Warning: the following is just one of the many, many, many odes I've written for my (transplanted) roots and my East Coast boyfriend. Stop me if you think you've heard this one before. Here, about two weeks away from the end of my undergraduate career, I've found myself involuntarily living in the past. But not really in the past past: everything that happened before that one night in the hospital four years ago doesn't exist to me anymore. There are traces, I guess, snapshots of what my childhood was like and audio clips of memories and flashes and seconds and blips. But sometimes I can't decipher between what really happened and what I just remember seeing on TV (inside my head, my childhood is probably half my own and half Kevin Arnold's.) No, now my tangible memories only reach as far as the start of university. So that's where I've taken up refuge lately. I'm spending my days in Halifax circa 2005.
As embarrassing as this is to admit, (and disregarding the fact that I've already revealed this secret to more people than I'd like to admit), one of the biggest reasons on my "pro" list for choosing Dalhousie was (sigh) Joel Plaskett. I'm not even sure what was going through my head at the time. I think, for a while there at least, I entertained myself with the possibility that this decade-older Canrock-er might actually fall in love with me. It was one of those eighteen-year-old-girl hopes that looked pretty and sounded funny but had some solid roots. I listened to "Down at the Khyber" on a cd player in my backyard during summer afternoons as my departure loomed. I watched old episodes of Street Cents online to catch glimpses of my new city I knew nothing about. I became obsessed with it all, because I needed to be hopeful about what was to come, because I still fought back tears each time I stabbed myself with a tiny needle, because there wasn't anybody to talk to, because I needed to be hopeful about something.
I moved out east, and I never once found Plaskett reading a tattered paperback on a bench in the Public Gardens, and I cried and I struggled and I tumbled, but there was always hope. (Is this getting sappy? Like, really sappy? I worry. I'm tougher than this.) I used to sit on the sill of my rez room window and listen to one of his old CBC Radio 3 sessions over and over, letting it repeat and repeat and repeat as much as it liked. I used to read the cartoon his girlfriend (or wife, now, maybe) drew for the city's free paper on a weekly basis. I used to go see him perform every time he was in town, even though that was frequently and the songs were always the same chords, the same banter, the same feelings. But at least I was feeling something.
I'll never advocate on behalf of Joel Plaskett, the amazingly innovative singer-songwriter. The music isn't anything special, and the boy behind the guitar is starting to lose his spark with every passing year. But I'm glad to have him on my side, all the same. Your Favourite Band Ever really should be the band that you're most afraid to admit liking. It should be the one band that you have a rehearsed defense for, the one that you follow with an embarrassed "I know" shrug, the one that still has meaning even if only in your room at night when nobody else is listening. Fuck, this is sappy. But Plaskett really, really did save me. I put the CBC session back on repeat tonight. It was probably the first time I'd listened to it in months, years maybe. And I sat on my bed, with a years' worth of notes on Old and Middle English fanned out before me, and I felt like I was still eighteen. And I cried, naturally, but they weren't exactly sad tears or fear tears-- just tears, just drops & drops for my rainy city and my long-lost East Coast boy, but really for some newer cities and newer boys.
I saw Plaskett at Pearson airport this past December. I was checking in at the counter and he was attempting to check in at the self check-in and failing miserably. He was flustered and there was a ice storm outside and our plane was delayed by four hours but the timing was perfect, and the world was beautiful. There's still hope. There always is. Thanks, Plaskett.
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