When we were first married, in 1988, we came out from Alberta to Vancouver Island for an immensely rainy honeymoon. My abiding memory is of renting a car and driving to Qualicum Beach from Victoria to the accompaniment of the windshield wipers and CBC Stereo. He loves rain, so we decided that our first definitive act as a married couple would be to drop everything and move out here. He dropped out of university, I rounded up enough courses to complete a three year degree, we quit our gas station jobs. We stuffed everything we owned into his truck and my car, including my cat, and headed out for a trailer park just outside of Nanaimo.
The trailer was a hand-me-down, given perhaps somewhat reluctantly by his parents. His father had gutted the inside of it to make a painting studio, and it smelled of oil paint and cigarette smoke. The people who were moving it for us showed up on Friday morning and hooked it up to a semi trailer. We were on our way. I loaded the cat, Mao, a black sleek tom with an attitude the size of China, he loaded his guitar and the go board, we set off. Three minutes down the road from Alberta Beach, Mao took a huge dump in the litter box I had thoughtfully provided in the back seat. I stopped for an air freshener.
I drove through the mountains, happily listening to Journey and Boston on the tape player and singing along. It is mostly downhill from Blue River to Vancouver, and I coasted. Mao was not ideal company. He complained in a dying cat voice, panted a lot like he was dehydrating, and kept insisting on being either on my lap or underneath the gas pedal. Finally I reached the outskirts of Vancouver, two packs of cigarettes and numerous tapes later.
It began to be warm. It was April and I had left some snow in Alberta. The sun was shining in Vancouver and I decided it was time to lose my sweater. I rolled down the window a bit. Eventually I stopped at a stoplight and began to take off my sweater. At just that moment, Mao decided to make a break for it. Just as I rolled my sweater up to my shoulders, he leapt up and tried to squish himself through the window. At the same moment, I realized I had also pulled up my t-shirt and was sitting with my sweater and shirt around my head, trying, clad mostly in my bra, to stop the cat from going out the window, and the light was changing. In one of those bizarre convergences, everyone stopped around me was looking at me while I struggled with sweater, shirt, cat, and window, and no-one seemed to care that the light had changed…