THERE’S A PHOTOGRAPH on my desk that was taken in the fall of 2003. Every time I look at it, I smile. Snapshots capture those tiny electric moments you want to save forever.
My girl and I are in that photo. We look like excited children. Deb has her arms raised in triumph and surprise. I’m sitting beside her with a fist pumped, obviously thrilled. We were both approaching our fifties at the time, but you wouldn’t know that from our faces. We were on a plummeting roller coaster, in the full pitch of that belly-dropping fall.
Deb and I had been together for six months by then. Our lives were a rollercoaster ride of discovering each other, finding each other’s rhythms and feeling the world shift beneath our feet. We’d both been through a pair of marriages and a rolodex of other failed relationships. It was our emotional resumés that brought us together, actually. We both knew and appreciated the difficulties of the journey.
We didn’t come together in one of the awesome emotional and sexual explosions of our younger years. Instead, we eased together in a confluence of streams. I was a First Nations man, and she was the progeny of some of the transplanted miscreants who built Australia. Her great grandmother was a West Indian slave bought on a Fremantle pier. Both of us had struggled to find our identities, and then to express them. We had both been adopted as kids. We bore similar wounds from that and both of us had drunk too much too often. Finding each other was a breath of fresh air.
Neither of us was a very conventional person. I ’d spent years on the street, behind bars and working a host of dead-end jobs. She’d worked on West Coast fishing boats, studied fused glass art with a renowned craftsman, lived in New York and partied through the hey-days of Vancouver in the early 1980s, when it was a thrilling cultural and entertainment hot spot. We both knew thieves and whores and strippers, drug dealers, bikers and madmen. We’d come to call some of them friends. We’d also rubbed elbows with financiers, celebrities, entrepreneurs, politicians and other high rollers. Somehow in that exotic mix of influences, we’d become ourselves.
The roller coaster in the picture is the old-fashioned coaster on the grounds of Vancouver’s Pacific National Exhibition. It brings to mind the days of nickel candy floss, twenty-five-cent midway rides and a fifty-cent admission charge at the gate. The roller coaster’s wooden frame and the small tin-can cars that shake and rattle along the track promise adventure. The romantic kind, not the gut-wrenching thrill of more modern, gravity-defying rides. Even so, it took us a few months to screw up our courage. We talked about the old roller coaster a lot, imagining how it would feel to ride it, reminiscing about the carnival rides of our youth. But whenever it came time to head to Playland and make it happen, there was always something more adult to do. We could see the roller coaster from where we lived, however, and in the evening sun it beckoned to us. Finally, one day there we were, walking up the ramp with our tickets in our hands.
The pleasure started as we waited in line. The faces of the people getting off the roller coaster were flushed with excitement. Their ride had lit up young and old alike from the inside. I was fascinated to see such joy. I shifted from foot to foot, amazed at how quickly the kid in each of us comes to the fore. Neither Deb nor I spoke as we handed over our tickets and stepped into the car. A 1/22/2011 spear of excitement pierced my belly. Deb and I were laughing, but it was that high-in-the-throat laugh of nervousness and tension. Anticipation gripped us as the roller coaster began the long, slow pull to the top. Then came the drop. Thirty metres almost straight down, then back up in a whoosh of air and energy that drew screams from us. The next plunge was even more of a rush.
We whipped around each bend and turn, giddy with uncontrollable laughter. There was none of the usual adult need to appear composed or proper. It was pure experience, and we felt totally alive.
We’ve been back to the roller coaster a few times since then. On each visit, I feel young and wild and dumbstruck with joy all over again. Each time, my girl and I return to our child spirits as we let go of everything that keeps us earthbound.
Staying in touch with that kid within is the secret to becoming a wise and more centred being. I wish I’d known that when I was younger. Maybe I’d have been a tad less grave, taken life’s sudden turns and drop-offs less seriously. I’d definitely have had more fun if I’d allowed myself more freedom to howl with laughter and be filled with wonder. Whenever I look at that picture on my desk, I remind myself to do that from now on.