Just read this passage in the summary of the final report of the Truth and Reconciliation Committee. It describes one horrifying consequence of a language policy in Canada’s residential schools that forbade indigenous students from using their first language. This one will stay with me for a while, I suspect. Just awful.
Back on February 29 of this year, Brian and I hosted a Leap Day Party – in theory, it was an homage to Leap Day William’s quadrennial emergence from the sea to exchange children’s tears for candy, but in practice it was a chance to have friends over after we didn’t have our usual Christmas or NYE party.
To decorate our apartment, I hung some yellow and blue streamers, left out bowls of candy, and printed some 30 Rock memes from the Internet to tape to our walls. I put one of those memes sitting in the paper table of my grandmother’s old typewriter; the paper table (that’s the technical term for the place you put the paper) usually holds greeting cards we’ve received that are too new to yet recycle without guilt.
The Leap Day party was fine; lovely and wholesome, and nothing special. We all dished out snacks using the same serving utensils; we shared arrival and departure hugs and we laughed loudly. The windows were closed, the rooms were over-warm, and our company was squished together in just two rooms.
Did we talk about COVID-19? I don’t remember. News of the so-called “Wuhan virus” had reached Ottawa, of course; it had been fodder for work conversations for weeks at that point, alongside the downing of a jet plane carrying too many members of the Canadian family, the assassination of a Persian general, and the hellish scorching of vast tracts of Australia. To my recollection, nobody remarked on COVID. There was too much to talk about; back then, the world was a crazy place.
But that whole party, the printed-out 30 Rock meme sat there, sitting on my grandmother’s typewriter – fittingly, an L.C. Smith & Corona model – and reminding us to use this extra day to do something wild and free and spontaneous. “Nothing that happens on Leap Day counts,” the quote from 30 Rock begins, and then my printed meme concludes rather prophetically: “Real life is for March!”
Real life was, indeed, for March.
I promised myself I would write more.
I haven’t written more.
Let’s correct that.
I was born in 1990. There were about 137 million other people who, like me, were born in 1990. Our debut on Earth came at the start of a new decade settled on the precipice of an old millennium. This year, we turned thirty. I can’t speak for everyone else, but for my part, I’ve been reflecting on three full decades of being shaped (beaten, hammered, tussled, jostled) by the world. So what has thirty wrought?
Most of my reflections – voluminous, contradictory, and largely unimportant – aren’t worth sharing. But there is one regret I will share, stemming from the last ten years: I didn’t write enough.
I am testing the blog. October 11, 2020.