Back of the living room there's a dining room. This sounds more tragic than it is. I remember sitting at the table all alone, maybe with the lights dimmed. Maybe it was all the way dark. I wasn't quite finished with my food yet. Once again. A medieval punishment? I'm not remembering it that way. In fact, is there a delicious taste of mashed potato in my mouth?
Kitchen, alongside. Learning a life-lesson, or starting to grapple with it on the way to finally figuring it out. My Mum, on the phone. Me, having need of her. Or maybe just wanting her. And just having to wait my turn.
Revenge! An infant recollection of my burrowing into the pots-and-pans cupboard. I'll show her! Counter-revenge! Turns out she didn't worry, or come looking even. Just kept talking on the phone. What do you do when they call your bluff? How do you face the fact that Copernicus was right, though you prefer Ptolemy?
See those lower two windows? The rumpus room! Travel posters. Christmas trees! And Christmas decorations, and enough presents that once, when I was really little, I actually got lost in the midst of them. Cried and everything. Forts made out of furniture and blankets. That amazing curved electric race track that Dad got us, and set up, and maintained. Also, Good Enough Isn't Good Enough. (Let it be noted that that one never really bothered me, maybe even at the time. He probably explained what he really meant by it, and I more or less understood what he said.)
The Saskatchewan Roughriders winning the Grey Cup, tragically just short of my being able to appreciate and remember the fact. When I came of age, at least in a sports-fan sense, I rooted for them every year. This, all the way though the Edmonton Eskimos' preposterous, Habs-like 5 year run between 1978 and 1982.
Sports, generally. Russ Jackson. Gordie Howe, going offside during a game played in his last (first) NHL season. He went right off the ice. I thought they'd given him a penalty! I felt bad for him. He probably didn't really need my sympathy.
Isn't media powerful? And ubiquitous? The Batman series. The moon shot! Laugh-In, for crying-out-loud. A lot of crazy sounds and images in fact, from south of the border. Now it's 1970. FLQ! Frightening sounds and images, this side of the border. Which is now, now that I think of it, that side of the border ...
