Reunion
We always traveled by bus. The Greyhound. Two little kids, traveling across the country by themselves, with no supervision, just a couple bags of clothes, a few dollars, and some snacks. It seems ludicrous when I think about it now. What kind of people put their kids on a bus to travel that far? I hate the thought of it now, and I hated the bus back then. This was before smartphones and portable electronics of any kind. We would just have to sit there, looking out the window, smelling people’s farts and listen to the slish-slosh of the bathroom at the back of the bus. And if you got stuck sitting beside the bathroom? Good God - it was the worst. Whenever we went to visit our Dad we always had to take the bus, and now that we are going to meet up with Mom again, it was the dreaded bus again. I tried to read on the bus, but I was just a little kid, so it’s not like I was getting fully engrossed in a novel. And then when I did find some comics and tried to read those, I would start getting pains in my stomach…like a sort of weird motion sickness. We sat on that bus, not knowing our fate, drifting through the Rockies and towards the Prairies, wondering if things would be different when we arrived in Edmonton.
I was anxious, nervous, scared, excited - so many emotions bounced around in that little body of mine. I was excited to see my Mom again. It’s strange how the anger toward her faded when it was time to get on the road and see her. When we’re born, our Moms are all we have. They are our whole world. Growing up like I did, in the chaos, it all felt normal, because that’s all I had ever known. I wasn’t mad about the violence, moving all the time, or the strange encounters we had with the street people my Mom and Dale were friends with; I was mad because she left me. I was mad because, even though I lived in chaos, that chaos had some certainty to it. I understood it. I knew what to expect. When you’re pulled out of that as a kid and thrown into more chaos (a different kind of chaos), it changes things. You’re already jumpy and scared because of what you’ve been through, but now you don’t know what to expect next, and the worry always is that it’s going to get even worse. It wasn’t worse with Dad - it was just different. Better in some ways and worse in others. Going back to be with my Mom now for the summer, I had this bizarre optimism that things could be better.
After what was probably 20 hours of travelling (at least that’s what it felt like), we arrived in Edmonton, and it was one of the happiest days of my life. I ran to my Mom with such joy and enthusiasm to see her, I felt like my whole heart was going to burst wide open. She looked better than I remembered; she was smiling and happy too, and things felt right again. Dale was there, and I was happy to see him too. I hugged them both like I wasn’t ever going to let go. I can still feel that hug now, almost 40 years later. It’s the kind of embrace that you feel through your whole body, warming your body from within and tightening with love every second. I wasn’t a vindictive kid who was waiting to give them both a piece of my mind - I just didn’t know what to expect when that reunion happened.
The old Camaro that they had left Quesnel in had been restored by Dale at the autobody shop he was working at, they had on nice clothes, and they took us out to show us around Edmonton. We went for lunch, I got a new sweatsuit, and they took me to get my hair cut (my Dad was balding and in my entire life he always refused to get my hair cut…so it was badly needed). It was one of the happiest days of my life, because things felt right, and the chaos that had always enveloped my life was gone. It felt good. I remember thinking, “Maybe this was just the fresh start that they needed.” And maybe we could be a real family.
Even today, that unguided optimism brings tears to my eyes.
