I went to writing school this past week.
One thing writers like to say about a story is how some background element was actually a major character in the story. Film buffs say this about the Overlook Hotel in The Shining. Everyone in my book club said it about the heat in Camus' L'Etranger. In the story of my week in writing school, the extra main-character-that-isn't-really-a-character is my old neighbourhood, which is where the school was held, in the private school across the street from my public school, a place that fascinated and annoyed us dirty public school brats.
I liked
eating off plates with the private school's insignia on them and reading all the weird rules that are posted around the school.
It was weird
how much the neighbourhood has changed. It has become more economically depressed, or it appears so anyway. Maybe only my perspective has changed. My childhood home, on the other hand, looks all schmancy with a new paint job and lots of renos and a new fence. It recently sold for half a million dollars. My parents bought it for 85 grand.
There are also speed humps everywhere, and a roundabout. This makes the driving more annoying, and despite my good intentions to bike, I ended up driving three days out of five, because Django got a flat after day two and I had no time for a visit to the bike shop.
The weirdest thing was feeling that while I knew the neighbourhood, it did not know me. No one lives there anymore. Even my friends' parents have pulled up stakes and moved out to Triangle Mountain, or upward and onward to Oak Bay and Fairfield. I've recently reconnected with about three dozen people that I went to elementary or middle school with on Facebook. So the Web offers me more in terms of reconnecting with my old neighbourhood than the actual physical neighbourhood does.
Then there's the fact that Steve Morrison, a guy I went to elementary school with, died last week at the age of 31. I haven't thought about him for years, and then, the week after he dies, I end up spending most of my waking hours in the old neighbourhood, which is where I knew him.
I was supposed to go to his wake tonight, but I am feeling the need to be very still on my couch right now and so I'm giving it a miss.
I didn't go for a walk around the neighbourhood, as I had planned. I think I would have gotten all emotional, which is strange, because I don't have any pain associated with the place, and while I'm sad Steve's gone, we haven't spoken for years and were never particularly close.
But as I was driving through on Thursday I saw two people walking around like they owned the place and I thought, hey, this is my neighbourhood, I want to go for a walk here. I want to do that walking thing around my neighbourhood and pass all my friends' houses and talk to peoples' dogs and get annoyed because I'm trying to walk here people, not socialize. And when I realized that that is impossible, totally impossible, completely impossible, not even if I make a movie about it, not even if I write a story about it, only possible if I had a time machine, which I don't, yup, when I realized that, I got super emotional, and I squeaked from the shock of it.
Lucky for me, I have a new neighbourhood, which is superior to the old one in almost every way, and where I intend to stay for a long time, much longer than the old one.
But you know, there's nothing better than being twelve and getting dressed up to go down to the baseball diamond because the boy you like is playing and smelling the air and thinking summer vacation will last forever and meeting your friends and eating a creamsicle and swinging on the swings even though you are too old and are wearing too short of a skirt and it's nine o'clock but it's still light out and maybe, probably, he likes you too.
The new neighbourhood is a just a bit lacking in that department.
