from “Hot Fudge High,” which was what Icy Dream Inc. called the weekend training seminar they offered to franchise employees. I remember at the time being pretty excited by the whole thing, because it meant we had to go into the city for the weekend and stay in a hotel, and I was the youngest person in the whole seminar, even though I didn’t look it. Gord introduced me to everyone there as his “new assistant manager” and at the bar afterward someone handed me a pint without a second glance.
Owen accepts every photo my father hands over, gazes at it for however long it takes for Gord to unfurl the fascinating Rank-centric anecdote attached, then politely places the photo in a growing stack on the end table beside him in time for Gord to hand him another. I decide that I will allow this to continue for as long as it takes me to hook up the wireless modem I’ve been fiddling with all day. It might seem a little rude toward Owen, but it’s good to have Gord distracted and nattering at someone else for a while. Besides, the modem has been making me crazy, and I can’t stand to put it aside until I’ve got it hooked up. My computer won’t pick up the signal. I have spoken, after waiting on hold for two successive eternities, to the tech support people representing both the manufacturers of the computer and the modem — neither party being of any help whatsoever — and I refuse to do it again. If I can’t figure it out myself, I am going to throw the computer away and buy another, more expensive one. I don’t give a shit anymore.
So as Gord hands over photographs to Owen, I sit there going back and forth between the modem and my computer, checking for a connection, occasionally giving absent-minded answers to Gord’s inane promptings, e.g.: “Remember that now Gordie?” “Didn’t care for that, much, did he son?” “Guess you showed them, eh, Gordie?”
And I’m muttering, “Yup. Yeah, I remember. Shit! This stupid . . . Yeah, I know Gord. Goddamnit!”
And Owen is saying things like: “He barely fits into that sweater!” and “That’s not the same sign as they have at the ID now is it? When’d you get that sign changed, Gordon?”
And as pissed off as I am at the computer situation I’m secretly very grateful to have something to distract me from the cure for insomnia that’s happening on the other side of the room.
And that’s when I exclaim: “You complete and total fucker!” and notice that I have shouted these words into an uncharacteristic sound vacuum. So I glance up at Gord and Owen who are leaning toward each other like school boys sharing a textbook, only they’re not reading, they’re looking at a picture together.
And Gord has stopped talking, so I know it’s a picture of Sylvie.
What’s more, I know what photo it is. I don’t know how but I do. Maybe just because I saw it and handled it so many times in my youth — and saw Gord and Sylvie do the same, because everyone in my family always loved the damn thing, were always passing it around, taking it out of the album to show friends and relatives. It was just one of those photos. In these days of digicams you can take a picture a second and delete whatever looks like crap, so a decent snap of someone — where their eyes aren’t half closed or they don’t look like they have six chins — doesn’t have the same magic of really good old photographs. The uncanny luck of a picture that not only gets across everything good in the moment, but somehow composes itself into a representation of something more, something beyond that moment — even better than the moment itself.
It’s almost like a lie, a good photo. An unbearable lie. Like that moment you feel yourself starting to wake up after the best dream of your life. And you hold your eyes shut and you just lie there; you can’t stand it, you’re so disappointed to be waking up.
It’s the photograph of me and Sylvie after my Confirmation — that’s the photo Gord is holding. He took it himself, out in the church parking lot, immediately following the ceremony.
Finally Gord speaks.
“Mother and son.”
“That’s a nice shot,” murmurs Owen. He looks like he would be happy to sit there gazing away at the image of me