Step 1: Insert the reel into the top of the View-Master. The reel is cardboard, warped after all this time, so give it an extra nudge to get it fully inserted.
Step 2: Hold the View-Master to your eyes. Not that way, turn it around. There, that’s better. Turn towards the window, the one with the most light shining through it, or look up at the ceiling, at the lone lightbulb dangling there. What do you see?
Step 3: Remember the tracks left by foxes across the beach in moonlight, as you and your father sit quietly on a blanket, hoping to catch a glimpse of the dark red fur, the glowing yellow eyes. The city of your youth contains more lakes within its boundaries than any other city you’ve ever heard of. You clutch your camera to your chest and wait.
Step 4: Depress the lever with your right index finger. If the reel catches in the holder, give it another nudge.
Step 5: Remember your mittens held to your coat by strings as you sit on a snowbank, waving Nerf Man towards the camera. Your snowsuit is red, warm, and comfortable. Yes, darling, that’s why I asked you if you had to go before you got the suit on. Now we have to go back inside.
Step 6: Wish you had a set of snow pants that fit. Search eBay for a Nerf Man, still in its package.
Step 7: Click.
Step 8: Remember hopping across the Canadian shield, jumping from the back of one stone whale to the next. They will blast through this rock for roads, for houses, for shopping malls. Everyone who remembers the ocean this once was is gone.
Step 9: Click.
Step 10: Remember your aunt declaring that never, ever again would she go to Tim Horton’s now that they don’t allow smoking inside. You’re glad you can breathe in there now when you go for a donut. Don’t tell her that though. It’s the norm now, it’s the law, almost nobody smokes in public now. Except downtown at the transit station where people are going everywhere and nowhere at the same time.
Step 11: You know what to do. If the lever sticks, push a little harder. You haven’t looked at these memories in a long, long time; there’s bound to be some resistance.
Step 12: Remember how to get there from here: go down the street a ways, turn right where all those dogs used to live, drive by the derelict building where you were born, pull right up to the giant science centre shaped like a snowflake where you once saw the Queen cut a ribbon. You were one child in a sea of children. You can’t remember what she wore. But you know she was elegant. You know you cheered.
Step 13: No, we’re not all the way around the reel yet. Keep going.
Step 14: Remember the high school cafeteria where you met your new friends: Led Zeppelin, the Pixies, Nirvana. You can’t go back there; you would never survive there now.
Step 15: Play Smells Like Teen Spirit at least once a day for thirty years, and imagine the hard wood of the dance floor rushing up to meet your feet. Rest assured that you are still stupid and contagious.
Step 16: One. Last. Click.
Step 17: Remember the Superstack, that giant cigarette they built by the nickel smelter to send our pollution to Sweden. At least, that’s where your father told you the pollution was going. Somewhere not here. You can walk to the top of the street in Little Italy, stand in the tiny lot where your grandfather’s house used to sit, stare straight up at the stack until you go blind. They’re going to tear it down soon.
Step 18: Wonder, when they tear down the stack, how you will ever know that you’ve come home.
Step 19: Remove the reel from the View-Master. Carefully now. Wrap it in tissue paper and slide it between the pages of the The New Century Dictionary, Volume One: A-LEAVENING, where maybe it will straighten out again before you pull it out for another viewing.
Step 20: Put the View-Master back on the shelf with the rest of your memories. Look at it once with reverence, then turn away.
Step 21: Leave the house for once and live in the present. It’s cold outside; don’t forget your mittens.
Notes:
- SONG: Laurie Anderson – Big Science Hallelujah!
✔- wolves howling – never heard them, but went to watch for foxes
✔- cold outside → mittens
– Directions that only your own mind can reference
– golden like your memories
– every man for himself?
✔- what’s that got to do with science of any size?
– organ music like the church that burned down
– what will the characters fall off of? – school for whales
✔- mind if I smoke?
– roll the film – like chemistry film strips
– a film of the city you think you remember
– how to remember the city you grew up in
– directions for remembering the city of your youth
pull the lever to see the next slide
- Images on a View-Master reel – pairs of images combined to create a 3-D effect (stereoscopic!)
Linda M. Bayley is a writer and artist living on the Canadian Shield. Her work has appeared in Geist, The Windsor Review, and Open Minds Quarterly. Her story “Uncle Fred Explains How the Great Church Flood of ’85 Wasn’t His Fault, Not Really” was longlisted for Does it Have Pockets 2023 (One Hand in My) Pocket-Sized Fiction contest. You can find her on Twitter @lmbayley.