Tuesday, June 22, 2010

The Language

It is interesting to listen to English speaking people talk about the French language. In their mind there are different types of French; amongst others, the proper French and the French-Canadian. It hardly ever occurs to people that indeed accents, colloquialisms, or education may play an important part in clarity or delivery of any language and that ultimately, it is but one language: French. Anyone who speaks French will understand a French speaking person. Sometimes there is struggle, but it is no different than a Canadian guy trying to understand a Welsh or a New-Zealand guy. Yet, it would never occur to most Anglo Saxons to split the language into the proper, the American or the Canadian. In people’s mind, it is the same language. Somehow, they seem to believe that if they were to learn French-Canadian French, they would never be able to understand or be understood by French from France. Little do they know that generally their English accent is so strong that either way, nobody can understand them.

Facebook

It is said that a picture is worth a thousand words. Sadly enough, it is true. Recently I became an active member of Facebook. It happened after a childhood friend contacted me. At first I was quite put off, she was after all a bully. What made me reconsider accepting her as a friend was her comment that she had such wonderful memories of me. It took me a while to realize that although she was indeed a bully, I never was her victim. I was also quite curious to find out what these - wonderful memories - could be since I had so very little myself. Almost right away, a flood of old high school buddies started to appear, people who had apparently been looking for me while I was pointlessly in hiding. High school years were good to me and I remember them quite fondly. Once I opened the gates, it was only a matter of time before others showed up.

I reconnected with the girls I used to hang out with, those same girls I had spent countless of hours with, dreaming of the ways we would change the world. Some stayed put, some others moved away, some got married, divorced, some had great career, but none of them had children. What more might we all have had unknowingly in common? I wonder. Although almost thirty years had passed, they all looked more beautiful than ever. The years had not taken its toll of them. However, the same was not true for the guys we used to hang out with. I could hardly recognize any of them. We had countless of times fought against the terrible prejudices that awaited us, future women of the world, but we had never realized how much pressure there was on boys to succeed, to provide, to make things happen, and not all of them had the ability to do so. It was sadly obvious.

I also reconnected with old flames, dear friends, endearing acquaintances, previous neighbors, old colleagues. At first, everybody’s life looked amazing, fulfilling. Gosh, I felt like a looser. How was it that I had done so very little? That is, until I realized that people put up a good front. Their lives were just as ordinary as any other. They put their best pictures up, their best smiles, and hope to convince themselves even more than others.

Some old friends quickly became precious friends again. Some others took the opportunity to use a faraway sounding board to share strenuous details of their lives with someone they had no risk of inadvertently encountering on the streets. Others, the castoffs of those years, those who invested much of their time into successful careers, in an attempt to prove to the world that even then they were worth it, are now investing themselves into fantasies where the past is being avenged by an imaginary present, yet stumbling still on the same rejections.

It is an interesting tool, to observe human behavior certainly, but also to compare, to appreciate the distance traveled. It helped me realize that once upon a time I was amazing, and I lost sight of it during my college years which were in retrospect, truly the worst ones of my life. Even though at first my life felt rather pale in comparison, it turns out that it’s not that bad at all. And as they say, I’m not dead yet, am I.

Tuesday, June 15, 2010

Mr. Rabbit

I have been looking at all these old pictures for almost three weeks now. Actually, I have mainly been looking at the young girl I was. She holds such mystery to me. I even asked my father to send me all the pictures he had of me before the age of twenty. Childhood pictures are quite a rare commodity in my household. Although I am sure we must have taken as many as any other families, a bitter divorce and later on the flooding of our basement, where the photo albums were kept, impoverished the collection even further. The pictures, I was told, glued together face to face, forever hiding their content. Only those that were secured away prior to any of these events remained accessible.

My father sent me two dozen pictures, half of which I had never seen before or at least, not in a very long time. The memory of these days was still very vivid, except perhaps for the fact that I had not thought of them since they happened. However, the impact of those days on my life lives on, sometimes rather clearly, other times more subtly. These were the formative years. They contributed in shaping me into the person I became.

My father’s pictures, added to the ones I already had, provided a good sampling of my early years. Once they were all scanned and arranged by date, a few patterns started emerging. The first one: there are no family pictures. There are pictures of individuals or pairs, only twice is the entire family gathered in the same frame, each times I am under the age of four, and both times my mother is distancing herself from us. Several pictures were taken during the same family gathering. I was obviously young and obliging enough to be passed around from hands to hands, since I am being held by a different person in every frame. Everybody is holding me at some point, except for my mother. Even though she often appears in the pictures, she systematically looks away from me. She would be standing between her two children, turned away towards my brother.

Another noticeable aspect is the fact that nobody ever smiles. Until I am about four years old, I am obviously out of place as I smile from ear to ear without restrain. Afterward, I just look sad; there is no hint that attempts were ever made, except once or twice and it looks rather more like a forced grimace. My face starts lighting up again late in my teens and the pictures then, are never in family settings. There is an exception I must reveal. I must be about seven years old, I am holding carefully a small white rabbit in my arms and there is a glimpse of unrestrained joy in my eyes even though my smile is reserved. Later on that day, Mr. Rabbit will become my first little companion.

I also noticed that whenever a few of us were forced to pose for the camera, we hardly ever touch each other and, in the rare occasions we did, the discomfort was palpable.

The saddest realization of all came from a group picture of nine little girls goofing around like eight years old do. I am sitting in the middle of the crowd and I look as if I am fourteen years old while indeed, I am the youngest of all these jesters.

I am sure anyone could argue that if I look and scrutinize long enough, I could detect almost anything I want from almost any expression I see in these pictures. It might be true. But others have reached the same conclusions without enticement. I also understand that we live in different times and back then, abuse was not something we talked about, least of all, interfere with.

Still, I cannot help but see a brave and strong little girl who faced something terrible and somehow manage to extirpate herself from that situation, all by herself. No wonder they stayed at bay, they failed her in every possible ways. Fortunately, childhood can only last so long and one day we wake up and it’s all over. And sometimes it takes a little while longer.