Five random facts about me

Elan Morgan tagged me in an old-school meme project to share five random things about myself. Interestingly (randomly?), she also tagged Vikki, at whose dining room table in Minneapolis I am currently blogging. It’s like duelling bloggers around here: me coming up with five random facts about myself downstairs while Vikki comes up with five facts of her own upstairs in her office. That’s how we roll. (Elan also tagged, for the record, Suebob, Alexis Hinde, and Eden Riley.)

Without further ado:

1.       My undergraduate and master’s English degrees both focused on African-American slave and post-emancipation literature. I wrote my undergraduate thesis on Toni Morrison’s Beloved, and my MA thesis on “passing” — the complicated phenomenon (and I won’t do it justice here) of black people passing for white and vice versa, as well as queer people passing for straight, etc. I was so consumed by that literature, by thinking through and analyzing those texts for patterns, trying to make meaning of it all. And while I imagine that all that thinking has shaped the way I look at life today, that period of intense academic analysis now seems so far away.

2.       When I was about six, my parents took what I believe was their first-ever holiday without children. They went to Aruba, and my father’s mother stayed with me and my brother, in the spare room. While my parents were gone, their bed caught on fire. A frayed wire from my father’s clock radio sparked on their metal bed frame, and that spark caught their bedspread, and — flames. I remember being woken up by my brother yelling “Fire!” I remember the smoke billowing out of my parents’ bedroom. I remember witnessing that smoke, and then going back into my own bedroom and getting back into bed. To this day, I can’t quite decide if this story is one of immeasurably good luck or of immeasurably bad luck.

3.       I used to teach yoga.

4.       I am missing a tooth. My right adult eyetooth just never materialized. Since I was 12, I’ve had a series of more and less successful prosthetic teeth and bridges. Occasionally, a bridge has come loose and I have had to spend the weeks or days before I can get to the dentist holding my tooth in place with my tongue. Sometimes, this results in hilarity.

5.       I assign personalities and memories to inanimate objects and unrelated moments. The colour of paint in Isaac’s room reminds me, every time, of an otherwise insignificant friendship I had in grad school. At a certain point in a exercise class in the gym, I always think of a certain client. Related, I used to imagine that that dust motes dancing through sunlight were fairies. I used to think that I must be the only person who experienced the world in this way, but now I imagine that most people do. That's both comforting and kind of disappointing.

Who will I tag? That's more difficult. Okay, I will spin the bottle and call on Sarah Gilbert, Stacy Morrison, Karin Cope (who supervised that undergraduate thesis), Rebecca Keenan and Deb Rox.

Fear, vomit, post apocalyptic YA, Jewish mothers & aliases

Friday is brought to you by dirty emoticons, my fantasies about post-apocalyptic science fiction, vomit, Jewish mothers, coddled children, and Shani Mootoo. To wit:

• A while back I tagged Emma Waverman and Tanya Gouthro to write blog posts about their writing processes. Read what gets them motivated (hint: fear and vomit).
• My post this month on VillageQ is a fantasy about a fantasy – thoughts on Patrick's Ness's More Than This and how we might deal with homophobic bullying in high schools.
• At Today’s Parent this week, I muse about rescuing my children. From what, I'm still working out.
• I also wrote about my mom's overinvestment in my own education. For chance to win a copy of Rachel Ament's anthology, The Jewish Daughter Diaries: True Stories of Being Loved Too Much by Our Moms, leave a comment here.
• And! Thunder Bay locals: this coming Tuesday, June 10, is the annual Thunder Pride Literary Evening, featuring headline reader Shani Mootoo (who has told me that she used to use the alias Susan Goldberg – for reals.) If you were as blown away as I was when I first encountered Mootoo’s writing — her novel Cereus Blooms at Night was so overwhelmingly lush and beautiful — you'll want to be there. If you haven't encountered her writing before, now's the time. See you at the Mary J. L. Black library on Tuesday at 7 PM

The other side

I was going through my bookshelves the other day, trying to make space. I weeded out of bunch of books to donate: novels I'll never read again, academic texts that will be better loved on university library shelves. It's getting easier to give away books — I console myself with the idea that they're still mine, just on other people's shelves. I like to think that maybe someone will read a book that would've otherwise died a lonely death on my shelf and maybe it will make that person's life a little bit different. In a good way.

And then I found this on the floor after my purge:

It's a vintage label from a Vaseline jar. It must've been used as a bookmark. When I picked it up and turned it over, this is what was on the back:

That's my mother's handwriting. She used to do that: doodle little shapes and connecting lines. I started to do that too, to copy her, and now it's my own habit. She was obviously writing down a telephone number, likely taking it down from a friend on the telephone, writing it over and over. The number 71 in the bottom left-hand corner: that's the year I was born. Could the Vaseline have been from my babyhood? My brother’s?

Do you dare me to call that phone number? I won't, but it's fun to contemplate.

I'm not so macabre and inconsolable these days. Now, I come across these physical scraps of my mom, tiny things that she touched, and I'm far enough past grief to be rather chuffed about them, to grin rather than gasp. I've no idea which book this fell out of, and now that the books have already been dropped off to their new homes, I never will. But somehow, this scrap of paper wormed its way out to find me: a little hello, a reminder from the other side.

Do you dare me to call the phone number? If this were a novel, I would, and it would be the beginning of some great adventure, some passionate romance. But it's just a bookmark, holding space in a story that simultaneously finished much too soon and still never quite ends.