The Time Traveler's Almanac

“It’s the first week of university, love. University is big people’s school.”

“Yes, I do know what a university is,” pipes the child. Sometimes Kamla speaks in oddly complete sentences. “But what in the world is a frosh?”

“It’s short for freshman,” I tell her. “Those are people going to university for the first time.”

“Oh.” She returns to trying to stab her hot dog chunks with a sharp spear of carrot. Over the top of her head, I smile vaguely at Babette. I sip at the awful drink, gulp down my carrot sticks and sausages. As soon as my plate is empty, I make my excuses. Babette’s eyes look sad as she waves me goodbye from the kitchen table. Sunil is only able to come up to their summer cottage on weekends. When he does so, Babs tells me that he sleeps most of the weekend away, too exhausted from his job to talk much to her, or to play with Kamla on the beach.

On my way out the door, I stop to look back. Kamla is sitting in Babette’s lap. There’s a purple Kamla-sized handprint on Babette’s stained yellow T-shirt. Kamla is slurping down more grape juice, and doesn’t look up as I leave.

*   *   *

When I reached the age where my friends were starting to spawn like frogs in springtime – or whenever the hell frogs spawn – my unwillingness to do the same became more of a problem. Out on a date once with Sula, a lissom giraffe of a woman with a tongue just as supple, I mentioned that I didn’t intend to have kids. She frowned. Had I ever seen her do that before?

“Really?” she said. “Don’t you care about passing on your legacy?”

“You mean my surname?”

She laughed uncomfortably. “You know what I mean.”

“I really don’t. I’m not a king and I’m never going to be rich. I’m not going to leave behind much wealth for someone to inherit. It’s not like I’m building an empire.”

She made a face as though someone had dropped a mouse in her butter churn. “What are you going to do with your life, then?”

“Well,” I chuckled, trying to make a joke of it, “I guess I’m going to go home and put a gun to my head, since I’m clearly no use to myself or anyone else.”

Now she looked like she was smelling something rotten. “Oh, don’t be morbid,” she snapped.

“Huh? It’s morbid to not want kids?”

“No, it’s morbid to think your life has so little value that you might as well kill yourself.”

“Oh, come on, Sula!”

I’d raised my voice above the low-level chatter in the restaurant. The couple at the table closest to us glanced our way. I sighed and continued: “My life has tons of value. I just happen to think it consists of more than my genetic material. Don’t you?”

“I guess.” But she pulled her hand away from mine. She fidgeted with her napkin in her lap. For the rest of dinner, she seemed distracted. She didn’t meet my eye often, though we chatted pleasantly enough. I told her about this bunch of Sioux activists, how they’d been protesting against a university whose archaeology department had dug up one of their ancestral burial sites. I’m Rosebud Sioux on my mum’s side. When the director of the department refused to reconsider, these guys had gone one night to the graveyard where his great-grandmother was buried. They’d dug up her remains, laid out all the bones, labelled them with little tags. They did jail time, but the university returned their ancestors’ remains to the band council.

Sula’s only response to the story was, “Don’t you think the living are more important?” That night’s sex was great. Sula rode me hard and put me away wet. But she wouldn’t stay the night. I curled into the damp spot when she’d left, warming it with my heat. We saw each other two or three times after that, but the zing had gone out of it.

*   *   *

Babette and Sunil began talking about moving away from St. John’s. Kamla was about to move up a grade in school. Her parents hoped she’d make new friends in a new school. Well, any friends, really. Kids tended to tease Kamla, call her names.

Babette found a job before Sunil did. She was offered a post teaching digital design at the Emily Carr Institute in Vancouver. Construction was booming there, so Sunil found work pretty easily afterwards. When she heard they were moving, Kamla threw many kinds of fits. She didn’t want to leave the ocean. Sunil pointed out that there would be ocean in Vancouver. But Kamla stamped her foot. “I want this ocean right here. Don’t you understand?” Sunil and Babette had made their decision, though, and Kamla was just a kid. The whole family packed up kit and caboodle in a move that Babette later told me was the most tiring thing she’d ever done.

On the phone, Babette tells me, “A week after we got here, we took Kamla down to Wreck Beach. The seals come in real close to shore, you know? You can see them peeking at you as they hide in the waves. We thought Kamla would love it.”