Inuksuit

The bubble-wrapped package showed up in my mailbox about the middle of last month. It wasn't the fun-size bubble-wrap that we all think we are too mature to pop, but the small-cell kind; the kind they make into envelopes by backing it with heavy paper so they look like ravioli. This particular pillow-shaped ravioli was over-stuffed so as to remind me of those fringed souvenir pillows from places like Niagara Falls or Las Vegas. If Staples sold souvenir pillows, I imagine they would look just like this package.

It was not until I saw the return address that I recognized what it was: a pair of cassette tapes that I had bought on eBay.

This was very exciting.

Since I discovered the online auction site, I have regularly returned to search for a variety of signs and totems of my past.

It happens all the time: I have something that dredges up some association to the past and I wonder it it's out there. Whenever I would wonder whatever became of the such-and-such toy, or the so-and-so book that I used to have, I would look on eBay to see if was out there.

A family photo taken at Man and his World makes me think about the Ca-na-da song that Bobby Gimby recorded and then I go looking to see if that once-ubiquitous anthem of our national centennial might still be available.

It's kind of like asking permission to have a history. Are your memories worthy of being offered for sale by someone else?

And this is the genius of eBay: making nostalgia into a scavenger hunt. It's the gaming of memory.

Do I have the correct spelling? How would the seller present the item? What key words would they use? Would they spell those correctly?

What is the right combination of breadcrumbs to lure the memory into view.

eBay understands the power of human beings to make bad decisions in an auction situation while drunk on nostalgia. Baby boomers buying back their childhoods are an important part of the business model.

I remember being so impressed with my Secret Sam spy briefcase with its hidden camera, periscope, dart-like scroll for sending secret messages and collapsible sniper rifle; those were simpler times. It was a toy, but it was also something that grown-ups had. James Bond had a secret briefcase; my dad had a briefcase: therefore my dad was Ja--. (That can't be right.)

I got the toy and I played with all of its parts. I remember taking pictures with the spy camera at Man and his World. And, of course, I broke the toy, lost parts and generally—eventually—outgrew the toy.

And then, as I evolved into another ravioli-shaped middle-aged guy, I wondered whatever became of that toy and, naturally, whether they might have one on eBay.

And they did.

So I bid on it.

And as I was bidding and re-bidding on this objectively depraved plaything, I became increasingly irrational. I was convinced that I could once again play with it as I did when I had it the first time.

My adult brain must have known that was impossible, but my memory-addled brain went straight back to the days when I would run through the neighbor's backyards with my sniper rifle, sneaking up on my friends, pretend-shooting them and then arguing whether I had hit them or not. Trying to do that now would get me shot and the bullets would most definitely not be plastic.

The hunting of the totem and, indeed, of the memory itself is the thing. The remembering and the searching and the bidding and the waiting are each more intoxicating than the step before. The debauchery does not end until when, in the cold light of day, the package comes.

When my new-old toy came in the mail, the briefcase with the secret camera and the collapsible sniper rifle, my excitement was immediately cured, my nostalgia lifted. I was struck by how small the briefcase was.

It was like it was made for a child.

It sounds silly to even try and describe, but, in that moment of unwrapping, when memory crashed headlong into reality.... It was like staring down at a long-ago pencil mark on a kitchen wall that recorded how much you had grown. At the moment the memory was recorded it was an achievement, but, now, it just reminds you how much time has passed through my hands.

That is the danger of being reunited with your past. It's what people talk about when they talk about being unable to go home. Past is passed and here is now and never the two should meet.

The power of memory is not in its accuracy, but in its power to evoke. Like the auction of some long-forgotten toy, the hunt is intoxicating because of the many associations that are anchored to the totem.

The secret of the Secret Sam is in its power to make me think about Joe and Peter and Toby and Micheal and our games of Cops and Robbers. I think about them and the others that I could invite to my birthday parties and I compare that to the few friends I have now and how they are so far away....

“Time, time, time, see what's become of me....”

The cassette tapes in my office supply store souvenir pillow contained a version of a radio show which was, itself, an imperfect artifact of a holiday tradition of my childhood.

Like the sniper rifle in the scaled-down briefcase, this recording was a scaled-down version of a holiday broadcast that Montrealers of a certain age looked forward to every Christmas. As broadcast, the program might run up to four hours, as packaged, it is just under ninety minutes. Unlike the live broadcast, it is the result of sober decisions regarding the length of recording tape and the costs of manufacturing and not pure sentiment for the season.

Somewhat sobered by my earlier eBay hunts, I knew what I was getting when I bid on this set. I had looked for a long time for an as-aired recording of one of these shows. For a time, they used to air one annually on a Canada-based short-wave station, but I always seemed to be one software update away from capturing it. Occasionally, I would see vinyl copies of the commercial release come up for auction, but I had neither the asking price, nor a record player.

The memory of listening to the broadcast, coupled with its restricted access made it, over time, the white whale of holiday sentiment. You want it because you want it and you want it more because you can't have it. And, because the value is so personal that it is hard to explain, to justify, then, with no small measure of defensiveness, desire ticks up even higher.

But now, the hunt was over.

After all the bubble wrap was removed, I had in my hands a copy of Paul Reid's Christmas.

Very exciting.

I recognize that, with very limited exceptions, almost nobody is going to appreciate how I felt to be finally in possession of these tapes.

PaulReid had a nighttime show on English-language radio station CJAD in Montreal through most of the Sixties and Seventies. This was still during the time when radio shows had local hosts and the hosts were allowed to have personalities. Their shows were personal to them and not to some sort of algorithm worked out by the programming department.

Each weeknight, when not preempted by sports or world events, Reid interviewed visiting celebrities and played what is now disparagingly called “easy listening” music. He read poetry and he told stories.

It sounds old-fashioned to describe and, in truth, it was a bit of a throw-back even then, but Paul Reid's warm baritone was just the warm milk his listeners needed to help them put the day to bed and even consider the possibility of sleep.

No amount of twisting on the volume control could entirely drown out the times in which we were living, but, after the news and their relentless reports of land wars in Asia and the Middle East, language war in Quebec and any number of constitutional crises—foreign and domestic—a little Andre Kostelanetz helped to take some of the edge off.

The highlight of the year was when he did his Christmas show. It was his annual tribute to his parents and fifteen brothers and sisters. In his fond remembrances of growing up during the Depression and the holiday traditions of those days, his listeners somehow each found their own way back the families, the fireplaces and the traditions of their own memory.

It has taken me years to appreciate that it was through his honesty and the fondness of his recollection that his listeners found connections to and association with his story.

Reid was unapologetically a Catholic, but, for him, Christmas was as much about sharing an openness with people as it was about faith. To him, saying “Merry Christmas” was another way of saying “I love you.”

I can't claim to have heard the show each year without fail, but I do remember thinking it was important that it was on. I can remember more than once tuning in and catching the tail-end of the program and feeling disappointed that I had missed it—usually for reasons I would regret in comparison.

In Canada, we do not have the one-two punch of Thanksgiving and Christmas to focus our thinking on the holidays. At least in Montreal, coming as it did, in early December, Paul Reid's show served to re-set your seasonal compass. It did more to put listeners in a place of gratitude and thanks-giving than any amount of holiday specials on TV or store-wide sales.

It's been a generation since since Paul Reid was last on the air and yet the recollection of this program has stayed with me, locked away in that small closet of moments and experience that remind me that I am still alive, still human.

In the same way that there are particular holiday ornaments, or a recording of “The Little Drummer Boy, or a particular film version of “A Christmas Carol” that may be a part of your personal journey through the holidays, this is part of mine.

We are fortunate, I suppose, to live in an age where gateways to sentiment are readily available, just a download away, but, like holiday tinsel wrapped around the beater bar of your vacuum cleaner, stripped of context, they can look pretty cheesy.

Like giving a toy sniper rifle to a six-year-old, there is much about this time of year that does not stand careful scrutiny. When compared to ever-shortening periods of daylight, falling temperatures and the snow and ice that make even simple journeys treacherous, decorating for the holidays may seem like that string quartet that played while the Titanic sank, but it is precisely for these reasons that it is important for each of us to find our way back to whatever “home” might mean for us.

I, regrettably, have one of those minds that can more easily remember every mistake I have ever made, every sleight I have felt, every criticism I have ever received, than I can any of their opposites. Sure, I was disappointed to see that the briefcase was smaller than I remembered it would be, but what was harder for me to appreciate was the fact that I got the toy in the first place. And the thoughts behind all that generosity are equally hard for me to connect with.

But it was there.

I was fortunate to grow up two parents, a brother and a sister. My parents did the best they could to take care of us, keep us safe, and honor those things that we felt were important to us and for us. It can take a long time to recognize the truth of any experience and far too often it is not until your time is all but gone that realization is even possible and appreciation within reach.

I was brought up with few religious traditions. We were affiliated with the Anglican Church and so I have strong associations between the “hap-hap-happiest time of the year” and the legato tempos of dirge and laments. (I suppose that is why I can connect Christmas and sniper rifles.) This is part of what makes it all the more important to hang on to whatever totems and inuksuit I can find to help point me to a sentiment and a perspective that I can work with.

“Inuksuit”?

You heard me.

Inuksuit are man-made stone landmarks found across northern North America. Among other things, they are used for navigation, to mark places of veneration. In a place free of natural landmarks, they help a traveler find their way and sustain them in their journey.

Landmarks are few and far between both on the barren tundra and in our very-cluttered real life. You gather what you can find—rocks, toys, books, music—pile it high and then strike off in what you hope is the right direction. You going as far as you can, out of sight of land, of the familiar, but never so far as to lose sight of that last marker. When you think you can't see it is when you stop and look for a new stone, or go online and look for an old memory....

These tapes still evoke the same feelings, but it is less because of what they are and more because of what they represent: a simpler time in my life, a time when I had fewer responsibilities and more opportunities, more answers and fewer questions.

That is, I suppose, the greatest gift we, as humans, can give ourselves, these tokens, these personal markers that lead us back to our past.

Our path through life is not linear, but, like the very structure of ourselves, helical and multi-stranded. We journey forward, we circle back, we make new connections and we reinforce those connections already made and it is all made possible by a set of markers, the guideposts of memory that we pull together and pile up so that they may be seen more clearly.

With each lap, we are moving forward and yet we are also climbing up the helix. The more distant the memory, the larger we have to make its marker so that it might remain in view. This is perhaps what makes the toys of childhood seem larger than they really were, the times simpler, the emotions purer and the food taste richer.

It is only fitting that we have special days in our year set aside for reminiscence and sentiment that are close to the end of the year. Daylight is scarce, nights are long and the weather forces us to turn inward. It is at times like this that our pasts are, like the images in the passengers side mirror, closer than they appear.

The winter holidays are the time to unpack your inuksuk and examine each stone. Learn from them, rebuild them and then, with the days getting longer once again, set of on the next lap of our journey.