Sim Carter: Past Tense Imperfect

# 9.1    Cherry Grove Road, Niagara Falls, Canada We hopped about quite a bit once we ’ d arrived in Canada from England via Turkey and Libya. We moved from Montreal to Toronto to Niagara Falls where we lived in a big old two-story house with a grassy lawn, surrounded by ancient maple trees.  A place where I was perfectly happy. As perfectly happy as a ten-year-old girl just discovering boys were another species could be.  Happy until my parents bought a house in Cherrywood Acres, a new development on the outskirts of town.  This is # 9.1 of the  “ On the Street  Where I Lived ”  stories. It ’ s a close up view of one day in particular.   Snow Day It was only a few miles from our gloomy old house on Ryerson Crescent to our family ’ s new split level across town in Cherrywood Acres but it could just as easily have been light years away. It was a whole different world out there in the barely built developmen...

My dad on the far left, Mum on the far right, my brother Russell towering over our mother,  My younger sister, Nancy, the little girl holding the bundle. Family friends, the Waldmans.  I’m the one in the black & white Op Art suit. I was 13 at the time.  # Cherrygrove Road, Cherrywood Acres, Niagara Falls, Canada It’s daunting to move into a new house and make it yours. A never-before-lived-in house seems more than new as it stands before you, untouched, immaculate, strangely virginal. The difference between new and brand new can be an almost empty hollow feeling. No ghosts live within those walls. No child’s smudged fingerprints have been wiped away. I was ten years old when we moved into our new house in Niagara Falls, a brand new subdivision called Cherrywood Acres, houses studding the land where cherry trees used to grow.  We moved in the spring of 1963, the season of change in what would turn out to be a decade of change. In a house without histo...

Halloween 1995, Batman and me My history is littered with Halloween fails. Before I became a mother the question of what I was going to be for Halloween terrified me. 1958:  Halloween on a blazing hot afternoon in Tripoli, Libya. Age 5 All the military brats from Wheelus Air Force base were going to a Halloween party  in an airplane hangar just outside Tripoli.  Lots of civilian kids—mostly Brits and Yanks—whose parents worked on the base in various capacities were invited which meant my brother and I got to go too.  Our dad, who spoke Arabic fluently and had been with British Intelligence during the war, had something to do with managing the PX on the base. My brother went dressed as a hobo, his cheeks smeared grey by my mother with a piece of burnt cork, while his friend, the older boy who lived next door, dressed up as a woman—a pillow stuck down his sweater shaped into clownish balloon-sized breasts and big red sticky lips. I went as Minnie Mouse i...

I was eleven the summer I broke my arm. I know because it was the summer that the movie  A Hard Day’s Night  came out and that was 1964. My best friend Trixie had brought her cousin over to my house and the three of us were playing in my backyard, taking  turns hitching ourselves atop a green pole and pushing each other off. The pole, about three foot high, ten inches around, dark green, smooth and shiny, was sunk into the earth to mark where the neighborhood’s power or phone lines were located. The pole’s rounded dome-like top resulted in a downward curve that we made a game of slipping and sliding off. While it didn’t occur to me at the time, the overgrown cucumber-like shape resembled nothing so much as a large penis worthy of the Jolly Green Giant.  After taking turn after turn of shoving each other off, I finally fell too hard and fast, landing face down in the middle of my mother’s staked tomato plants. I felt foolish and clumsy, like a little kid, es...

I can get a little nostalgic writing memoir—you might say it ’ s the nature of the beast—but there ’ s probably no place or time I get more soppy about than growing up in Niagara Falls. Niagara Falls was  where I spent most of my elementary school years; it was where I learned to swim in the pool at the Cyanamid plant; it was where I broke my arm when I was ten; it was where my period came for the first time in the girls room at Princess Elizabeth Middle School and Niagara Falls was where I cried serious tears when we moved away when I was fourteen. But before that, Niagara Falls was where I had my first boyfriend, a boy named Randy Tuck. I was eleven and it was the same year the Name Game song came out. Remember? The name game!  Shirley!  Shirley, Shirley bo Birley Banana fanna fo Firley  Fee fy mo Mirley, Shirley!  It was a huge hit all over the world but no place more so than in our schoolyard. We stood in our little clique circles and sang a...

Photo by Adam Kloketka via My Modern Met I love the snow. As long as it’s out and I’m in. Despite the romantic appeal of the sound of the crunch of snow beneath a pair of brand new leather boots on a starlit Christmas night, snow is cold. Too cold for me. Growing up in Canada, winter days could get so cold that not only did the freezing temps blanket the ground with two feet of white fluff, a severely cold winter could cause the falls to freeze over completely. That's happened this year, the cold snap transforming the falls into something from a sci-fi flick. Back in my day, along with those snowfalls came some painful cases of popsicle toes. As a child, I’d hobble in from outside and stand next to the radiator, pain stabbing at my feet, tears pricking my eyes while my mother gently unbuckled my snow boots so she could rub my numb feet back to life.  Living in Southern California my snow days, thankfully, are far behind me. Winter—real winter—has just never been my season....

Living in Niagara Falls in the 1960 ’ s, my parents cooled their itchy feet long enough to buy a house. Here ’s a piece I dug up out of the cellar about those years.  Of Brasso and Brownies It’s daunting to move into a new house and make it yours. A never before lived in house seems more than new as it stands before you, untouched, immaculate, strangely virginal. The difference between new and brand new can be an almost empty hollow feeling. No ghosts live within those walls. No child’s smudged fingerprints have been wiped away. I was ten years old when we moved into our new house in Niagara Falls. We moved in the spring of 1963, the season of change in what would turn out to be a decade of change. In a house without history it fell to us to write the first page. Real the rest here.     

I went to LACMA the other day to check out the exhibit by Diana Thater before it closes in late February. Thater works primarily in film, using motion & light with multiple screens. The piece above was inspired by, and filmed in, Monet’s Gardens of Giverny, filled with beautiful natural colors that transform when you step between the screen and projector. It’s an irresistible invitation to place yourself within the art piece, to become part of the show, as these millennials were to me. It got me thinking about art, and about museums, how much they they open us up to new ways of seeing. The first famous painting I ever saw in person was the Mona Lisa, DaVinci ’ s masterpiece  hanging  in the Louvre. I was four, maybe five years old and it meant nothing. A small dark picture of a lady. For my parents the Mona Lisa was on the must-see while in Paris list, for us kids the Louvre was little more than an escape  from the cold of a wintry Parisian day.  ...