The Erica Museum

It appears I have left the sub-continent.
Now I am in Canada. Montreal, as fate would have it.

I thought that India would involve more sex, and more blogging. But that’s okay. Now I have a whole bunch of extra condoms I can put in the Erica Museum I’m about to blog about.

The girl I am subletting from for April kindly emptied her plentiful shelves. I am curating the shelves with my suitcase and two backpacks full of stuff. Since returning from India, I have added an extra suitcase to my life. At first, this generated mixed feelings; however, I think that ultimately it expanded my curating options. Isn’t curating a delightful word?  One might also say, Curation, though I am not entirely sure about that.



 

Me and My Life with the Extra Suitcase

My room is large and sunny. It came with two beds, two sets of shelves, and a weird pale peach coloured dresser. Included on the biggest bed was a Canadian Version of the Ugly Polar Fleece Bedsheet. It reminded me of India, and this instilled unrivalled comfort. I have nicknamed the Canadian Version of the Ugly Polar Fleece Bedsheet (CV/UPFB), the Deer Duvet. As a source of sexual gratification, it is working reasonably well, as such polar fleece items generally do. These days I tend to leave the Deer Duvet rolled up.  

Deer Duvet

Palm Tree Wallpaper. The photo does not do it justice.

On the walls, there is absolutely nothing apart from three long strips of palm-tree covered wallpaper, framed together. I’ve never seen framed wallpaper before, not even in India. What good fortune. If I had tape, I would add to the walls a birthday/going away card from my sister. It is a picture of a photographer taking a photo of a whole bunch of people’s bums. Full Moon Portrait, it is called. My sister generously labelled some of the bums with names and initials of some folks whose bums I saw and/or came close to seeing this year. How nice that at the birthday dinner table, my father and his girlfriend got a sense of what I’ve been up to.

Full Moon portrait. Labels on bums removed to protect the innocent.

As it happens, I do not have any tape.

However, I am the very proud owner of scissors. And they made it into Exhibit One of 19. While I was in Delhi, I purchased a large pair of blue scissors for 90 rupees. Since then, I have been cutting my own hair and it is one of the greatest joys of my life. Travelling with scissors means that on airplanes, you no longer qualify for the prestigious Strictly Carry-On luggage status. But let me tell you, it is totally worth it.

Exhibit One of 19 + Scenes from a Haircutting Party, Bangalore

Exhibit One of 19 also features the Juno nominated children’s CD, “(name concealed due to the Dignity of my Somewhat Famous Relatives),” in addition to the intermittent presence of my I-pad mini, whose redness brings together a rewarding motif of primary colours.

Now we are going to skip the purse, shoes and broccoli t. shirt exhibits to get right to Shelf Nine of 19. Purple Combination Lock and Chain. Purple Combination Lock is from back in the days when cardiovascular fitness was still a concern and I used to go to Public Lap Swims. I took the combination lock all the way to India and used it to keep various beach house shacks secure. Somehow I remembered the combination which I wrote down in a cloth covered fushia journal in approximately 2009. The journal now exists in an unknown location. I really really really like purple. Same thing for fuschia, despite its elusive spelling.

 

Chain from Shelf Nine

The Chain from Shelf Nine was given to me by my Friend Franck. Franck is a rather spiritual and unusual fellow. In the winters, he hangs out in Rishikesh, writing, helping with a digeridoo factory and talking to God. In the summer, he builds boats in Montreal. Like a real Boatman, not just an arbitrary name I made up for blogging fairy tale purposes. Oh well. Anyways, when I went to Rishikesh, Franck took me up the mountains on his motorcycle. Everyone is dying to know what happened and so we are both going to write a story called, “No Garlic, No Onions, No Toilet Paper.” Franck’s version and Erica’s version. Franck gave me the chain after the motorcycle trip, for my eighteen-hour train ride to Varanasi. God is a big deal for Franck. He talks about God all the time. Even so, he thinks you should lock up your bags on the train. I wanted to leave my chain in Goa, but my Israeli friend convinced me to keep it, in case I ever want to be tied up.

Me and Franck on our way up the mountains.

Plus Me, In the Mountains
No Garlic, No Onions, No Toilet Paper

Exhibit 16: Books.

The Book of Stuff and Whatnot: I helped a bunch of teenagers put together this anthology of short stories, drawings and poems. Perhaps this in itself counts as a sort of curating. In any case, narrowing down my book collection to contain 50% teenage poetry and creative writing was not a terrible choice.  A few excerpts:

The Struggle:

My heart feels ever so heavy.
I’m about to stumble. I’m feeling unsteady.
I feel like I could forever fall. I just can’t stop hitting this hard, brick wall.
My head spins.
And I feel like I’m not going to win.

The Hardest Part:

Even though my mind knows it, my heart refuses to accept the truth.
That you are gone from me.
Forever...

Curiosity Killed the Cat (A Sonnnet)

They say curiosity killed the cat.
Now and then, notice where your head is at. 

The Book of Stuff and Whatnot + a book about Ashtanga Yoga and Having Babies

Yoga Sadhana for Mothers: Shared experiences of Ashtanga Yoga, pregnancy, birth & motherhood: For someone who has no desire to bear her own child or be a mother and/or practice Ashtanga Yoga, I read this book incredibly quickly. I think I am going to pass it on to my Pregnant Friend, who is no longer pregnant, but who has remained my Pregnant Friend in my psyche. Maybe you have friends like that.

 Hazy Indian Currency/Condom/Bandaid/Broken Rock Mini Museum

Indian Currency/Condom/Bandaid/Broken Rock Mini Museum: Here we have the leftover Indian currency, the leftover Canadian condoms I took to India – there were more than two, but I gave some to friends, and selected these specially for my exhibit – and the broken brown rock that my friend Naomi gave me to heal my painful gushing periods. And bandaids. I smashed the menstrual rock in my seven-dollar hotel room in Rishikesh. From that point on, menstruation ceased for over four months.  The blood came back two and a half days after I curated this exhibit, and the morning before I went to visit Franck. Franck takes full responsibility.

Teenage Poetic Interlude:

The Serenity of a Journal Entry:
As you can see, I adore poetry.
Reading and writing are skills I carry.

(End of Interlude.)

May we all carry these skills all the time.

Some of my clothing made it onto the shelf, including a somewhat fuschia and multi-coloured dress I bought in Goa for 500 rupees, the Threesome Tights, and a fancy frilly shirt my mother game me.

Threesome Tights on Legs, with Birkenstocks

Other exciting exhibits feature Tarot Cards, the Fanny Pack Museum, Generic Spiritual Objects A, B and Others, Burgundy Doc Martens and A Letter from Cambodia. The Erica Museum will be on display for the month of April. That is to say, it is a limited edition. Also, I will need a new apartment come May. And/or another country to live in.

To learn the Secret and Exciting Location of the Erica Museum, please get in touch. Curating/Curation Workshops are also available. The fees are not exorbitant.  But if you’re super short on cash, in lieu of money, I could sort of use a decent sized book for balancing on my head during meditation. I gave, Not That Kind of Girl to some rickshaw drivers in Agra.

Not That Kind of Girl, passed on to young rickshaw drivers in Agra

 

Not That Kind of Girl, on my head

And it seems the teen poets are winning the day.

At the end of The Book of Stuff and Whatnot, they generously wrote me a bio. Whoever taught them how to write bios was an okay teacher. I am pretty happy with this:

Erica Schmidt (Coordinator)

A woman of character and just a touch of both serious and childish nature. An altogether fearless mentor to the writing club, she is fearless in her writing, as well as in real life.

Book: The Book of Stuff and Whatnot

Genre: Murder, Mystery and Imagination

The End.

See you at the museum!

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Legs

In Niagara Falls, Ontario,  there is a museum full of wax statues of dead people.  My parents took me and my sister there during spring break when I was five.  Some of the dead people had suffered horrific and violent deaths which were depicted in elaborate dioramas:  prisoners of war with their heads at the guillotine, their captors holding axes, frozen in mid-air, right above their necks; tortured artists hanging by nooses; soon-to-be assassinated politicians at gunpoint.  My sister, nine years old at the time, was rightly terrified.  I however, remained stoic and brave.  Until we passed by the glass cage of a wax man named Terry Fox. 

Terry Fox at the Wax Museum, Niagara Falls, Ontario 

 

Terry Fox was a young man with brown curly hair, focused eyes and a mouth that gaped open.  He wore dark coloured shorts, and a white T.shirt, with a red jacket on top.  Behind him was a Canadian flag.  His face looked pale, stunned and half-dead, but at five years old, I didn't know what a dead person looked like so this didn't really concern me.  The Terrifying and Traumatic part was that in contrast to the rest of Terry’s wax skin-coloured body, his left leg, from the top of his thigh and down, was made out of wood. I froze and stared.
 
“What happened to his leg?” I asked. 
 
My parents told me the story all about the Canadian hero who had lost his leg due a disease called CANCER.  To try and raise money to find a cure for this disease, he’d decided to run 8000 km (5000 miles) across Canada, completing a whole marathon distance every single day.
 
I wasn’t very interested in Terry Fox’s Marathon of Hope.  I was consumed by the word CANCER.
 
“Canker?” I said, still staring at Terry’s leg.  I had cankers on the insides of my cheeks from biting down my skin to hard and drinking too much orange juice.  Maybe it was related, an early stage in the journey towards losing my leg.
 
“Can Sir,” my sister corrected me.  I did not feel consoled.
 
After the wax museum, we went to a film about the legend and mysteries of Niagara Falls.  For awhile, a number people had thought it would be a good idea to get in a barrel and roll down the Falls which were 173 feet high.  I hardly paid any attention.

 

 Niagara Falls, one of the world's great wonders. Some people roll down in barrels with their cats.

One woman went down in a barrel with her kittens.  When they opened the barrel, I’m pretty sure the woman was dead.  And her kittens had turned from black to white.  

I wasn’t scared or surprised.  I was thinking of Terry Fox’s wooden leg.  And cancer. 

When we got home, my sister wrote a speech about Niagara Falls, and the people who rolled down it in barrels and all the places there were to see around it.  I think she won second-place in a public speaking contest.

I made my mother take me to the library and find all the movies and books that there were about Terry Fox.  She called the Canadian Cancer Society who sent me a big package in the mail.  Now I had a big folder full of pamphlets and fact sheets all about cancer, and about Terry Fox.

I remember sitting on my couch watching the video from the library.  When Terry started his run across Canada, his cancer was gone, but so was his leg. He ran by placing his right artificial leg on the ground, drawing it back with what was left of his right thigh, and then crashing forwards on to his left leg which he hopped onto twice before landing again on his left.  Double-hop, step, double-hop, step.  It looked excruciating.  Terry started his run in Newfoundland. As he hobbled across the country, people met him at the sides of the road, handing him money. 

 

CBC radio archives: Interview with Terry Fox

 

Maybe this would be a happy story, I thought from my couch. Then I remembered Terry’s statue in the wax museum.  I looked down at my own five-year-old leg and imagined it disappearing, ending just below my hip and then attached to a long foreign contraption that ended with my running shoe.  I kept worrying about this for the rest of my life.

The film continued. Terry hobbled down to Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Quebec.  Every single day, he covered a marathon distance-26 miles, or 42 km.  He arrived in Ottawa on Canada Day where there was a huge celebration in his honour.  His goal was to raise at least $1 for each of Canada’s 24 million people.  Big corporations started to sponsor him, and things were going very well.

Then Terry got tired.  Northern Ontario is lined with hills and rocks and trees, and a very cold lake called Lake Superior.  It’s pretty at first, but then the roads become monotonous and endless.  Watching Terry run past the trees on the tv screen, I could tell that he was wearing out.  His face was pale and he kept having coughing fits.  Just outside of a city called Thunder Bay, Terry had a long, drawn out coughing fit, and he bent over clenching his chest.  An ambulance came. 

Later they showed Terry on the road, still wearing his t. Shirt with the weird broken up Canadian flag on it.  A bunch of microphones were held up to Terry’s face.  Terry looked clammy, exhausted and sad.  After running 143 days and 5,373 kilometres (3,339 mi), and raising 1.7 million dollars for cancer research, he had to stop his marathon of hope.

“The cancer has spread to my lungs,” he said, his voice cracking.  I leaned forwards on the couch, clenched my jaw, and felt nauseous.

(CBC footage: the end of Terry's run. Not available on Youtube. Alas.)

“Are you okay sweetie?”  my mother asked.

 

“I think it’s the cancer,” I said to her.  Terry Fox died less than a year after he began his run across Canada.  He is one of those heroes you are not allowed to insult.  Saying that Terry Fox was a quitter is kind of like saying that Ghandi was an asshole. You should never say either of these things. Terry Fox and Ghandi were both great.

Since Terry Fox’s death, every year around this time in September, close to a million people all over the world participate in what’s called “The Terry Fox Run.”  They run or walk as far as they can with as many legs as they have, raising money for cancer research in honour of Terry.  I’ve participated in this run or walk several times, grateful for Terry’s inspiration and for the fact that I still possess both of my legs.  For now.

Our bodies are not like a worm’s.  Everyone knows this.  I often dream that my arms or my legs fall off.  Because I have the same cancer as Terry Fox, or because of diabetes, or because of some terrible accident.  In my dreams, I wish desperately that my arms and my legs will grow back, but I know that they won’t.  I also know that I won’t be able to be as brave and heroic as Terry Fox.  I will be scared, and sad and ashamed. 

Then I wake up, and none of this matters.  All of my arms and legs are there.  I poke around the edges of my knees, looking for bumps. 

“Is that a tumour?” I ask the Boatman.  The Boatman keeps sleeping.  I will have to figure out the answer for myself.  Probably the bump is just the end of my thigh bone.  Probably I am safe.

No one is going to build a wax statue of me.  Not anytime soon. I hope.

The End.

 



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