15: Sunset Metaphors

     In grade seven I painted my first sunset, it was a purple wash with a solitary silhouette of a naked tree. My teacher, Mr. Bosman made a display of it on the back bulletin board at the old limestone Bruce Street School. The sunset motif reached its zenith for me in grade eight, when I painted orange skies exclusively in art class. My art teacher would say, 'Do something different for a change,' and I'd say, 'I did; this one's a sunrise.'
     I recall playing on the edge of a sandy beach with a big, red plastic racing car. It was an Indy racer with yellow plastic wheels. If held up to the sun, it would glow. My grandparents were sitting along the beach with the rest of our family in deck chairs. On the water, older children were diving from a raft. As the sun set, the water became pinkish-orange and their suntanned skin glistened a warm brown. The setting sun was a racing car that sped around the corner out of sight, to make one more lap. The last filaments of the sun went up like hands and the racing car crashed. On the way to the car leaving the beach, a fire truck screamed past, a burnt red color with dome light flashing, the huge circle of light like a huge heart spinning. All eyes turned in the dusk to the light and knew that an eight-year-old girl had drowned. The light pulsed on each person like the magnification of their own hearts.
     Another vivid memory occurred at sunrise on my way to a days cherry picking with Rick. I was five at the time. It was early in the morning in an amber school bus full of cherry pickers driving through fields drenched with dew. Passing a farmhouse I saw a rooster standing on the spillway of a pond and yelled out, 'Hey, look at the eagle.' Everyone laughed. On the way home I noticed Rick surreptitiously tweak the white satin like blouse of a woman friend he had brought along.
     As a kid I had looked up to Rick when he was head of the Spartan Car Club. I'd run upstairs to get his red satin car club jacket and would help him wash his bronze Fifty six Chevy with the custom taillights and moon hubcaps. Rick used to make everyone take off their shoes before they sat in his car. Ma had a picture of Rick in his dump truck, wearing his corduroy hat and his dark sun glasses sporting a mustache like Confucius, the esteemed Chinese philosopher.
     The only time I could recall Rick ever being upset was when he dropped his car keys into Lake Ontario while fiddling with them. He had to call up Fern to come and tow him home. Recently Rick had driven his huge yellow tandem dump truck up into ma's driveway while I was visiting. He was on his coffee break while doing a job in Acorn. I could smell his pipe and came downstairs. Rick was just finishing off the last piece of upside-down peach cake ma had saved for him and began to talk about driving his truck into a pack of running dogs at the quarry. 'I ran straight into them; you should have seen them disperse.' Rick paused for a second and regarded me with a displeased look. 'You're giving me a sanctimonious look,' he said. 'Well, those dogs can attack children when they're running wild like that.' Once, Rick had stopped by to take a few shots with Kim who where playing street hockey. Mary, Rick's fiancee was standing nearby and Rick almost threw Kim into the creek for swearing while a lady was present.
     Rick seemed to be concerned about the image I was projecting, and the fact that I wrote incessantly in my journals: As I'm writing this I'm in the back of Rick's GMC Jimmy with the top down, wearing a white sports coat and a cowboy hat. The truck is parked at the hospital; Rick and my mother have taken baby Dylan to the emergency room. As an apricot sunset blends into gray, the headlight of a southbound train appears in the distance. The sound of crickets and a flag pole rope pinging are lost as the train approaches. Train fades and they're coming back.
     "Who's the dude in the back," Ma said.
     "That's just a dude dressed up in cowboy clothes," Rick said.
      "Dylan has an ear infection," Ma said. April 18, 1976.
       Saturday, November 13, 1976, I went skiing with Rick and Danny and broke my glasses. Hadn't seen Rick since the spring when he had driven us to see Danny in reform school. While we sat drinking hot chocolate in the lodge, Rick asked me what I was writing. "My journal," I said.
        "You know," Rick said, tapping the dottle from his pipe, "I'd like to move up north; ski all winter and come the summer I'd write a book. It would be something like a Henry Miller book, as far as the content goes—I'd call it 'Lines of Longitude.'"

The day Rick drove Kim me and ma to see Danny in reform school, was a crucial time since ma was still recovering from her stroke. That Danny had gone to reform school for breaking into a barber shop, hadn't helped matters. (The police followed his footsteps in the snow to 49 Mary Street.) When Kim had been jailed for stealing cars and for a whole list of other crimes ma had cried for a week. It made it difficult for her job as a correctional officer, but as her superior put it, "Having three out of seven go in, ain't that bad."
     Whenever someone was suffering, ma was always able to empathize and could usually tell exactly what the problem was. When Kim's baby son, Dylan, was crying she said, "He doesn't know what it is." Many people might not have understood that 'not knowing' was also a factor.
      Sister Sue, who had just returned from Calgary with her two children, had called me and talked of how Danny's problems had upset ma. "Dad stayed off work so that he could make sure mother didn't have a relapse the day Danny went away. You know that's a possibility. Dad won't let her drive her car because, he says, 'A bee might come in through the window and the shock might make her have a relapse.' And mom keeps saying that she'll get a patch for her eye so that she can go out. She says she'll paint a false eye on the patch. She's able to move her eye a little now. The doctors said that she wouldn't be able to it, but she did. She says that it was just one of her everyday miracles. Anyhow, dad decided to take the day off work, so that he could watch mother, right. So he spent the day in bed and your mother went for a walk to the bank by herself. She was just walking by the back fence and started to have a relapse and was hanging onto the fence. The dog started to bark and finally woke Dad, who had been so gallant in taking a day off work to watch her. It's a lucky thing we have a dog. So Dad took her to the doctor and he wanted to take her to the hospital. But, oh, no, she won't let him. All he could do was to give her more drugs."
     As Sue talked I couldn't help but think of our visit to mother when she was in hospital. I'd just returned from out West, having found a strong urge to come back while in Fort St. John, British Columbia. I had a ticket to fly to Whitehorse, but came straight home instead. Kim had driven Danny and I to the hospital and I could scarcely recognize her. The people at the next bedside were crying. It was hard to believe that Kim and Danny had been acting flippantly just minutes before on the way to the hospital.
     While Rick and ma stopped in the lobby of the reform school, I looked over the painting on the wall. It was an autumn scene with a pond around sunrise or sunset, painted in ugly mauve and oranges. Ducks were rising where a blind would logically have been placed, but there were no hunters in the picture. All the violent elements had been omitted. The only dangerous thing about the painting was that it had been painted on compressed chip board. The picture reminded me of the calendar in Marg's Restaurant around the time Kim and I had been going to Sunday school in Acorn. The calendar was an advertisement for a Local car dealership and every year they used a different sportsman's scene. Kim and I would stop into Marg's Restaurant every Sunday to have toast with Bonny, Kim's Sunday School teacher. Kim and I would have our hair slicked up and they would be wearing our blue blazers, feeling proud sitting in the restaurant with the grownups. If Kim didn't get to sit beside Bonny in Sunday School class, he would pout and sit underneath the table. Once when another girl said she was going with Bob in Bonny's place, Kim had kicked her in the shins, called her a liar and spit at her.

     Everyone was in the waiting room, waiting for Danny. The art in this room was even more depressing. There were plaques with sailboats made of nails and their sails were threads strung on more nails. "There's Danny wearing a big smile," said ma. Danny sat down and the chat began. Danny talked about his attractive English teacher. He said he was saving his muffin for her. All the boys gave her their muffins and Danny was waiting until his was really stale, and of course hard to boot.
     "Remember when you came to visit me, and I stole all those sweaters?" Kim said. My father had taken Ma Danny and me to visit Kim at his Reform School. Walking across the park to the car we were all chuckling cause ma said, 'Look at his hair.' My father had died his hair with some of ma's auburn hair color and the roots were showing. Kim showed me that he was wearing seven prison sweaters, and said, 'I'm gonna steal a half dozen of these.'
     Danny and Rick talked about skiing. They would hot-dog down the slopes, during the winter, and when they passed woman, they would ski backwards making crude faces as they passed. Rick gave me a look as I wrote in my black book. "This is no time to be writing a song," he said.
      "I'm not writing a song," I said.
       "Then what are you writing?" Rick asked.
       "My journal."
        "Oh, the diary of Stefan Frank."
        "Do you have a bad memory?" Kim asked.
        "No," I said, "A lot of writers keep a journal."
         "You better watch it,"warned Rick, "Or you'll wind up with your face flat in a mud puddle, for keeping a diary."
       On the way back to the truck Rick added, "We'll have to talk to the warden to arrange your imprisonment for keeping a diary."

        Ma sat beside Rick on the way home and talked. "Remember that house we had in Long Branch," said Rick.
       "Remember that dump," said ma, changing the subject.
        "There was a huge pond," said Rick, "And they were filling it up, so trucks used to come down all the time, dumping things in. Once they dumped a parade float so we used it as our Good Ship Lollipop. They dumped a whole shipment of Wrigley's gum, so we had that on our little ship. And then, another time, they dumped a whole truckload of fireworks."
        "Remember all those boots catching fire?"
        "They dumped a whole load of left footed boots, so Fern had them all up in the attic," explained Rick. "Fern fixed up a couple kids with them, but then there was the fire, just after Hurricane Hazel and the whole attic was pouring out with black smoke."
       "The fire Marshall really gave us hell for that."
        "But our lawyer got us a lot of money for the insurance so we could move to Scarborough."
         "I remember one time when I rode in a rowboat to the island," said Rick.
         "You mean you rode a rowboat out to Center Island?" I asked.
         "You're so stupid," said Rick. "I just rowed it to the other side of the lagoon."
        Rick dropped off everyone at Kim's house. I was sitting in the front room, watching television when ma came in. "You seem to be quiet," she said, meaning, "What's wrong?"
       "Oh, nothing," I said. I walked out to the front drive to see Kelly and Shelly, my nephew and niece. Kelly was trying to blow my head off with a cap gun while Shelly tried to run him over with her bike. And they were both wearing blue cowboy sweaters like the ones Kim and I wore when we went to Kindergarten and fought over a cap gun. Finally I said to ma, "So that's where all the firecrackers came from."

 

The old Bruce Street School where my Purple Sunset 

and Solitary Tree Was Hung