I drink to remember
by Kate Zimmerman for the North Shore News
I’VE been drinking a lot lately.
I’d prefer to claim that I’m drinking to forget. That would imply an exciting past on my part -- a tragic trail of broken hearts, perhaps, or a touch-and-go escape from some oppressive regime, only foiled in its efforts to capture me and my family by my selfless yet steely resolve.
It stands to reason that this is not the case, unless we are now counting Air Canada as an oppressive regime, or maybe the eagle-eyed meter maids on Lonsdale. (I’ll go for that if you will.)
No, the drinking stems from a new gig writing for the Vancouver Sun about drinks. It means I get to sample various potables that I had hitherto taken pains to avoid. It never means I get pie-eyed at somebody else’s expense, which of course is what I thought was the idea when I applied for the job.
However. The point is this: I now realize that there comes a time when you do not have to drink to forget. Better yet, you don’t even have to not drink to remember. The other morning, for instance, my husband woke up sober with an amazing recollection.
“Do you remember when I used to rent and fly ultralight planes?” he asked me.
I stared at him. Surely I hadn’t lost my wits overnight. Just the day before I had attempted my first Sudoku puzzle. I cleverly realized that I was stumped and should never try one again. So my brain was obviously working. Yet as far as my grey matter could haul me back, I could not recall Stanley ever having flown anything.
I once heard that he had pushed his brother out of a second storey barn door into the snow and broken his arm, but that was the only flying-related story I could recall.
“You?” I said, laughing incredulously, in that special way of longtime wives. “You mean, like, you flew model planes, the kind you put together yourself?”
“No, real ultralight planes. I’m sure I used to go somewhere and fly them,” he said. “I have a very clear memory of flying over some boats.”
“I don’t think just anybody can go and rent an ultralight plane and take it out for a spin,” I said sagely. “You probably have to take some lessons or something. Did you ever take any lessons?”
“I don’t think you need lessons,” said Stanley, who was starting to freak me out, standing there in his underpants with his dreamy high-flying eyes. “I think you do just go and take one out for a spin.”
This sounded unlikely. And another thing: where did he get the money for such an extravagant hobby? Furthermore, if this happened, where was I?
“I guess that must have been when I was a supermodel in Milan,” I said hopefully. I half-thought he might believe me; he seemed that far gone. “Remember, I was, like, always away?”
“Well, you weren’t there with me when I flew,” Stanley admitted. “I don’t know where you were. But I know I went somewhere outside of town and got an ultralight plane and flew it around. A few times.”
A more interrogative personality than mine might have then grilled Stanley on exactly how one operates an ultralight plane. Is there a key involved? Does it make any noise? Is it made of paper, and do you colour the required insignia on it in crayon? Do you have to start it up with your feet, running really fast, like Fred Flintstone?
Is there a vegetarian option in the inflight meal? Does everybody who operates an ultralight plane have to keep in radio contact with John Travolta? I know he used to be a fan, before he graduated to the big leagues of hobbyist jet pilot.
I would have asked all these questions if I had known the correct answers to them. Unfortunately, I was aware that if Stanley said these planes were made of aluminum foil and you started them with a firecracker made of celery I would have been no further ahead in ferreting out the truth.
The scariest thing about this little announcement of Stanley’s is that apparently this wasn’t the first time he had made it. A month before, a friend took him and some other passengers up in a rented small plane to enjoy the beautiful landscape of the Lower Mainland. They took off from the Abbotsford airport and loop-de-looped around for an hour or so. Stanley maintains that he gazed down at the glittering inlets and slothful mountains and so on and said conversationally “You know, I used to rent ultralight planes and fly them.” Nobody challenged him -- not even his friend of 25 years, the one who keeps predicting that the peripatetic Stanley’s next career will be “stock car racer.”
This story of Stanley’s has inspired me to muse over all the things I’ve probably forgotten. I’d like to blame the ephemeral quality of my past on the sherry I was testing last weekend. But I know Tio Pepe cannot be faulted for my losing mental proof of that time I traversed the Sahara by hot air balloon.
I can’t recall where we took off from, the sheik and I, or the nature of our route, or the purpose of our trip. Sheer hedonism, I suppose; that was typical of us. We knew nothing of the vagaries of hot air balloon travel, or that the baking sun would make our spanakopita almost unpalatable. I had brought only evening gowns, I’m pretty sure of that, and in the heat of the blast that kept us aloft the sheik kept having to remove layers of his own muslin until he only had about 10 left. They were a little grubby. No matter.
“Hot air ballooning is not about being immaculate,” I feel certain I would have told him as I watched him open yet another bottle of champagne. “It’s about being airy.”
These were my supermodel days, so I didn’t talk a lot or make much sense because I didn’t really have the energy. My ration of a quarter of a spanakopita wouldn’t keep a quail alive, and I couldn’t smoke my usual six packs a day because all those cartons took up too much room in the balloon basket.
So I was a little testy. Sometimes I would see mirages that I thought were oases and vice versa. This kind of balmy confusion reigned until that evening, just around sunset, when we spotted something on the horizon that I knew was real. It was flying toward us at an astonishing pace. I quickly understood that its objective was to meet us in mid-air. As the sheik began to panic, I told him to relax.
“It’s fine,” I said. “It’s only Stanley. He’s come to get me in his ultralight plane.”
Writing > Humour
