TBT #37: True Stories

I randomly googled a bunch of names the other night. Mostly the names of people I knew in middle or high school. Mostly the names of people I have not seen or talked to in years. It’s not that I didn’t like these people, and the time I spent with them growing up. Rather, it’s just that I’ve become very adept at the art of moving on. Of disappearing. I’m not a perfectionist by any means but I am addicted to the idea of fresh starts. Of realizing what I’ve done wrong and then trying again, somewhere else. Somewhere off in the distance, where no one knows me and, more importantly, where no one has defined me.

But that seems to lead to a mixed up amalgamation of a person — a mix-and-match puzzle game that’s been built up and torn down in the image of several different things. Can I put these lives together and still think of myself as a person who has led a cohesive life? Or am I doomed to an endless series of half-lives, false-starts and people who can’t quite remember the difference between me and the dozen other Matts they know.

The following are true stories from my past. The following are the events that have made me who I am. The following are The Best Things for April 11, 2005.

Regardless of inclination

Stop me if you’ve heard this one. I’m about six or seven years old and my parents have finally let me ride my bike to school and back. They gave me a blue-chain lock the night before, and I memorized the combination by repeating it a million times in my head before I fell asleep. I’m riding the bike I’ve come to love. The bike my dad so carefully taught me how to ride without training wheels. He’d hold the back of the seat and tell me to pedal. And I’d be so focused on the road in front of me that I wouldn’t notice that his hand was gone, and I was balancing on my own. Riding down the sidewalk towards the end of the street.

A few days after I started riding this bike to school, I was coming down the street towards home, when an older kid pulled up beside me on his bike. Much bigger than I was, he was riding on the street, while I was stuck on the sidewalk. Already a bit intimidated, it only got worse when this kid started laughing at me. “Hey!” he yelled. “What are you doing riding a GIRL’S bike?”

And, yes, it was a girl’s bike. Light powder blue with a cross-bar that sloped downwards when it should have gone straight across. I didn’t say anything to the kid. Just kept pedaling. He eventually pulled away and I made it home. Parking the bike — the damn bike! — in the garage, I lept through the door into the kitchen, where I immediately began to cry.

But it was okay. My Dad knew what to do. One weekend, he lay down a sheet in the garage, and hung the bike from a hook on the ceiling. Using orange and black spraypaint, he gave the bike a devilish flame paintjob. “There!” he said proudly. “Now it’s a boy’s bike!”

And it was.

Fortunate Son

In elementary school, I met a kid whose parents were both killed in a car accident. Over the years, he became one of my best friends, and remained so until I started pulling major disappearing acts in high school. The weird part was that, when we were in elementary school, we’d often talk about his parents’ death, and what it meant. I’m not sure I had the capability, as a third grader, to understand quite how traumatic such a thing would be to experience. It did not register to me then, how painful it would be to lose your parents, especially as such a young age. I just thought it made him interesting, both the fact that he had a story unlike anyone else in our elementary school, and that he would be getting a whole lot of money when he turned 18.

One day he told me that he could still see his parents, and often did, at random times during the day. He told me that he did, in fact, see his father right then and there, across from him in our third grade classroom where we were doing math problems. “Do you talk to them?” I asked him, imagining them to be some sort of ghost figures like the type I saw on TV sometimes. He told me that no, he didn’t. He couldn’t. But they could and did talk to him. They told him things. We sat there in that classroom, and I looked around the room, wondering what they said, and if it was scary.

A Hundred Smiles

One of my best friends when I was growing up — until around middle school, I guess — was a girl. I’d never admit that to anyone at school, of course, but her parents were friends with my parents and I didn’t really have much of a choice when it came to hanging around with her. And besides, she had a pool, which was pretty nice. And, also, I kind of liked her. We had fun together, her playing with Barbies and me with Ninja Turtles. Having them fight. And then kiss. And then drive down the stairs in a pink convertible while being chased by the Rat King.

I lost touch with her more and more as I entered the awkward years of puberty and developed a deep-rooted loner instinct. I’d still see her occasionally, mostly when our families would get together. Often, they’d come up to our cottage, so we’d usually see each other then. In the summer, we’d spend time in the water: balancing on windsurfer boards for long seconds, getting towed behind a boat in inflatable tubes, seeing how long we could stay under the surface. In the winter, however, we’d be stuck inside for much of the day, and so we’d end up either watching movies or, my favorite, playing videogames.

One winter weekend, Mario Kart 64 had just come out, and we spent a lot of the weekend playing that. With us two, her brothers and my brothers, we had more than enough to keep 4-player games going for hours on end. Over the course of a particularly memorable night, she mastered a beautiful Princess Peach impression. “Peachy!” she’d say, in perfect falsetto. “Bingo! Bye Bye!” We laughed a lot.

The morning after that, they started to play again, before I woke up. When I finally came to, I sat there and watched a few rounds. She was still doing her Peach impression. “Take that!” she’d say. “Yeah! Peach has got it!” For some reason, I found myself staring at her. From the angle I was at, I could only see the side of her face, half-eclipsed in long blonde hair. Her eyes, though focused rabidly on the TV screen, briefly caught me staring. I tried to pretend that I wasn’t, but she knew. And she smiled. She smiled the kind of smile I hadn’t seen from her, in all of my years of knowing her. It was a different kind of smile, one with a hint of promise, a hint of excitability and a hint of — forgive me for this — magic.

After her family went home that weekend, I didn’t see her much anymore. She grew up, and so did I, and we stopped having to go places with our families.

Briefly

We used to play a lot of games in the evening with the other kids on my street. You know, freeze tag, sardines, hide-and-seek — that sort of thing. It was the best part about growing up in a suburban neighborhood. It was there that I had some of the best times of my youth. It was there that I met yet another blonde girl (weird trend) that made me think the word ‘love’. (I’m convinced that’s a word I will not stop using naively until I stop using it altogether)

One night, we were playing some variation of “tag” involving teams. I was on the side trying to catch people, and we had just found someone, and had them on the run, going up a street. Thinking I was genius, I decided to run around the block, thereby intercepting their getaway from the back. I didn’t tell anyone this plan — to do so would be to give away its brilliance! I simply went, running as fast (and as quietly) as I could down the block. I couldn’t help but laugh to myself, as I sped down the sidewalk.

I’m not a very good runner now, and I wasn’t then either. I got tired about halfway around the block, and started to walk. Still thinking this was probably a good plan, I kept a brisk pace. I knew I would capture this person and bring my team victory in whatever the hell game we were playing. It was dark. The streetlights in my neighborhood always took a while to kick on. They started with a soft orange glow that became brighter as the night progressed.

When I made it around the block, there was nobody there. Everyone had gone home. When I went inside my house, my brother asked me where I had gone. I had to come up with a clumsy and flimsy lie to avoid telling him the truth.

The Water Cycle

When I was in Grade 1 I wrote a poem about The Water Cycle — you know, how water evaporates then turns to rain — that was apparently one of the best poems my teacher, Mrs. Russell, had ever seen written by a person in the first grade.

The Other Day

The other day I worried aloud that I was an asshole, because of my ability to so easily move on, and leave the people I care about behind. I was walking with a friend, and I couldn’t quite put into concrete words why this made me an asshole, but it was something I was worried about, nonetheless.

This friend and I got lost, taking a wrong turn down by the water and ending up about as far from our destination as two regularly intelligent people should be able to get.

“I don’t know where the hell we’re going,” I said.

“Me neither,” she said.

I watched the light. The streetlights and the moonlight and maybe even the starlight and how it all reflects off the ocean water and buildings I haven’t been this close to in months. The city was mostly silent. It breathed quietly with the far-off sounds that cities always make — industrial machines, laughter, yelling, old car engines and, well, waves. I could hear waves.

It was then that I realized that, not only did I not know where we were going, I was also, perhaps surpisingly, okay with being lost.

Happy Endings,
Matt