Relief · 17 August 2001
If there’s an upside to never throwing anything away, it’s that you never chuck anything by mistake.
I’ve been trailing small piles of bricks the last couple days: a certain piece of paper crucial to the impending move – nothing major, just the certificate that indicates I was born in the true North (strong and free) – wasn’t in its designated place when, with reliable last-minuteness, I went to get it.
What a horrible, dark state of mind that is. Little faded photos gurgling up from memory every few seconds – surely that was where I saw it last; no, there – never anything concrete, only vague spatial relationships and a blurry peripheral setting. Homes, to those of us who just can’t get organized, tend to be mapped by muscular memory and the trauma of the last time something couldn’t be found.
A few years ago I decided it would be fun to irritate my socially conscious friends by getting a gun license, which, up here in the land of politely infrequent homicide, is known as a Firearms Acquisition Certificate. With it I can pack some serious heat, sit atop a pile of ordinance, shoot first and let God sort ’em later. Me and the Nuge. I never got around to it, though. I did show my birth certificate however, after passing the safety course and written test (91/100), and pressing $50 into the hand of Constable McWhatever.
And there, tonight, after much searching and use of the word fuck, tucked into the paper wallet emblazoned with the RCMP’s then Disney-managed corporate identity and the catchy title Aiming for Safety, was my birth certificate.
And thus was I saved by the gun.
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