When I was a kid there were a few things I knew for certain. One of them was that if I were lucky I’d be a teenager one day. If I lived to be a teenager, and if I were even luckier, I’d grow up to be an adult. And if I were luckier than that, I’d be old. An old person. That was the top prize. Nobody told me this. I worked it out myself, under ten, maybe under eight, by looking around and counting who was still here.
What hadn’t crossed my mind was that times change. The old people I was looking at belonged to a different generation than mine and I would not grow up into them. I’d grow up into something else. I didn’t know that yet. So I watched old people the way you’d watch the one person who walked out of the plane crash. These were the survivors. This was the prototype. Whatever they were doing, it was working, and I needed to know what it was.
So I spent time with them. More than most. I’d put myself in the top 99th percentile of people who have logged hours with the greatest generation. I worked in a palliative care facility for two years. My grandmother lived down the street from me, first in a nursing home and then a palliative home, and I visited her every day for years with my kids. I wasn’t a great granddaughter or anything, well I was but also? Free food and I had little kids to cook for. I was visiting but I wasn’t visiting. I was observing. I had a clipboard in my mind.
In the first grade, the neighbors at the bottom of my hill invited me over for lunch. Alone. No parents. He was a retired RCMP officer, eighty years old and six foot six. He looked like Mr. Drummond from Diff’rent Strokes, and I want to stop here and ask how we were all supposed to say that. Diff’rent. With the apostrophe. Was there a correct way? Did anyone at the network consider how it sounded? Seems really bad. Anyhow. He looked like that man but much taller, with bowed legs, in brown polyester pants, and you could see where his knees were, and they were as high as my head. He was a giant. There was another hill at the bottom of my hill and his house was perched on top of it, the way an RCMP officer’s house would be. You don’t live at the bottom of anything when you were the law.
I remember thinking, this is it. I’m an adult now. I’ve been invited to lunch by a giant, by myself, and whatever he’s about to put in front of me is the answer.
They pulled out Breton crackers. Wheat. No. Triscuits. Breton crackers and Triscuits, I can’t commit, I was six and in shock. And then a tin of salmon. With the bones in it.
They put the salmon on the Triscuits. The salmon, the skin, the bones. All of it. And they set the plate in front of me like it was a plate.
I had never seen salmon in a can. I didn’t know salmon came in a can. Salmon was a fish that lived in a rivers I frequented in British Columbia… and always a main course in a restaurant. And here it was, pink and grey, with a spine, on a cracker, and two people who had made it to eighty-five were eating it like it was lunch. Because it was lunch. This is how you survive, I thought. You eat the bones. You don’t ask questions. His wife had been a homemaker for sixty years and still, it seemed to me at six, didn’t know how to make lunch.
It is not the worst thing I have seen come out of a can. On a camping trip, a family in the next RV reached into the back of a cabinet and produced a whole boiled chicken in a can. Jellied. A pale, white-looking, saggy-skinned, can-shaped lob of goo and meat. It came out with the shape of the can still on it. It looked like a knee. Someone had looked at a chicken and boiled it, and kept it in a can, and drove it into the woods. And that family was fine. They were thriving. They had an RV.
And this is how I tell you that I once had a park shut down because I didn’t throw away my oyster shells properly. A family of grizzly bears came onto the campground. So I apologize if any of you were at Pacific Rim in the fall of 1999 and had that park closed because of a family of grizzlies. Maybe it was the best day of your life and I shouldn’t be apologizing at all. Maybe you saw bears.
Back to food.
I was wrong about the food. Canned salmon with the bones in it is not how you survive. It’s just what was in the cupboard. The old people I studied weren’t eating the secret to a long life. They were eating what they’d eaten during a war, in a house with no refrigerator, because that was what food was when they were my age and nobody had updated them. They weren’t the prototype. They were the previous model.
Except.
As I age I find myself whittling down. Smoothies. Yogurt. Wasa crackers with cream cheese on them. Wasa crackers with pickles on them. Kimchi, in a bowl, with nothing else, standing up at the counter. I look at my own plate and I know exactly what it is. It’s a cracker with something on it. Some first grader could walk into my kitchen tomorrow, get handed a Wasa with a pickle on it, and go home thinking she’d been shown how to survive.
