Walking with Myself
I walk to work and back. Normally it takes about twelve minutes, but nowadays with a broken bone in my foot it’s about twice as long. I don’t listen to music or to audio books (so I can hear traffic behind me). Sometimes I hum or sing, if there aren’t too many people around I might bother. Sometimes I have conversations with imaginary companions. Sometimes I imagine an earlier version of myself riding inside my head and figuring out where I am and what I’m doing. I want to tell you about a recent experience with my twelve-year-old self, but I’ll lead up to it with a couple of anecdotes involving memorable imaginary companions.
When I worked at the University of Windsor back in the late nineties, I also walked to and from work, under the Ambassador Bridge. Once, when I was teaching Richardson’s Pamela, on my way home I imagined how the mid-eighteenth-century teenaged Pamela would respond to late-twentieth-century Canada. She wasn’t as frightened by the traffic as I expected, but she’s often a bold character. She was terribly shocked by the indecent way both women and men were dressed, but I kind of expected that. Then we got to the bridge, and she refused to go underneath. Somehow the noise of all the transport trucks going overhead was scarier than the noise of the cars on the street beside us, and she was convinced it would all come down on us. I stopped and tried to soothe her fears, but she continued to refuse to go farther, and then threw herself on the sidewalk, hugged me around my knees, and burst into tears. I was stuck there with an imaginary person holding onto me. I developed more of a sympathy for Mr. B— as a character…and eventually I picked her up and carried her, weeping, under the bridge so I could get home.
The second companion story I’m going to share is from August 2021, the night of the best viewing of the Perseid meteor shower and during the Covid pandemic. I like to see at least one good shooting star every August, so long as it’s not cloudy or raining. That night I had decided to take a beach mat and a blanket and go lie in the unlit parking lot of the sales centre for new condos near where I live. On the way there I was having a conversation with an imaginary person who had never seen a shooting star, explaining to them where to look, not straight up but off to the sides because the meteorites bounced off the atmosphere and went off at angles. My companion, who didn’t have a name but who was about twenty-five or thirty, asked me what it looked like if one of them was angled straight toward you. I was a bit non-plussed, surprised that my imagination had thought of something that had never occurred to me before consciously. I said I didn’t know. Then when I settled down on my back in the parking lot on my beach mat, I let the companion go. About fifteen minutes later, I saw something strange: a dot of light appeared in the sky, moved sideways just a little bit, and disappeared. Without my walking conversation, that would have been a WTF moment, but instead I said “That’s what it looks like!” It was very exhilarating and exciting.
Now back to my walking with myself experience. I was recently thinking about Grade Five (see earlier blog post on saving the planet), so I decided that at age sixty-two I would walk to my office with my twelve-year-old self. I generally enjoy the clues part of this activity most: what things in my environment would my imaginary companion notice and what would she deduce about the world in 2022 and my life now from them? Nicky12 was first and foremost relieved that the world looked normal and not like a nuclear winter, because in 1972 I pretty much assumed there would be a nuclear war before the year 2000. The cars looked smaller and more rounded to her, but the apartment buildings were very similar to the ones that went up in the 1960s. People’s clothes looked boring and dull coloured to Nicky12 (Nicky62 is also bored with how North American fashion has been stuck with skinny jeans and hoodies for three decades now). The masks were puzzling to Nicky12. She first guessed there was air pollution that we needed protection against, but only a couple of people we passed were wearing surgical masks, a couple had them in their hands, and several didn’t have any visibly on them. She was a bit worried because I was carrying a mask, not wearing one. She assumed that my walking with a cane was because I was old. She figured out that we were at a university because of a service vehicle with Simon Fraser University on its doors, and she was thrilled to find our name on an office door as an English teacher. She was surprised by the large number of Asian-looking faces, because the Air Force bases and the small town she had grown up in were all very white. But she was OK with that, and with hearing smatterings of different languages around her in addition to English.
I let go of Nicky12 as I got on with my day, except that, when people commented on how well I was moving now that my foot was getting better, I wanted her to see that the cane was due to injury not age. But thinking about it afterward, I know what would have surprised and gratified her most about riding along with me for the day would have been how many people said hello in a friendly way, knew me by name, and wanted to know how I was doing. When I was twelve, I was in Grade Six, and it was not as good a year as Grade Five. My teacher was horrible. Although his abusive ways may well be public and documented, he may still be alive, so I’m just going to call him Mr. G (ooh, Mr. B, Mr. G…that’s an interesting coincidental link). He was physically intimidating to male students—I once saw him slam a boy into the lockers at the back of the room—and emotionally intimidating to female students—he enjoyed picking on someone to make her cry. One of the horrible things Mr. G did was a learning activity about graphs. He had everyone in the class write on a slip of paper which fellow student they’d most like to share a seat on a bus with on a school field trip and which fellow student they’d least like to sit with. Then we collected the data and made big graphs on the board of who the most popular and least popular students in the class were. I still remember the names of those who were top and bottom. It was a cruel thing to do in general, and it hurt me specifically in two ways: 1) I was the only person in the class whom nobody had voted either for or against, socially invisible, and 2) that meant my only friend in the class, whose name I had put as most wanting to share my seat with, had written someone else’s name.
By the time I was twelve, I’d mostly learned to avoid bullying except on the school bus, where I was trapped. There were a couple of people who threw my homework out the bus window on a number of occasions, so I had to redo it when we got to school. I had “teacher’s pet” status because I was smart and liked learning and put my hand up all the time, so I was a target for bullies, and most people didn’t want to be my friend. I escaped into fantasy novels (see this personal essay from an Engl 487 project), and I was lonely. Thinking about it now, I imagine Nicky12 was moved to tears to know that people were friendly to Nicky 62 and respected her. It took me until my undergraduate years to make social connections that were fulfilling and confirming. I’m so glad it happened. That and my conversion to Christianity at age fifteen made me a better person, a happier person, and a person better able to connect with others, both imaginary and real. And to walk gently with myself.