Weirdos are Living in My House

Chapter 6 Hippy?

After a while, my Dad got a job, and we got back into more of a routine, which suited me just fine. My brother and I even started doing stuff together again, because if we squabbled, my dad would tell us to go to 41st Avenue and play hopscotch on the yellow line. 41st Avenue was a really busy street, and we knew he didn't mean it. He was just warning us to get out of the house. My Dad wasn't a loud man, but he was wicked fast if you made him mad, and he didn't threaten you and then ignore you like Mom did.

There was a park down the street from our house, and we'd go and play scrub baseball, where everyone took turns playing all the positions, rotating around until they got to bat. We never had enough kids to play teams, and it was more fun than playing teams anyway. Even players who weren't very good, like me, got to bat and pitch, and didn't just get sent out to centre field to count the daisies, and then get yelled at if a ball happened to hit them or bounce right next to them when they weren't paying attention. I wasn't much for organized sports. I always got picked last when kids were choosing teams for PE, and I hated sports day. That wasn't because of Vancouver though. I hated sports day in Dawson Creek too. I guess I was getting used to Vancouver, and didn't mind it quite so much. Going to Stanley Park was almost like gumping around our old neighbourhood. Tammy and I would take the bus to Stanley Park and go to the zoo and look at the monkeys, or feed the ducks, or walk on the trails, or look for starfish on the beach. She never got lost on the buses, even though she was younger than me. I got on the wrong bus all the time and would have to wait for it to go all the way around again so I could get home. Or I'd just ask the driver how to get where I wanted to go. They didn't seem to mind. Mostly I liked being lost. It was interesting to see other people's neighbourhoods. Some of them were full of big fancy houses, and some of them didn't have any nice houses at all. There were areas where I wouldn't get off the bus no matter how much I was supposed to catch a different bus. Scary men with missing fingers stumbled around old hotels. My Dad called it "skid row" when we passed there, in the car, on our way to eat at Ho Ho's in Chinatown. That was a big treat. We ate chow mein and lemon chicken, and little bowls of soup with bits of green onions.

My Mom and Dad didn't take buses. I don't think they knew how. I liked the buses, especially the trolley buses that were kind of attached with poles to overhead wires that sparked sometimes. If the poles fell off, the buses would stop and the drivers would have to attach them again, while cars and trucks backed up behind the buses and honked their horns, and the adults on the bus said things like: "Oh great. Now I'm going to be late for work." My Mom said it was babyish to say trolley buses, and I should just call them buses, so I tried to remember to do that around her.

So that summer passed, with going to the park or going to the beach, or going to the swimming pool. There was a lot of going places and not much of staying home. My Dad was working, and my Mom was going to university, even in the summer, and my brother was mostly hanging out with Shane, and my sister was just being a two year old, going to the babysitter and playing with her little friend Nicholas next door. Sometimes I babysat Nicholas and his little brother, but I wasn't good at it. I always fell asleep, and after a while their mom stopped asking me. I don't know why, but there was something about being in a house that was always tidy, and never had overflowing ashtrays and empty bottles and dirty glasses and a mom who didn't think there was something wrong with baking and a dad who didn't get all snide about going to work that made me very sleepy. So, we were five main people in our house, but we were sort of like planets in the solar system, all with our own moons of people that we sometimes brought with us, but all in our own orbit around the sun that was our house, but hardly ever being in the same place at the same time. If that makes sense.

We got the first weirdo before school started for me to go into Grade Six and Dan into Grade Seven. He wasn't really weird. I knew him already because he'd stayed at our house in Dawson Creek lots of times when I was little. His parents knew my parents, so it was that kind of thing, where he was kind of like a cousin even though we weren't related. When my science teacher was teaching us about cold blooded animals, he said that there was a story that if you tried to put a frog in a pot of hot water, it would jump right out again, but if you put the frog in cold water and turned on a little bit of heat, it would get used to the warm water, and then when you turned the heat up a little more, the frog would get used to that, and you could keep doing that until the water was boiling and the frog would cook without even trying to get out of the water. He said he didn't know if it was true, because he didn't like frog soup and so had never tried it. My science teacher was pretty funny when he wanted to be. Ryan - that was his name - was like the first bit of heat, and I was the frog not knowing to get out of the water.