Falling Backwards: A Memoir (7 page)

My mom and dad were very excited to be building a brand new house and at the same time scared to death. I hadn’t discovered that my parents were real people yet, so I didn’t know they had a worry in the world. I thought that my parents were there to look after me: drive me around, feed me, give me pocket money, listen to my problems and solve them. I thought they were there to save me from a hostile world and mean people and diseases of every imaginable kind. I thought they were there to make sure I never got sick or died, period. I didn’t know they were actual people with feelings and troubles of their own. Someone should have clued me in. Parents are people. Who knew?

I am sure they lay in bed at night and wondered how in heaven’s name they were going to build a house with what little they had. In many ways it was like
Little House on the Prairie
. They bought a giant,
grassy field with nothing on it but trees and brush and dirt and they had to make something out of it. We had a lot of work ahead of us.

When we moved, our house wasn’t yet built and we had sold our other one. My dad, God love him, bought a small white holiday trailer for a pittance and parked it a few hundred feet away from the building site. He hooked it up to water and power and we were off on our very lengthy camping adventure. (I think we ended up living in the trailer for about a year, which was about ten months longer than my mother would have liked.) And it was camping, there’s no doubt about that. It seemed like a lot of fun for the first six months, and then it kind of wore off as the Canadian winter sank its teeth into us. You can freeze your nose off in about three minutes if you’re not careful. I know a lot of people without a nose—they just have the nostril holes. (Okay, no I don’t.)

We hadn’t lived in the trailer long before the weather turned terribly cold. The water line running into the trailer froze almost immediately. My dad tried everything to keep it from blocking up, but we were more or less at the mercy of Mother Nature. My dad said it was a goddamn pain in the ass not having water. We all agreed. It was next to impossible to shower or bathe or wash dishes without it. We drove to my gram’s place a lot to take baths and do laundry, but other than that, we were just out there fighting the elements.

My gram was my mom’s mom. She lived in Calgary with her second husband, Charlie. It was about a thirty-five- or forty-minute drive for us to get to their house. She was always glad to see us tumble in through her back door with all our plastic bags full of dirty laundry. She and my mom always had a good visit. The coffee pot would go on and some kind of cake would appear on the kitchen table. My mom and my gram could talk the leg off the lamb of God if they had half the chance. They were extremely close (and I could write an entire book about the two of them and the struggles they faced and
the hardships they overcame). My gram would prove to be our lifeline on many occasions.

My mom and dad slept in the only bedroom in the back of the trailer. Duray and I were in bunk beds off to one side, and my little brother, Patrick, was small enough to sleep on the fold-out kitchen table, which conveniently converted into a little bed. I think our breathing in and out kept us warm at night. My mother is cold at the best of times, never mind in a paper-thin trailer in the middle of winter. It must have been hellish for her. I, on the other hand, loved every minute of being in our home on wheels. I didn’t mind seeing my breath hang in the air like a cloud. I thought it was completely fun. I felt like Jane West on a real country adventure. I started to think that perhaps I had found my true calling as an outdoor adventure guide. I would never have to brush my hair again—or my teeth, for that matter. The country life was definitely for me.

At a very early point in our adventure, my parents thought that it would be nice to get us a kitten. Actually, the kitten was part of the bribe we accepted when they moved us out of the city. They promised us a variety of pets, although my father denies that to this day. We were in the country now, after all, and country people had animals! We had room in the trailer for something furry and small, and a kitten would be perfect. We found free kittens advertised in the local newspaper and drove to pick our furry little buddy up. My mom named the tiny grey kitty Smokey or Spanky or Chunky; well, she called it something, I just can’t remember what. And there’s a reason for that.

We didn’t have Smokey very long, I am sorry to say. We had her just long enough to fall in love with her before disaster struck. Mom had let the kitten out onto the steps of the trailer for a little sun and some fresh air and a pee when out of the woods came the neighbour’s giant, white husky. My mother was standing right there beside the
kitten on the metal steps, when the dog grabbed Smokey, or whatever her name was, by her tiny, fuzzy neck, and ran over the hill with her screeching wildly. We just stood there, watching it happen like a slow-motion car accident. It was so awful. The neighbours were upset, to say the least, when their husky dropped the dead, mangled kitten off at their front door like a trophy. We all sobbed for days.

I decided then and there that I hated that white husky. I threw something at it whenever I had the chance. I yelled and swore at it. That dog soon figured out never to come anywhere near me. The whole thing makes me sad to this day. My mother can hardly even talk about it—though we still somehow always manage to bring it up on the weirdest of occasions, like Christmas or Thanksgiving. You know, the happy holidays. She’ll say, “Remember the Sodmonts’ big white dog grabbing our little kitten off the steps of that trailer? Wasn’t that terrible?” And I always say, “Yes, it was terrible.” It’s one of those horrible things that sticks to the inside of your eyeballs.

After the kitten was tragically taken from us, I realized that we were not in the city anymore. This was a whole new level of horrible that was much more horrible than the death of my pocket turtle.

The house slowly started growing up out of the earth. Every time my folks got a little extra money, another phase of the construction would begin. We did have builders shuffling around doing things, but it was very apparent that my dad was doing a
lot
of the work himself. My mother was becoming a builder too. They were always busy constructing something. Dad was always swinging a hammer or sawing a floorboard or installing a cupboard hinge or putting in windows or nailing shingles on the roof. And this was after he’d spent an entire day at his real job. He left the trailer early and came home late. Whatever spare or not spare moments he had were spent working on the house.

My dad’s entire life had somehow revolved around construction and concrete. He knew every possible thing there was to know about concrete. He knew about quarter-inch and half-inch and two-inch gravel. He knew about crushed gravel and rebar and exposed aggregate and finishing and framing and forming and everything else in between. He knew how long the concrete needed to set and what temperature it needed to be. He knew how much it would cost to pour an eight-foot by ten-foot by four-inch slab and how much concrete you’d need to make a garage pad or a sidewalk or a retaining wall just right. He knew how much concrete—to the very ounce—it would take to make it all work out perfectly. He was the go- to guy for anything made out of limestone, water, sand and gravel.

My dad had his own language when it came to concrete. I’d hear him on the phone talking to somebody about something to do with a job, and it made no sense to me at all. He’d have a cigarette hanging out of his mouth, and I always marvelled at how he could talk and smoke at the same time. He’d hold the phone between his shoulder and his neck, and he’d puff away without missing a beat. The smoke would often billow out of his nose. I thought it looked wonderful. I wondered how in the world he managed to do that. I wanted to blow smoke out of my nose too. It seemed to me like my dad could do anything, and that’s because he
could
. He was such a talented man in so many ways.

He pretty much knew all there was to know about plumbing and carpentry and fixing cars and building bird feeders and mending clocks and rebuilding antique furniture of any description. (I have so many of his pieces in my house today and they are all gorgeous.) He knew how to build sheds and change brake pads and plant potatoes and fly kites and make tree forts. He knew how to pull heads out of milk chutes and how to build giant barbecues. My dad’s hands were scarred from thumb to pinky with hundreds of punctures and gouges
and blisters. He’d lost more fingernails than anybody I’d ever known. He always had a black nail, always. I remember him sitting down for supper, tired and covered in sweat, with at least one black fingernail. He’d have a giant new gouge or an old cut that hadn’t healed yet. I would watch him sitting there at the table thinking about whatever it was he was thinking. He’d look at his hands, folding and refolding them. He’d run them through his strawberry hair and look pensive. I wondered what he was thinking about. It must have been something heavy, because around the time I was twelve or thirteen he started drinking a little bit more just to make all the heaviness go away. He always said that he’d drink anything back then, but what I remember him drinking most often was dark rum. The smell of it to this day takes me back through a twisting and turning time-tunnel. My dad sitting there at the table with a dark rum and Coke in his fist and a lit cigarette hanging out of his head. It’s a good memory—it could be bad, but it’s not. He worked hard all the time, but he was starting to drink hard all the time too.

If I have any kind of work ethic at all, I get it from my parents. They were always so steadfast and determined. They never quit working on things. They worked so hard on the house and the yard and at their jobs, and they never quit working on themselves. They were constantly moving and doing and creating. It was a luxury for them to sit and read the paper at the end of a long day. They are in their seventies now, and they still don’t sit down. I swear they’re doing cocaine over at their house. Either that or they’re inhaling vitamins or they’re just really healthy and eager to get things done. I would rather think of the cocaine scenario as it would make me feel a little less lazy.

We usually had dinner together as a family, the five of us sitting around the small pull-out table that was Patrick’s bed come nightfall. Our meals were simple and hearty and, well, interesting. My mom
was an interesting cook—she had to be because we were still living in the trailer, getting used to all sorts of adventures, culinary and otherwise. She’s the first person to admit that when she was first married she did not have a clue about what she was doing. She’d call my gram pretty much every night of the week to ask her at what temperature to cook a roast or how to make a pie crust or how long to boil spaghetti. She didn’t know how to do anything. We had some very well-done spaghetti over the years. A single noodle was usually about an inch in diameter. Italian folks would have lit themselves on fire if they’d had to eat my mother’s pasta.

My dad didn’t talk to us much at the table or any other place, for that matter. He mostly kept to himself. When he did talk, it was often in the form of yelling. He always seemed to be mad about something. He always seemed to be at the end of his rope. He would say, “I’m at the end of my goddamn rope with you kids.” So I guess that’s how I knew he was at the end of his rope. I have very few memories of him laughing back then. There weren’t a lot of things for him to laugh about, I guess.

I thought that’s how all dads were—swearing, grouchy bastards. My new friend Theresa’s dad yelled a lot too. We talked about that from time to time. I had a kindred spirit in Theresa. We compared grumpy dad stories whenever possible. We still do after thirty-five years. I met Theresa the first day of grade four as we stood outside the elementary school waiting to go into our homerooms. She was so tall compared to me, and shy. I found out a few weeks later that she lived just up the road from us but was assigned to a different bus. I was excited to learn she was within walking distance.

My dad ate with us less and less as the years went by; it was rare to have him home. And when Duray was about fourteen he tended to turn up at the dinner table less and less as well. Then it was just mom and Patrick and me sitting there sawing through pork
chops because my mother believed that pork should be cooked to the point where you could make shoes out of it and walk on hot coals without feeling a thing. They always say you should chew your food at least thirty times before you swallow; that was never a problem for anyone in our family. We
had
to chew our food thirty times in order to swallow it without choking to death. We all had really overdeveloped jaw and temple muscles.

Every time she cooked meat, my mother insisted it had to be cooked thoroughly or you could and would get very sick.

“That chicken has to be very well done or we’ll all be sick,” she’d lament. Beef, pork, chicken, any kind of animal flesh at all, had to be cooked until it was a fifth of its original size. She’d put a roast the size of a bowling ball in the oven, and four hours later she’d take it out and it’d be the size and colour of a hockey puck. She had had one bad incident with undercooked chicken that prompted her to fry the hell out of everything. We all got terribly sick from it, apparently. (There is no concrete proof that it was indeed the chicken.)

I am very happy to say that I don’t remember having food poisoning. I just remember chewing chunks of well-done meat until my temples ached like I had been gnawing on twenty-three pieces of Dubble Bubble for days on end. My dad would often make us sit in front of our plates until we had cleared every morsel off them. I am not sure what that was all about. There was always one of us sitting there in front of our plate staring at a pile of Brussels sprouts or green beans or boiled cabbage. I hated Brussels sprouts more than any vegetable in the world. They tasted like dog farts and copper pennies.

I have a feeling those were the nights that my dad had had more rum than usual. He’d be extra cranky and that meant we’d be watching the clock on the wall and missing
I Dream of Jeannie
. If it was Brussels sprouts we had to sit in front of, we could be there for hours. My dad would usually forget about us sweating it out in front
of our warm glasses of milk. My mom would finally come and take our plates away and tell us we were off the hook. He’d go off and have a cigarette or work on some project he had on the go. My mom would release us from our dinner purgatory. If someone had of told me when I was sitting at that dinner table all those years ago that I would someday love Brussels sprouts, I would have shot them on the spot.