How Happy to Be

After she died, everything tasted worse. unlike my father, my mother had no contempt for the occasional dinner in a tinfoil tray, clean borders between tastes. I would imitate her walk down the frozen food aisle, breath frosting the air, hips sliding, shoulders back. A walk I only later recognized as sexy when I saw it worn by movie stars playing cocktail waitresses.When she was gone, my father kept his eyes on the road and drove his truck straight past the glass spaceship super-market. He parked outside the health food store where walls and food were brown and moist. Pushing through the door was like stepping inside a redwood tree, all flesh and fibre. My dad wandered off by himself to finger the herbal teas and sugar cane, distracted and drifting, as if these foods were the source of all his sadness. He would look up, eyes running, unable to choose. So it was left to me, eight years old, to fill worn plastic containers with peanut butter and honey that lived in white tubs. But our old containers once held feta and butter and applesauce, and the system bred disappointment. Later, looking for the bumpy sweetness of jam, you ended up with yogurt, mean and tart. Longing for yogurt, you gagged on ropy tahini.After my mother died, bread got crunchier and the house got messier and then we left Squamish, British Columbia, to see the country, driving east to Newfoundland until the edge and the water and then we turned around and went back west. We finally stopped at the Gambier Island compound, almost to the highway’s end, a boat ride from Vancouver, where there ­wasn’t a house at all but a monastery that resembled a roadside motel. A handful of soldiers had come back from the Second World War with Tibetan texts in hand, claiming a corner of the island. Unbothered by the farmers who lived there, they spent their mornings in walking meditation, barefoot up and down a beach so rocky their soles bled.Two decades later, the hippies marched in, crossing water to escape the city. The soldier-­monks packed boxes of burgundy robes and headed north, out of earshot of the rumble. To them, the Sixties must have sounded like a couple arguing down the street; the window’s open and the noise gets closer and louder and closer and even though they swear it’s just a friendly conversation, it sounds like yelling to you.The new arrivals made a compound out of the empty buildings and called it a commune. Our dinnertime, once set for three, became a long Formica table occupied by other people’s children. We slept in monks’ barracks, kids above and kids below in bunk beds and hammocks, swinging in space.My father faded out gradually, escaping to the woods for days at a time, though this was nothing new. He half-­built a yurt, then gave up on pastimes and slept a lot. I was schooled in the gutted prayer hall and sulked in the classrooms, which ­weren’t classrooms at all but circles of stained throw pillows on cement floors. Other people’s mothers passing out finger­paints and encouragement.