Falling Backwards: A Memoir

by Arden, Jann

  For some reason there were a few months where all I wanted to do was burn things up. I just liked striking the matches and seeing them burn. You could strike them on anything: a zipper, your two front teeth, your Levi’s jeans back pocket, the wall, the floor, your forehead. Any surface could light an Eddylite match. Except for the side of the toilet bowl. I tried that several times and it was too smooth. One morning I crouched in my parents’ half-bathroom off their master bedroom and dropped about five hundred lit wooden matches down the heating vent one at a time. I didn’t think about where they were going. I thought they just dropped into nothing. I knew China was down there somewhere because my gram had told me it was. I don’t know why I did it. It just felt good to me. The fact that no one had seen me for two hours and that the pungent smell of sulphur was crawling down the hallway was a dead giveaway that something was amiss.

  When he found me, my dad became absolutely out-of-his-mind mad and I do remember getting a really good spanking. We had an old worn-out sort of thick canvas-and-rubber strap that hung in one of the kitchen cupboards, and that’s what we’d get whacked with. My dad could be a very frightening man when he was angry. His face would change and he’d look like a completely different person. He had a temper like a bull in a ring. In this particular case, though, I don’t blame him for being angry. I could have burned our house down.

  I still love wooden matches. I always feel compelled to buy them when I am in Home Depot. What the cavemen wouldn’t have done for a box of wooden matches. They probably would have torched the planet and I wouldn’t be here writing this.

  Me + fire = the end of the world = arse welts

  You’d think I would have learned from the vent incident and the subsequent spanking that I shouldn’t be playing with fire, but oh no, not me. My arson phase was just getting under way. I proceeded to burn down a very large hedge at a house around the corner from where we lived, and almost lit their garage on fire. I remember the woman who lived there came screaming out of her back door wrestling with the garden hose and dousing the rather large flames that were now burning with great gusto. It was really scary.

  All I could think of was how mad my dad was going to be and that I had better put a phone book between my dad and my bum. I don’t think I could sit down for a week after that spanking. My parents didn’t know quite what to do with me. I was officially an arsonist. I have to give it to my mom, though, because she always managed to disarm terrible situations for me. She told me that the big fat woman who came charging out of her back door wielding a water hose was horrible and mean and a lousy babysitter, and that at least it was her garage that I almost burned down and not some nice person’s. My mom made me feel vindicated somehow, though she didn’t tell me that in front of my dad …

  I am sure I would not be alive to write these words had I burned that large woman’s garage down. My father would surely have killed me or at least pulled the arms from my body so I couldn’t strike matches anymore. He’d send them to the Masai people in Africa to feed to their goats. I really don’t blame him for being mad. Burning down my own house was one thing, but burning down the large lady’s house was another thing entirely.

  The whole crazy relationship with the matches didn’t last long, thankfully. I am glad I didn’t become Drew Barrymore in Firestarter, but I came pretty close. I have no idea what got into me those weird few weeks. I was just obsessed with watching the sulphur end burst into a little ball of fire. It was instant gratification at its best. I am now one of those people who plays with candle wax in restaurants, although I am trying to curb my enthusiasm for that. Thank God they hadn’t invented disposable Bic lighters in the sixties or the whole city of Calgary would have been long gone by 1970. Perhaps even the entire country of Canada. My dad had a Zippo lighter, but he was smart enough to keep it in a safety deposit box buried somewhere in the backyard.

  My friend Gary was such a good boy that he didn’t come anywhere near me during my Firestarter phase. I didn’t want to incriminate him anyway. I don’t think he even knew that I had been buying matches and burning things down. He was still an angel in my parents’ eyes, and I was encouraged at every turn to colour with him. Davey, the boy who made me play in garbage cans, thereby contracting the worms that required the Scotch tape bum worm removal, was my accomplice during the Eddylite Easy Strike period of my childhood. In fact, Davey was the one who thought that the burning of the hedge would be very controllable and that we would not be caught, never, ever! Yeah, sure.

  One thing I learned very early on is that boys can be dumb liars, so don’t believe a thing they tell you. Davey was quite the character. We should have had our own reality show, if only we had known what those were back then. Our show would have been called Jann and Davey Plus Crazy. I might have to contact him to see if he has any interest in that concept. We could recreate the worm scene in the bathroom with my mother. We could burn things up. The Scotch tape people could sponsor us.

  Davey is my age, so I am sure he’s still somewhere out there in the world. Maybe he became a fire warden or a zookeeper. I highly doubt it, though. As you know, according to my mother he had a crazy mother, so that was half of his problem. I don’t know what the other half was. Well, Davey was the other half of the problem, and I think my influence was mixed up in there somewhere too.

  When I feared losing touch with my friends after we moved, mom told me that Gary could come to visit us. She didn’t mention Davey. I think where we were going had way too many trees to risk allowing Davey and me to spend any kind of quality time together there. As it turned out, Gary ended up coming out to our new house only once or twice. I learned early on that people come and go in your life—and most often they go.

  I don’t know how my parents managed to buy land in the country in the first place, because they didn’t have any money to speak of. My mom said it took them a whole year to pay off their Bay card after they maxed it out buying Christmas presents for us. This went on every year for about fifteen years. They never seemed to be able to get ahead. “We would just get the credit card paid off and it would be Christmas again,” she’d say.

  My mom has always been very matter of fact. I have never had the sense that she felt sorry for herself about anything. Even though her young life was very hard and often lonesome, she never complained about the hand the universe had dealt her. My mom’s dad was a miserable drunk who verbally and physically went after his wife whenever he came home plastered after a bender. Mom would always say that her dad drank all their money away and left them with nothing. They often had to scrape together meals and they seldom, if ever, bought new clothes or treats of any kind. Mom’s dad worked in logging camps way up north, and he dragged his family with him, literally to the middle of nowhere. In fact, they were even farther away from civilization than that!

  There weren’t many other kids for my mom to play with in the camps. She told me that one of her favourite games when she was little was “funeral.” She’d wrap a stick up with some old cloth and deliver sermons. That always makes me feel so sad for her. I can picture her there, mumbling humble words over a little grave for a dead stick doll. My mom was witness to a very abusive relationship between her mother and father, but she simply refuses to dwell in the past. She throws her shoulders back and always faces forward.

  I am the same way. Life is life. You just get on with it. You do what you have to do to make it work. My dad always said, “The harder you work, the luckier you get,” and I believe that with all my heart. My parents are the salt (and the pepper) of the earth.

  I didn’t have a clue about how much money we didn’t have. They sold the house on Louise Road for $24,900 in 1971, which was a whopping $14,900 profit. I spend more than that on feminine protection every month. (Would someone please take my uterus from me and give me a new liver? My uterus is costing me a small fortune that could be going into buying wine.) I can’t even get my head around the fact that they bought an entire house for ten thousand dollars in the si
xties. It doesn’t seem possible.

  My parents purchased five acres of land just a few miles west of Calgary with the few thousand dollars they’d made on the sale of the house. Then they had to figure out how to pay for the new house they were going to be building. Interest rates were beyond out of control, and getting a mortgage from a bank was literally signing your life away. You’d be looking at a document that would basically say that you’d have your house paid off in sixty years. My parents remind themselves of just how lucky they were whenever possible.

  “If we’d waited even a few more years, we would never have been able to afford to move out here,” my mother often said, as she looked out her kitchen window.

  I know it was a huge leap of faith for them, moving us all out to Springbank. I know they wanted us to have fresh air and a chance to go to a smaller school. (That is an understatement—there were only forty-two kids in my high school graduating class.) I think they just wanted to invest in something that would make their lives easier forty years down the road. They knew the house and the land would someday be their nest egg, and it has turned out to be just that.

  My mom and dad were very excited to be building a brand new house and at the same time scared to death. I hadn’t discovered that my parents were real people yet, so I didn’t know they had a worry in the world. I thought that my parents were there to look after me: drive me around, feed me, give me pocket money, listen to my problems and solve them. I thought they were there to save me from a hostile world and mean people and diseases of every imaginable kind. I thought they were there to make sure I never got sick or died, period. I didn’t know they were actual people with feelings and troubles of their own. Someone should have clued me in. Parents are people. Who knew?

  I am sure they lay in bed at night and wondered how in heaven’s name they were going to build a house with what little they had. In many ways it was like Little House on the Prairie. They bought a giant, grassy field with nothing on it but trees and brush and dirt and they had to make something out of it. We had a lot of work ahead of us.

  When we moved, our house wasn’t yet built and we had sold our other one. My dad, God love him, bought a small white holiday trailer for a pittance and parked it a few hundred feet away from the building site. He hooked it up to water and power and we were off on our very lengthy camping adventure. (I think we ended up living in the trailer for about a year, which was about ten months longer than my mother would have liked.) And it was camping, there’s no doubt about that. It seemed like a lot of fun for the first six months, and then it kind of wore off as the Canadian winter sank its teeth into us. You can freeze your nose off in about three minutes if you’re not careful. I know a lot of people without a nose—they just have the nostril holes. (Okay, no I don’t.)

  We hadn’t lived in the trailer long before the weather turned terribly cold. The water line running into the trailer froze almost immediately. My dad tried everything to keep it from blocking up, but we were more or less at the mercy of Mother Nature. My dad said it was a goddamn pain in the ass not having water. We all agreed. It was next to impossible to shower or bathe or wash dishes without it. We drove to my gram’s place a lot to take baths and do laundry, but other than that, we were just out there fighting the elements.

  My gram was my mom’s mom. She lived in Calgary with her second husband, Charlie. It was about a thirty-five- or forty-minute drive for us to get to their house. She was always glad to see us tumble in through her back door with all our plastic bags full of dirty laundry. She and my mom always had a good visit. The coffee pot would go on and some kind of cake would appear on the kitchen table. My mom and my gram could talk the leg off the lamb of God if they had half the chance. They were extremely close (and I could write an entire book about the two of them and the struggles they faced and the hardships they overcame). My gram would prove to be our lifeline on many occasions.

  My mom and dad slept in the only bedroom in the back of the trailer. Duray and I were in bunk beds off to one side, and my little brother, Patrick, was small enough to sleep on the fold-out kitchen table, which conveniently converted into a little bed. I think our breathing in and out kept us warm at night. My mother is cold at the best of times, never mind in a paper-thin trailer in the middle of winter. It must have been hellish for her. I, on the other hand, loved every minute of being in our home on wheels. I didn’t mind seeing my breath hang in the air like a cloud. I thought it was completely fun. I felt like Jane West on a real country adventure. I started to think that perhaps I had found my true calling as an outdoor adventure guide. I would never have to brush my hair again—or my teeth, for that matter. The country life was definitely for me.

  At a very early point in our adventure, my parents thought that it would be nice to get us a kitten. Actually, the kitten was part of the bribe we accepted when they moved us out of the city. They promised us a variety of pets, although my father denies that to this day. We were in the country now, after all, and country people had animals! We had room in the trailer for something furry and small, and a kitten would be perfect. We found free kittens advertised in the local newspaper and drove to pick our furry little buddy up. My mom named the tiny grey kitty Smokey or Spanky or Chunky; well, she called it something, I just can’t remember what. And there’s a reason for that.

  We didn’t have Smokey very long, I am sorry to say. We had her just long enough to fall in love with her before disaster struck. Mom had let the kitten out onto the steps of the trailer for a little sun and some fresh air and a pee when out of the woods came the neighbour’s giant, white husky. My mother was standing right there beside the kitten on the metal steps, when the dog grabbed Smokey, or whatever her name was, by her tiny, fuzzy neck, and ran over the hill with her screeching wildly. We just stood there, watching it happen like a slow-motion car accident. It was so awful. The neighbours were upset, to say the least, when their husky dropped the dead, mangled kitten off at their front door like a trophy. We all sobbed for days.

  I decided then and there that I hated that white husky. I threw something at it whenever I had the chance. I yelled and swore at it. That dog soon figured out never to come anywhere near me. The whole thing makes me sad to this day. My mother can hardly even talk about it—though we still somehow always manage to bring it up on the weirdest of occasions, like Christmas or Thanksgiving. You know, the happy holidays. She’ll say, “Remember the Sodmonts’ big white dog grabbing our little kitten off the steps of that trailer? Wasn’t that terrible?” And I always say, “Yes, it was terrible.” It’s one of those horrible things that sticks to the inside of your eyeballs.

  After the kitten was tragically taken from us, I realized that we were not in the city anymore. This was a whole new level of horrible that was much more horrible than the death of my pocket turtle.

  The house slowly started growing up out of the earth. Every time my folks got a little extra money, another phase of the construction would begin. We did have builders shuffling around doing things, but it was very apparent that my dad was doing a lot of the work himself. My mother was becoming a builder too. They were always busy constructing something. Dad was always swinging a hammer or sawing a floorboard or installing a cupboard hinge or putting in windows or nailing shingles on the roof. And this was after he’d spent an entire day at his real job. He left the trailer early and came home late. Whatever spare or not spare moments he had were spent working on the house.

  My dad’s entire life had somehow revolved around construction and concrete. He knew every possible thing there was to know about concrete. He knew about quarter-inch and half-inch and two-inch gravel. He knew about crushed gravel and rebar and exposed aggregate and finishing and framing and forming and everything else in between. He knew how long the concrete needed to set and what temperature it needed to be. He knew how much it would cost to pour an eight-foot by ten-foot by four-inch slab and how much concrete you’d need to make a garage pad or a sidewalk or a retaining wall just ri
ght. He knew how much concrete—to the very ounce—it would take to make it all work out perfectly. He was the go- to guy for anything made out of limestone, water, sand and gravel.

  My dad had his own language when it came to concrete. I’d hear him on the phone talking to somebody about something to do with a job, and it made no sense to me at all. He’d have a cigarette hanging out of his mouth, and I always marvelled at how he could talk and smoke at the same time. He’d hold the phone between his shoulder and his neck, and he’d puff away without missing a beat. The smoke would often billow out of his nose. I thought it looked wonderful. I wondered how in the world he managed to do that. I wanted to blow smoke out of my nose too. It seemed to me like my dad could do anything, and that’s because he could. He was such a talented man in so many ways.

  He pretty much knew all there was to know about plumbing and carpentry and fixing cars and building bird feeders and mending clocks and rebuilding antique furniture of any description. (I have so many of his pieces in my house today and they are all gorgeous.) He knew how to build sheds and change brake pads and plant potatoes and fly kites and make tree forts. He knew how to pull heads out of milk chutes and how to build giant barbecues. My dad’s hands were scarred from thumb to pinky with hundreds of punctures and gouges and blisters. He’d lost more fingernails than anybody I’d ever known. He always had a black nail, always. I remember him sitting down for supper, tired and covered in sweat, with at least one black fingernail. He’d have a giant new gouge or an old cut that hadn’t healed yet. I would watch him sitting there at the table thinking about whatever it was he was thinking. He’d look at his hands, folding and refolding them. He’d run them through his strawberry hair and look pensive. I wondered what he was thinking about. It must have been something heavy, because around the time I was twelve or thirteen he started drinking a little bit more just to make all the heaviness go away. He always said that he’d drink anything back then, but what I remember him drinking most often was dark rum. The smell of it to this day takes me back through a twisting and turning time-tunnel. My dad sitting there at the table with a dark rum and Coke in his fist and a lit cigarette hanging out of his head. It’s a good memory—it could be bad, but it’s not. He worked hard all the time, but he was starting to drink hard all the time too.