Snow Flakes - The Ventures (mp3)

I rode a streetcar up a mountain today, starting in frosty fog and ending in sparkling snow. The urge to stomp a path into unmarked snowdrifts was more powerful than I expected. I ran around like a kid and got ice down my jeans and in my blundstones. This song is a somewhat calmer take on snow, but you can hear the sparkles, can’t you?

The Ventures produced one of the all-time great xmas albums, all obnoxious xylophone twinkles over surf guitar interpolations of famous carols. This tune pulls from Greensleeves, a traditional English song that was first registered as a broadside ballad in the friggin’ 1500s, and which became associated with Christmas around a century later (it was originally about a young, possibly-promiscuous woman).

My dad is the person who introduced me to The Ventures and to a love of Christmas music. He and I both religiously observe the rule that Christmas songs may only be played between December 1 and 25. I was thinking about my dad on the mountain today, because a ride up a snowy slope was what he told me about after I read him this short passage from Douglas Coupland’s Life After God:

After you're dead and buried and floating around whatever place we go to, what's going to be your best memory of earth? What one moment for you defines what it's like to be alive on this planet. What's your takeaway? Fake yuppie experiences that you had to spend money on, like white water rafting or elephant rides in Thailand don't count. I want to hear some small moment from your life that proves you're really alive... Imagine that you’re drowning and you reach within yourself to save that one memory which is you - what is it?

Douglas Coupland was my favourite writer for a few years as a teenager, and my parents once took me to a reading he did at the Isabel Bader Theatre. After the reading, he gave some instructions while inviting questions: “No questions that are actually comments, please. In fact, you know how the first few questions are usually kind of boring? The audience is warming up, or the first three people to put up their hands think they’re too smart, or something. Could we skip those, and try to start on a question that would normally be the fourth question?”

I don’t remember if my question was the first one, but I asked what his answer would be to that passage from Life After God. I don’t remember his exact answer, but I remember that he thought it was a deserving Fourth Question, and that he apologised for addressing me as “the young man up there” when pointing out my hand. He said “sorry” again when signing my book, and I responded that I didn’t mind, “that’s okay, honestly it kind of validates my androgyny”. I always found it confusing, as a very androgynous teenager, that people would apologize for mistaking me for a boy. If I didn’t want that to happen, I easily could have grown my hair longer than a few inches and stopped dressing in my dad’s extremely oversized flannel shirts. As an adult with blue hair and a short body, strangers call me “sir” quite rarely, but I still like it when it happens; I’ve never felt like a man, but I feel reassured when people don’t expect me to act like a feminine woman, and being briefly perceived as male is one way to be validated in that.

Anyway: do you have an answer to that question? My own answer feels a bit too private for this semi-public newsletter, but it makes me feel good to reach within myself and pull up one of my best memories of earth.

With appreciation for mountains and ballads,
Tessa