When I Was Twelve

We still lived in that tacky subdivision in Richmond where the houses more or less looked alike.  There were perhaps five distinct styles, maybe six.  Ours was a split-level as I have previously mentioned.  It was very uninspiring, painted black with white trim.  We had three bedrooms: one for my parents, one for my brother, one for me.  My brother naturally had the better room except for one detail: the walls were painted an almost obscene shade of shocking pink.  Naturally Mom got immediately to work to paint it for him, generic eggshell, and thus assuaged his emerging masculinity.  My little bedroom was more like a walk-in closet with a window, perhaps one third the size of my brother's room.  It was a similar shade of cerulean blue as the room we shared in the previous house.  I liked, and still like, the colour which for me is a colour of comfort.  Despite my brother's, and mother's, and father's occasional violent incursions it was for me a sanctuary and I loved to lie on my brown bedspread reading or staring at the silhouetted fir trees behind our subdivision as the night wind made them sway like dancers.
     We had a big fake bay window in the living room with fake diamond lead frosting on the side panes and a modern brick fireplace.  The curtains Mom chose for the window were beautiful, rather like muted rainbows that seemed drab in the evening light but in the daytime shone in pure glory.  The stove and fridge were matching avocado green, like all appliances in the sixties.  The basement was unfinished and Dad made a project of transforming the basement room into a rec room, using dark fake walnut panelling and acoustic ceiling tiles.  It never became anything but functional, nothing was done to cover the concrete floor except for a scrap of ugly urine coloured carpet and eventually Mom moved the TV down there.
     Following the acre lot we had previously lived on, the small corner lot was tiny and wretched, always flooding in winter and neither Mom or Dad were able to make the lawn or the planted areas attractive.  The enclosing cedar hedge that my father tried to plant never really flourished and the trees remained small and stunted.  My mother planted a deodara tree which now, fifty years later, is tall and flourishing, like the cedar hedge.
     These are things that I believe I have already written in earlier posts but I want to focus on when I was twelve, when I finally stood up to my mother and refused to buy her any more cigarettes.  I had spent much of the summer before, 1967, in Saskatchewan where I stayed with my grandparents on their farm.  It was my first time away from home and flying in an airplane on my own.  I knew that I was growing and soon would no longer be a child.  August, 1968 seemed particularly intense.
     As well as refusing to be Mommy's little enabler, the Soviet Union invaded Prague and their hopes of building a viable democracy were dashed which also played all too well into the propaganda machine of the USA and NATO.  Martin Luther King was assassinated in April just after Trudeau was elected prime minister of Canada and Robert Kennedy was murdered in June and we all wondered what was happening to the country south of the border with all the race riots and burning.  The war in Vietnam was uglier than ever and American draft resisters were being welcomed into Canada.  My mother was in opposition to this and I was in favour because already I could form my own credible opinion.
     Three incidents in that month of August particularly stand out to me.  I was walking through a field not far from our house.  In three years it would be two apartment buildings, one of which my mother would be living in for seven months while I was in grade eleven.  In the meantime, I used to enjoy creating a small bed or hollow in the tall grass and lie down and look up at the sky and listen to the birds in the bright summer evening.  One evening I came across a lone cat lying in the grass.  She had white and grey striped markings and seemed to be panting as though in distress.  I looked to see if she was pregnant and had sought this place to give birth, but it was hard to tell because, though I liked cats unlike the rest of my family I didn't know them very well.  She was friendly and welcomed me as I sat with her and petted her for a while.  We seemed to be a comfort to each other.
     I don't know if it was the same evening, it's all a bit of a blur now, forty-six years later.  But I walked to the new hospital where I used to enjoy looking at the small fountain that was lit sapphire blue at night.  It was rather a tacky thing but to me it suggested the sophistication of being downtown and the downtown of Vancouver, which I didn't yet know intrigued and beguiled me with its promise of knowledge and culture and life experience and, I didn't know this at the time, its sex-appeal.  The sun was getting ready to set and I was just passing the hospital emergency entrance where I saw on the pavement a severed leg clad in denim and a black motorcycle boot, lying in a bright red pool of blood.  I went to the fountain, hoping to find consolation.  I walked back to the emergency, to be sure that I wasn't hallucinating.  The leg was still there and so was the blood.  I walked back to the fountain where I encountered a woman with two children younger than me.  I took her aside and warned her not to go near the emergency entrance in case her children saw the leg and were upset.  She thanked me, I think sincerely.  When I walked back on my way home the leg was gone but the blood was still there.
     I think I did tell Mom about what I saw.  I can't remember her reaction but I think she was a little bit horrified at the crash course in life I was already getting at the age of twelve.  It turned out that a young man on a motorcycle was hit by a car and that was his leg.  He survived, but I think his girlfriend riding behind him died.
     Soon after, one evening, my mother had some friends over.  Dad was away all summer and fall catching fish.  I was on the floor, reading the paper, I think.  She suddenly said that she didn't like the shirt I was wearing.  They were drinking alcohol, vodka I think.  I liked the shirt and didn't see why it would bother her.  Without warning she ripped it off my back.  I was horrified and humiliated and ran up to my bedroom crying.  She never apologized for this, nor for anything else.