raging, incoherent twats. I take a breath and glance over at Owen. His eyebrows are up, his hands in the pockets of his cords.
“Ready?” he inquires.
We take a walk.
07/29/09, 9:14 p.m.
So, you’d think it would be strange hanging out with Owen Findlay after all these years, but in fact it feels as comfortable and familiar as my old bedroom at the back of the house. But when I say “as comfortable,” you shouldn’t mistake that to mean “comfortable,” exactly. We head up through the back field and I can’t help but be reminded of the walks we used to take together when I was in the Youth Centre. I know I haven’t spoken much about the Youth Centre, but that’s not because it was such a bad place. The tough-on-crime crowd won’t like to hear this, but I was sort of happy there. It was quiet, for one thing — something I never got a lot of, growing up in the house that Gord built — and my days were totally routinized. People told me when to get up and when to eat and when to shower and when to study and when to exercise and when to go to bed. If Owen’s social work colleagues ever wanted to develop some kind of ideal mental-health retreat geared toward a sixteen-year-old boy who had accidentally nearly killed somebody and whose mother had just died and who couldn’t stand the sight of his father, they would very likely end up with something resembling the Youth Centre. I needed the routine and the quiet but I also needed that overarching sense of being punished — that every morning when I woke up I could be sure I would go through my day enacting a punishment. Every breath of air, every step taken, every morsel of food ingested — everything punitive.
It was Owen’s job to interview me once a week and find out what I thought and how I was doing, but he never wanted to do this in one of the centre’s concrete-coloured interview rooms, adorned as they were with industrial seventies-era office furniture, uniformly orange for some reason, and further bleakened by fluorescent lighting. Instead, Owen always insisted we “take a walk” around the grounds, which wasn’t bad because the grounds overlooked the ocean. And I know I’m starting to make this place sound like more of a resort than a penal institute, but keep in mind that this was on the coast, so pretty much everything overlooked the ocean — pubs, grocery stores, and Youth Centres alike.
The funny thing is, I remember very little about the talks I had with Owen. Mostly I just remember the sound of our feet in the dirt — the dual rhythm of our footsteps. Being lulled by our shared, repetitive trudge. And maybe that’s why, trudging along beside Owen Findlay again after all these years, I can’t help but mention this memory to him — or this lack of memory, maybe. The memory of being lulled and not thinking or talking about much of anything, even though we must have.
“That was the idea,” says Owen. “That was the idea then and now.”
I look over when he says “now,” and he’s smiling at the oncoming woods in the distance.
“Oh, this is great,” I say. “You’re using the same therapeutic techniques on me that you used when I was sixteen years old. I thought I’d come so far.”
“It wasn’t so much a technique as it was just — you know — ‘let’s go for a walk,’ ” says Owen.
I remember this from the old days. Owen says or does exactly the right thing and when you point that out, he shrugs it off as common sense — as the obvious move. It took me a while to figure out that this was one of his techniques as well.
“Horseshit, Owen,” I say.
He smiles again at the approaching trees. Owen still wears the same round, wire-frame John Lennon glasses I remember from when I was a kid, back when his hair was black with flecks of white instead of the other way around. “I worked pretty intuitively in those days,” he tells me. “I thought kids needed to be out and moving around — you in particular. That’s why I started coaching hockey. But it makes sense, right? You get upset, you go for a walk. You walk it off. People do it on instinct.”
“Yeah,” I say, feeling a little bored but also content — again, exactly what I