that there truly was top-40 radio stations, and everyone listened to the same music, a hit was everywhere: on our mix tapes, on movie soundtracks, on the radio, especially on the radio, at least twice an hour, and we would know all the words, and if we didn't, they were printed on the inside of the CD booklet, so we could find them, learn them, sing along.
that we would walk over the hill at Sauble Beach and end up at the roller rink on a Friday night, listening to top-40 country music and silly pop hits from the 1970s as we circled on the asphalt, holding hands and sometimes kissing, just kids in baseball hats and braces, quoting Monty Python and the Holy Grail, flirting endlessly, flirting that went nowhere because we were eleven, twelve, thirteen years old; sex was light-years away, something we read about in the pages of YM but never did, never even considered for ourselves, because how could we? We were kids at the rollerpark.
that we took trips to the Keady flea market, the Mennonite girls with their strong forearms and bad teeth working the fruit and veggie stands, and us yearning for something delicious and wrapped in plastic, tarts and strudels that were homelier than anything from a restaurant but the ugliness just made it taste better; endless toys to pick over and examine, pop-culture references I would never understand, matchbox cars whose metal bodies were already hot under the July sun at ten in the morning; thirsty in the heat and the crowds; and then going over to the barns where the animals were sold and seeing the oldest-order Mennonite women wrapped in black wool capes, under black wool bonnets, with black running shoes, ancient already at 20 years old, and me turning self-conscious in my tank top and shorts, feeling the judgement of an old God on my bare shoulders; and then sticking my fingers into the rabbit cages and pulling them back out before they bit.
that there were snow days in schools; that black ice on the roads held the country kids at home, unable to ride the bus; that the town kids would show up and teachers might not; and a harried-sounding faculty member might announce that people could study in the library or hang out in the gym, or that we could leave, and there was a great scraping-back of chairs on linoleum floors, and we would get out coats and snowpants from lockers and make plans—your parents won't be home, he has cable—and then we would just leave, go out into heavy weather, snow falling from a steel-gray sky, and sometimes we would go back to someone's house and eat bowls of cereal and watch music videos, but sometimes we would wade through hip-deep snow, through the cemetery, breathless and screaming with holy laughter.
that the farmland of southwestern Ontario would feel like the centre of the world, the blue sky piled with thunderheads, the green boundlessness of corn spikes and the shock of electric-yellow canola, the perfect circles of bales and the shagginess of stooks, a lazy gang of dairy cows out in the field, lying down when it was going to rain and chewing constantly regardless of weather; that between farms were towns with drive-in movie theatres and Christian bookstores, and that those hills would feel like the most natural thing in the world, and eventually, mountains and forests and plains would become Away and those farms and little towns would be Here.
that I could watch a thousand sunsets over Lake Huron and never get tired of them: the glowing peaches and thick reds and dreamy golds, the ripples of clouds reflecting oranges and cream, or cloudless skies where the whole horizon blazed with unyielding sun, with the fire finally dropping into the lake as the clock circled to ten at night, the sand under my feet cooling by degrees as I stood and watched the sky's colours fade to a spill of stars.
that if someone had a camera, there was a one-in-three chance they would ever develop the film, that phone were attached to the walls at our homes and schools, that twenty-five cents could buy a call for parents to come pick us up from the movie theatre or a friend's house, but otherwise it was notes on the counter, notes passed in class, mailed letters, pictures torn from magazines, messages left on machines that the whole family might hear, and that we could disappear into the places between places, unseen and untracked and unfound and a certain type of free.
that we would haunt libraries, bookstores, school auditoriums, coffee shops that served BLT sandwiches for $3.45, empty classrooms, the hallways of school at 4:30 PM; places that were, it felt, just for us; kids with no money and nowhere else to be, who wanted to keep hanging out despite there being nothing to do; so we made plays, we wrote short stories, we traded mix tapes and burned CDs, we drew in each other's sketchbooks, we drew on bathroom walls, we cut up our clothes, we smoked each other's cigarettes, we kissed, we cried, we laughed, we told each other's jokes and each other's secrets, we thought we were inventing the world. We piled our stupid lonely teenage hearts together and sometimes, years later, despite everything, they stuck.
