Rapture

No memory is ever pure, for we all construct narrative in hindsight. I have constructed a strong, bitter narrative around one episode from my childhood such that I have made it a lynch pin of my identity. The memory involves rapture movies. Do you know of these beasts? Have you ever borne witness?

By now you all know that my father died when I was 7. You may even know that he died of a curable disease: Hodgkins--that's the one that sidelined Mario Lemieux for a couple of months back in '93. Even back in the early '70s, Hodgkins was curable if it was detected in time. My dad's was not. Now maybe that was because he was a stubborn, bear-the-pain-in-silence farmer or maybe it was because my small town was serviced by two family doctors who had spent the bulk of their careers as missionaries in Africa and, as such, were not really on top of the diagnostic literature. I don't know the answer for certain but as I mentioned above, I have consciously constructed bitterness from this story.

When my dad died, our doctor felt deep and honest remorse. I'm certain of it. Whether he also felt pangs of guilt, I'll never know. For years following dad's death, the doctor's wife came to visit once each summer carrying a cheque that would send one of us kids to camp. I know this family of devout Christians saw this act as God's work, charitable work. We were dirt poor; going to summer camp was an opportunity we certainly wouldn't have had without their help. The camp, Fair Glen, was a pan-denominational, evangelical Christian organization with a few acres of land about a half-hour from where I grew up. Its sole purpose was make us born again... while teaching us a bit of paddling and bead work on the side.

I remember my first year at camp. I was 12 or 13 years old (but I felt younger) and it was my first time away from home--really away, not just visiting Uncle Lloyd and Aunt Vi or bunking down at Gram's for the night. I was gone a full week without the ability to contact home. On our first night at camp, before we were even able to get to know one another and form strategic social-sanity bonds, we were all herded into the main hall for movie night. We watched A Distant Thunder, a rapture film.

A Distant Thunder begins with a guillotining scene set to a chorus of complacent Christians singing "We shall overcome" dirge-like as they are marched to their death. You see in the prequel to this film, A Thief in the Night, all God's faithful are swept off to heaven in the Rapture. Those left behind are given a choice by Satan's followers: accept the mark of the beast or be executed. The only hope promised to these poor sods is to accept Jesus Christ as their personal Saviour such that their reward will await them on the other side of the blade. Some do. Some do not. All are murdered brutally on-screen.

After the film, we were told that the Rapture could happen at any time, that end-times were at hand. Only those known to Christ would be taken in the Rapture. The rest of us would have to deal with the apocalypse. We then walked back to our cabins, which had no indoor plumbing or electricity, to contemplate our souls and to get a good night's rest. Suffice to say, that night, as I lay on my bunk unable to sleep for fear of being attacked in the night, for fear of simply dissolving, for fear of never seeing my family again and for fear of fear itself, I became born again.

A week later on my return home, CTV carried the "World Television Premiere" of The Omen. I made it as far as the Nanny scene ("Damien, Damien, this I do for you!") before having to leave the room more terrified than I had ever been in my life. I didn't sleep all night, for if I slept on my side I could be attacked from behind. I could easily be smothered if I dozed off on my stomach. Phantom arms were sure to spring up from the bed should I lie on my back. The hands under the bed would no doubt grab my ankles if I made a run for it. Hours passed by and I watched the slow path of headlights crawl around my walls, each light a trumpet blast from one of the horsemen of the apocalypse.

It's not that I was new to Christianity when I walked through the gates of Fair Glen. We were a god-fearing family. When I was little, my mother played the organ at the Anglican church and I helped by putting the hymn numbers up in the hardwood display boards. My Gram was a fire and brimstone Baptist who made sure I attended Pioneer Girls. She was also responsible for the various illustrated editions of the Bible we had kicking around the house. And yet, Christianity was quietly observed in my family, my mother being more a disciple of C.S. Lewis than any kind of organized doctrine.

After my rebirth of duress in Christ, I remained a Christian throughout my teen years though never so earnest and terrified a one as I was that first summer. I returned to camp at least one more time and saw a few more Rapture films before my indoctrination was complete. I eventually joined the United Church and became part of a singing teen ministry. I went to Breakfast Club before Church each Sunday and eventually the social aspects of Christianity won out over all that fear-mongering. At the time, I believed I was a true person of faith but in retrospect I know that my core was hollow on this count.

As I passed into adulthood I began to question so many aspects of Christianity and the Church. I lost my faith entirely and I know deep down that I will never reclaim it. I don't pretend for a second that this loss of faith can all be pegged on a single rapture film, but when you come to God by way of the lion and not the lamb you will always be frightened and unsure. When your experiences are soured by poverty and parental loss such that you can't help but question the motives of even the most sincere do-gooders, you become that proverbial camel on the wrong side of the needle--except that you can't help but wonder to yourself why you would ever want to squeeze yourself back through.

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This post was written as part of Julie's Hump Day Hmmmm. I would have had it up on Wed except I got too sleepy to finish it last night. And yes, I have read Gwen's post but not until I had this one more or less written. Oh and I have also seen the Mimi Rogers/David Duchovny Rapture, just in case you're wondering.

I wish I had a river

For the love of hockey and feminists, this Canadian gal finally taught herself to skate in her mid-30s. It's not that I had never tried before. When I was a child, there were always skates kicking around the house. "Girl skates" we called them: always white with that awkward claw of toe-picks that would force you to hobble-glide around the ice if by chance clutz and not lutz was your athletic destiny. It was clear from early on in my childhood that I was nothing more than a Katarina Twit. You'll still see women of my generation working their way around the rink using that tell-tale prissy hobble. I often wonder if those same women are soul sisters: bullied from the rec room by their brothers for asking too many stupid questions when the Leafs played the Habs; coerced into an interest in figure skating; and living for the winter Olympics just to watch the speed skaters fly.

Any skates I wore as a child were ill-fitting. As kid number 5, little was new, little was mine. When I did skate, it was never at a rink. No, "us kids" would trudge across two farmer's fields, dragging shovels, boards and skates to get back to the crick. My prairie husband might call the crick a slough. I don't know what your regional flourish is for a small pool of standing water in the middle of farm country.

We'd arrive at the crick tired from the knee-deep hike and then spend a half an hour clearing the ice before tightening our skates with knuckleless frozen fingers. Five minutes later, after falling repeatedly on the ice's wind-rippled surface, we'd head home for hot chocolate. I'd strip off my wet clothes at the register vent inside the back door and then sit in my underwear, nursing the warm choclately goodness while watching my thighs turn from pink to frost-patchy white to red before settling into their pale mottledness. The whole affair was a make-work production designed to make us patriots if perhaps not skaters.

In my 30s, I joined the Library School women's Co-Rec hockey team. The ability to skate was not a prerequisite in this league. Punny team names were, however, de rigeur. Sadly I cannot take credit for christening The Infomaniacs but my second team a year later, The Booby Orrs, that was all my doing. We were a mixed collection of academic feminists who actually did manage to bring a high degree of collegiality to team sports. And, when it came to skating, being on a hockey team changed everything. I had padding and a stick for stability. I had a purpose with rules to define it. At long last, I wanted to learn. I wanted to be a Canadian Amazon of the Ice. I began showing up for noon hour public skates. I started jumping the boards of my local outdoor community league at midnight. I sought advice: watch the bum of the skater in front of you to establish a rhythm; don't tighten your laces across the foot to prevent cramping but strap your ankles in with all your might, push your heels out from the bum on down to slow down quickly... And, dear readers, at long last I bought hockey skates--still used, but hockey skates nonetheless.

Little by little, I learned that wonderful rocking motion that feels a bit like oblivious escape. I lived in Edmonton at the time where I could skate on the lake at Hawrelak Park or go a few rounds on the Victoria Oval, places where you could build up speed and begin to lose yourself in thought. Outdoor skating offered clean fresh air and endorphins. Other people dream their wanderlust to being by flying to foreign lands. Not me. All I need is a clear, bright -10 day and a patch of unending ice.

Ah but then I moved out here to the Maritimes--where women's hockey is actually played by real Acadian Amazons NOT aging, pudgy feminists with a penchant for living life for its metaphorical resonance. My teammates had little time or sympathy for my spazzy stops and my inability to skate backwards. I spent one season miserable on a flatly named team that was filled with hyper-competitive asshats. I drove to games an hour out of town at 6 am on -20 January days. I practiced the drills. I ate the pizza and drank the beer. I hated every single minute of it.

Now, a few years after quitting, I guess I am a true Canadian skater at long last: you know, the kind of person who can only get access to ice time at public, noon-hour skates. As such, two lunch hours every week, I go around in tight circles, breathing Zamboni fumes and making friendly chit-chat. In this teetering obstacle course of fitness, I am surrounded by the Old Timer hot dogs who stop short of body checking in their efforts to claim ice real estate and by the teetering international students looking for the le vrai chose Canadienne--all the while surrounding the Intolerable Cranstons, figure skaters doomed to spin and leap at centre ice. Theirs is a circle of icy hell more circumscribed than mine. Yet, that rocking hockey motion is sufficiently seductive to keep me coming back week after week, year after year.

Each winter day, I dream of of lakes, rivers and canals, expanses of ice that promise a wintery escape.

How I wonder what you are

I was cuddling Miss M on the couch Saturday morning, cradling my coffee in one hand and a book in the other. My arm was around her and the chill of our back family room bit our noses as we snuggled under a blanket. This is one of the most familiar and cherished scenes in my life, as comfortable and familiar as my stretched elastic waistband pajamas and my worn-out sheep skin slippers. In that end-of-book silent pause Miss M burst into song:

J'aime papa
J'aime mama
J'aime Baby Daisy aussie

"What?" I thought to myself with more than a few exclamation marks. To the best of my knowledge, my daughter does not speak French. Yet here she was declaring her love (if rather dubiously in the same company as Baby Daisy) in the language of love itself.

WASPy old me, I speak French about as well as the next box of Shreddies. I do, however, live in Canada's only officially bilingual province, a province that is butted up against Quebec. Suffice to say my ear knows the difference between Ken Dryden French and la chose authentique. Miss M was singing la langue propre. One of her sitters is francophone by birth and, no doubt, she has been singing and possibly even speaking to Miss M in French, all of which is lovely. It's just that until this moment I didn't know. This woman is accent-free bilingual and I have a very unilingual relationship with her. I didn't have a clue that she was bilingual with my daughter.

This moment of being ripped quickly and wholly from my profoundly familiar world got me thinking about the power of language to transform. It also got me really thinking about the infant ability to absorb and acquire language in all its verbal complexity. Language acquisition is an aptitude that erodes quickly as we age. This fact saddens me greatly. Just imagine what our lives would be like if we retained this ability as we got older, the ability to hear and speak the words of others correctly, as they were intended, and with all the beauty and nuance of the native tongue. Imagine if we had access to all the world's languages to pick and choose from as we wish. Imagine if we could each make a lexicon of our own choosing to describe the world according to our own sense of aesthetics. There are definitely English words I adore like "slacks," "sandwich" and "chesterfield" that I would always keep in my vocabulary but oh how wonderful it would be to augment them with multi-lingual synonyms. I could take étoile instead of "star"; casa instead of "house"; kuchen instead of "cake", and so on and so on and so on. I could find those necessary words for which there is no equivalent in English. My world would expand according to my ability to describe it.

Indulging in all these wild imaginings has led me to realize that with each passing day Miss M becomes further enslaved by her mother tongue. I see it time and again. She encounters a word, she plays with it on her tongue, and eventually she adopts it with an evolving-to-correct pronunciation. The signified gets nailed to its signifier. Each time this happens her world becomes more concrete yet somehow so much more narrow for it. It's as if all the million possible alternative synonyms die in that moment of her very concrete language acquisition.

Fortunately I do hear sounds of rebellion coming from her, indications that she is willing to take agency and name the world for herself with her own words. Her favourite song right now is "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star." For the longest time she believed the word for "star" was "twinkle" and because she could not pronounce "twinkle" she substituted her version, "Wait-da" instead. "Wait-da, wait-da" she sings day and night, particularly on cloudless nights from atop the swing in the park. Her command of the language is much better now and she definitely knows that the proper term for those points of light is "star" but she has consciously decided, in this instance, to name the world her way. Those magical dots in the sky and in the books, those brilliant companions to the "moooon", they simply can't be anything as prosaic as "stars"; no, they can't even be the more mystical étoiles of that other tongue she has heard; no those sparkling diamonds must be "wait-das." It's as if her entire understanding of the cosmos is weighted upon this knowledge of the right and proper word, this perfect marriage of signifier and signified.

Oh, where is this post going? There is so much I want to say about language and the way it brings us freedom because it gives us the power of understanding; about places in the world where being multi-lingual is simply a way of life; about my own regrets at being too poor and insecure to follow through with the Au Pair posting I had lined up in Paris the year after high school only to watch my French-language skills wither and die; about the size of Shakespeare and Joyce's vocabularies; about the dwindling lexicon of high school students today versus fifty years ago; about how my own relationship to words is one of the most powerful and transformative forces in my life; about the fact that I would genuinely like my daughter to learn as many languages as she can so that her world and her mind will be more expansive for it; about how I fear that ticking time-clock of lost aptitude because I also fervently believe these first few years should be entirely about play not structured learning; about the despair of living in a province with separate French, English, and Immersion school systems and a population-base that can support none of them adequately; and about the beauty of being told "I love you" in language and song that exists just beyond my grasp.