mmk

• 2012-02-06 4 notes

  

  He sat in front of me in my grade six class. His floppy brown hair matched his clumsy mannerisms. He was always dropping things, tripping over his lanky legs as well as his words - which he spoke with an ever-so-slight Newfoundland accent. He never faced the front of the class; always turned towards me, drawing on the corners of my notebooks with my pens, constantly trying to make me laugh.
  
  I grew accustomed to having him entertain me daily - no one had ever shown me so much attention before. When he missed a week of school because he had mono, it sank in just how accustomed I’d grown to him. I legitimately, wholeheartedly missed him.

  It was then I started caring what I looked like at school - I argued with my mom to buy me new clothes so I wouldn’t just be in my brother’s hand-me-downs. “I want to look like a girl!” I wanted to fit in. I had always been a bit of a loner and not cared about sitting alone at lunch with my “weird” sandwiches. But now I wanted to be invited to his lunch table, to go to the corner store with them all after school. So I turned on my charm and got right into the soccer games and note-passing.

  In band class one Wednesday, I was waiting for him to finish putting his saxaphone away. He kept putting each piece in backwards and upside down like a Charlie Chaplin sketch, making me giggle. Then it just came out in between giggles, “Will you be my boyfriend?”

  I wasn’t nervous, I knew even if the answer was no, that I had to ask. He looked up wide-eyed.

  “Uh.. yeah. Yeah!”
  
  My face flushed red and a grin I couldn’t wipe off spread across my pudgy cheeks. We walked back to homeroom together, not speaking because we were both too busy grinning from ear to ear. In this hallway alone, he grabbed my arm, turned me around, and we had the most awkward, but ridiculously endearing, first kiss.

• 2012-02-05 1 note

  

  Behind this uninspiring facade is an enormous outdoor public pool. This place cultivated my love affair with swimming, my bravado with new people, and - along with my mother - my self-image issues. All of which have stuck with me all this time later.

  Thanks mom.

• 2012-02-01 2 notes

  

  The first boy who ever caught my attention was a neighbour-boy named Miles. Since my dad had always been a huge Miles Davis fan, I automatically assumed the neighbour-boy was super cool because he shared that name.
  Blonde-haired, blue-eyed Miles was the same age, and went to the same grade-two class as me. We walked with his older brother to and from school everyday. I’d skip merrily over to his house in the mornings and steal a spoonful or two of his cereal, then come back after school to kick his ass in Mortal Combat until dinner. He picked me flowers and told me I would be his wife one day, but when I was, I wouldn’t be allowed to beat him in video games. Little did he know I was just a button-masher and actually couldn’t play any other video game what-so-ever. I kept that to myself.
  He moved away the summer before grade three, but our neighbourhood romance ended abruptly before he left.

  We were playing in my back yard around my pear tree when Miles inexplicably, and quite suddenly, threw a pear at me. This wouldn’t have been so bad, but the hard, unripe pear hit me square on the nose. My mom came out of the house to my screaming. Not knowing what happened, just seeing the blood spewing out of my nose, mixing with tears, streaming over my gaping, crying mouth - she yelled at him to leave.
  He never came back.

• 2012-01-14 3 notes

  When you start school and meet all kinds of other kids, you begin to learn that not everyone’s family life is like your family life. I remember this being a completely crazy concept, the world outside my house. “You have a SISTER? Wow I don’t have one of those.”; “No.. I don’t have a middle name. That’s not normal?”; “You’re allowed to watch TV?!”; “No milk with dinner?!” “Your family plays golf?”

  One of the newfangled concepts other kids taught me was lying. I specifically remember this blowing my mind. You mean you can say something that isn’t true?! So of course I, like all kids, tested it out, failed a bunch and eventually had the concept beaten out of me. But I did get away with one lie that kinda carried itself all the way through to University - it never seemed worth it to correct. In grade one when kids started teasing me about not having a middle name, I made one up. So to most people in Windsor, my full name is Melody Maple Krauze.

• 2011-12-14 14 notes

  

  Everyone has one of those teacher’s who just “got” them, and pushed them in all the right ways. Miss H was the first person to ever call me an artist, and re-enforce the importance of art and artists in the world. She gave me out-of-class assignments and would put drawings/paintings I brought on her desk. She took the time to have chats and gave me shit when I wasn’t living up to my potential. She was young - 28? 29?  Tall, average woman-shaped, blonde haired and always smelled like cigarettes, but also sometimes pot. She was my English teacher, by the way. Yeah, she rocks.

  I used to go for walks around the neighbourhood in the evening with my Walkman, one time I was singing (quite loudly) along to Cindi Lauper when I heard a loud giggle coming from the bottom left apartment in this picture. Startled and embarrassed I looked into the well-lit apartment and saw Miss H waving at me.

  Even years later she would hum Time After Time in class and smirk.

  Yeah, she rocks.

• 2011-11-29 3 notes

  

  My parents and I went to visit my great-aunt’s grave. I don’t remember her - she died when I was 2, but we sure have a lot to thank her for. Our house, for instance.

  When my parents first came to Canada, a young married couple with a three year old son, she invited them to stay with her in the house her and her deceased husband built. She wouldn’t let them pay rent and allowed them to renovate the house to suit the growing family. When my parents told her they were expecting another lil one (me) she was so excited she talked them into getting a puppy, too. Just to complete the family. When she died, she left the house to my parents.

  I wish she could know how thankful we are - we’ve taken such great care of it, Ciocia.

  Thank you.

• 2011-11-24 3 notes

  

  There was a new girl in my Grade 8 class. She was an overweight, unfortunately homely and very unfortunately smelly girl. We were never outwardly mean to her, in fact all the kids made sure to invite her to grade-wide soccer games, but she seemed to be perfectly fine keeping to herself. That summer I ran into her at the park and she invited me to her house to play in her pool. Being a sucker for swimming, I went over the next day.

  She was slightly reluctant to let me into her house to use the bathroom, and when I went in, I understood why. It wasn’t the fact there was barely a clear path through boxes and garbage and laundry in her kitchen to get to the bathroom, it wasn’t even the strange smell of old hamburger and worn socks permeating over everything. The thing that disturbed me to such an extent that I left immediately was the shit-stained pair of mens white briefs in the already pee-filled toilet.

• 2011-11-20 6 notes

  Hair School.