30th Birthday Look Back: Part 4 "15 to 20"

At 15, I was beginning high school. At 20, I was beginning marriage. Quite a gap.

I’ve already covered high school, and maybe I should have split this up differently, but lets see what happens.

I had my first serious girlfriend in high school. I was able to kiss her on the cheek, no problem at all. I got to know her family pretty well. We got a long most of the time. In the end, we just were not going to last. Truthfully, I liked someone else and it was not fair of me to treat her the way that I did. A few years after high school I worked at Movie World. She came in to rent a video and I took that opportunity to tell her that I was sorry for being a dummy in the way I broke up with her. I guess one of the facts is that I just never had any real “break up with someone” experience. She was kind of my first.

The only other thing that I will say about my relationships is that both of my ex girlfriends ended up marrying guys named Brett. That is a weird coincidence, isn’t it?

After sports and girlfriends, life started to round out for me. I got my first real job at Movie World. I started making money and spending it. I had a sweet car too; a 1981 Dodge Diplomat. It was basically a police car from The Blues Brothers. One vivid memory with that car was when the town was having it’s annual Farmer’s Days parade. The parade was starting soon and I was going to take the car out to pick up my friend for the parade. Little did I know that our house was located inside the parade route and there was no way out. The exits were already blocked off. So, here I was, driving down main street minutes before the parade. There were hundreds of people lining the street, some in bleachers. Some sarcastically cheered for me. One man yelled, “Get the Hell off of the road!”. I tried to shrink down to climb inside the glove compartment but it did not work. So, I drove for another 5 or 6 blocks until I found an out in the Saan store parking lot. That was one of the more embarrassing moments for me.

My first car was just like this beauty, only it was dark green

I started working at camp with Dad when I was 17. I hated it. Every time I had a day off I would drive back into the city to hang out with my friends.

I remember being so happy to leave camp that I would crank the stereo. At this time I think that I was driving the ’84 Accord. I would crank Dave Matthews Band and sing to the cows as I drove by.

Eventually, I started to hang out with a few people at camp. One of these people, indirectly, was my wife Barbara. I remember being with a group of people and playing around with the video camera. We were sitting on a couch and we were doing a thing where we edited it to look like people were changing places as we were sitting there. Barbara and I were both there, but I don’t think that we actually talked to each other. It was cool because I took off my shirt for one of the frames so, in the video, it looked like my shirt disappeared for a moment. I bet that that little move is what hooked Barbara. Yeah, I bet it was.

I moved to Montreal for a few months in the Fall of 2000. I remember that being an interesting time of reflection. I also missed Barbara a lot and wrote her a lot of letters. I remember finding the cheapest phone card I could find in Chinatown. I think it was 10 cents a minute.

I was walking down the street once and, for the first time, a man tried a pick-up line on me. He asked if I had a girlfriend or boyfriend and then asked what I would prefer. I was speechless. Not really flattered, though I guess that maybe I should have been. Luckily for me I could kill the awkwardness by saying that I had a girlfriend.

The long distance relationship thing ended up working pretty well. We got to know each other a lot better because we had to put it in writing instead of gazing. I ended up seeing Barbara 6 months after I left for Montreal. We met up in Hawaii in between the courses we were taking there.

In Hawaii I went to see The Vandals, a punk band. The thing I remember after walking through the door was seeing a 2 year old kid sitting at the bar. He had a mohawk. 2 girls were “looking after the kid”. Basically, they thought that it would be cute to give the kids sips of beer and try to get him to puff on their cigarettes. What is wrong with people? Maybe you could say, “What is wrong with you, Brett? Going to see a punk band?”

After that I spent 3 months in the Philippines. Beautiful place. Beautiful people. I was just thinking the other day that the cutest kids in the world are Filipinos.

In the Philippines we got to do a lot of cool things. One thing I remember was going to serve people at an old folks home. Most of the men in this place were alone. They didn’t have any family at all. I got a bowl of some sort of soup and they told me to go feed an elderly man that was laying down on his bed. They said that he could not sit up but was used to eating on his back. They told me to just kind of shovel it in there.

So, I went over and the first thing I noticed was him noticing the bowl in my hands. Then he smiled a big, toothless grin; he was hungry. So, I shovelled it in there and he smiled at me the whole time. He could have been the happiest person in the world at that moment, laying on his back in a home, no family, but a bowl of soup was just what he needed.

I came back to Canada and Barbara and I worked at camp again. By this time we were pretty sure that we were pretty great together. We went out and bought her an engagement ring. It wasn’t very expensive, but Barbara liked it and said that a modest ring would be nice if we were going to be traveling around. There would be less temptation for someone to steal it. I thought that it was nice of her to say that instead of saying that it’s okay that I can’t afford a big rock.

I kept the ring and waited until I could surprise her with it. Then, at camp on a walk, right after Bluegbird cabin #4, I knelt down and surprised her with the proposal. She wasn’t sure if I was serious considering that we had agreed that I would propose after the summer. Well, the surprise was that I decided not to wait. She said that she would marry me and, in the end, she kept her word.

The wedding. The main memory I have of this event is that it all happened so fast. It was surreal. I cannot remember the ceremony that much at all. I remember feeling relieved when the ceremony was over and I felt a lot more comfortable at the modest reception. At the mic, I tried to thank absolutely everyone. I was just so happy that so many people from my life from so many different parts of it were there at the same time.

The years flew by. I found a great girl and decided to take the plunge. It turns out that she is much better than I could have ever hoped. Surprising even myself, I have realized that I am not an easy person to live with all of the time. I get frustrated, depressed, bored, intimidated and confused quite a bit, sometimes all in the same day. Barbara is quite an emotional girl herself, but when it comes to supporting me, she is always a big help. I guess that I didn’t really know what I was getting into when I got married at 20, but it turned out to be a pretty good deal.