When I was a
child, there were two worlds. I moved from one to the other of them and back
again with the regularity of the seasons.
Dorval
Island formed a summer world that was green and peaceful and dearly known. The
mainland of Montreal formed the other world, that outside world, and it was
cement grey and noisy and smelled of car exhaust and diesel engine fumes. It
was hard and loud and big.
These two
very different spaces were four minutes away from each other by boat, so I knew
that although they contrasted sharply with each other, they lived side by
side. And as years passed I had to spend time in that second world, that
outside world, more often.
I knew where
I wanted to be. All winter I would wait for spring and picture myself running
and playing in that cool green grass. I wanted to be in the circle of family,
the Romper Room of childhood that was contained for me in the rough oval of the
island. I didn’t like the other world. I saw, though, that I had to live in
both. I didn’t want to, but I had to go out there.
Years passed
and I found I’d been pushed out of the known world of family and away from the
island. They were hard years, fast-paced years. University studies in Ontario
took up most of my time. The years trundled on by.
Of course, I
visited, especially the island. I spent a whole week of my two week summer
vacation there. But Ontario, and summer jobs, and boyfriends in Ottawa, all
conspired to keep me away. That mainland world which I had disliked as a child
had now become my life.
I graduated
and looked for work. After exploring quite thoroughly the absurdities of being
well-educated yet unemployable, I grabbed at the first offered position, that
of a lowly office clerk in a small importing business. This was not the sort of
position that I had envisioned for myself, but this big world can do strange
things to all of us; can redefine us, even as we stare into our bathroom mirrors.
Thus did I
become an adult. I worked hard and learned quickly. I earned the minimum wage
allowed. I saved money compulsively and tried to make do with the somewhat ragged
clothes and single saucepan that I had left over from my days as a student.
I became
functional, focused on invoices and accounts payable, bus fare increases and
bank service charges. When the work day was finished my one room apartment and
the beer cooler at the corner depanneur awaited me. I drank beer and killed
cockroaches in the evenings. I drank enough beer each evening to lose my place
in the world, to travel back, running through memories of that green and
sun-splotched island space.
Then, I had
been free to watch the circling, swooping barn swallows for hours in the long
late June afternoons. I had been an explorer on the rocky windy lake-sprayed
beach. My memories were interrupted only by the dark surreptitious scuttlings
of the cockroaches. I killed them, one by one, with my running shoes.
I worked so
quickly in that dingy brown office, and was so neat and accurate in my work,
that the bellicose boss-man ordered his bookkeeper to train me. When I knew the
routines and methods used for accounting in his small business, he fired her
amidst tears and shouting and gave me all of her work to do, as well as my own
of course. He assured me that there would be a pay raise within the next six
months.
Spring
staggered into Montreal that year of 1984, and I learned just how filthy a bus
window can be. I was the bookkeeper. I was responsible. I was over-worked and
under-paid. I had become one of many in that big, noisy city world at last,
indistinguishable from all the others.
My boss, in
a fever of high-tech ‘flu, bought a computer for his somewhat outdated office.
It seemed incongruous, sitting perched there on an old, paper-strewn desk,
beside the bent grey filing cabinet and the wheezing photocopier.
I was told
to ‘learn how to use this thing,’ and to ‘get the thing going.’ Along with
everything else that I had to do, I was given a two-hundred page manual to
study and a three month deadline on the establishment of a functioning
database.
My younger
sister came back to Montreal from Vancouver at that time and got a room in a
lovely old stone house on Laval Street at the far end of the Prince Arthur
Street pedestrian mall. She was no more than five minutes walk from me since
my grey cockroach infested room was on the corner of Clarke and Prince Arthur.
Now it was
early summer and on Prince Arthur the clowns and jugglers staked out territory
beside the portrait painters and the old man with his accordian. The pedestrian
mall was thronged, as sidewalk cafes and glass-fronted restaurants enticed
lovers and tourists from all over the city. Montreal loves to eat out.
Although I
had carried the computer manual home and had no free time to speak of, I walked
slowly along Prince Arthur, savouring the noise and the colours in the early
evening on my way to Jane’s house. I could suddenly remember what it was to be
alive, not to live in memory, or to lose one’s self in mindless work. The
jugglers fascinated me. I stood in a crowd to watch them like all the other
office workers. They made their brightly coloured juggling balls dance and the
fire torches fly. They seemed so young and playful that I wanted with all my
heart to be one of them. But I was a mere spectator and anyway I had so much
to do. I had to be on my way.
At Jane’s
place, which was very small, but had nice woodwork, I met a woman named Joan.
Joan was a large somewhat ragged young woman with a beautiful way of speaking;
very soft and very sincere. She shocked me when she told me that she had lived
on the street. She had left home when she was fifteen, and somehow had made it
on the street in Vancouver, playing her guitar on Granville mall and sleeping
wherever she could.
She was
twenty-one when I met her, just arrived in Montreal and almost broke. She and
her knapsack and her guitar were living in a dingy dirty room just off of St.
Denis near Rachel. My minimum wage suddenly seemed more than adequate and I
was glad that I hadn’t complained about my weekend work.
I realized
also that Joan was not despondent in her situation. She was learning French and
collecting unemployment benefits from her last job. She had friends in Montreal;
as she left Jane’s place that day, she told us that she was going to visit
Yacko. He was going to cut her hair for her.
“Oh, so he’s
a hairdresser, then.” I said.
“No!” said
Joan, “He’s Yacko. Yacko the Clown.”
I thought
about Yacko although I said nothing. I wondered what he looked like, what he
talked about to people, what he did for fun with friends. I wondered how he had become a clown. I wanted
to meet Yacko.
Joan invited
me to Glenn’s house for cocktails and I went there right after work one hot and
hazy late June day. Glenn was a tall thin man with beautiful blue eyes. He and
his friend Jay seemed so gracious as they lounged on the tiny porch in the
heat. I couldn’t quite believe that people could be so easy and relaxed in the
city world. After a day of work in that tense and unhappy office warehouse, I
had forgotten what manners were, what conversation was.
Glenn was a
performance artist. He had a clown character and had clowned and done street
theatre in Vancouver. Jay was a lawyer, but I couldn’t quite believe that. It’s
not that I thought he was lying, he just wasn’t being like a lawyer at all. He
was indolently sipping a cocktail on the front stoop of a dilapidated walk-up
on Coloniale and Prince Arthur which is the inner-most inner city.
They
welcomed me and soon my sister appeared on the steep stairs to join us. For the
first time since I’d come crawling into the city, with a history of dead-ends
and a hundred dollars in my wallet, I felt like I was enjoying Montreal. Glenn
was well-spoken and full of insights to share and stories to recount. The heat
haze washed over us and the street sounds mixed well with our words. When Joan
arrived, Glenn announced that dinner was ready and we all went into the dark
humid apartment with a kitchen overflowing with food and pots and dishes, dirty and
clean. And the evening went on and on, so that I remembered, with the help of
the wine, what ‘well-being’ meant and how purple a June twilight could be.
Joan, Jane
and I walked up the half-block to Prince Arthur to go our separate ways, but
once there we felt the energy of the crowd. People packed the street and
thronged around us. Joan said, “Oh, God! There’s Scottie and Archer. Let’s go
say hi. I love these guys!”
Scottie had
laid claim to one of the prime spots on Prince Arthur and was holding onto it
by placing his pins, unicycle and props in a rough semi-circle in front of a
crowded open-air café. As he moved, tracing the semi-circle with his footsteps,
creating an illusion of ownership, he nodded and smiled to Archer who followed
along beside him on the inside talking non-stop to the crowd.
Scottie had
on a pair of old loose shoes, the kind that tie, baggy trousers and
suspenders, an old suit jacket and a bowler hat. Archer wore a sleeveless vest
of black, short black trousers and a red bandana headband. His skin was
beautifully dark like teak wood. He moved with such tremendous energy that he
seemed to be on fire, and he shot out words rapidly as he moved, a seasoned barker
at a country fair.
Joan greeted
the two of them and they both stopped in the center of the circle and hugged
her, grinning. Jane and I were introduced, but I didn’t say much. I’d seen
Scottie on the street. He was good; he was one of the best jugglers there, and he was
real cool; a young man working on the streets on his own terms and succeeding.
Joan chatted
on and another clown appeared, joining the group. I realized that Joan was one
of them because she had lived that street life, but I was just an office
worker, out too late on a Thursday night, and I was hovering, fascinated and
awed like a young girl in front of the high school hunks.
I left and
nobody noticed me go.
Work was
slow and I struggled with that computer in the darkness of ignorance and the
heat of July while the pressure from my boss mounted. While I sorted the mail,
recorded invoices in the payables journal, or pushed buttons on the shiny new
keyboard, I would picture Glenn lazing on his front stairs, or Scottie juggling
and cycling in the sunshine at Jeanne Mance Park. There were two worlds, and I
was in the wrong one.
Joan and
Archer, the metis juggler, came over to
my place with a guitar and a bottle of wine. I felt honoured. Joan played
Vancouver songs and Archer told stories about anarchists and feminists and the
Parade of Fools out West when all the clowns and jugglers would gather in their
free-spirited finery to celebrate April first; Fool’s Day.
He was a
beautiful young man with brilliant dark flashing eyes and a strong sense of the
lack of social justice in the world. When Archer talked, the world seemed a
huge and brightly coloured place with clear rights and wrongs and an infinity
of stages on which to act, causes to live for, selves to celebrate. Listening
to Archer and stretching my arms up to the daylight still flooding my little grey
room at eight o’clock on a Wednesday evening, it seemed that how I was living
was wrong, that I was indeed in the wrong world, a different world from the one
that he was in, or Glenn, Scottie, or Yacko whom I’d never even met. I’d
gone through the wrong door.
“Life is not
just to be got through.” I scolded myself. “Days are not just this work to be
done, this boss to be appeased, this pay cheque to be oh-so-carefully divided
up into yes and no and savings.”
Every minute
that I spent in that office now seemed wasted. I embraced Joan whole-heartedly,
kissed Archer lingeringly in the Montreal fashion, and stood on the threshold of their world
of play and colour and foolishness; clowning.
Remember the
story of the juggler who wanted to give something of himself to God? It’s an
Italian folktale. All he had were his beautiful golden juggling balls, and his
marvelous ability to make them dance. He juggled with all his heart, as he had
never juggled before, and it was enough for heaven. God accepted his gift. And
here I had been, for months, endless, dreary months, trying so hard, struggling to be an adult.
You know,
there are two worlds; the world of the adult, the worker and the world of the
child, the clown. I saw them both. I saw a world of conformity, of rigidity, of
tension, because ultimately everyone in that world is doing something they
don’t want to do. I saw another world, a world of self-expression, of
playfulness and of self-fulfillment because the people in that world do
whatever interests them. They follow their bliss.
It is this
that I remember from my childhood, from the island; that safe, yet enchanting,
fascinating world. At almost any moment, every moment, we were doing what we
wanted to do, what interested us. We were wearing the colours that we wanted to
wear, playing.
But life
moves through seasons. As a child, I saw two worlds. In the winter months, the
island house was boarded up and the family lived in the city. As we live
through the years, summer passes and winter wearies us. When I got to know
these jugglers, these artists, these clowns, I saw that they lived in shabby
houses with cramped rooms and dirty windows. Some got tired of travelling and
stayed in Montreal through the long and dreary winter, went on welfare, wore
black coats.
So I kept my
job, although it pained me, and taught myself to juggle on weekends. Jay went
back to Vancouver and Glenn and I moved to a cockroach-free two bedroom
apartment further up on Clarke. Joan got a job, dyed her hair and bought new
and fashionable clothes. My sister moved further east and was always broke.
Scottie and Archer went south.
We move
through seasons, juggling worlds. There is summer and play and light. There is
winter and work and compromise. But there is a place and a time every now and
then for all of us to play, if we can but seize the moment, and as we live our
lives in an endless dance between sweet freedom and stale compromise, in a
sense, we’re all jugglers.
