In the air tonight…

When I was in elementary school my teachers often didn’t  know what to do with me…

I was known as a divergent thinker…

So one year I was moved directly from grade five into grade seven…

as an answer to an uncategorical problem…

In grade seven we learned about negative numbers…

For some reason this concept made me cry… I could work it out on paper… but I always wondered where the numbers went… and why they had to be negative…

I could never find the words to explain the torrential rainstorm washing out my eyes during math class, to my teacher…

At eleven everyone names you hormonal… or too sensitive…

This is a common way of dismissing depth, feeling, and

historical connection… 

So to avoid explanation, when negative numbers came up, I would just leave the portable and walk in very large circles around the school field… which would become a lake in the winter… and sometimes stand at the edge of the field visiting the Shetland pony who lived alone, so it seemed, on the other side of the fence…

My friends and I were all fascinated by this pony because it had a penis that could almost reach the ground… not one of us had ever seen anything like that before… William Gibson hadn’t envisioned the World Wide Web… and porn was still fairly soft… and as far as I knew it didn’t involve male subjects… but then at twenty-one, as a Canada Customs officer, it was required duty to search for and assess permissibility or seizure of suspected materials… and I discovered that there had been a shocking change in content…

I lived several houses down the street from school… and once in a while my dad would open up my parents’ bedroom window and my sister and I would get to do target practice into the back yard with a .22 rifle… this is before they built the subdivision behind our house where Phil Collins’ ex-wife (the first one) and their children used to live…  and way before the event of the Agricultural Land Reserve and global warming, when on rare occasion, the possibility of skating on frozen puddles presented itself…

When I was in high school I hung out with a group of really nice boys… 

I remember sitting in the basement of one boy’s house watching Top Gun, the year it came out on video… played on a first generation VCR… this friend said he was going to fly a F-14 Tomcat one day, and he did… but even though he wanted it, he was never given permission to put his hands under my shirt…

This viewing was a slightly uncomfortable experience… but not nearly as uncomfortable as the time when the buddies were all over at my house watching All the Right Moves, on our first VCR and colour television, and my dad came down to the family room to demonstrate how he could make a male elk ejaculate by mimicking a mule on his bugler…

Thanks Dad…

Did they teach you that in dad school???

Everyone always thought my dad was SO cool… he said things like ‘adhesive’ instead of glue… and he could dress a moose with his bare hands…

At 16, even though I had an exceptional sense of humour, I wanted to die…

Stories out of my life…

Did you see the beautiful dusting of snow and the stripe of light running across the North Shore mountains at sunrise this morning???

Up the hill at SFU, I learned in my class today, that the first fall of snow marks the beginning of Winter ceremonies for the Coast Salish people…

Marking the beginning of a new cycle of transformation…

The ceremonies continue all winter until first frog song…

People go to creeks to listen for calls to mark a NEW transformation cycle to begin in Spring…

Imagine what it would mean if not one frog made it through the winter…

Just before lunch I made a silent powerpoint presentation on Pitseolak Ashoona… 

One of my classmates commented to me as I was packing up…

Your use of silence forced me to pay attention…

Thank you for creating it…

Sing a Summer song...