Monthly Archives: September 2016

I wish that my story could be happier, but one of my most important values is sincerity, and to tell my story truthfully it has to begin sadly.

Home stopped being a ‘place’ on the day that my mother passed away. I was five years old, months away from entering the first grade, when my father took my brothers and me aside and said, “Mommy is not coming home.”

Looking back, for the next seven years after that, home was the wonderful feeling that I got when I was pretending to be somewhere else with my twin brother. We called it “The Game.” In “The Game” we had the power to do absolutely anything. We created alter-egos as the demigod siblings Sar-Sar (that was me) and Teru (Max) Tamtan. We had a pet koala named Poponicus and we lived in the place where anything could happen. In reality we moved from apartment to house, to larger house to smaller house, and went through a series of stepmothers. My father worked himself into illness, partially because his notion of self-identity was as a breadwinner, but also because his notion of home was mostly from decadent home cooked meals.

When my twin brother and I were twelve, my father told us to stop playing “The Game” and he played us “The Logical Song,” which is an actual song by the band Supertramp. If you’ve never heard the song before, it tells the listener about the experience of growing up. Max took it seriously and immediately became incredibly somber, and for all intents and purposes morphed into an adult. That Halloween, he was forced to go with me, and not wanting to dress in a costume, he dressed as a business man. People thought that he was Harry Potter, so it was not as awkward as it could have been. Meanwhile I did what I had always done when darkness fell upon my life: I soared deeper into my imagination. Max and I never played together again.

Then out of nowhere, my father began to pretend. Another world was born with farmers, lambs, badgers, wolves, mice, and pigeons at its center. I played the farmer’s daughter, the lambs, and the pigeons, and my father played the badgers, the mice, and the wolves.  Home was coming back from school and making stories while cooking meals for my father.

Unfortunately, years into the story, the logical song found its way in. Sometimes I wasn’t the farmer’s daughter. I was “Dullard Daughter” who could never do anything right and whose job was to appease her father, and he was “Footha”, the tyrant authoritarian parent. I never was a dullard though.  In reality I had gotten into university and the time spent making stories with him, and cooking increasingly elaborate meals for him was eating into time for my school work. Even worse, I had never been allowed to spend time making friends. When I asked to stop playing, Footha came to life, and by that time I was in my early twenties.

I could not call on Max because he strayed from the dysfunctionality by quitting university and getting job that took up most of his time. I could not call on my other brother, Benny – who had left my family as soon as he was old enough to.

I had to escape.

As death seems to be a large factor of change in my life, serendipitously my grandmother passed away, and my father decided that he had to move to Vancouver Island to be closer to my grandfather. I had to continue my education, so I stayed behind in Vancouver.

After that my idea of home changed completely. I got my first boyfriend at age 24. I took time off from school to start a business. I went travelling. I FINALLY EXPERIENCED REALITY UNSKEWED BY CONSTANT IMAGINATION!

Home became my boyfriend’s laugh, my kitten’s purr, warm slippers, and prospect of future opportunities.

Now, I type here on this little island, with my fiancé nearby, planning to reassemble a relationship with my father through story, planning to begin my own family through adoption.

I don’t like to play pretend any more. Real life is much better.

 

(Values: Family, sincerity, the pursuit of reality, utilizing opportunity)

I’d tell you why I seek the truth, and why I try not to lie, but that is another story.

 

Works Cited:

Keller, Sarah. Studying. Drawing, Vancouver, BC, Canada, 2012.

Keller, Sarah. The Badger And The Lamb. Drawing, Vancouver BC, Canada, 2012.

Supertramp, “Logical song.” Online Video Clip. Youtube. alberto meza,  September 27, 2016.

It was a chilly fall afternoon that a large white luxThe Story That Ruined A Man And His Worldury yacht glided into North Bay. Four couples of snowbirds disembarked from the boat and began their stay at the local bed and breakfast, which was really no more than a four room cabin with a small kitchen, propane stove and fridge. No one wanted to go outside because the paths on Ruxton Island were muddy and the steep rocky shores were covered in slippery seaweed. Even so it was a perfectly tranquil environment with little brown birds chirping in trees and river otters playing at the point of the bay. Nothing could go wrong in a place so natural.

After a few hours, the owner of the property arrived at the cabin and welcomed the travelers to his retreat. The snowbirds unpacked their bags and got cozy as night fell. Let us say that the names of the couples were Fred and Abby, Josh and Lucy, Garth and Gail, and Louis and Daphne. The owner of the property was called Mickey.

When everyone was settled, Mickey started a fire in the wood stove, because it gets cold at Ruxton in the fall. It would also make the retreat much more romantic.

Unfortunately, even with the ambiance that the fire created, Garth was bored. He was not exactly accustomed to retirement yet, and was even less accustomed to a cabin setting. Before retirement  he was an accountant and had become a workaholic, and workaholics don’t get out much.

To make himself less bored he asked his wife to tell everyone a story. She was a published author – she had to know how to tell a good tale. Hopefully it would be something funny.

Gail shrugged and looked at the fire dance on the arbutus logs in the wood stove. She began her story with:

“There was once an old man who lived on this island. He was the sole survivor of a terrible car crash that killed his family, so he had terrible trouble sleeping at night. The only thing that helped his insomnia was to sleep in other people’s beds. Once he even slept in this cabin.

As the story goes, if he ever found anyone else in their cabin, he would kill them. His name was-”

“STOP” shouted Mickey, whose face had turned the colour of the light grey linens on the cabin’s beds. “You need to take it back! I don’t kill people. I just don’t sleep right.”

“Well, we all heard it now,” said Garth “– and I think that I’m going to sleep in the yacht tonight.”

“Me too,” said Lucy, and the others nodded in agreement.

Mickey’s bed and breakfast business failed soon after. In his sorrow he burned down his cabin, which set the whole of Ruxton Island on fire. If it hadn’t been for Gail’s story and the negativity that went with it, he would have preceded as normal, sleeping in other people’s beds when their inhabitants were away, and no one would have been the wiser.

Let it be known that stories can be entertaining, but they can also be harmful. It is stories like Gail’s that brought evil into the world.

Once you have told a story, you can never take it back. So, be careful of the stories you tell, AND the stories you listen to.

 

Here is the conversation that I had with my fiance after I finished telling him the story. I would have told it to a bigger audience but we are currently on a secluded island:

Ljay: “I like that you used true stories from the island that we know and people whom we know as the characters.”

Me: “They’re just the first things that popped into my head. What did you think of the story?”

Ljay: “I’m wondering why the story of the man who slept in other people’s beds became a negative story when he really ended up with a new family in a different place.”

Me: “Oh. I needed to have a negative story for my assignment.”

Ljay: “Fair enough. Why would Gail tell a negative story at a retreat though. I thought you said that Mickey tried to create romantic ambiance and that other guy wanted to hear a funny story.

Me: “Because scary stories go well with the light from wood stoves at night. You know that.” (Personal Interview, 22 September 2016.)

Other Commentary:

Unfortunately Ljay did not comment at all about the theme of the story like I expected him to. He reads quite a bit and listens to stories on the radio constantly when he is at Ruxton. Perhaps I should not have told him my story after he spent a day of listening to other, more polished stories.

I tweaked the definition of ‘world’ slightly and used Mickey’s world – his livelihood on Ruxton Island where he has made his home his entire adult life, as the ‘world’ that gets ruined by the evil contained in a story. Ruxton island gets burned in the story as a way to show the consequences of the evil that can inhabit stories. A life and a place get ruined together.

I told Mickey that I was making a story with him in it, but he has not heard it yet. In reality, he is not the man portrayed in my story, though he does run a bed and breakfast from Ruxton Island.

 

Works cited:

Keller, Sarah. The Shaw Family Wood Stove. Photo, Ruxton Island, BC, Canada.

“Ruxton Island, BC.” Map. Google Maps. Google, 22 September. 2016. Web. 22 Sep. 2016.

“Ruxton Rental Retreat & Sailing Tours.” Salt Spring Exchange. N.p., 15 July 2016. Web. 22 Sept. 2016.

Shaw, Ljay. Personal interview. 22 September 2016

The last chapter of J. Edward Chamberlin’s “If This Is Your Land,Where Are Your Stories,” discusses how there can be multiple equally truthful versions of a single event in history. It all depends on the culture in which one is raised, and how they look at the world, for which version of a story that one wants to believe – or even multiple versions. An example that Chamberlin uses is the story of a large angry bear who tore half a mountain with him when the Gitksan people of the North West of British Columbia got too comfortable in a valley and no longer respected the land or the animals in the way that they once had. After geological analysis, it turns out that there had been a massive earth quake that tore the mountain away in the same time frame that the bear story took place. The Gitksan believe both stories because of their culture, especially since the oral story had been around thousands of years before seismology existed. The land claim court that the Gitksan took both stories to, however, could not use the bear story as evidence because it was not understood in colonial terms. Perhaps the two stories having the same time frame and setting was coincidental. I find this interesting because it make me think that oral histories should be taken more seriously than they have been – even if they are told like a story with elements of religion and spirituality.

The story of land title connected to Aboriginal title is another interesting topic of Chamberlin’s last chapter. Chamberlin explains that land title is a completely fake notion, that people take for granted. This made me think of Vancouver where large sums of money are transferring hands for houses, condos, and the rare commodity of bare land. Likewise Aboriginal title is a made up thing, and rather pan-indigenous, as what makes someone indigenous is as much cultural, as it is genetic, but these days post-colonial governments seem to base Indigeneity on genetics mostly. Before colonists arrived in what is now called Canada, Aboriginal title did not exist. The difference from band to band existed, the stories that they passed down did, and their cultures did – even if those are all made up as well. Just people grouping themselves as they tend to.

The third part of the final chapter that I found interesting is connected to the other two parts of this chapter that I touched on in this post. It is Chamberlain’s idea that knowledge is made up of stories – from science, to religion, to national anthems, to laws. Thus scholars cannot be as objective at they try to be because they read and write with the knowledge that they had before they started writing. They have to choose between stories, and what to believe. Who is ‘barbaric’, who is ‘the other’ are chosen too. Chamberlin says, “Like home, it is at the centre of contradiction,” because there is no ‘home,’ (Chamberlain, 240.)  That is made up too.

This book has really made me question what I know and my place in the construction that is Canada. I think that it is a good step on the path the reconciliation.

 

Cited works:

1. Chamberlin, J. Edward. If This Is Your Land, Where Are Your Stories?: Finding Common Ground. Toronto: A.A. Knopf Canada, 2003. Print. 219-240.

2. CTV News. Will Vancouver’s Real Estate Bubble Burst? http://bc.ctvnews.ca/video?clipId=875918 , Accessed September 15, 2016

3. Indigenous Foundations. Aboriginal Title. http://indigenousfoundations.arts.ubc.ca/home/land-rights/aboriginal-title.html, Accessed September 15, 2016.

4. Gitxsan_map. http://www.nativemaps.org/files/images/pictures/Gixtsan_map.jpeg Accessed September 16, 2016