i received a note from classmates.com last night, informing me that dean baziw was wondering how i was doing. that he had found his wife on the internet, is a successful real estate agent in calgary and had two step daughters in australia.i have vague memories of high school. not because my consciousness was altered....i just wasn't that present. that evening, i am standing at the kitchen counter in the dark, eating poptarts, and swilling chocolate milk to wash down my 'bio-identical' estrogen, flipping through my high school yearbook, looking for dean baziw.
i found my own picture...not dean's and was giggling out loud at what i had written. favorite memories...going to washington with leslie....i smile....running from the school counsellour, mr. koipoilli......ambition....super mom......phys-ed....
phys-ed???
wtf??
i look over at the front door, where the brand new nike adidas something or other sit, unblemished, laces perfectly tied, the mr. clean sponge close by in case i should feel like running and might need to perform a quick touch up afterwards. i too will learn the questionable health benefits of feeling like my lungs are burning and i want to fall over afterwards.
but i'm not. i'm eating poptarts and estrogen tablets. happily. i am waiting for 24 to come on so i can watch torture scenes under the guise of entertainment and feel smug about being canadian. i am defrosting packages of ground round for dinner tomorrow, a sad and pathetic ground beef replacement that i disguise with taco seasoning because eric told me that ground beef will kill me. i'm listening to the sounds of pascale breathe.
and then, i remember.
why i wanted to be 'phys-ed'. i had spent most of the summers of my childhood and teenage years shrieking with laughter on a crystal blue lake in the interior of british columbia; the nights sleeping on the beach by a campfire under a mansion of stars, unattended by adults.... because life wasn't full of pedophiles or kidnappers.
at least they weren't at sandcastles resort.
august afternoons on boiling hot inner tubes, and mornings waterskiing with eric and his brothers. they were athletic types from washington that would make the drive north every summer with their families. they skiied around plastic 'boo-eys', their arm sweeping the surface of the water as they carved their ski around the plastic; pulling the boat back just slightly with each turn. they played football, and basketball and they ran.
eric was funny and i was funnier. i thought. i liked who i was when i was with him, we would catch up every year and later would go back and forth to visit each other. i would see his basketball photographs in the sumner newspaper and would hear of his team playing some final something or other in the superdome.
it seemed so NATURAL to be athletic. after one particularly riotous kelowna summer, i thought, shit man, i can waterski... eric showed me how. so what if i fell into the surface skimming weeds we called 'the paranoia'? eric would drop off as well. he'd yell at me that i better goddamn get up on one ski as the paranoia was curling around his legs and he wasn't very happy about it. i got up on one ski.
if i can ski, maybe i am athletic. i wanted to be PHYS-ED. i wanted to be carefree like eric. i thought if i were PHYS-ED, i wouldn't be worried about things. that i would feel like i were home. like i felt when i was in kelowna.
because in a school of 3000 students (just grades 10 through 12), i didn't know where home was. that fall i decided i would try out for the high school volleyball team. after running 'sprints' (badly) and realizing that the team was already chosen (they were the ones WAY ahead of me and not laughing like eric) i quit.
this summer, years and years after kelowna, we travelled to eric's house. he lives by the ocean, surrounded by fields of blueberries. he has found home. he still makes me laugh more than anyone and i wished we lived closer. he is the brother i wished i had. if i had been 'lettered' i could have married him.
as we sit in his back yard with our own families, he talks about running, and how he hated it at first and now how it brings him peace of mind. i believe him, just like i believed him that i could get out of the paranoia on one ski.
so the shoes are still here, three months later. and perhaps one day i will decide to seek out that little part of me that wanted to be 'phys-ed' when i was eighteen. i will join eric in running stories; how much i hate it but how good it makes me feel. but for now, everytime i see the face of some little person who wants to be an artist, i'll show them how to paint, and when one of them is teary because of algaebra, i'll show them how to get out of the paranoia.
