Comfortably Numb

Katherine and I both share the memory of the first time we laid eyes on one another, with our parents and a number of other grade eight students, in Mr. Kirkwood's English classroom at Martingrove Collegiate. Some months later, in grade nine, and actually students in his English class, we discussed that day, and how we had been drawn to one another. In typical Amelia fashion, my thoughts had been, "She looks so cool. She'll never want to be my friend." In fact, she did want to be my friend, and in fact, she was not particulary "cool," despite what I and several of her young suitors initially believed.

Katherine was and is unusual, smart, wise about people in a way few people are, and unwise about certain social conventions in a way few people are, a dreamer, a writer, a loyal friend, and a truly remarkable human being. But "cool" is not even in Katherine's vocabulary.

Katherine-isms include an unbelievably poor sense of direction, especially when one lives in a city as sensibly laid out as Toronto (Had we grown up in Halifax, I am sure she would still be trying to find her way home),  long-winded voicemail messages, and, still astonishing to me is this last one - the bizzaro, opposite world ability to come across as a snob.

There is not a snobby bone in Katherine's body, which is no small feat for someone with such refined taste in literature. She is one of the least judgemental people I have ever met in my life. Yet throughout highschool, I repeatedly heard her referred to as a snob. Friends and I would sometimes refer to her as a "little grown-up," because she was uncommonly articulate and used multi-sylabic words and, having grown up without cable television and with a steady diet of classical music, was completely unaware of the popular culture touchstones that united our peers. I made fun of her a lot, about all of that stuff, and, I presume, because we are still best friends 25 years later, that she took it all in jest or, just as often, completely missed it. She talked smart and she was often lost in her own thoughts, seemingly distant, and these things, I guess, made her appear snobby. But really, I never saw how people saw that; I only knew that they did because they told me.

Katherine was also very cute and small and all of the boys were in love with her. I mean, it was crazy the boys that were in love with her - the jock boys, the nerd boys, the weird boys, even the right-wing conservative boys. Several of my crushes developed crushes on her. Perpetually single in high school, I often felt like a third wheel, and I sometimes resented it, but my resentment felt less like "Why do they like her?" and more like, "They don't even like her." Because, for the most part, Katherine dated nice, unremarkable boys. I do think they saw something special in her but I don't think they had any idea what it was.

Katherine's favourite song for a very long time, when we were in high school, was Pink Floyd's "Comfortably Numb." While it was I who introdued Katherine to many cultural touchstones, it was Katherine who introduced me to Pink Floyd, by way, I presume, of her older brother Tony (who also introduced her, and then I, to Billy Bragg!)

Because it was her favourite song, she carried it into her earliest relationships, and for two consecutive ones, it became "their" song. Two! Consecutive relationships! "Comfortably Numb"! As inappropriate as that might seem, it isn't hard to see how that song could have resonated with someone who felt so outside of the whole high school experience that her peers - myself and her boyfriends included - were such active participants in: "You are only coming through in waves / Your lips move but I can't hear what you're saying."

It is hard to paint a picture of Katherine because she isn't a type. I have never met anyone who reminded me of Katherine. And that's part of the pleasure of knowing Katherine.

Most of the pleasure of knowing Katherine involves words. It has been getting to read her writing throughout the years - she is one of the best writers I know. And it has been lengthy discussions about people - their behaviours and oddities and particular reactions to particular situations. And when I talk to her about myself and my life, I am always reminded of how she really knows me and how I am in the world, better than almost anyone.

When I have teased Katherine about certain aspects of her behaviour, she has retorted that some of these traits are Amelia traits as well, and I do see a small amount of Katherine lite in some of my behaviour. Something I like and believe about myself is that I am someone who is difficult to pigeon-hole; that I am full of contradictions. And she was and is certainly like that in the very biggest way - so concurrently wise and unwise.

Katherine has been married for several years now to a man, Andrew, who makes sense for her, and who I'm enormously happy to see her with and to get to have in my life as well. He is strange and thoughtful and smart and kind in ways that are not quite like Katherine's ways but that are complimentary. And he really sees her, which is what I have always hoped for for Katherine.

A couple of weeks ago I attended Katherine's son's 16th birthday party with Katherine and Andrew. It had been years since I had seen him and he has become, so seemingly suddenly, a teenager, with friends and enthusiasm and a passion for weird art projects. He looks like her, and I could not help recalling Katherine and I at that age. How difficult and devastating and exciting and new everything is when you're 16, and how lucky Katherine and I were to have had one another.

Fairytale of New York

Fairytale of New York is my A#1 absolute favourite Christmas song in the history of ever. No two ways about it. This is a very informed claim, having enthusiastically sifted through thousands of versions of hundreds of Christmas songs, because I am weird like that. And because, thankfully, Sean is weird like that, and introduced me to the whole Christmas music phenomenon.

He did not, however, introduce me to this song.

I get kind of pissed off by people who make the claim that this hardly counts as a Christmas song because said people feel they can listen to it all year round. It's a very derogatory comment to make about Christmas music. But truth be told, my formative and best memories of "Fairytale of New York" are of Toronto summer nights spent dancing sloppily, drunkenly, and with Justin, to this song at the James Joyce Pub, strummed by that guy who would play all of our requests. For us, he played The Beatles, David Bowie, Stan Rogers, and the Pogues. Now, I mind the Toronto summer heat, but then I never did, and for reveling in it there was no better companion than my dear friend and very first drinking buddy.

Justin and I had a very easy relationship that was sometimes made complicated by our youth, our sensitivities, our genders, and our unabashed enthusiasms that occasionally got tricky with our tendencies to go hard rather than going home. I remember a particularly sobering and difficult conversation at Hob Nob Donuts following one such evening. I remember it like I was approaching the end of something that I needed to have in my life. I remember feeling like I knew that we could never go back to the way things were; the way things were when our friendship was uncomplicated by things that should have been left out of him and I. It was okay, though. We were okay. We repeated some of the same mistakes I suppose; but no, they weren't really mistakes - just growing pains I guess. And I think we learned through one another a lot of what we really wanted.

I also think about Justin when I think about Christmas, though the soundtrack to our Christmases together would have been far less inspiring than the soundtracks to our summers. We began a few consecutive Christmases at Country Style Donuts at Dundas and Islington, it being the only place open so late on Christmas Eve night, and I'm sure that whatever godawful music they were playing there was entirely appropriate to a suburban donut store franchise. These evenings would follow our tradition of tobogganing at Centennial Hill with our brothers.

Justin's mom sold her house on Saskatoon rd. several years ago. He has no family left in Etobicoke. My mom lives on Kipling Avenue, now, in an area that's fairly close to the home I grew up in on Edgevalley Drive, but in a house that is not quite my home.

I don't get to see Justin much anymore. It's been a couple of years since his last visit to Halifax, and now when I go "home" he's not one of the people I get to see. He has his own house with his wife and a dog (!) in the Ottawa Valley. I've never even seen it. We hardly ever talk on the phone, and the rare emails we send are fairly concise. Justin has always been sparing with his words. He is, through and through, a man of action.

The closest friends I had in high school were Justin, Katherine, and Tim, and they remain, despite distance and generally pretty shoddy upkeep, three of my closest friends in the world, to my mind at least. They are all very good with words, but Justin has never ever needed to reassure me. Not even that one time I thought he did. He is one of the few people in the world, like family, whom I know will always love me; and he does love me, in his understated and very loyal Justin way, just for being me.

Fairytale of New York - The Pogues

It was Christmas Eve babe
In the drunk tank
An old man said to me, won't see another one
And then he sang a song
The Rare Old Mountain Dew
I turned my face away
And dreamed about you

Got on a lucky one
Came in eighteen to one
I've got a feeling
This year's for me and you
So happy Christmas
I love you baby
I can see a better time
When all our dreams come true

They've got cars big as bars
They've got rivers of gold
But the wind goes right through you
It's no place for the old
When you first took my hand
On a cold Christmas Eve
You promised me
Broadway was waiting for me

You were handsome
You were pretty
Queen of New York City
When the band finished playing
They howled out for more
Sinatra was swinging,
All the drunks they were singing
We kissed on a corner
Then danced through the night

The boys of the NYPD choir
Were singing "Galway Bay"
And the bells were ringing out
For Christmas day

You're a bum
You're a punk
You're an old slut on junk
Lying there almost dead on a drip in that bed
You scumbag, you maggot
You cheap lousy faggot
Happy Christmas your arse
I pray God it's our last

I could have been someone
Well so could anyone
You took my dreams from me
When I first found you
I kept them with me babe
I put them with my own
Can't make it all alone
I've built my dreams around you

The Emperor's New Clothes

Sinead O'Connor's incredibly moving, enduringly affecting album I Do Not Want What I Haven't Got was released in 1990, during my first year of high school. Most of the songs on this album are about relationships, and while I had no real idea about relationships then, I was certainly obsessed with having one, and with the boys I dreamed about having ones with. Crushes in high school seemed to hit harder than any that I've experienced since. I guess because even friendships were shallower then - or more innocent, to be kinder. I didn't have any experience with real intimacy, and I didn't have the weight of a large and confusing and multifaceted history or world view that I needed empathetic ears and honest dialogue for. I was just fourteen. By the time I started to recognize the difference between actual friendships and people I had fun hanging out with I'd learned to make these distinctions because I'd been let down, misled, or just plain wrong about the people I imagined I knew. So crushes these days, while fun and I think necessary, are also comparatively very fleeting. They never carry that kind of investment, because that kind of investment just doesn't make any sense. First crushes, first hurts; there was no barometer.

I honestly didn't understand the song "The Emperor's New Clothes." It was the line "How could I possibly know what I want when I was only 21?" that I ran into like a brick wall. I didn't understand what she meant, because 21 seemed so impossibly old, and I figured that I already knew what I wanted, at fourteen.

In my canvas World Famous backpack, along with my NoteTote and my Beaver Canoe pencil case, I carried years and years of ridicule into Martingrove Collegiate. In middle school, my classmates would spread my germs and cross their fingers as I walked down the hall. On most afternoons as I walked home from school, the houses on Anglesey boulevard looked blurry through tears that I could never hold back, no matter how hard I tried. I went to Martingrove because nobody I knew from middle school was going there, and I started going by my full name, Amelia, shedding the shortened "Amy" I had been called up until that point. I bought bright purple Converse sneakers and I joined the drama club and the choir and I went to dances and I talked loudly, and people thought that I was fun and open.

It strikes me now that I was incredibly lucky to have been received as I was. I could have been devastated. It seems insane that I tried so hard to be known, to meet people, when all of the people I used to know just called me cruel names and left me to eat lunch alone. I took everyone at face value. I didn't even recognize that people lied about stuff. I was so blissfully innocent in grade nine.

I guess high school is probably like that for a lot of people, if not most people - a training ground for dealing with other human beings. I thought I had a best friend. I thought I was in love. I thought I knew what I wanted.

It makes all kinds of sense that I was moved, along with my peers, by Sinead O'Connor's cover of Prince's "Nothing Compares 2 U," sitting on the bleachers in the gymnasium at 8 o'clock on a Friday night, watching the boy I wanted to be dancing with as he danced with someone else.

It took a few more years before I connected to "Emperor's New Clothes." I eventually required more reasons for wanting things and people in my life, and for wanting things and people out of it. Of course this song is explicitly about the speaker's experience of enduring other people's reactions to her pregnancy. It's also one of the most empowering songs I can think of. It's so bold and bare and honest and despite the assertive declarations there is, too, the "I would return to nothing without you." Everything is there, and no, at fourteen, despite my purple sneakers and my brand new school I couldn't for the life of me understand how someone so old just couldn't have it together. And when I hear this song, I can remember that confused reception. I know exactly how that felt. Two decades ago.

The Emperor's New Clothes - Sinead O'Connor

It seems like years since you held the baby
While I wrecked the bedroom
You said it was dangerous after Sunday
And I knew you loved me
He thinks I just became famous
And that's what messed me up
But he's wrong
How could I possibly know what I want
When I was only twenty-one?
And there's millions of people
To offer advice and say how I should be
But they're twisted
And they will never be any influence on me
But you will always be
You will always be
If I treated you mean
I really didn't mean to
But you know how it is
And how a pregnancy can change you
I see plenty of clothes that I like
But I won't go anywhere nice for a while
All I want to do is just sit here
And write it all down and rest for a while
I can't bear to be in another city
One where you are not
I would return to nothing without you
If I'm your girlfriend or not
Maybe I was mean
But I really don't think so
You asked if I'm scared
And I said so
Everyone can see what's going on
They laugh `cause they know they're untouchable
Not because what I said was wrong
Whatever it may bring
I will live by my own policies
I will sleep with a clear conscience
I will sleep in peace
Maybe it sounds mean
But I really don't think so
You asked for the truth and I told you
Through their own words
They will be exposed
They've got a severe case of
The emperor's new clothes
The emperor's new clothes
The emperor's new clothes

Lik My Vacuum

Perhaps the best present I've ever been given was the one I received for my eighteenth birthday, from my friend Aidyl. A year ahead of me, I missed her presence at Martingrove during my final year of high school while she was enjoying her first year at Ryerson, where she was studying Radio & Television Arts. Having access to a super cool studio and the equipment it housed, she made me a cassette tape that played like a radio program for my birthday.

Aidyl and I were friends for the duration of my time at Martingrove, first becoming acquainted when I was in the ninth grade, in a tiny room where members of the Auditorium Facilities Crew hung out during lunch hour. Our friendship varied in degrees of intensity. Both of us were social creatures who were comfortable and friendly with a number of diverse groups of people, but where her friendships often included the sportier set, mine eventually leaned towards the smokers who congregated outside of the cafeteria in an area commonly referred to as "the outback"; and particularly those smokers who were especially eccentric and determinedly unaligned with the extra-curricular activities that I (and Aidyl) also enjoyed, such as the Martingrove Stage Company and the aforementioned Auditorium Facilities Crew. Aidyl and I would go for long periods of time, immersed in our own, separate things, and then reconnect for a week or two of near constant companionship.

Aidyl and I both loved to sing, and this was one thing that definitely bound us. It was with her that I started my first "band." In actuality, we were a duo who performed once, on the stage in the auditorium at Martingrove Collegiate, during the annual "Martingrove Jam," a glorified open mic.

We called ourselves 12 Eagle Road, taking the name from the address of the "crazy lady" who lived on a side street near Bloor and Islington. Our friends and ourselves used to delight in driving slowly and repeatedly past the paranoid woman's house, and in watching her increasingly insane reactions to our presence there. She would yell, "Get off the road, you sons and bitches!" which would always put us into hysterics. She was always threatening to call - and actually did call - the police. She took our photographs and even brought out a video camera, for which my friends and I performed Monty Python sketches on one occasion.

For our debut - and final - performance as 12 Eagle Road, Aidyl and I had each written original songs. Here, I will boldly include the chorus from the first song I ever wrote with my guitar. Much of my high school existence having been defined by being painfully and unrequitedly in love with one of my best friends, Tim, it is of course appropriate that my first song would have been about him. The stupid, embarrassing chorus went, "Well it's hard to be your friend / When my feelings aren't correct." Aidyl's song was better, but I'll let her decide for herself whether or not she wants it exposed.

We listened to and sang along to so much music together. Particularly fond are my memories of singing along to the Les Miserables soundtrack. We collectively, particularly, dug then-popular CanCon fare like Blue Rodeo, The Waltons, Barenaked Ladies, and - yeah, really, ugh - Moxy Fruvous.

Lik My Vacuum is the name that Aidyl gave to the cassette she made me - a take-off on The Waltons' Lik My Traktor. It was a record of our high school experience together and a testament to the endurance of memories, if not location or musical taste or even enduring friendship. I don't even have Lik My Vacuum anymore. Along with all of the other cassettes I used to own - and many other valuable possessions of mine - they disappeared from the basement of a house I used to live in, which is another story altogether. I am almost over these things that I lost, but I still don't like to talk about it.

It was Aidyl's birthday yesterday, and I was reminded of all the birthdays that we shared together during high school. I thought about the surprise party Tamie and I hosted in my basement - the one that Charlie showed up to drunk, a short while before I really had friends who drank, or drank myself. I remember one year Aidyl gave me a diary for my birthday, and the good use I made of that over the following year. And most of all, I remembered how impressed and delighted I was to receive Lik My Vacuum. I listened to it all the time. I couldn't believe someone had gone to so much work to show me that I meant something to them. It sucks that it's gone, but I can't imagine I'll ever forget the majority of the songs on Lik My Vacuum. In fact, I bet I could still sing along to every one of them.

*Aidyl and I did not look that old when we were in high school. That picture was taken last December.

Nightswimming

When I was in grade thirteen, which is something they had, in Ontario, in 1993-94, I went to this weirdo public school called SEE. This converted elementary school with its too-small toilets and coat hangers offered me a lot of things my more conventional and teenager-sized high school, Martingrove, had not. Not the least of which were the mornings I spent luxuriously indulging my newly acquired bad habit - smoking cigarettes - whilst intentionally creating an authentic and romantic space for myself and myself alone within my great big world of friendships and crushes and pining and feelings of unworthiness. Amidst the soundtrack of these years that screamed significantly and appropriately and synchronously from car stereos and ghetto blasters and not-yet-mastered guitars in friends basements, I found this one song or else it found me, and I made it my own through this repetitive, ritualistic process that I kept for myself.

Mom and Dad and Geoff and Ted would leave for work and school like regular people at least an hour before I rolled out of my bed, the house and the hours before my twelve o'clock class to myself. I would sit in the living room with my coffee and my cigarettes, which I could smoke secretly because my dad smoked there too, and the lingering smoke would certainly be attributed to him. I would place Automatic for the People in the stereo, skip ahead to track 11, and press play as I smoked my cigarette on the comfortable armchair in the corner, blinds closed, lest I expose myself and my secret habit to my neighbours. It is the best personal indulgence I have ever had, and maybe that is something I could use now - a secret ritual that no one else knows about, that I enjoy so wholly and repeatedly. For years I refused to tell anyone how much I loved this song. I would leave the room if someone else played this album in some other room, as soon as I heard it begin. I did not want to associate this with any other person in the world. I greedily hoarded this song.

Automatic for the People had come out the previous year, when I was in grade twelve, and I listened to it in its entirely a lot that year. I had a part-time job working at one of my dad's stores, and after school I would ride the Martingrove bus all the way up to Steeles Avenue. "Everybody Hurts" killed me. It made me think about the friends I felt I was losing, growing distances and little betrayals. I suffered a minor depression I think, maybe it's a high school thing.

I did not feel amazing in grade thirteen, but I felt a little more sure of myself, like I was on the cusp of something. I had this awareness of going new places and leaving some old things behind, and I had no idea how I would reconcile the two. But really, I don't think I thought about it too much. I was pretty optimistic, despite being so easily hurt, when I was eighteen.

I played "Nightswimming" for myself and I loved the strings and the piano and I loved that part about the photograph on the dashboard, driving somewhere with something from before right there in front of me. Nightswimming seemed like the perfect solitary event, and so I played this song in the morning, in my dry living room, and I felt a lot of things that I couldn't and can't explain.

Nightswimming - REM (Berry/Buck/Mills/Stipe)

Nightswimming deserves a quiet night

The photograph on the dashboard, taken years ago,

Turned around backwards so the windshield shows

Every streetlight reveals the picture in reverse

Still, it's so much clearer

I forgot my shirt at the water's edge

The moon is low tonight

Nightswimming deserves a quiet night

I'm not sure all these people understand

It's not like years ago,

The fear of getting caught,

Of recklessness and water

They cannot see me naked

These things, they go away,

Replaced by everyday

Nightswimming, remembering that night

September's coming soon

I'm pining for the moon

And what if there were two

Side by side in orbit

Around the fairest sun?

That bright, tight forever drum

Could not describe nightswimming

You, I thought I knew you

You, I cannot judge

You, I thought you knew me,

This one laughing quietly underneath my breath

Nightswimming

The photograph reflects,

Every streetlight a reminder

Nightswimming deserves a quiet night, deserves a quiet night