West Vancouver. It’s a thoroughfare, three lanes each way, thick with strip malls and autobody shops on each side.

Nothing happened there that I can remember. I just have to make a U turn. That’s the memory. I have to get back to something. Not a place, but a person, someone I left on the side of the road. And I am waiting to make that turn.

Not Marine Drive, not even close to it.

But I never make the turn because the light doesn’t change. I just wait and look at the orange and white sign for the autobody shop across the way.

Zooming with Charlie

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I zoomed last with the guys in the band. They had decided to see if they could get back together; they looked relaxed, ready to go. Charlie was there too, even though he had only played bangs with them once. I don’t know how he does it, but he’s always there. I made a joke that The Hothouse Flowers were reuniting with The Black Crowes for a gig in London.

The guys all did this gag of rushing to leave, climbing and falling over each other in a massive comic wave. I couldn’t stop laughing. I knew I’d have to write all of that down, and then lost the signal. When I finally got them back, only Charlie was there. He had lost his coat and needed to go find that now.

An Everything Thing

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Here is a place I know. It is easy. I know where I am. I am here. I am afraid of it. I dream of living in this. It isn’t a thing that is anything else. It is the thing, all of itself. And I am here. Lucky me. There is a sound. It is quiet and not. Oh, an abstract thing. No. It is tiny and whole. It is physics. It is a big thing. It is the everything thing. But don’t say that. Too many steps back.

It is that thing in you, that thing you hold too tight, little too much of you that you don’t want to let out, that you might say no to, that you might think that is too much and is everything. And that is the thing, tiny as it might be that is everything. It wakes you and makes you remember.

It was a while back and I was different then. But I wasn’t. You weren’t. We were there. And we remember. And that is the curse. It is love. Or memory.