I used to go to this sort of fancy gym where the insides of the lockers were nice and clean and I could watch my own individual television while I worked out on one of the two dozen cross trainers and they set out stuff like cotton balls and Q-tips and tampons that you could just have for the taking. Like, ZOMG, as many free Q-tips and makeup sponges as I wanted! (As Rowan might say, “It’s like, they sell it to you for free!”)

But I stopped going to that gym, in favour of a different gym that was closer to our house. The new gym has a pool, which makes it great for the kids. Also, the new gym is cheaper. I figured I could sacrifice the individualized televisions and the free feminine hygiene products and all for the sake of the household bottom line, even if the lockers at the new gym are gritty on the bottom and I often have to do this complicated shuffling dance with all the other women getting changed at the same time as me.

I thought that it might take a bit of time to get used to the new gym, what with having to bring my own cotton balls and all, but it’s been a pretty smooth transition. In fact, I like the new place better. I like the bootcamp classes and the instructors. I like watching the toddlers and their parents. I like that I can walk there in ten minutes. I like eavesdropping on the teenage swim-team girls, and watching them grow up over the course of the year. (Once, I witnessed one of them change out of her bathing suit and into her street clothes inside her locker with the door closed, not even aware she was there until she popped out like some kind of modest groundhog, and I remembered that angsty time when I cared so much what people thought about my body. Just wait till you have a baby or two, honey, I thought, to cure you of caring whether people see you naked in the gym changeroom.)

But mostly, I like the old ladies.

That’s what they are, the dozens of women in their late 60s and 70s and for all I know 80s who are constantly at the gym, sometimes twice a day, going from boot camp to aqua fit to the weights room to the cross trainers and beyond, talking the whole time. The gym is their hub, their social circle, their second home. And they chat away — with each other, with me — about the weather and their children and grandchildren, who’s getting married and who’s coming home for the holidays. They talk about shopping and what they eat and their work and their families and their bodies: what aches, their haircuts (“Why do they always cut your hair so short once you’re old?” one of the old ladies bemoaned the other day. She turned to me: “You’ll understand when you’re old,” she said, and I felt instantly as though I were 20.), how their clothes fit. A few days ago, all the showers were lukewarm and it was like there was some Greek chorus on the subject, wave after wave of women asking and answering each other “Is your shower hot?” “No, no, is yours?” “Oh no, are they cold?” The showers are cold, the showers are cold — I don’t know why exactly, but the urgency of it all made me smile.

I love the old ladies. I love how they take up so much space, how unapologetic they are about their bodies, their scars, the weight of age and experience stripped naked. I listen and occasionally laugh and kibitz. I watch as an old lady spreads her towel carefully across the bench, how she needs to sit down to put her sweatpants on one leg at a time, how she skips a bra because it’s just too exhausting to put on. I love how they always smile, or at least nod and say hello. I love how familiar they are: yesterday, one of them walked by me as I was doing up the hooks and eyes on my ratty old sports bra and actually reached over and twisted off a dangling string. FROM MY BRA. It was awesome.

“There!” she said. “You’re going to get a nice long letter now! At least that’s what they say.” She paused. “Maybe an email in this day and age.”

And then she went on her merry way, leaving me with the sense-memory — just for a moment — of what it must be like to still have a mother.

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Rachel: What was the name of that one-woman show we saw at the Tarragon?
Susan: With what’s-her-name?
Rachel: Yeah. In the smaller theatre.
Susan: No, it was in the main space.
Rachel: No, definitely in the smaller space.
Susan: No, I remember. The childhood memories? The fairies?
Rachel: Yeah.
Susan: Right, at the cottage, with the fairies and the neighbour and they tied her to a tree to keep her from rolling into the lake?
Rachel: Yeah. That’s it. And the divorce.
Susan: I don’t remember the divorce. But remember she comes in and starts off by talking about whether there’s an intermission.
Rachel: Yes.
Susan: And the neighbour sends her notes from the fairies, and she uses her sister’s record player without permission…
Rachel: Vaguely.
Susan: It was that woman, Susan something – she was the ex of that guy who founded that fancy new theatre company…
Rachel: What fancy new theater company?
Susan: Well, not that new anymore. Maybe 10 years ago now.
Rachel: I have no idea what you’re talking about.
Susan: You know: the Distillery District, a focus on plays for actors, all sexy like…
Rachel: Soulpepper?
Susan: Yes!
Rachel: Oh, that guy. Schultz something.
Susan: Robert Schultz.
Rachel: no, no – not Robert. Al— …
Susan: Alfred Schultz!
Rachel: No, no, not Alfred…
Susan: Albert Schultz! Of course!
Rachel: And she’s his ex?
Susan: Well, she wasn’t then. They founded it together. And then they split up — not surprising, really, in the theatre world. You know, surrounded by nubile young actors and intrigue.
Rachel: Is that what happened?
Susan: Oh, I have no idea. That’s just conjecture.
Rachel: I see.
Susan: [pulls out phone, begins to type] A-L-B-E-R-T S-C-H … See, Albert Schultz and Susan Coyne! That’s right. And that’s the play, Kingfisher Days.
Rachel: No, no… I’m talking about a different play. With a little girl and the parents are getting divorced. I… I… something.
Susan: I, Claudius! I mean, I, Claudia!
Rachel: Yes!
Susan: Totally different one-woman show at the Tarragon! That was awesome!
Rachel: It was.
Susan: With the masks!
Rachel: Yes.
Susan: That was totally in the smaller space. I saw that twice. It was fantastic.
Rachel: It was.
Susan: She wasn’t married to Albert Schultz.
Rachel: Apparently.
Susan: But she went to my yoga studio.
Rachel: This is what happens when two middle-aged women try to remember something.
Susan: A hundred adjectives and no nouns.
Rachel: Exactly.
Susan: Are you calling me middle-aged?

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Yesterday, I performed one of the boringest tasks known to the millennial generation: I switched e-mail accounts. The process involved tracking down and updating every last one of the jillion or so sites (and I’m sure I’ve forgotten many) and businesses and organizations that somehow rely on contacting me via e-mail, as well as messaging every single contact in my address book to let them know about the change.

Tedious as it is, it’s a useful process, every so often, to go through your contacts and see who’s actually still there, which of those whimsical Hotmail and Gmail addresses still works, which contacts haven’t yet expired, which people I want to hear from and those I imagine I’ll never talk to again. A couple of dozen dead e-mail addresses bounced back to me and I — diligent girl that I am — deleted them from my contact files, along with names I no longer recognized.

And then I did something simultaneously tiny and enormous.

I deleted my mother.

For close to nine years, I’ve kept her in my Outlook contacts, importing her information from system to system along with everyone else’s: the street address of the house she died in; the long-cancelled phone number; the e-mail address she never used but that my father set up for her because he was tired of her using his account; information about her spouse, now remarried. I’d go to look up another Goldberg and there she would be, her name popping up always a slight jab to my gut, a tiny twisting in my soul. Like when, several months after she died, I had a roll of film developed (was it really such a short time ago that we developed film?) and when I opened the envelope of photographs, there she was like a ghost staring back at me and I couldn’t breathe.

I’m mixed about this. On the one hand, who needs the reminder of heartbreak? Like the semi-conciliatory phone message from my high school boyfriend that I never erased from my answering machine (remember answering machines?), just flipping the cassette to the other side: why? On the other hand, it’s a big step, or at least it’s a step that feels significant: to hit “delete” on the name of the person you miss most in the world, whose name popping up today in my inbox or on my caller ID would be the most welcome of everyday miracles.

I made the call, in the end, on the basis of futility: keeping her in my contact list will never provide me with closure, let alone contact. Keeping her there isn’t so much a form of respect as it is desperation or denial. Much better to wear her rings so that part of her is with me constantly. Much better to pull out a picture and show her to my kids, write another story and say her name out loud: Ruth Laine Goldberg, I have a new e-mail address. You’ll never use it, but I know that we both would have wished that otherwise.

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Witness Isaac’s latest masterpiece.

It’s so hard, isn’t it, when what you see in your head isn’t what appears on the paper?

I remember so distinctly that feeling from childhood, that bottomless well of frustration that yawns open when the vision in your head doesn’t match what your five-year-old fingers can sketch out; when you can’t make your own drawing look like the one on the crayon package; when all you want in the world is blonde pigtails in ringlets like Cindy Brady’s but your mother has insisted on cutting your auburn hair short; when you bake cake after layer cake and whip up countless batches of icing in the food processor, but they are too sweet and never look like the ones on the Duncan Hines boxes look, all symmetrical and no crumbs. When you would make the perfect Laura Ingalls calico pioneer costume if only you or your mother knew how to sew and why don’t you? When the teenage you wants the same skin as the girl in the Noxzema ad, the hair and the bodies and the wardrobes and the lives of all those cheerleader girls in all those Seventeen magazines stacked meticulously on your shelf.

When the writer you searches for the precise metaphor, tries over and over to find an elegant way to get her character out of the car and into the house. When the parent you envisions a perfect evening together as a family, with Clue and hot chocolate.

And you keep trying, until the ink in the markers runs dry. And sometimes you learn to see differently and sometimes you capture exactly what it was you meant all along.

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Isaac, magpie that he is, came downstairs with this the other day:

“What’s in here?” he asked, making a Pandora-like move to undo the heart-shaped plastic latch on my youthful memory box, right before I swooped in and relieved him of it.

Because some things — like taking a little tour of what you found important between the ages of 11 and 15 — you just have to do by yourself.

On the Internet.

Without further ado:

An announcement of my Grade 7 musical production of Free to Be You and Me. (I’m in the far right of the right-hand photo, one down from the top, if that makes any sense.) As I wrote in a different blog post, “It was 1983. I was in a class of ten girls, with my first teacher who went by ‘Ms.’ and didn’t shave her armpits. You could say it was my feminist awakening.”

Stickers!

The thing is, about stickers, is that when I was eight and nine and ten (and, fine, I admit it, 18 and 19 and 20) is that they weren’t just everywhere, all the time, like they are today. When I was a kid, stickers actually were a treat, not something that people just handed out willy-nilly every time you went to the doctor’s office or a birthday party or woke up in the morning or got your hair cut. You stood, at the sticker store, with your entire eighty-five cents’ worth of allowance, in front of the racks that held the spools of hope, and you added up all the different possible permutations of the offerings on the five- and 10- and 25-cent racks, and you carefully cut away what you wanted and brought it to the cash register. Stickers were an exercise in math literacy, people, not just something that toddlers paste to airplane windows.

Stickers were currency: you traded them, yes, ad nauseam, but they were also a form of cultural literacy. I remember when smelly stickers appeared on the scene: I was in third grade, and my teacher, Mrs. Iron (Mrs. Gilda Iron, whom I would run into 25 years later the Tarragon Theatre in Toronto, and who would say to me, “Weren’t you going to be a writer?” Yes, Mrs. Iron, I was. And I am, and how cool it was that I knew and you knew even then?), put chocolate smelly stickers on our perfect spelling tests, and it was mayhem. Mayhem. And we waited weeks before the powers that be in the sticker world came out with strawberry, and then — hold me — root beer. ROOT BEER! Cinnamon!

Stickers were more fun then. They really were. Somewhere, somewhere, there must exist my fourth-grade sticker album, so carefully curated, stickers trimmed carefully of their excess backing, arranged artfully by category and theme. I took that album to every sleepover, along with the gum wrapper chain, of course, looked forward to forays to the United States of America, where the stickers, like the chocolate bars, and the pop cans and the clothes, were way better.

But now it’s all the same.

The birth documentation of my Cabbage Patch Kid, Vanessa Carmel.

Ah, Vanessa. You were a good kid. I bought you at Consumers Distributing (remember them?) and you came in a standard-issue corrugated cardboard box, but I loved you anyway. I’m sorry that I briefly thought about changing your name to Renée Alexandera, complete with the second E in both names , but then I realized that that would be to somehow change your very essence. You know, you had your quirks:

“I’m a little bit clumsy sometimes, and I can hardly wait until you and I can share each others’ little secrets!”

(In Canada, the Cabbage Patch Kids were bilingual. And they had free health care.)

Little kits filled with tiny stationery. So that you could send “friendly messages” to your friends. Except that I could never really bear to deplete the tiny plastic folders of their tiny little envelopes and so I kept them mostly intact.

I bought these at a store called Something Nice at the Richmond Centre shopping mall, which I passed through after school several days a week on my way to swimming practice. Something Nice was chockablock full of Hello Kitty and Little Twin Stars and My Melody and Moly & Moko all sorts of related Sanrio paraphernalia. I would have lived there if I could have, among all pencils and scented erasers and notepads and pillows and shower caps and all the other truly ridiculous things they thought up that I craved, craved like some orderly, pink, straight-haired life. When I wasn’t buying stickers, I saved up for overpriced Hello Kitty nesting dolls, which I planned to keep intact and later sell on eBay once the Internet was invented.

A real note from a real boy,  on a real-life Gestetner form, no less:

Sent to me via balloon-o-gram in grade 10 homeroom on Valentine’s Day. I was overwhelmingly embarrassed and a little bit flattered.

“How’s it going, give me a call at [number blocked out just in case his parents still live there, or, worse, he still does] maybe we’ll get together sometime.

Love,

J— C—”

I forgave the comma splice. I called. We chatted. It never went anywhere. But that’s okay — it was a nice gesture that filled me up a little bit in the way that I needed to be filled up in Grade 10.

Silly notes from my fifth-grade best friend. Do you see — do you see — the one to the far left, sealed with the strawberry scratch-and-sniff sticker? I won’t tell you what the notes say because they are silly in ways that only fifth-graders can be silly.

A Hello Kitty sticker, because obviously.

This guy.

I had half a dozen or so these guys, the little pom-poms with googly eyes on sticky vinyl feet. They all had individual names, like Fuzzy and Jezebel, but collectively I referred to them as “Creatures.” I made little houses for them out of the bottoms of stationery boxes, made them little beds with little bedspreads and pillows. I made them dolls and jigsaw puzzles. I wrote school report cards for them, and I made little tiny boxes of stationery for them, with little tiny envelopes (you are picking up on a theme here, aren’t you?). And I wrote them little teeny tiny books.

Like these.

Let’s read one together, shall we? Maybe we can read How Things Feel. it’s awesome; you’ll see:

How does leather feel? ROUGH.

How does foil feel? SMOOTH.

How does wool feel? SOFT.

How does cloth feel? BUMPY.

How does metal feel? HARD.

How does tissue feel? NICE. (I’m sensing a slight desperation at this juncture.

This is what Mrs. Iron saw, all those years ago. THIS.

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I canned peaches with a friend last night. I’ve never canned anything before, aside from that brief foray into pickled beets a couple of weeks ago (and, frankly, I’m not entirely sure I got that one right, although I don’t have the heart yet to go check on my jars sitting there so hopeful in the cupboard). I’ve wanted to learn how to can for years and years, to line up the jars of summer and sweat in the cupboard. But the project has seemed so daunting for so long from the outside: all that sterilizing and boiling and popping out of air bubbles and processing and waiting and hoping for the seal and the threat all round of death.

So many things to get wrong, such huge repercussions.

But then Stephanie texted me like a gift to say she’d ordered peaches and did I want her to order me a box, too, and then I could come over and she could show me how. And I wrote back, YES! of course, and she mentioned that they would arrive in the next couple of weeks, these British Columbia Freestone peaches, and that once they arrived we would have to can them the very moment they were ripe. What followed was a comedy of errors in terms of scheduling: the traditional and the modern colliding as we tried desperately in the midst of Jewish holidays and soccer tryouts and wine club dinners and Symphony tickets and work schedules to find an evening that would work. Last night, we finally opened a bottle of wine and two boxes of peaches as tender as a baby’s bruise, and got to work.

“They won’t be pretty,” she said. “But they’ll taste good.”

So much is going on right now, all those beginnings and endings of chapters and pieces that I am sorting through in my life. It’s the kind of time that makes me crave a big project that can be accomplished over the course of an evening and a bottle of wine when two people stand and score and scald and cut fruit and place it gently, cut side down, in hot, clean jars. Fill with syrup, knock out the air bubbles, screw on lids fingertip-tight and process, process, process in boiling water for 25 minutes. At each step me saying, “Just so long as nobody dies, I’m okay.” And her saying, “Nobody’s gonna die.”
She should know; she’s a doctor. For what that’s worth.

In between those steps, I made peach pies (also for the first time), rolling out dough and mixing cut fruit with lemon juice and flour, cinnamon and salt, stirring it together with my hands. I held them up, dripping with fruit and sugar, and asked Stephanie if she would forgive me if I licked my fingers — too much sweetness to rinse away. She, meanwhile, was boiling down the tiny bits of peach left over to make juice for her kids, and why not?

We chatted, mostly about the process at hand and how we grew up: what we’ve learned on our own, what our mothers taught us (for the record, while my mom loved to feed people, canning would never have interested her. She did, however, make several dozen apple crisps each fall, when the apples were at their peak, and froze them — a tradition I have continued and that my children adore.).  I asked her what it actually meant to be on call all weekend: does that mean you sit at home and wait for your beeper to go off? Are you at the hospital all day? What’s involved? What do you do? The things I don’t know about a doctor’s life. She asked how the writing was going, mused about the difference between being an avid reader and an absolutely reluctant writer. Did I like rereading what I had already written, she wanted to know. When enough time has passed, I said.

And when what I wrote was good in the first place.

And then we were done, the project completed well before midnight, beginning to end, nothing killed but the bottle.

So far.

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I was thinking this morning about this time when I was nine or ten and I took a sheet of puffy stickers with googly eyes — remember those? — and I decided, on a whim, to stick all the stickers, the entire sheet’s worth, in random places in my parents’ bathroom: the underside of the toilet seat, next to the shower head, inside the medicine cabinet, the plant stand. Secret places, not readily visible. About a dozen stickers. I stuck them all on, and I didn’t say anything about them, and they didn’t say anything about them. And then, what I remember now as a couple of months later, I was in their bathroom and I remembered the stickers, and I said to my mom, “Hey, did you ever—” and she laughed quietly and said, “Daddy and I had so much fun finding those.”

Sometimes I think that’s my favourite childhood memory, everything good wrapped up in a single moment: the Day-Glo colors and 3-D textures, the secret whimsy, the intimacy and silliness of it all and the way they kept my secret. The way they never got mad at me for messing up their bathroom. The way they never removed those stickers; I had that plant stand for years, all through my university-apartment days, and every so often I would catch a glimpse of that ice cream cone with a cherry on top still stuck on it and it always made me smile.

I wonder what my kids’ memories will be. I wonder if they already have them.

(What’s your favourite, tiny, childhood memory? Why?)

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So, my friend Judy – godparent to my children, one of approximately three people who have seen my entire nuclear family at its individual and collective highest highs and lowest lows over Sunday brunches and other occasions the past eight or so years – sent me a wee message a few nights ago on Facebook:

my stress dream last night: you had a 3rd baby (charlie) but you were bummed that he was interfering with the lovely dynamic that you had as a 4-some, so you mostly left him at home. (like, you would come for brunch and not bring him.) i spent the dream fussing about what to do about charlie and the million possibilities of what i could be/should be doing. you were so nonplussed about the whole thing. Oi. woke up exhausted and so wanted to write and say thanks for not having a third baby. xox. i told some people at work about the dream, and so now the code for any decisions i need to make about students is “what are you going to do about charlie?” ha ha

Now, we’ve been through this: it’s not like anyone around here was considering having a third baby. We are a house of big kids now, the rhythms and needs of babies and toddlers vague, distant memories. Pregnant women, women with babies, look so young to me now, so unbroken, so sweet with their strollers and their round-faced children with those tummies who don’t know how to open doors. We are a house wherein, most of the time, most people sleep through the night in their own beds and wipe their own bums. Etc. Simply put, we are a household that is — more to the point, we are two 40-plus parents that are —no longer equipped to handle the crazy that would be another baby, a third child.

And yet, there’s something slightly disconcerting when other people are having stress dreams about me having another baby. I mean, I realize that dreams are dreams and open to interpretation, but still. It makes you wonder about the kind of angst I must have projected into the world as the mother of infants.

Because, as I recall, there was some angst. Or, as Judy put it in our ongoing chat, “Can you imagine if you had another baby????? Oi. the sleepless nights the feeding the helplessness. i get panicky just thinking about it for you. or maybe anyone.”

So, the short version is: we are going to do nothing about Charlie. And yet still, there it was, there it is: a tiny part of my brain that immediately thought, “Oooh, sweet baby Charlie! Mama would never forget to take woodums you to brunch!”

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My cousin Jill likes to tell me and anyone else who will listen about how I used to torture her when we were little and spent summers together at our cottage in Winnipeg Beach.

Apparently — and I remember none of this — I used to devise quizzes for her, and then tie her up or tickle her or imprison her or fart on her head or something if she got the answers wrong. She acts out these stories in great detail for my benefit, for my kids’, her kids’, I’m not sure: me at seven demanding, “Name the four seasons!”

Her, age four, forgetting spring.

“What are we sitting on?” I kept asking, bouncing on the bed, making the springs squeak. “What’s inside the bed? What are we sitting on?”

She didn’t know, didn’t know, desperately didn’t know and I was thrillingly relentless, tickle-attacking her for her faults.

If don’t remember the particular incident, I do remember what it was like to be simultaneously annoyed and flattered by her constant attention, the way she followed me around like a puppy and how I could get her to do anything. I remember a summer home thick with children, the easy and immediate (and sometimes grating) intimacy between all of us and our collective parents.

(But torture? If you want torture, how about the time my brother dipped Jill’s thumb in hot sauce in a sadistic attempt to get her to stop sucking it? Or the time I dropped my cousin Jason’s goldfish into a sink of hot water — totally by accident, I swear?)

Jill’s constant retelling of the story used to confuse me: was she mad? Had the incident traumatized her unduly? Had I somehow betrayed her? Did I need to make amends?

“It’s weird,” I once said to Rob, after introducing him to her and sitting through another iteration.

“I think she does it to show she has a history with you,” says Rob.

And I was momentarily stunned. I never thought of that.

But I think of it now, think of it after returning from a weekend away and watching my boys with their own cousins, who live now on three different continents and whom we see sporadically. But there’s still that easy intimacy, the way they gather and play and curl up together and are parented collectively and spontaneously by whomever happens to be around. I love how quick and strong the bond is, how it holds between months and miles. One day, if we’re all lucky, I’ll hear them tell their own stories about each other, demonstrating their shared and thrilling and relentless history.

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And the Internet says that it bets that I have migraines. And also to suck it up and go to all the appointments, time and expense be damned! Which, for the record, I was generally planning on doing anyway. Now, however, I am specifically planning on doing that anyway, if only to circumvent your general wrath.

Seriously, you folks are sweet, and I am quite touched by everyone’s concern. And a little sheepish to have caused you so much of that concern; apparently, not everyone is as quite as cavalier about phantom smells and temporary blindness as me. Who knew? It’s like having a little cloud of virtual mothers looking out for me. Which reminds me: one day I’ll have to tell you the story about how my mother, who was on some drug one of the side effects of which was blood clots, watched her left leg swell up and did nothing about it for approximately three days until she decided that maybe she would stop by the SPORTS MEDICINE CLINIC where her friend Ruth worked to say hi and casually mention her leg, and then was admitted into Scarborough Grace Hospital for a week on stroke watch and drugs to break up the clot in her leg. (Oh, hey – I did just tell you that story.)

I was a bit ticked with her for that one, as I recall. Made her promise never to do something so stupid again. And although I have been known to leave some appointments too long, I’m working on it.

Also, it might make you all feel better to know that today I am going to have a massage.

In other news, what are you doing at 7:40 AM on Labour Day? Sleeping? Really? For those of you who have better things to do, tune into the Thunder Bay CBC’s The Great Northwest to hear me talking about end-of-summertime blues (“There are no snowsuits in July.”) with host Lisa Laco. This (mourning about the end of summer) seems to be a pattern with me: witness 2011, 2010, 2009. Etc. I believe that non-locals can listen on the Interwebs.

Enjoy your last long weekend of the summer!

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