I remember saying this blog would be about memories...

...so this entry is elsewhere. Cuz it isn't really about memories at all!

I remember feeling uncomfortable in my shoes...

The time, late 1986. The place, a high-rise office building in Vancouver, BC.

I had acquired a job as a receptionist/secretary for a legal insurance company that was just getting off the ground. I had to dress "office" for work, which I didn't mind, but I usually managed to show some sort of individuality by wearing funky shoes with my boring secretary clothes. My favorite pair of pumps were a bright turquoise satin pair with very pointy toes, straight from the 1960's, and oh, so new wave! I bought them at a garage sale down in America for about fifty cents.

I was sitting at my desk one day when one of the lawyers that worked for us, a weasel-like short little man, wandered through the office. He stopped at my desk, looking down at my feet. Without moving his gaze, he said slowly, "Nice shoes."

I felt uncomfortable.

"Thanks," I said.

His gaze didn't lift. "No, really...I like your shoes," he almost muttered to himself.

I felt really uncomfortable. Small-town girl in the big city, I had never heard of a shoe fetish, but I found myself confronted with a man who was becoming very, VERY interested in my shoes. I felt violated, and I wasn't even sure why! I crossed my feet under my chair, as far under my chair as they would go. Sounding as bored as I could, I said, "Thanks. Don't you have some work to do?"

Finally he looked up at me, kind of chuckled sneeringly, if you can imagine what that sounds like, and wandered out. After that day, he always managed to slither through my section of the office and check out what shoes I was wearing, which, because of my love for shoes, were usually pointy or buckled or leather. In fact, I didn't own any boring shoes. I seriously considered buying some.

What a creep.

I remember winning the "Good Sportsmanship" award.

Every year they'd make us elementary students compete in a Track and Field day. Every year I'd try my hardest, come in just about last in every event, feel like crying but manage to somehow hide it...and then be called up in front of everybody in the gym later at the awards ceremony and given the public humiliation of the Good Sportsmanship award. They only ever give that ribbon to losers, even little kids know that. I certainly knew it. So up to the front of the whole school I'd go, again feeling like crying but managing not to, shake the teacher's hand and take my ribbon. They may as well have written "Loser" on my forehead with a Sharpie.

I think I won four of those stupid ribbons. I didn't save them.

I remember my first "punk rock" gig.

I think it was my friend, Sandi, who suggested we go see The Enigmas, GoForThree, and Slow do a gig at the Commodore. I was very excited, nervous about what to wear, how to behave, all of that stuff. We got duded up and drove into Vancouver.

The Commodore, as I learned later, is a beautiful, fabulous place to see bands play, and this night was no exception. The place was about full, and every person was so different from who I was usually surrounded with at my Christian college campus, it was like a sparkling adventure. Spiky black hair, the smell of sweaty leather, the boots, the eyeliner!! It was probably 1984, but I'm not sure of the year.

The first band, GoForThree (or however that's written) weren't very exciting. The next band, Slow, was amazing, really energetic and creative. The final band of the night was the Enigmas, a garage-type band.

Sandi took me by the hand and dragged me right up to the front when Slow started, and we stayed there, squished up against the stage as the slam-dancing (that's what "moshing" used to be called, kids) raged at our backs. The press of bodies against us, the "accidental" groping, began to be overwhelming, so we hopped up on stage and sat cross-legged to watch the music. Nobody stopped us! We had a fabulous view of Paul Mackenzie, the lead singer, going through his mad gyrations and contortions. As the show really heated up, he grabbed a knife and pretended to disembowel himself--he must of had a bag of raw liver taped to his stomach--and it spilled out all over the stage. Sandi and I figured this was punk rock, so we grabbed it and started hurling it at the rest of the crowd. Really, there was no other course of action even worth considering! You would have done the same thing.

I remember looking over the sweaty, young crowd, looking at the mad bands, and thinking "This is where I belong! This makes sense to me." By 1987, I played the Commodore, opening for the Scramblers. As I stood on stage for the sound check, I vividly remembered the gig a few years before where I had decided this was where I should be. And there I was. It was quite unfulfilling, actually. Maybe I should have brought raw liver, maybe that would have helped.

I remember the year my mom discovered Snow in a Can.

Remember the old farm house I lived in, the one I just mentioned in the previous post? It was the parsonage for Mount Olive Church, back when this church was a country church six miles west of a small town in Alberta. As the church could afford, the house was slowly updated. I remember when the coal furnace was removed and replaced with gas, I remember when the ringer washing machine was replaced with a modern top-loader...

...I digress, but with a purpose. I want you to understand how quaint and old this house was. You need to be able to picture that in the winter, we could draw patterns in the frost on our bedroom window just like Laura did in Little House on the Prairie.

I remember Mom bringing out this blue can with a red lid one day as we were preparing for Christmas. "It's decorative snow!" she said. "We can make pretty patterns using stencils on our windows..." She seemed very excited. First she used the can to spray the white foam all over our real Christmas tree...the pine smell was replaced with the odour of propellants, and if you squinted, our tree almost looked fake. In my childishness, I thought this was very clever! We could never afford a REAL fake tree.

Then Mom used the can to spray white foam into all the angled corners of the window, covering all the real frost with a nubbly sheen of faux frost. This was not quite as clever, in my opinion. What window could I draw on now? Only my bedroom window upstairs, all the others were out of reach! Oh well. Mom knew best. My little sister and I begged to be allowed to do some of the spraying, and I think we were allowed to try...but we sprayed it on unevenly. The can went back to Mom.

She still uses that Snow in a Can stuff. I don't get it. Maybe if we lived somewhere hot like Arizona and frost was something we dreamed about along with the sugar plums and other Christmas visions, then it would make sense to fabricate it on our windows. But real frost is so pretty, and here in Alberta (especially in our old poorly heated farm house) we had plenty of it! No sir, I don't get it.

I remember being afraid of the toilet in the middle of the night.

When I was a little kid, we lived in an old farmhouse out in the country. My bedroom was upstairs, and the ceiling sloped on both sides...in a larger house, it would have been the attic, I guess. My bed was tucked into the narrow place where the ceiling met with the wall. I had to watch how I sat up in the middle of the night, or I'd bonk my head!

The trip to the bathroom in the dark of night is where my fear comes in. Unlike many kids, I wasn't aware of any monsters under my bed or in my closet. My fear was directed towards the toilet. I knew with certainty that if I wasn't back in bed before the toilet stopped flushing, that I would be dragged back and sucked into the vortex. Being close to my bed didn't count...I was sure I could be dragged back down the stairs, through the piano room, through the kitchen and into the bathroom and sucked down the toilet unless I was in my bed with my head under the covers.

So, here's how it would go. I'd relieve myself. I'd put my hand on the lever and assume the "On your marks" position. Then flush, run like my life depended on it, back through the obstacle course of the first floor, up the stairs, and dive into my bed, heart racing.

I never told anyone about this fear. It was mine, and I didn't want to share it. As an adult, I watch this whole memory with amusement, but also with wonder. Almost every night I faced a near-death experience and won! I had set up for myself an almost impossible obstacle, and then would conquer it every time I had to relieve myself. Talk about esteem-building! Is that what our childhood fears are for...so we can practice survival in the face of our fears?

Thanks to Papa Herman for sparking this memory for me.

I remember being witnessed to by a true Rastafarian. (Warning, dear children, there will be drug references in this memory!)

I was hanging out at the Channel 1 Klub in Vancouver, just down some stairs from Denman Street. There were three or four guys from Jamaica, dreadlocks, big funny hats and everything. I got into a conversation with one guy, and he asked me if I wanted to smoke a joint with him...at the time, that was a bit of a rhetorical question with no need for an answer from me. We headed to a car park for some privacy, and Mr. Rasta (I can't remember his name) pulled out one of the fattest doobies I'd ever seen. We shared it, then headed back into the club. As we sat down by the bar to talk, he pulled a little well-worn New Testament from his back pocket. He opened it and asked me if I knew that Jesus loved me.

I burst into fits of giggles...I just couldn't quite put the whole experience together in my head. First, Mr. Rasta gets me more wasted than I'd ever been before up to that time, then he starts sharing the gospel with me. 'Interesting witnessing technique', I remember thinking, 'If people smoked you up first, you might be more inclined to listen to people proselytize!'

He shared the whole thing with me, the whole Romans Road...and I just kept giggling. I kept seeing myself in Sunday School memorizing the very verses he was reading to me, and then seeing myself at that moment, sitting in the dark club listening to him. The two images just didn't juxtapose.

Part of me wonders...was God reminding me that He was there, watching over me? I was certainly trying to ignore Him as much as possible, yet somehow He was always there, peeking through a window, eye to the keyhole, ear to the wall...unobtrusive, yet inescapable. Nice thought...

I remember winning "Most Improved" in our college choir.

If you've been reading my blog for awhile, you'll remember Mr. Janz. He was conducting us through Handel's "Elijah" for Masterworks Choir at Trinity Western University. This was going to be a big deal, a performance with professional soloists, an orchestra...we were excited and nervous to take on this mammoth challenge.

It seemed that Mr. Janz was constantly singling me out. For the first part of the semester, he would stop the music and say something like, "Did everyone hear how Paula did that? It was wrong. Paula, let's try it..." and I'd have to work the part out in front of everybody until it was right. Mr. Janz, as all good musicians should be, was a perfectionist. Couple my crush on him with my own perfectionism, and you can imagine how humiliating this whole process was for me.

But by the end of the semester, he would stop the music and say, "Did everyone hear how Paula did that? She was the only one who did it right!! Now, Paula, sing it for us so everyone can hear how to do it." (In case you haven't guessed, I sing loudly whether I know what I'm doing or not...) And when it came time to vote for "Most Improved", apparently I was the obvious choice, the only one brash enough to make my mistakes and improvements in full view of the class.

I still wonder if he ever got married. Ahem...

Not really about remembering at all....but rules are made to be broken, yes?

Your Inner European is Italian!

Passionate and colorful. You show the world what culture really is.

Who's" Your Inner European?

I remember shopping for a winter coat with my mom.

We lived near Three Hills, I was about 12, and I needed a new winter coat. We drove into town and went to Fields. I think it was Fields even way back then...I could be wrong. I'm sure the location was the same as the Fields now; not much changes in these small towns.

I remember walking into the store and seeing the coats on the racks. I walked over, picked out a red down-filled coat, tried it on, and said, "This is the one, Mom. I like this one." She made me try on every other coat in the store to see if I liked some other coat better. I didn't. We spent an hour in there, and in the end I walked out of the store with the coat I had known I liked from the very first.

I am sure this confused my mother. I know I was certainly confused by her that day. Why try on more coats if you've already found the One?