[A]cross The Universe; [B]eetlejuice; [C]ake; [D]arwin Deez; [E]agles

Shooting Stars

I really envy the ease with which my grandmother is readily accepting her fate. In every room of her lovely home in Elliot Lake, there is a roll of labels, destined for anyone in our large family wishing to own any of the numerous relics scattered across the house. The idea is that it will make the triage so much easier once she has passed away. The labelled items will be spoken for, and the rest will go to good will.  I'm not one for knick-knacks, but I do have my eye on a few of her paintings. She's got so many, though, that they are available for immediate obtention.

While everyone went for the valuables, I put my name on the shot/wine/martini glasses my cousins and I spent our chore money on during Saturday morning yardsaling when we were eight or nine. They're awful, they're gaudy, and I can't see them matching with anything but they take me to a place where sitting at my grandmothers bar downstairs and drinking Pepsi out of an ugly wine glass with a chipped stem while pretending it was sparkling red wine was just about the most fun I could have. In the afternoon, we would scale mountains on the sand mounds behind the house, make an elaborately drawn out scale model of the city by covering the entire driveway with sidewalk chalk, or lie in the grass and play the alphabet game, which consisted of picking a topic such as song or movie titles and going through the entire alphabet, a game that's passed the time on many road trips with friends in later years. At night, we sat by the lake eating burnt marshmallows and exchanged poorly reasoned hypotheses about the origins of the stars and the causes of human behaviour.

I always thought my parents overly stern and forbidding. I now realize that they were desperately trying to keep me from becoming a person mindlessly consumed by passive media, easily told how to think, and constantly needing to be entertained. They only wanted me to grow up with the opportunity to benefit from an active, creative, assertive mind. I always believed the off the wall ideas I had when I was a child had nothing to do with anything but my own early obsession with critical analysis and winded thoughts. I can at last readily admit that I can far from take full credit for my ever-active and bizarre creativity.