October 6, 2008

Childhood



At six years old I thought two hundred dollars would fill a briefcase (I wasn’t so extravagant as my sister, who figured a large bag was required for each hundred). What matters is that when I gave the man in the store money he gave me a motorbike.

My cousins lived in the tallest house in Hudson Bay, Saskatchewan
The town not the bay. A blue house.

The village I grew up in was
named after an airplane
That crashed nearby in 1901. Endeavour, Saskatchewan

Endeavour was ancient.
Fifty, maybe sixty years old. Seventy? Impossible.
Saskatoon was a throbbing metropolis,
Alberta an invented place; The Rockies a shape I could draw but not imagine.
TV came from America. And black people, apparently.
A Japanese girl came to my school. Once.

I could play David & Goliath shirtless
Not my sisters.

When we moved to Alberta we had to press buttons to cross the road.

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Looking for more movie lists? Try the compiled list of Cahiers du Cinema top tens located here.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

This post is awesome.

s$s said...

aw shucks.