Oh, Canada. We tried.
But you like bathroom people best.
It’s been a full last few weeks and my writing brain has been powered down for days on end. Here’s a little tidbit I’ve added to the memoir project this last week…
We all have foils or nemesis at some point in our lives. This may not be true of childhood anymore, but there used to be opportunities galore to pit kids against each other. Contests were one of the prime avenues for this. They motivated us to achieve and pushed us to think and act creatively. My most fierce competitor in every arena of school life was Anna. In 6th grade, when our class spent a music unit learning the recorder, she was always called on for the solo parts. She was an obvious favorite of my burned-out hippie teacher’s. Mrs. Young took a less-work- more-Simon-and-Garfunkel approach to music. While I didn’t mind the tunes, I didn’t need a frizzy-haired troubadour from the past to tell me it was better to be a hammer than a nail. My 1980s childhood was making that abundantly clear.
While I never got called on to sing or trill a solo in music class, the playing field seemed to level out in junior high art class. I could hold my own as long as we weren’t doing perspective drawings, and my bubble letters were epic. We weren’t aspiring Picassos; our expectations were realistically modest. Even so, we gladly answered the territory-wide call to create a design to represent the Yukon at the national Canada Day celebrations in Ottawa every year. A trip to the nation’s capital city for the big party was the prize, and for a kid from the Yukon, that was nearly as exotic as the Bahamas. People in Whitehorse will still drive an hour and a half for a tasty cinnamon bun and something to do. It’s easy to feel stir-crazy up there.
The Canadian flag is famously simple and, I’d like to think, iconic. Our challenge wasn’t to improve upon it but to celebrate the joy and beauty of living as a Canadian through art. Natasha and I took this opportunity as seriously as we could, working with pencil crayons and a blank sheet of paper. Maybe I had unrealistic expectations. I’d won a coloring contest once at the grocery store and received a Hostess chips-themed toboggan, which we promptly destroyed by riding down Dynamite Hill at 40 miles an hour. My pride in finally being recognized for my artistic prowess lasted just as long. I now needed to prove that I could capture the essence of my country in a poster.
Truthfully, I knew that if the judges would pick a design based on merit and ability, the prize was clearly my sister’s. She easily drew realistic people, compelling gestures, and intricate landscapes that most children could only dream of creating. And yet, even for her, the dream was elusive. After months of waiting for the results, Natasha and I had to reckon with the reluctant triumph of one of her closest friends. Ally had guiltlessly phoned it in, expecting nothing more than a participation grade for the project. She took her inspiration straight from the boys and girls bathroom signs in the school hallways, colored them in and called it a day. Yet, somehow, her technicolor toilet people, their fingerless, block hands touching, spread across a maple leaf backdrop with confetti-like fireworks thrown in for good measure, was the toast of our little town.
Perhaps other kids would just shrug off this lack of recognition. Maybe if Ally’s poster had wowed our socks off that would have been the case. Instead, it only confirmed my sense that good things didn't happen to me. Or that they happened to people who didn’t even appreciate them, people who flew on airplanes and had more exciting things in their lives than huge cinnamon buns to look forward to.