Mortifying Christmas Memories

In honour of the fact that I'm flying home for Christmas today (and, of course, because I'm procrastinating), I've decided to share one of my less comfortable Christmas memories.

It was the last autumn of 1987 and I was about to turn seven. My church decided that, instead of having our usual Christmas program, we were going to make a video that we'd watch at our Christmas dinner. One of our members had just started a university film program, and so this was going to give her a chance to practice some film editing.

An older couple wrote a play for us children to perform. They named it "Star Light, Star Bright." There would be a framing story about a little girl who loses her puppy, and an older girl who helps her, tells her about Jesus and the Christmas story, and teaches her to pray. Which would frame a re-enactment of the Christmas story, performed by all the other children.

They cast me as the little girl who loses her puppy, which in my mind confirmed my awesomeness. (It doesn't help that I'd been a flower girl in a wedding that year, too. I was sure I was the star of every show.) My tiny fame got to my head.

One evening, the whole church gathered in someone's living room and recorded ourselves singing Christmas carols for the video's soundtrack. Because there was going to be a scene where all the other little girls were the angels who appeared to the shepherds, we sang "Hark, the Herald Angels Sing," and they had all the little girls gather around the (only) microphone to sing the line "Glory to the newborn king!" They included me in the group of singers, even though I wasn't one of the angels in the play. Convinced that I was the star of everything, I elbowed my way to the front of the group and hogged the microphone all to myself. Seriously, my mouth was pretty nearly on the microphone.

And then the day arrived for us to watch the video. And everyone watched as I over-acted my way through my lines -- "OH I DO WISH MY LITTLE TAM-TAM [the dog's name]. WOULD. COME. HOME." I was Tiny Shatner. And it wasn't helped by the fact that the people in charge had me do these big over-exaggerated hand actions that didn't have much to do with anything.

And then we got to the angels scene and the music started up. And everyone got to hear me shrieking over the microphone, "GLOOOWREEEEEEY TOOOO THE NEW-BORRRRRRN KING!" Over and over. Everything else was muffled, because I had been blocking the microphone.

They gave me a copy of the tape because I was one of the stars. And for a decade I avoided that tape at all costs, mortified at my own behaviour.

(Of course, now I'm some sort of sucker for punishment and tend to bring the tape along with me whenever I'm going to be gathered with the girls, so that we can all relive our personal traumas associated with that tape. Just ask Bronwyn about how they cast her as Joseph because there weren't enough boys and she was the tallest girl.)

Opening myself up for mockery on my birthday

I'm the Attempt At Optimus Prime on the left. My sister is the Frightening Donald Duck In Rubber Pants. (Chris called me a "Garbled Strong Bad".)

Also, on the occasion of my birthday, my sister has posted my official baby picture. I was not a pretty baby. I was also yellow from all the jaundice. And already looking like an old man, which is how I continued to look until I was about 3.

Little-Known and Non-Seasonal Fact about your procrastination Queen

My first Halloween costume as a child: Optimus Prime.

(With a mask, a brown parka, and I think possibly pigtails in my hair. I was three years old.)

I'll just take a tiny little break and post something

Chris just left to pick up an old man from church from the bus depot. As a result of a complicated mix of circumstances, we have an elderly man staying in our spare room tonight and then we're taking him to church. I have supper in the oven already (meatloaf), but there's still a bunch of cleaning to do before our house is old-man-ready .

We've also been spending the weekend reorganising the storage spaces, thanks to the fact that Chris took heaps of teaching resources out of our apartment and now we aren't nearly as tightly-packed as before. We're pulling boxes out from those back corners, where they've sat since we moved in two years ago. Anything that was touching the floor has been sorted through since the flood, but the spare room was untouched by the flood, as were the upper shelves of our bedroom closet. It makes my OCD-tinged heart sing to watch our spare bedroom closet become an orderly place. All those boxes and books in rows. Everything in its place. (The next step will be to find matching baskets to line up on the shelves of our long linen closet, so that everything doesn't feel so jumbled in there. It'll be a while before we tackle that task, but I'm far too excited.*)

I found my childhood journals, during that big reorganisation. I haven't touched them since I packed them to move to Victoria. They were in this big tub that I had taped shut, labelled "Memory Box," and then shoved into a back corner of our closet. But now I guess I'm ready to face myself and do some sorting through of my brain, for the first time since we moved here. I also found that I was finally ready to read my first journal, written between the ages of 14 and 15. I have avoided that book since my later teens, embarrassed by the flowery prose and the italics. Even now, I had only expected that the book would just be good for a laugh at the expense of my teenaged self. But then I started reading between the lines and found that this insight into my fourteen-year-old self was useful for understanding myself now. Even that self that would not write directly about the more serious things going on in my brain and in my life, or would jump away from the serious stuff and retreat right into escapism, especially around the time when Dad went into the hospital for the first time. I'm starting to understand my avoidance tendencies and my procrastination. I'm also starting to accept myself for who I am.

And that's a fantastic thing.

* Chris is confused by the fact that I can completely fail to notice dirty dishes and clutter on the floor, but glory in the painstaking organisation of my bookcase, and idealise about perfecting our closets. I don't pretend to make sense.

The returned prodigal

In the past half-week, I've had a chance to to do the following:

1. Pick strawberries and vegetables with Grandma;

2. Have jam sessions on violin and piano with Grandpa;

3. Explore the barn and look at the new calves;

4. Go hunting for kittens;

5. Drive all over gravel roads, including a trip to a nearby lake;

6. Run and play like I was nine years old;

7. Make up the rules to croquet;

8. Search through photo albums, playing "Guess which relative this is, fifty years ago" with the small(ish) cousins;

9. Speak with a vaguely Norweigan accent (it's addictive);

10. Cook with Grandma;

11. Get Grandpa to tell stories from his childhood in Norway;

12. Slide down the (carpeted) stairs. On purpose.

At my Little Grandma's funeral, I was visiting with my Norweigan Grandparents, and it occurred to me: unlike Chris, I still have two living grandparents. Two grandparents whom I had not visited in the past two years. And so I devised a scheme to get myself up to the farm. It ended up working out that my sister and I drove up after we went to our church camp, and we even ended up staying one more night than we'd originally planned, just so that we'd have a bit more time with the family up there.

It's funny being up there after a two year absence (especially since it had been even longer since I'd had a significant stay up there). For part of me, it was like my instincts were kicking in. Everything was so familiar: the route to the farm, the accents, the layout of my Grandma's kitchen, the places where they keep the games and where the kittens hide; how the ground felt under my feet as I ran as hard as I could.

But there was also this shock of what has changed: new buildings were everywhere, and everyone has aged more than I had expected. My grandpa has retired from farming during the time I was away, and my uncle had finally taken over the farm. And suddenly, out of the blue, my cousin Jaclyn turned twelve years old, and is no longer sure about playing kid games with her little brother and adult cousins. (And yet it didn't take much to get her right in the middle of our made-up croquet game.)

Remind me to get up there more frequently, so that I don't always feel like the returning prodigal.

(If you want to check out the whole set of photos from the farm, including whatever kitten photos turned out, it's right here.)

My childhood understanding

Last night, as we were half-talking while we were falling asleep, I asked Chris what his earliest memories of politics were. He stopped, and started figuring out in which grade he probably learned about governments. I interrupted him and said no. I meant world events. When did he first notice what was going on in the world around him, politically speaking?

It turned out that he had mostly known about Saskatchewan's premier, and didn't really comprehend what was going on in the world around him until he was older.* (On the other hand, he doesn't remember not knowing about the atomic model, and he knows that he explained to someone how a nuclear submarine worked, back when he was in grade 3.)

I asked him this because last night I was finishing up yet another sweeping history book that came all the way up to the recent past, and I started coming to terms with my childhood remembrances of these world events, as I was forced to compare them with the written record.

And it has occurred to me that, for a child born at the end of 1980, I sure knew a lot of what was going on around me through the 1980s.** The first federal election I remember was 1988. My parents encouraged us kids to pick a favourite and cheer for him through the election. We watched the big debate between Brian Mulroney, John Turner and Ed Broadbent. I chose Mulroney (I confess), Janny chose Turner, and my brother cheered for Broadbent. I won, and was confused when I read a political cartoon that depicted the Prime Minister as a pig, waving a flag that read "Four More Years!" (My understanding of the world only went so far.)

I know that the reason why I cheered for the incumbent was that I had a pretty static understanding of the world. Mulroney, Reagan, Thatcher, Gorbachev, the Berlin Wall and the USSR just were. And they loomed pretty largely in my worldview. It's probably because we watched and listened to a lot of political satire on the CBC, because we watched the news a lot, and because I liked political cartoons so much.

I'm reminded of this as I read account after account of historians having been so suprised in 1989, and again in 1991, as everything that they thought was permanent fell away. I'm also reminded of this as I read Paul Kennedy's 1987 exhortation not to hope for the dissolution of the Soviet Union, even as it appeared to be in decline, because dissolution could only happen in the midst of a bloody war. As I read these, I find myself remembering watching TV as the Wall came down, amazed that it could really happen. And I remember reading a political cartoon in 1991, which depicted Gorbachev at a Lost and Found station (trying to find his lost country); I remember feeling a little sad and bewildered that something that seemed so permanent on my map and in my mind had now changed.

(On the other hand, I feel that same sadness and bewilderment when I read about political leaders now trying to recreate Cold War politics all over the globe. There's this part of me that wonders: didn't we leave this behind us when I was a child?)


* I'm not saying he wasn't exposed to current events as a child. He probably was. He also doesn't remember the names of any of his elementary school teachers, but can tell you in detail about the cool experiments he did, and can pretty much draw a map of every town where he ever lived. He's just like that.
** I apologise to anyone who's older than me, who now feels even older by that realisation.

Comments from my grade five report card

November: "Well done, Maryanne. You are learning to control your anxieties well. Keep working on it."

June: "An excellent student, kind and hardworking. Keep it up. You were even able to laugh at yourself this year and that's good."

Say what? And is it weird that I got all anxious realising that my grade 5 teacher* thought I was anxious?

I'm also wondering if I've changed that much. The general consensus about yesterday is that I got so freaked out about the whole I-put-a-knife-into-my-thumb thing that I actually sent myself into physical shock. For most of the day. Slurred speech, dizziness and all. And a really bad headache. Largely resulting from my combined heeby-jeebies and The Vapours. (My thumb's a lot better today. Thankfully it was a really sharp knife, meaning that the cut was really clean, and the cut didn't go really deep. It was such a clean cut that it's already healing well.)




*Mrs. J was my most favourite teacher ever, and she was well-known for being entirely non-generic, not to mention hilarious. On my brother's report card she referred to him as "quite the lady-killer."

Continuing with the feel-good themes

I've found myself being forced to re-assess my perception of early teenaged years, or (as I said at Whining Wednesday) my "Inner Tortured Grade 8 Student." I know that I've already told you folks about some of my problems in elementary school. In short, I was teased badly and I cried a lot; I was the least popular kid in my grade. I've managed to forgive a lot through the years, especially as I realised the troubled lives that my tormenters had. But there still was some hurt there, especially with the thought that no one in my grade liked me, and that maybe they still didn't like me. Maybe they still saw me as that kid, and maybe I sometimes still saw myself in that way.

And then a girl contacted me over Facebook. Introduced herself, hoping that I remembered her. Of course I remembered her. She and I were good friends from the very little grades, and she was nice to me when a lot of the other kids were mean. We stayed friendly through high school. And now she's been trying to track me down for a while, because it made her sad that she lost track of me after grad. She told me that she was talking with some other people from our elementary school, speculating on whether they'd go to next year's reunion, and she said that the only reason she'd go is to see if she could get in contact with me, because I'd always been nice to her!

Huh. Someone liked me and thought I was nice.

Talking with her has reminded me of others who were my friends during those years. I'm having happy memories of a time that I've only associated with unhappiness. I can't begin to say how good that is for my emotional health.

Flashbacks from your Canadian childhood

For your entertainment

While we were cleaning, Chris and I realised that he'd never seen inside the trunk that I keep in our closet. It was my grandpa's trunk, and I got to keep it when he went into a home; I filled it with random grad and childhood stuff. When we opened it up, I realised that I had no idea what all I had put in there. I documented my finds on Flickr. Go and check out the insanity. (I may be adding a few more pictures there soon. I just realised that I should have documented the giant-haired Barbie birthday card/poster from my aunt, and the letter I wrote to my grandma when I was nearly 6 years old.)

What were you like in high school?

I've been thinking a lot about high school lately. I guess it started at my department's recent potluck, when I was entertaining the other grad students with stories about how excessively weird I was in high school. I think it started with the statement, "Well, of course, when I was in high school, I had pictures of the Beatles and the Monkees up in my locker." And Chris chimed in something about I also had hair down to my waist and wore polyester '70s clothes at a point when it wasn't really cool to do so.

And that's gotten me trying to describe what I was even like back then. (Not that I've changed so drastically. Just ask Ky.) I have never been able to find an adequate equivalent to me in movies and TV shows about high school students. (Okay, maybe if you took the anger and the goth hair from Janis Ian on Mean Girls, and combined that with some of Damien from that same movie, then you'd be pretty close...)

Some facts about what I was like:

• Of course, you've already had the physical description: super-long hair and thrift shop clothes. My grad dress was an early-'70s bridesmaid dress that I found at Value Village. The one day when I wore jeans (borrowed from my sister) to school, it caused such a stir that my English class had a discussion about their feelings about it.
• I was heavily, heavily involved in non-sports or drama extra-curricular activities. One concert choir that had several hundred members and where we did choreography. A chamber choir, and several vocal jazz groups. And I played flute in the band. And I was assistant editor of the yearbook. And I was in advanced classes.
• By the end of grade 12, I had my own school keys.
• University was a relief, because I wasn't so busy.
• Somehow, I became known as a "writer," to the point that I won a Creative Writing award, which is odd because my writing was frightening at the time. So very flowery. Of course, I also spent several years only reading books by L.M. Montgomery, and I thought that writing ought to be constantly describing sunsets and trees. (Okay, I'd recovered from the floweriness largely by grade 12, when I won the award, but I was really melodramatic in my writing still.)
• I co-wrote a play that my English class performed at our Advanced Class Medieval Feast.
• I was known to sing songs from musicals, and perhaps dance to them as well, in the band hallway. While I essentially wore leisure suits to school. Popular girls of the sort that dated the school quarterback hated me.
• I wasn't actually unpopular. I clearly wasn't a social misfit at my school, neither did I sit in back corners with people who took too many computer classes and roleplay in maniacal voices. I had a really diverse group of friends, some of whom were popular (but more in the "nice people that everyone likes" sense, and not in the "I'm going to enforce my reign of terror on this school through the powers of my plaid short skirts and hairspray" sense). Even though it was a really big school, I knew nearly everyone's names by grade 12. (Thanks to yearbook.)
• I was known for my abilities to get along with a lot of people, which is why I was assistant editor of the yearbook (I could be the liason to the other members of the club, and smooth over hurt feelings when the editor got too intense). I also ended up as the liason to our photographers, who were known to be high maintenance.
• Traditionally popular people disliked me, because I ignored their whole class system. But they avoided me, because they were afraid (in a respectful sense) of the ringleader of my group of friends, who told them all to leave me alone. I didn't know this until I was well into University. But it makes sense now why Barbie (head Mean Girl) and her quarterback boyfriend always seemed to be making out on my locker.
• Okay, so I would only refer to the Head Mean Girl as "Barbie," and openly discouraged my friends from running for SRC, "Because it's all a rigged popularity contest, and you don't want to even try to become like Them."
• In addition to all that, I saw myself as "outdoorsy." I was a Girl Guide until I turned 18, and asked for stuff like camp stoves for Christmas.
• Also, I got really high grades in maths and sciences. But also in English and Social Studies, of course.
• And, when I was grade 11, there were a few Grade 12 boys in my Geo-Trig class. The teacher put one of them, Giant Rugby Player, beside me because he kept talking to people in class. The teacher assumed that I was so shy and serious that I would be the person to sit next to Chatty Giant Rugby Player. Which is how I ended up being friends with him. We'd work together on assignments, and turn the diagrams for the assignments into crazy pictures involving spies.
• And my locker featured pictures of the Beatles, the Monkees, and the cast of The Man from U.N.C.L.E. And a clothing tag that read "Je suis lavable."
• When we played a World War I simulation in grade 11 Social Studies (we were all assigned the roles of different countries involved in the Great War, and had to negotiate to try to avoid war), my Social Studies teacher was really, really excited to cast me as Kaiser Wilhelm II. (I lead the world in a war against Russia.) Also, when we did a mock inquiry into the fate of a National Park, they cast me as the head of a logging company. Somehow, my Social Studies teachers loved best to put me in the "evil" roles. "Because we like to watch you fight your way out of a corner," one of them said.

Who were you in high school? Would we have recognised you, back then?

Weird News

So, my elementary school burnt down. Again. Almost exactly 20 years (to the month) after the school fire that consumed my favourite gym bag and shoes (okay, and the kindergarten classroom). This time, it was the grade 5 classroom. Both Chris and my response: "There's some poor grade 6 kid who just left her shoes in the classroom, who will no longer trust her parents when they say nothing bad could happen over the weekend."

Weird.

In other news, Boney M's Christmas album isn't available for sale this year. Not for ready money. They suddenly discontinued this year, just in time for us to decide that we needed our own copy and that I desperately wanted to listen to it before Christmas. And it's going for astronomical prices on Ebay. (I'm thinking of attempting to order it from Amazon UK, since apparently they're still selling it, except with a 4-6 week wait. Although that could also mean that they just don't know it's not available. I'll try to order it and see what happens.)

Again, weird.

Edited to add: Apprently, mysask.ca doesn't have a reliable permanent link for that story. And so I'll post this one from the Leader-Post.