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knights_say_nih) wrote2006-01-12 06:37 pm
knights_say_nih) wrote2006-01-12 06:37 pm
Memories
Ch-3
Uncle Terry's Home.
Home was, for the moment, a boat. Actually, sort of a boat. A float home and a house boat are very different things. Houseboats are the typical image, everyone’s seen them before. They can be brought wherever needed, and you can travel and function in them. Admittedly, you don’t want to have much out on the counter, and you tend to avoid glass dishes, but you can function when they’re moving.
Float homes amount to houses picked up and sat on Styrofoam, with tooling about the edges to make them look prettier. The concrete extends down into the water, out of sight in the murky waters of the Frasier River, giving you the impression of a puddle. To get out onto the homes, there’s a rather complicated series of maneuvers involving an unhitched ramp, a rail-less wooden boardwalk (this one balanced on milk jugs) and whatever you happen to be carrying at the time.
By the time my dad and I get home, the tide is out and the ramp has turned into a ladder (wooden slats nailed to it at equal distances just for this purpose) and I have to hitch my skirt up again to get down, other hand engaged in holding on to the bag of parcels (a dress my father got me, and a necklace he wanted to get me, but I insisted on paying for myself.) There’s a guy working on the slats for the milk-jug-Zion-bridge. He looks about eighteen, give or take. I notice him. He notices me. He’s not my guitarist, and my father is right there huffing slightly from the walk and giving him the evil eye as we pass. Oh well.
I smell home before we get there. My uncle is cooking us gumbo, and ice cream or not it sets my stomach to growling. We’d gone shopping for the fish together, him getting fresh things to top up the pot this morning as the boats drove by our house. The bridges always make me seasick, and I more than want to get onto the home when we finally reach it, after a creaking journey across a slab of too-old plywood. It’s the second last in a line of shiny white homes, decorated with the perfect taste of the flamboyantly gay.
Outside is the only visual scar- and still, looking beautiful, for all my uncle bitches. It’s an antique tin tub, artfully draped with various crawling plants, covered over by a ratty old screen. Our footsteps on the wood as we walk past it set it to ‘peep’-ing. Or rather, the ducklings they have living inside it. I don’t remember why they had the ducklings. Something like their mother died, was eaten by a raccoon, a sea lion, a fisherman. Loads of things die in the water. That morning I saw a bald eagle swoop at something just off the edge of the window. That’s one of the reason the screen is resting on top of the tub.
Past the ducklings is the screen door we’re not supposed to walk through. A fine screen on a rainy day (it’s always rainy in Vancouver) is like a spider web to a fly, only not quite as sticky. I get there before my father and slide it open for him. He walks through it loudly and we’re back in our gently rocking womb of a temporary home.
Uncle Terry was in the kitchen, looking lonely, frustrated, fashionable and flour covered. Uncle Terry wears denim shirts with the sleeves ripped off. Uncle Terry reads PlayGirl. He was one of the fifty first homosexual men to be married (to a male) in Canada. He sends me designer clothes for Christmas, and tells me the Best Stories. Uncle Terry is a minister.
The minute we’re in my dad is out again, because he’s like that. He can’t not be doing things. He specifically can’t not be doing things around me and Uncle Terry, not after the weightlifting Johnny Depp conversation, which I promise to tell you about later. Dad is going to pick up movie tickets for later this evening. Terry says never mind that, get over here Steph and help me stir the flour in. Whatever Terry says to do, you do it. He’s a man who Knows What’s Going On. He’s just come back from a religious retreat in the mountains, so his voice is still a little soft.
Thirty seconds after my father leaves, we’re stirring gumbo and singing along to Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dream Coat, played at full volume. He has a good voice, a buttery voice, probably a tenor. I still sing alto, and the both of us know how. The neighbors don’t complain. We stir the flour into the gumbo mixture, because we do want it finished before Chaz and my father get back. It doesn’t burn.
Uncle Terry's Home.
Home was, for the moment, a boat. Actually, sort of a boat. A float home and a house boat are very different things. Houseboats are the typical image, everyone’s seen them before. They can be brought wherever needed, and you can travel and function in them. Admittedly, you don’t want to have much out on the counter, and you tend to avoid glass dishes, but you can function when they’re moving.
Float homes amount to houses picked up and sat on Styrofoam, with tooling about the edges to make them look prettier. The concrete extends down into the water, out of sight in the murky waters of the Frasier River, giving you the impression of a puddle. To get out onto the homes, there’s a rather complicated series of maneuvers involving an unhitched ramp, a rail-less wooden boardwalk (this one balanced on milk jugs) and whatever you happen to be carrying at the time.
By the time my dad and I get home, the tide is out and the ramp has turned into a ladder (wooden slats nailed to it at equal distances just for this purpose) and I have to hitch my skirt up again to get down, other hand engaged in holding on to the bag of parcels (a dress my father got me, and a necklace he wanted to get me, but I insisted on paying for myself.) There’s a guy working on the slats for the milk-jug-Zion-bridge. He looks about eighteen, give or take. I notice him. He notices me. He’s not my guitarist, and my father is right there huffing slightly from the walk and giving him the evil eye as we pass. Oh well.
I smell home before we get there. My uncle is cooking us gumbo, and ice cream or not it sets my stomach to growling. We’d gone shopping for the fish together, him getting fresh things to top up the pot this morning as the boats drove by our house. The bridges always make me seasick, and I more than want to get onto the home when we finally reach it, after a creaking journey across a slab of too-old plywood. It’s the second last in a line of shiny white homes, decorated with the perfect taste of the flamboyantly gay.
Outside is the only visual scar- and still, looking beautiful, for all my uncle bitches. It’s an antique tin tub, artfully draped with various crawling plants, covered over by a ratty old screen. Our footsteps on the wood as we walk past it set it to ‘peep’-ing. Or rather, the ducklings they have living inside it. I don’t remember why they had the ducklings. Something like their mother died, was eaten by a raccoon, a sea lion, a fisherman. Loads of things die in the water. That morning I saw a bald eagle swoop at something just off the edge of the window. That’s one of the reason the screen is resting on top of the tub.
Past the ducklings is the screen door we’re not supposed to walk through. A fine screen on a rainy day (it’s always rainy in Vancouver) is like a spider web to a fly, only not quite as sticky. I get there before my father and slide it open for him. He walks through it loudly and we’re back in our gently rocking womb of a temporary home.
Uncle Terry was in the kitchen, looking lonely, frustrated, fashionable and flour covered. Uncle Terry wears denim shirts with the sleeves ripped off. Uncle Terry reads PlayGirl. He was one of the fifty first homosexual men to be married (to a male) in Canada. He sends me designer clothes for Christmas, and tells me the Best Stories. Uncle Terry is a minister.
The minute we’re in my dad is out again, because he’s like that. He can’t not be doing things. He specifically can’t not be doing things around me and Uncle Terry, not after the weightlifting Johnny Depp conversation, which I promise to tell you about later. Dad is going to pick up movie tickets for later this evening. Terry says never mind that, get over here Steph and help me stir the flour in. Whatever Terry says to do, you do it. He’s a man who Knows What’s Going On. He’s just come back from a religious retreat in the mountains, so his voice is still a little soft.
Thirty seconds after my father leaves, we’re stirring gumbo and singing along to Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dream Coat, played at full volume. He has a good voice, a buttery voice, probably a tenor. I still sing alto, and the both of us know how. The neighbors don’t complain. We stir the flour into the gumbo mixture, because we do want it finished before Chaz and my father get back. It doesn’t burn.