Sixteen Years Old

From a Judy Collins song, "Born To The Breed"

"Sixteen years old
  Out on the road

  Trying to get to the sky"

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Dear Kate,

So I picked this quote, a portion of lyrics from a Judy Collins song, to trip myself up real bad.

Because the 16-year-old Alex is a blur to me.

I hate to use the word as it is so heavily laden with connotation of pigheaded scientism, but I must say then I cared about nothing but survival.

Of course I am sure I cared about many other things and people; yet the overarching narrative had to be about getting into university, something only two years before that, to this new migrant, this ESL student with a heavy Cantonese accent that I am carrying even now, was all but an unreachable sky.  Now at sixteen I was improbably given a legitimate shot at the title.  "I coulda been a contender," into the mirror I spoke everyday.

I am sure I am misrepresenting myself here.

Because I do remember spending hours every Saturday soaking up celluloid in second-hand movie theaters, even during weekdays taking home stacks of VHS tapes from the library, the onset of a "movie phase" in my life, multiple and frequent 90-plus-minute freedom sessions to find my own story in those of others.

And to find my own voice too.

My head would swim around in my high-school hallways and sometimes byways of hitherto unexplored parts of town, like I was a moving camera and my life one long tracking shot,  à la the one in "Goodfellas," my favorite, the shot, the movie, Scorsese, everything.

Oh, yes, now I recall, I also took out all sorts of music from the library and spent my summer job money on mail-order CDs ("Columbia House," remember?); that's how I soundtracked the mise en scène of my life.  (My son wouldn't acknowledge but this is the inception of his current "music career."  The day he got his first guitar I handed him my Eric Clapton CD and asked for "Layla.")

So I must have cared about much more than getting into post-secondary.

In fact I cared a lot about living and dying--more dying than living, at that time, strange enough.  It might have to do with loneliness, knowing not where to stand on a wonderful but peculiar land and with no strong impression of a home from where I came, a point-of-reference to re-create the givenness of my first sixteen years past.  It certainly has to do with Ingmar Bergman.

My motto then was what Boris Pasternak once said, "Art has two constant, two unending concerns: It always meditates on death and thus always creates life. All great, genuine art resembles and continues the Revelation of St John."  Art and Death, yes, I was somehow enlivened by seeking their face.

Now I don't really know where I am going with this letter.  My head is swimming again.  Always.  Shall forever.  I know you hate this, my being obscure and pointless and probably evasive.

Maybe I do have a point.  I think we need to be generous with even ourselves, especially about things past.  Just because our history did unveil in a certain way doesn't mean it's set in stone.  "Set" is a metaphorical action, "stone" an allegorical image, and this is the sort of language available for us to make sense of our own becoming, to write our next chapter.  Our life is meant to be, but only in a roundabout way.

"Trying to get to the sky."  What sky?  It can't mean we are all meant to be astronaut.

Yours, Alex

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Dear Alex,

2 rounds of 4 seasons before 16 years tender, I followed her home after school for fun for friendship for my 1st time. A fairy-tale sort of a Spring afternoon in west end Vancouver.

With our soles and spirit she and I traced the contours of her land, her neighborhood and place in life as sky-arching dreamy as the long limbs of lanes and oak trees meandering before us, our backs ruggedly eager to bear lofty longings beyond ninth-grade textbooks.

This was a route I had not known. She knew it all too well. Our paths would merge on this day in 1 enchanted. Born to the breed of Spring up "to the sky". Why bother “trying"?

Her home was a splendid dollhouse enlarged to real dimensions too fragile to imagine. Past the mahoganies and rosebushes she unhinged the door of her gate to open the New World for me, my access to sky on soil.

Over the threshold into her living space I entered paused exhaled and saw her mom in high definition. She was dressed in something intensely wishful, sculpting ceramic figurines, carving fairy into form on the dining table.

And the most exhilarating notes of classical music swept the room in rapture upward sideways back-forward to mesh into one big bog of a mouth that would gorge on the feast of my sixteen years young.

At sixteen I lived in the Dark Age. Friends and families drifted in distance and shadows. My school grades sucked. The sky seemed darkly small. I was my biggest bully.

Tonight the Judy Collins lyrics have coursed its way past my 16 years and more decades unwound in “trying to get to the sky” and now through the wavelets of time to arrive at my lap of half-done life. I have never listened to this song before. But there is something intensely more wishful about it. I watched on Youtube Collins on the piano, singing.

Something new syncs with another old in vertigo. Winter white dabbled with Spring shades of paint. The rebirth of a child at recreation under this January sky. For one more try. At the playground. More wondrous than my years of 16 in color and song.

Yours, Kate