Born Tall
In third grade at Ahuntsic School I was the second tallest girl in my class, after Kathy Vandenberg who had a slight edge -- she was 5 feet plus half an inch or so, and I was 5 feet. We were class giants. We even lived on the same street, Rue Dauphin in Pont Viau, and her mom had been my kindergarten teacher in 1956. Mrs Vandenberg was also very tall, even taller than my mother Therese Bouthillier whose genes went back to 18th century France. Mrs Vandenberg and her husband had come to Canada from Holland after the war, and started having children at the same time as my parents.
Kathy was tall and blonde and big-boned, and so was I. In a class photo from 1959, we're standing in the back row side by side, grinning with arms crossed, and looking gangly and awkward. Our front teeth are still growing in and look too big for our mouths. To be extremely tall at age 8 is embarrassing. The average 8 year old girl is much shorter and even a tall 8 year old girl is only 4'9" so we were like Gargantua and Pantagruel. We were Gullivers among the Lilliputians. Almost taller than our Grade 3 teacher, Mrs Williams.
In addition, I was often not in school and had few if any friends so it was reassuring to know Kathy Vandenberg lived only a few doors down from my family in Pont Viau. Did her mom know about thr secret program I was part of at McGill? She very well may have, but her kids had not been chosen although they were bright and talented. Looking back, I think many parents knew, especially teachers in the Protestant School Board which (I was told) entered into a secret agreement with Dr Cameron to supply him with subjects.
Anyway, in addition to my supposedly very high IQ, I was very tall. So tall, I now realize, that at age 8 I could pass for a twelve year old girl of low-average height. Not that I wanted to, or tried to pass for older, but that's not the point.
The point was, I was missing a lot of school and my teachers said nothing. Sometimes I was home sick with measles, reading children's classics in bed, and when I returned to school I would have a note from my mother explaining my absence. Those times I can account for, in a way, because I remember the books and the stories in them. Little Women, Black Beauty, Tom Sawyer, Alice in Wonderland-- I read 'em all before I was 9, lying in bed in my little room near the living room where my mother watched TV or talked on the phone, mostly in French, to friends and relatives.
But for my other absences, which may not have been recorded (and for which I had no mother's note), I have learned I was often downtown at undisclosed locations, meeting people who would show up again in my life 10 or 20 years later. They would seem to know me. One even called me "wee Annie" -- that being Leonard Cohen, when I officially visited him for the first time in November 1977, and played me a song, Red River Valley, that he famously used to play with the other smokers and mental patients in the common room of the Allan Memorial, where I used to go as a child and sing along.
Returning to Grade 3 from these secret excursions through the looking glass, or exploring Wonderland, I would blend back into my class of 8 year olds and try to catch up with whatever activity they were engaged in, which was usually no problem given my IQ, and also the fact that the teacher had to have been tipped off. She would eye me as I slipped into my empty seat, and say nothing. One afternoon at Ahuntsic School I remember her reading us a story -- a chapter from Waterbabies, a 19th century children's novel. I had heard her read the first chapter, about Pip the chimneysweep setting off to work one fine morning in Victorian England -- she would read us a chapter a day. But here I was again and it was Friday and she was already on the last chapter and it seemed Pip had died, and I had missed all the action in the middle so the ending, such as it was, made absolutely no sense. And I wondered at the time about that -- not realizing I'd been "away" -- so I blamed the author for making such a mess of a good story.
It was a metaphor for my life as a "water baby" - an experimental tadpole - swimming downstream and attending parties with kids and adults on LSD, and losing whole chunks of time to Subproject 68 "Drugs, Hypnosis, Sensory Isolation" -- always skirting the borderlines of reality, which is why I had no friends, not even tall Kathy Vandenberg who lived on my street.
I was more of a mental nomad, like a child soldier trekking through jungles of the absurd. And now I realize I had an alter who was a short 12 year old girl, with the mind of an 8 year old on LSD... and that 12 year old was going to parties and getting up to things I couldn't even imagine.
That would explain why, in later life, when I became a writer, certain McGill professors and others in the local literary scene appeared to know things about me ("wee Annie") that I didn't. They were waiting to see if I would write about those days which I had long forgotten, when I had lived in the body of another girl, who wasn't so tall and could pass for 12 --
Unfortunately it would take years to figure out, by which time these literary giants had all passed on to Glory, or whatever awaited them in the Beyond. It may not be fun and games for these men, who were buried with their secrets locked up in libraries and books, while I remain behind, cleaning up the mess.
to be continued
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