The Erratics by Vicki Laveau-Harvie

Author:Vicki Laveau-Harvie
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: 4th Estate

That will be the year that was, following my departure from this airport where I sit looking out the huge windows, drinking in the panorama of the Rockies to the west, trying to imprint on my retinas the line of the peaks against the sky.

I remember that every day at dawn when I was a teenager (except Sunday of course – this is Alberta and nothing happened on Sunday in Alberta), the Calgary paper was delivered with a thump to the front step of the house where we lived in the city by a paper boy flying by on his bike. He never missed. I tried to get to the paper before my mother, who was always eager to compile her gallery of horrors for our breakfast edification: seals blown out of the water off Alaska by American weapons testing; unbelievable and tragic car accident stories (‘Paramedic called to fatal accident on Banff Highway recognises both children in the crumpled wreck’); cats up trees and babies with their heads stuck in railings. Four dead, my sister would mutter to warn me as we passed in the hall of a morning, one dog, one horse, two humans.

I wanted to get to the paper first to look at the editorial cartoon, but not for its content, about which I was totally unconcerned. I just wanted to start my day, before anything else happened to me, by seeing where in the drawing the cartoonist had hidden the little person looking toward the sketched-in backdrop of the Rockies, ignoring whatever else was going on in the cartoon, and saying quietly, like a mantra, every day, Aren’t the mountains beautiful today.

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