Albertasaurases (“Autobiography” cont’d)

Albertasaurases (“Autobiography” cont’d)

       By So-called author Dung Reimer

              ­kleenex

             one deserves preserves on the reserves

                 observe the reverb of the preverb at the highverb
                 nevre everve the televerves if they comatyouvervs

A body was flung into the sea. Police were notified and they followed a suspect. Cameras and hidden devices searched for clues and patterns. Scott Peterson was tried and finally exonerated. His wife and unborn child, dead by drowning, were buried at a cemetery near Wichita. The sea does not preserve well, but it preserves well enough. Much, much later it washed up on shore a nylon rope with markings on it and of a length that proved Scott Peterson guilty. After twelve years a free man he now whisked into a police station, he crowed and pleaded before a judge, he ate little and slept poorly, and then he died of a lethal injection administered at the Port Pravda prison in Louisiana. Scott Peterson is no more. His memory falters on. Only his kind remains in our minds two thousand years hence. Like the dinosaurs. We say there were Duck-billed dinosaurs and Albertasaurases along the Red Deer River, but none of them are named Bob or Aaron who had this or that specific history of criminal or generous behavior. History will not be kind to the particulars of Scott’s life, nor will it care about this or that demise. It will, though, recall forever that in itself that kills mothers and children by drowning them.

       Talking about preserves and the preserved, my mother, married to the great, great grandson of Klaas Reimer, fool of that Chortiza colony so resplendent in the late nineteenth century, made the best Bing cherry preserves. I fermented wine from the juice of those preserves, as some fifteen-year olds are wont to do. That is neither here nor there. The preserves are what I wish to tell about. They were in mason jars lined along a pantry in the northwest corner of the basement. There were cherry preserves, pickles, tomatoes, tomato ketchup, mustard pickles, pickled pig’s feet, salted chicken feet, jellied smoked farmer sausage in jars that had about them a grayish, jiggling look, raspberry preserves, strawberries in sugar water, beets, tomato soup, and in a corner a five gallon crock of sauerkraut. This was how I grew up and this is what we ate and thought about eating when we grew hungry. I did not eat in a restaurant three times between the ages of three and fifteen.

       At fifteen my sister was staunchly evangelical, my brother younger than myself was a flying daredevil on a Honda 150, my brother older than me was a budding scholar in the USA, and my youngest sister was growing up so beautiful the entire world would know about her in the sequel to the Flying Nun that hit the screens in the late eighties.

       In the late eighties things changed once again for the inhabitants of Greek Island on the north shore of eastern Asia. Descendants of Genghis Khan, they throve there in those godforsaken barrens. They remained excellent equestrians and gave themselves and their lives wholly over to horses and horsemanship. Even the girls rode well. For a period they had attempted en masse to switch to sidesaddle instead of riding bareback but that fetish soon got itself forgotten and they took off their blouses once again for riding and observed tradition. In eighty-nine, however, a visiting missionary asked to see the register of names of the town’s people and those of the surrounding hamlets and he was brought a tome of a hundred pounds bound in leather. In it he found entries as far back as the great Khan himself. He could not believe his eyes. Could he be perceiving correctly, he wondered.

He asked if he could borrow the book and take it to Moscow to have it verified, but the locals looked at him with amazement. They drew their knives and began to stab him. He implored them to save him for he had meant no harm. They bound his wounds and let him go. He came back ten months later with a small army of historical experts who saw the book, filmed each of its pages, secretly took a sample of the velum to identify the age and type of the manuscript and left. Then, to their great surprise, the thing turned out not to be a hoax. The village of Hamperskhan has never been the same. Now they have a television station, a radio station, a fast food outlet, and a small library.

It was in a library, in fact, that I had my first epiphany. I may have been thirty-two and I was idealistic. I thought that women were magic and that touching them was restorative. I also thought that I would or could find out a great deal more about God than I knew at that point. I entered the library at the university and began perchance to read books in the older sections of the building where were stored as yet uncatalogued volumes. I found one marked Shelley and it was an old, old text. In it I found to my delight a story about a monster who died trying to reach the North Pole. It killed its master in the process and then vanished over the ice running and swimming as if immune to the cold. I realized then that idealism is a bane not a boon. The real is not but only the reel of our imaginations hoping to be made permanent and famous and, so, valuable. I eventually reversed my opinion. Later epiphanies concerned babies, music, teaching, mules, underwear, children, food, and luck respectively.

Never underestimate the ability of a preservative to keep wood solid. My deck and my dock are still pristine after twelve years because I painted them with a green preservative purchased of a lumber company in Kenora. My boat gets attached to the dock each year and it is a happy sight. My wife sits on the deck and reads each summer for a few weeks when we are at the cabin, and that too is happiness. I should preserve them once more soon, just to keep in mind the day when rot may wish to make its presence felt. A great white pine and a great red pine made the respective logs on which my dock decking is laid. They are massive trees at least sixty feet in length and of a great weight. A white pine is a thing of beauty, and I only wish we might have, as a human race, preserved one lake-worth of these beauties for posterity. But no, we had to take each one down, so that now not a two-foot thick pine stands in all of the northern Ontario region.