Last night I dreamt.
I’m going home from somewhere near the Van Horne shopping center. I am three years of age. The first thing that I notice is the park across from the mall is nearly impassable. Not the way I know it to be in reality. I decide to cross it despite the very steep downveering hills and all the old railyard junk (sharp, pointy and jagged). I go down with some difficulty and pass through a hole in the fence which guards the rusted out tracks. On the other side two smaller, yet tougher looking children, going in the opposite direction, pass me without a word. They have nothing to say to one still so innocent. I pause. Do I really want to forge ahead into this unknown territory?
Someone grabs me from behind. He is older, red-haired and very menacing. He threatens me in vague ways. He is very angry. I knock him down and scurry up the steep hill on this, the other side of the park. Reaching the top I think to run but stop myself and sit, legs dangling over the hill. I see the redhead climbing up with great difficulty, gasping for breath and livid with anger. As his nose reaches the point where my feet idly hang, I shoe him as hard as I can in the nostrils. After watching his downfall I get up and dash home.
As I run, I experience no shortness of breath. I can run forever and the redhead can never catch me. This I know and during the realization I grow older, and gradually turn into my current self. And as I grow I become increasingly nostalgic. Although I am now at my real-life age, the suburban Montreal that I run through is the one of my youth. The Montreal of my earliest memories. Each structure passed is quickly reassessed as the as the structure that it has evolved into in my fortieth year. A great depression consumes me as I near my parent’s home. I slow down now, hunched over and panting. The shortness of breath does not bother me nearly as much as does the loss of the old sixties styled A&W restaurant. This A&W was knocked down and rebuilt as a pizza joint. The pizza joint burned down but was rebuilt bigger but not better and eventually went bankrupt. Now it’s a kosher falafel place with a hall for rent on the top floor. This place, this area, this plot of land has a definite identity crisis. This place reminds me of myself. I cry a bit about that.
The redheaded kid cuts me off just as I’m about to enter my parent’s new abode. He grabs my arm and threatens me with a fist. I’m no longer frightened by him. Although I somehow sense that he still perceives me as a three year old runt, I no longer see him as a bully. I put my arm around his shoulders. I explain to him the nature of change, point out each and every edifice within sight and tell him how and what they will come to be in the too near future. He begins to cry during the telling. He has relied on these things to remain the same everyday that he rises from an unsure sleep and I am telling him they won’t. Shaken, he runs home to his mother.
I enter my parent’s home to be. It’s subterranean. The workmen about are laying more white paint on the walls. There is no furniture, no color. No nothing. It is one large room and very Mediterranean in feeling. My parents greet me as if I’m here to observe. They know me, but not as their son. He is elsewhere at the moment they inform me. But then he emerges through a doorway which I had not noticed. My parents introduce us. They actually introduce me to myself at the age of three. He is quite thin-haired as am I. I quickly note this and remember his parents cajoling him into digesting certain vitamin laden pills lest his hair never grow in properly. His eyes are much wider and happier than mine. He takes me by the hand and pulls me towards a passageway.
We come out into what I slowly understand to be an empty Olympic-sized pool. I look down at him and myself what should happen if they ever decide to refill it. Surely it would flood and wash away our parent’s newly renovated flat. He walks over to some workmen seated at the shallow end and precociously relates my fears to them. They laugh and tell him not to worry, it’s to become a museum and anyway, the passageway will be blocked off. My parents will have no direct link with the museum. I go back through the passage and into the flat. The kid follows me.
I study his parents, my younger parents. I listen to them making plans for the new place, discussing things with workmen. Making plans for their new life; they are refugees. The kid emerges again through the passage that leads onto the pool. He too is a refugee of a kind. He was recently adopted. I know this even through his large smile. I remember this.
His mother asks me if I like the place. I look at myself looking up at her and I begin inwardly to weep. I answer yes with difficulty, as that feeling long since gone and short-lived is rekindled for me in his eyes; that I must love her. His eyes turn to his father who is grinning proudly and he smiles in unison.
Now I cry openly, more so than I had for the old dead structures of yesteryear, seeing his father’s early vigor and transposing it against the aged and death-waiting father that I now know. The father who has already paid for his spot in the ground beside his long dead wife.
Then I look up at myself and I stop smiling. I watch my older self leave the building while wiping away his tears and I wonder why I look so sad.
—–
An ex-girlfriend once told me she could spot an adoptee from a mile away. When I asked her what gave us away she said, ‘It’s not just that you’re all fucked up, it’s that you’re all fucked up in the same way.’
I’m 41 years old and my name is Christopher L. Silzer but I only found out about that a few weeks ago. This series, this voyage, is about identity, what leads up to it and how. But it’s also about other things. Things historical, philosophical and psychological. Other things too, and although less academic, still important. Things like love, spirituality, travelling, comedy and drinking. A lot of drinking. This is a trip that is going to go back a hundred years. More if you’re sober.
