odditycollector

This is what I did on my Edmonton vacation: I went to a family reunion, and I saw Superman Returns in 3D. I'm still not quite sure how I ended up in Alberta; my mother phoned me up one day with the news that I had a plane ticket but she, alas, was too busy to join me, and I had to ask her where I would be flying to. The final travelling party consisted of myself, my brother, and my grandmother – my mother's mother, for those who are counting. After landing at Edmonton's airport, we spent our time working slowly into the region, visiting relatives and old friends my grandmother hadn't seen in a long, long time and my brother and I hadn't seen ever.

There were no set plans for the day before the reunion itself, so my grandmother asked us where we wanted to go. Already desperate for civilization, my brother and I picked West Edmonton Mall.

West Edmonton Mall is famous. At over five million square feet, it's far too big to be useful, and besides that, it contains a water park complete with wavepool, an amusement park complete with roller-coaster, glow in the dark mini-golf, and a sea lion show. All the tourist attractions you might hope for, conveniently packaged between air-conditioned shoe stores and a food fair.

We split up and spent the afternoon looping around the entirety of the mall, ending with a net booty of two books, three anniversary gifts for people I couldn't remember, and IMAX tickets for Superman Returns.

"What did you think of the movie?" I asked my brother as we drove back out of the city, my grandmother behind the wheel.

"It was okay," he said, teenage shorthand for "I don't want to have to think about it." I shrugged internally.

"So what did you think?" I asked my grandmother.

"It felt like Superman was going to punch me in the face," she said, approvingly. My brother and I made noises of envy; we came in too late to find three seats next to each other, and the two of us had been stuck sitting close enough to the screen that most of the 3D effects hadn't quite lined up.

And then we fell silent again, staring out the car windows.

The Edmonton area isn't properly the prairies, but when compared to the West Coast, it might as well be. There's too much space. The buildings in the city are too wide and too spread out; every instinct I have screams that it's wasteful. The two lane highways could comfortably fit three cars across – or four, if you're willing to sacrifice a few inches of side shoulder - and every possible curve is ironed out.

Travel becomes a tedious parody of horror film suspense; no matter how fast you go, you never seem to get to any closer to a destination. The fields beside you remain fields, the road ahead never shifts from due position. Contemplation of the landscape invites agoraphobia; the horizon is too far away, broken only by heat mirages and small patches of trees. My grandmother tells me that farmers leave them standing to buffer against the harsh prairie winds; I think to myself that the thin, scraggly trees would more likely be toppled in anything more powerful than a strong breeze.

The only landmarks outside are variations of yellow cows and fields of yellow canola. Conversation drifts to the economics of self haying, if you're not careful. The importance of barbed wire fences. Who can possibly eat that much canola oil, anyway.

Because, as we all know, talking about the environment is always easiest, if you're slightly uncomfortable with your conversation partner, not sure what to say. My brother and I share a sense of humour and a particular way of parsing the world, but between me and my grandmother there is no common connection. Our discussions are stilted: she tells me about the melodramatic weather patterns in the prairies; I advise her not to buy an expensive cell phone. We take turns pointing out that, by golly, there sure is a lot of canola outside of the car. Not to mention cows.

I stared, now, at the roads leading away from the sprawling mess of Edmonton. We had spent much of the past days looking at places from my grandmother's childhood, and they were all just like this. I wondered vaguely what she saw in them as we drove along, and then wondered vaguely if I was, for the first time in my recollection, feeling homesick.

"When I was a child," my grandmother finally ventured, "we had no TV. There used to be radio programs instead, with voice actors and sound effects, but no pictures. Did you know that Superman used to be a radio show?" I did, and she smiled wistfully. "We used to run home after school, so we could listen to Superman. And another show… I don't remember what it was, anymore. But we always made sure not to miss Superman."

I looked back out at the unending, unchanging fields, and imagined a procession of kids hurrying along them (siblings were one thing my grandmother never lacked for), turning at last up the still-unpaved road leading to a house that was more fairly a homestead, complete with stillborn children buried on the grounds. They would turn on a large wooden radio of the sort I'd only seen in movies, and gather around. Listen.

And suddenly my grandmother seemed a lot more human.

When I was eight years old, give or take, my parents were freshly, finally divorced and my sister, my brother and I were unpacking boxes in my father's new house.

Most of the boxes were crisp and new, bought at premium from U-Haul, but there were a couple droopy-looking unlabelled ones by the side of the staircase. I pried one open, possibly to figure out where it was meant to go, possibly because I was curious and procrastinating. Stuffed inside the box were faded, four-colour booklets. I knew they were comics, of course – I was familiar enough with Archie Digests from the supermarket – but I'd still never seen anything quite like them.

"What are these?" I asked my father, bemused. It was my understanding that the boxes all contained stuff from the old house, but I didn't remember the comic books.

He told me that they were his old Superman comics. "I've had them since I was about your age." Which still didn't answer the question of where they were hiding, but the mystery was solved well enough.

They became my comics, and I loved them with a ferocity that doomed them. I read them all, even the ads, even the letter pages, and organized them on the floor of my bedroom into half hazard piles – ones I'd finished, ones I'd not got to yet, ones I really enjoyed – that slid over and collapsed into each other. Fragile covers were torn from rusting staples and yellowing corners were ripped when I stepped on them accidentally. Issues were crumpled at the bottom of backpacks, or dropped outside in the mud, or dipped in the bathtub, or lost at school. Whether my father felt differently, he never said, but I was slow to realize the comics might have an inherent value in themselves, rather than simply for the stories inside. For many of them, there will be no chance to be enjoyed by a third generation.

(He did, however, recently manage a small amount of revenge. I lent him my copy of Busiek's Secret Identity - a story about a young farm boy named Clark Kent who models himself into a hero as great as his namesake – and he returned it to me with the cover creased where he held it too tightly. "It was a good story," he said.)

My father grew up on the other side of the continent from where I did, an English-speaking boy in the great Québecois metropolis of Montréal. He would talk of underground tunnels, and of winters with cold I couldn't imagine; after all, there's a point where the numbers on the negative scale of the thermometer become simply integers, if you're lucky enough never to have to plan for them. To understand.

I visited Montréal once (in summer), a long time ago. I remember close packed brick buildings and French signs and a sense of *age* that will likely never be earned by Vancouver, a wood-built city in a damp climate. The building my father grew up in is still around; the house I spent four years in as a child – longer than any other so far in my life – is about to be torn down to make way for something else.

My father told me that there was a grocery store near the place he lived. At about age twelve, he started dragging groceries in a wagon for tips to supplement his twelve cent allowance, as it was too hard to chose one title a week from the cross section of DC's Superfamily comics. He amassed quite a lot of them over a few years, hanging on to some small percentage, those which he eventually gave to me.

Everything else I know about the world my father lived in, I learned from twelve cent issues of Action and Adventure, from World's Finest and Lois Lane.

Outside Edmonton, my grandmother, my brother and I spent the night with old friends of my grandmother's family. People who therefore, following through the logic, must be friends of my family as well. They told me stories of my grandmother as a child: horse riding adventures and how she would often forget her coat, irregardless of the weather. She looked faintly embarrassed, and I laughed in recognition – I used to be guilty of running around in the snow in a T-shirt, myself.

The next day we went to the family reunion. It was much like I imagine most of them are: introducing and reintroducing yourself to vaguely familiar relatives; eating suspicious pot-luck meat; watching people you haven't met in a decade chain smoke on a porch, hiding from the sun or the attention.

But there are a few moments that stick in mind:

My grandmother's uncle – my great, great uncle – drinking moonshine in loud defiance of doctor's orders. "Best present I got," he said, grinning, the guest of honour by dint of what those doctor's orders implied.

The impromptu Canada Day fireworks competition, a joined battle over five sides of the lake. The younger generations piled onto a moored boat to better see the lights, and one of the fireworks from our side angled too low and exploded three metres away. There was a temporary hole in the water, and the next stage of the firework shot around us like phosphorescent shrapnel. ("Do it again!" shouted one of kids. Her brother added, "Yes, please! You missed killing us the first time.")

An extended cousin running around the yard with a serious expression, trying to objectively determine which of the puppies chasing her she wanted most to take home. She was eight or nine – unborn the last time I had been to such a reunion – and dressed in a well-worn sweatshirt emblazoned with Superman's crest.

I've heard from many people that the world has outgrown Superman. That society is too complex, too cynical, too mired in shades of grey for a figure in bright red underpants and cape to swoop in and save the day, and that we can no longer relate to the ideas he represents. I always tell myself that they're wrong, complaining about a overly complicated mythos, or imperfect storylines, or movies they've missed the point of entirely, too focused on the details.

So Superman was deposited on this world by an unlucky accident of fate – but who isn't? The lesson of Superman isn't that the powerful can solve our problems, but that we can be powerful ourselves.

It's to be strong and still fair, and to afford mercy even to those we don't love. To be kind. To stand, unbowed, in the face of evil and fight it back and at last, at always, defeat it.

To help those in need, not out of guilt or obligation, but for the simplest, hardest, best reason of all - because we can. To believe that the world is worth saving.

Superman isn't here to rescue us. He *is* us.

That society has made this hero into the most recognizable iconic figure of the last century, surviving through decades of war and fear and exponential change, suggests to me something brave and ultimately good about humanity, and what humanity strives to be. I wouldn't want to live in that world where Superman has no place. And just maybe, that's enough to mean I won't have to.

My mother often tells me that I don't see her enough, for being so close, but in a few days I'm finally going over to visit. We've already got one plan set.

We're going to see Superman.

Sketch by Alex Ross

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Date: 2006-07-10 10:41 am (UTC)

From:

petronelle.livejournal.com

no subject

This is really beautiful, and much though I love your unifying theme, I love the details of your family members more. The environment commentary rings true in ways that make them all seem like my extended family, too, never mind that I avoid my extended family.

Date: 2006-07-10 06:32 pm (UTC)

odditycollector.livejournal.com

Thanks! I orinally sat down to write what I thought of the movie itself, but I quickly figured out that that was maybe the *least* interesting thing I had to say about it.

Date: 2006-07-10 12:21 pm (UTC)

sholamith.livejournal.com

Agreed that this is beautiful. Connecting through generations with Superman and seeing something of yourself in your Grandmother as a child.

Lucky person seeing it in 3D. The IMax theater wasn't close enough.

Date: 2006-07-10 06:28 pm (UTC)

*g* Thanks!

And as for 3D... The scene in the airplane seemed pretty well done, but from my seat I missed most of the fun. It was more Superman Returns in occasionally double vision! *sigh*

Date: 2006-07-10 04:08 pm (UTC)

brownbetty

This is a really lovely essay. Your family comes through very clearly. You might try selling it somewhere.

Date: 2006-07-10 06:40 pm (UTC)

That's really a compliment, thanks.

*ponders the idea... For Sale: one slightly used Superman essay?*

Date: 2006-07-10 05:26 pm (UTC)

vagabondsal.livejournal.com

Oh, way to make me cry like a little kid with a skinned knee, Karen.

Date: 2006-07-10 06:25 pm (UTC)

Aw... Um. I have band-aids?

Date: 2006-07-10 05:40 pm (UTC)

penknife.livejournal.com

This is really lovely.

Date: 2006-07-10 06:24 pm (UTC)

Thanks. :)

Date: 2006-07-10 08:47 pm (UTC)

From: (Anonymous)

A beautiful piece and shows off your family to people who never met you in understandable ways. If you ever become famous, keep this one for your first short-pieces or autobiography book.