Remembrance

Today is Remembrance Day and the sky is properly cloudy. Now and then a little sun pokes through, a little blue begins to assert itself through a lighter grey patch but for the most part it is exactly the kind of day it should be - grey, damp and cold.

I think of Texas on days like this. It is raining there today I hear but still I wonder what it is like to observe holidays like this one in a climate where the sky is usually blue, the sun almost always shining and the temperature rarely dips below 60 F. I think it must be difficult to believe anything could ever go irrevocably wrong in such a place.

The idea of memory is shifty. There isn't a person alive who can claim to remember their lives objectively - well, there are loads who make the claim, the important thing is, they are all wrong. This means that all memory is, to one degree or another, fiction which makes all fiction a kind of truth. I say this because it seems to me that fiction trims away the hyperpersonal to speak a kind of universally meaningful truth to an audience of readers who are, as we all are, looking for themselves in the things they read, see or hear.

Of course, this makes my little life as meaningful as any other provided I can tell it without dwelling on the nuances of my feelings in every single situation that strikes me as being poignent.

After having touched on Kathleen and Bill's part in my life it occurs to me that I would like to chronicle the process of getting from there to here - from being a flighty, oversexed bimbo in a small and pretentious Canadian city to being the first woman in my family to attain a university education and write - in however mundane a fashion - for a living.

Just like every other self-obsessed teenager, I kept diaries. My life at that time seemed important enough to me to write it down. It was dramatic, that much is true but even in its drama it was all fairly trivial.

My parents were a mess. They divorced when I was 13 and each one embarked on their own self-destructive path through bad relationships and business decisions. My father was a dilletante, he never stayed in any job for more than a few years. He bored easily and this was reflected in his habit of collecting women. My mother was smarter when it came to work and investments but her self-confidence was so worn down by a life with my father that her judgement when it came to men was abysmally bad.

I moved out in my final year of high school. It wasn't really a decision, I accepted an offer of housesitting to gain a little freedom and some peace from all the fighting and I just never went back.