Little Me This

I scrunch my face and press my finger into my ear. The growing ache in my ears signals my airplane’s descent, and I push up the gritty plastic window shade, eyes blinking to adjust to the sudden shot of light. I don’t love flying. My simple brain can’t compute how a massive hunk of metal can lift into the sky, never mind stay there and take a deliberate path. I always place my palm against the side of the airplane and pat it three times before boarding — my safety and surrender ritual, never to be missed. But I admit to an ironic love of take-offs and landings — they scare me, adrenaline viscerally shoots through my veins, yet conjointly I pocket several secret minutes of pure awe and wonder.

From my small round peephole in the sky I see perfect cul-de-sacs lined with miniature green trees and cubed houses. I watch impossibly tiny cars moving along long, thin, grey strips with painted yellow and white lines. Lights appear and disappear, red, white, yellow. Sometimes these toy-like vehicles are packed together in the slow grind of rush hour traffic, sometimes a solitary car peels away down an empty road. I imagine the music blaring in those cars, the cheesy banter of radio hosts between 2-for-1 mattress ads and weather reports, the smiles and the frowning faces, anxious glances at the clock, and endless phone conversations. Like a toddler delighting in its three hundredth round of peek-a-boo, I’m ceaselessly astonished that there are people in those cars — doing the same things with the same worries as people, everywhere. So many folks doing things they feel are important, or rather because they are human, likely doing all sorts of things that don’t matter at all. 

Advertising and marketing deadlines are fast and hectic. At a magazine publishing house, I worked at (a lifetime ago!) I pulled all-nighters puzzling over how to cram as many crappy computer repair shop ads as possible into multiple editions of a nerdy tech rag that used to run coast to coast in Canada. My first editorial experience was not by way of skill, but of desperation — I couldn’t get a hold of our editorial team who never seemed to notice the word count limits for their articles. Their content never fit, yet my job would be someone else’s if I missed the print deadline. Being on layout duty meant I was the last to touch it, and my already limited time was cut shorter by the late ad and editorial submissions. And there were always late submissions. In my panic and frustration, I slashed and re-wrote paragraphs myself. I resized ads hoping the businesses paying for the spots (and my boss) wouldn’t notice their slightly reduced size, frantically ran a spell check, and uploaded the files for printing. I stressed, denied myself sleep, exercise, and healthy sustenance, missed parties, and all the hot TV shows, intent on getting those stupid FREE magazines out in time. At the time it seemed ever so important.

When I worked in-house at a mobile phone company, I bribed printers with promises of future print contracts to make the impossible happen. They too would spend a sleepless night to get the new mobile phone pricing brochures printed and in-store within 24 hours of a competitor’s price changes. At the office, I was almost always the first one in and last one out. I did the work of two or three people but was rarely rewarded for it, neither in coin or title. I never missed a deadline. This was my work ethic. But what for? Why did I care so much?

When I was 15, I was selected to be on Team Ontario for field hockey, after being scouted for try-outs during a high school match. Practices were held at The University of Toronto’s field house on weekends and were several hours long. They were grueling, the kind of drills that made you question whether your body could stay prone if you dared to stop.  I didn’t know anyone else on the team. We lived 45 minutes away in Bolton, what was then a small country town with just two stoplights (its sprawl of full city-block-sized Amazon and other logistics warehouses and factories makes Bolton unrecognizable to me now.) Mom, being a nurse, often worked weekends and couldn’t always get me to practices as it would mean hanging around in the city until the four-hour sessions concluded. 

I don’t remember where my dad was, possibly in jail, or some halfway house. He certainly didn’t have his driver’s license anyway, as those were the days his troubles with drinking were at a climax. Mom dropped me at my grandparent’s place in Etobicoke some evenings. I slept fitfully on their blue, dark floral-patterned couch, covered in my great-grandma’s musty, itchy Icelandic wool knitted throws. Practice was at 7am so we woke before the sun to make our way across the city. Driving through the dark, mostly empty streets in my grandpa’s old silver Chrysler was arguably more intense than the practices. My grandpa, who we called Bump Bump, or just Bump, had little patience for “all the other assholes with a gear shift,” and even less for “the righteous bastards that need to put stop lights every hundred feet,” and although the streets were practically bare at that early hour, he sped and found people and things at which to curse and honk. 

Shriveled in the back seat, my hand tightly gripped around the worn door handle, I’d brace for what inevitably came next. As we neared the waking city centre, Bump’s “patience” thinned. At stop lights, it was not uncommon for him to lay a verse of profanities, barely brush the brakes, and then floor it straight through the red. Seasoned, my grandma sat braced in the front passenger seat, uttering “Jesus, Bryan,” at the extra close calls. How he and my grandmother were alive (and me) is a true mystery. Bump Bump only slowed down as we neared the university where we encountered speed bumps. He would slow just enough to not bottom out the car, look at me in the rearview mirror, and announce “Bump, bump!” as the front and back wheels in succession bounced me off the seat. I heard his trademark purr, the rumble in his chest when he was pleased. Not quite a laugh, but a happy sound.

I used to stumble out of the car, insides roiling, neck tensed, and all limbs trembling from the stress of clenching and hoping to arrive in one piece. It took me about 20 minutes to settle into practice. Bump was quiet (usually) but his energy was large. His moods could shift like a transistor radio and our experiences with him became pages in our life’s stories.