LETTITOR

 

Summertime reminds me of my youth. It reminds me of
the long days spent roaming streets I swear were desert-
ed. There were probably people everywhere, but I was a
kid then, and kids don’t have time to notice unimportant
things like passersby—there’s simply too much fun to be
had. Summer reminds me of huge backyards and being
dirty and pick-up hockey games played out in abandoned
tennis courts. Basically, summer reminds me of Langley,
where I spent my first ten years in this life.

I was different then, more different than Langley is
now, even though it’s changed considerably. There are
one-way streets now in the one-horse town of my youth.
But thinking back on it, I remember finding a Colt on
the ground with an inch still left to be smoked on it. I
remember firing the sucker up. I remember that it hurt
my lungs and I knew that I had to head for the bushes
because you can’t walk down the road smoking Colts
when you’re nine, not even in Langley.

Langley’s heart has always been in the soil, and try as
City Hall might, that remains fact even today. Amongst
all the urban sprawl and shitty strip malls, between the
box stores and the giga-box stores, Langley still has the
stink of the farm on it. I haven’t lived there in a decade
and a half, but I still know the short cuts.

But that’s the thing about shortcuts in your old
hometown; they all seem to lead straight into a labyrinth
of memories. I remember Steve Boreman and my broth-
et Chris putting a hose on Doug’s family’s door, setting
it up so it was spraying perfectly to soak whoever
answered the ringing bell. I remember that Doug’s whole
family was away that day until around 11pm, when they
returned home to find their basement flooded in eight
inches of water. I remember Chris hiding under the bed
when Doug’s dad was raging about what he’d do if he

ever got his hands on Steve Boreman. Chris got away
scot-free.

I remember the day my pops split, and long nights at
a bay window in a house that burned to the ground 6-
months after my family moved out (we’d been there
almost ten years and it was an electrical fire due to faulty
wiring). I remember my dad staying with us when my
mom had mono, but really she just needed a break from
raising three kids. She went and lived two miles away
with her then boyfriend. I only saw her maybe once a
month, and no touching was allowed.

I remember getting a kitchen knife and searching for
Charles Manson after reading a page from Helfer Skelter,
running bush to bush with a gang of my eight closest
friends. I remember Ronny, the dirty kid who lived in
the slanty shanty on the corner of 53rd and 203rd. That
house is still there. I remember getting caught shoplift-
ing with my brother, the two of us bolting down a hall-
way at exactly the same time and actually getting away. I
ran home and hid under the bed, my lungs on fire,
scared that we’d been tailed. I was eight then.

Kids hide under the bed a lot. It was the best place to
hide—it’s dark and if you can’t see them, it figures that
they can’t see you. I miss that kind of logic.

I can’t keep this up for too much longer, the remi-
niscing has its cost, and today that cost is a sad longing
for the years I pissed away. Years spent cracking my
knuckles, staring at the sky, and wondering just how big
it is up there anyway. And the whole time I was staring, I
didn’t even notice that they were putting one-way streets
in my old hometown.

You can’t go back, so you may as well go forward—
into June’s Other Press. It’s tomorrow’s history today....

—Colin Miley, Editor-in-Chief

 

SASQUATCH OF CO

NTENTS