The Four-Cylinder Indian

There are many times, especially when I'm alone, when I think I am hearing things that in fact aren't those things at all. Last night as I lay curled up in bed with my cats, reading the last few chapters of my book for that evening, I suddenly thought I heard something resembling an Aboriginal drum ceremony going on. I heard the drums and the high-pitched cries so distinctly that I actually sat up straight to listen more carefully. As soon as I had done so, I realized that this audio tribal symphony was just the washer banging around with its redundant thumping wish-wash rhythm. As per my last post, I have a fantastic palate of imagination, and so I am never too surprised at my mind's capacity to tranform the mundane. Perhaps my Aboriginal ancestors would even have considered me a visionary?
*
Okay, I agree, that is taking it a bit too far.
*
Although all stimuli that we come into contact with is delicately sifted and garnished with our own special processing flavor, not everything in my every day life makes it through my kaleidescopic imagination. Mostly it's just the usual humdrum input/output stuff that bores me silly. Sure, sometimes I hear chanting phonebooths on windy days, or drums on the wash cycle, but I'm pretty sure that I'm still on a level playing field with the stale norm, and not in need of pharmaceutical assistance anytime soon.
*
There have been a few times, though, when the input/output got a bit garbled, and left me laughing to the point of tears. One of these incidents really had nothing to do with my imagination actually, but rather my inability to interpret the strong english accent of a fellow treeplanter who I think, in hindsight, had some motor skill impairing LSD experiences in the 60's that left her tongue near paralysed. To credit myself, I was not the only one who could not interpret what she was saying most of the time.
*
We will call this treeplanter 'Sally'.
*
So there we were, Sally and I, treeplanting side by side on a flat, brushy clearcut in the back country of Merritt, B.C. in 1997. It was a warm, sunny day, and the last day of the shift before our day off. We were feeling unusually optimistic and very talkative, and our conversation meandered to different topics as we noodled our way through the brush to find open spots for our trees. At one point I asked Sally about England, where she is from. Once in a while during her response, I picked out a few words here and there so that I generally understood what she was talking about. Then she asked me about my heritage, and I told her that I am Metis - having 1/4 Aboriginal blood from my father's side. We then got separated by some bushes for a while, and when we came back together again, I started talking about a recently purchased car with an engine that needed work. And so I rambled on about the car between huffing breaths as I tried to pick up the pace a bit. I could only faintly hear Sally at that point as she trundled along with me, and combined with my scarce ability to translate her unique twist on the english language, I completely misunderstood what came next.
*
"What kind of engine does your car have in it?", was what I thought Sally had said.
*
"A four cylinder", I replied. I figured perhaps Sally was going to give me some insight into my car's engine. But instead, she just gave me a confused, blank look, nodded her head appeasingly, and said, "oh".
*
Later that day, when I rejoined the rest of my crew at the tree cache, one of my fellow planters said to me, "Hey, I heard that your dad is a four-cylinder Indian". Everyone was bent over laughing while I stood there perplexed, demanding to know what on earth they were talking about. Finally they let up and told me what Sally had been mulling over since our earlier conversation.
*
"She said that she asked you what kind of Indian your father had in him. To which you replied that he was a four-cylinder".
*
"So", they asked between gasping laughter, "how many cylinders does that make you?"
*

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Mother

Image
  “Hello, old friend,” I said. It had been 40 years since we parted ways. I stood in the afternoon sun by the side of the road, with my outstretched hand softly touching her craggy bark. Her thick, green lower bows used to touch the ground and shelter me when I was eight and nine years old. I could vaguely make out the grey rounds in the bark where lower limbs had been severed long ago. I turned my face to the sky and saw her high needled branches, which now seemed so sparse that I barely recognized her. You’ve lost some branches too , she said. I smiled. Yes, I have. Sometimes I brought friends here with me when I was a child and we told secrets in the shade of her bows. Once a couple boys came with us and told us terrible, terrible things. “Girls bleed from their vaginas,” one of them said. All the girls gasped and exchanged looks of disgust and indignation. “What are you talking about?” I demanded. “That’s disgusting.” “You’re a virgin. That’s why you don’t know about it.”
Read more

Wind in Her Hair

Image
Two decades had passed before I returned to live back in my homeland of Nanaimo, B.C. Life as I knew it had ended, its remains sorted and rendered down to bare bones in boxes. A friend who lives in Nanaimo insisted that it would be impossible for me to find a place to rent because of an over-crowded housing market. “People live in hotels for months while on waitlists,” she said. “You need a place to land first.” But on the day my realtor listed my house in Alberta as sold, I got an offer for a condo rental in Nanaimo. And right in the place I most needed to be.       In mid-December of 2021, I arrived to my small condo unit on Jingle Pot Road. The lofty ceilings made it seem even emptier during those weeks alone before my furniture arrived. But I came prepared: in my car I had packed my Christmas decorations, basic dishes and cookware, a couple IKEA chairs, an air mattress, and a tiny, wrapped present from a friend for under the tree.       When I arranged to have my things shipped
Read more

Behind the Glass

Image
In the famous words of Carrie Fisher, "Take your broken heart, make it into art." And so I did just that a couple years ago while drafting another entry for the CBC Creative Nonfiction contest. I dug this one up from the archives. It needs some air. *** The metal door clinked loudly as the officer shut it behind me. “Follow me.” He led me across a sterile room to a plastic and metal chair positioned in front of a booth, grabbed the back of the chair and motioned silently for me to sit. I sat down and looked ahead through a sheet of thick plexiglass to the opposite side. My mother stared back at me. “Hi, mom.” “Hi, sweetie.”  Small, dark specks of blood remained on her nose and chin. All the blood on the front side of her white sweater had crusted into a deep crimson from the chest down. “Mom, why are you in here and not him? It’s not fair.” “It was an outstanding warrant from a while ago. Nothing serious. They want to keep me overnight, that’s all.”
Read more