We find ourselves on different sides
Of a line that nobody drew
- Leonard Cohen

Where we start is where we end
- David Gilmour

I think Ma started swerving off the road right after my parents’ 25th anniversary. I’m talking metaphorically, of course. I mean in her mind.

Then again, it was all too literal later on. I’ll get to that.

My parents had a great marriage until then, or so I thought. I’m the only teen I know who doesn’t come from a broken home. My bedroom was next to theirs so I got to hear my share of disagreements and out-and-out brawls between them — even through the headphones. But, hey, they were passionate people. They fought passionately, but they loved passionately. Mom was part Italian after all.

Their 25th was a quiet affair. Dinner at their favourite restaurant, a romantic comedy later that evening and that was it. Or so they told me. They would have liked to celebrate in a big way but Dad had been laid off and Ma’s part-time salary was all that supported us. So they scrimped on their silver date, as they scrimped through most of their marriage — more lean years than ripe.

They went to bed and the next morning — POW! — it happened.

Well, not pow exactly. More like a gradual transformation. A metamorphosis. Or maybe, given Ma’s changed condition in life, a menomorphosis.

“Gregory,” she said, “we’re switching sides. Starting tonight.”

My dad was the softest spoken, quietest of men — unlike Ma whose whispers seeped through the wall between their room and mine. I couldn’t actually hear his response but it probably would have been, “Huh?”

“Our bed,” Ma added. “We’re going to switch sleeping sides.”

I don’t know what happened after that. I think I was sleeping at the time and no voices were raised so I doubt there was much of an argument. But sure enough, it started the next day. After 25 years of lying on the left side of their marriage bed, Ma moved to the right. The side closest to the door. The one where the man is supposed to sleep to protect his wife in case of a home invasion, as Dad would say.

It got weirder after that.

Ma decided she wanted to join Facebook. I don’t know why. I asked her. She just said, “What, you own the Internet?”

I helped set her up and she started posting freaky, creepy shit. Like photos of her doing a breast self-examination. Man, my friends never let me live that one down. She put up videos of hunky men in kilts and burnt red knees with messages like, ‘Ladies, enjoy Robbie (Carpet) Burns Day!’ She would goad lonely men in countries like Azerbaijan to friend her only to unfriend them. Stuff like that.

She got on Twitter and would send out tweets. ‘Twats,’ she called them, starting each one with, “Twat of the Day”.

I thought it was a phase, that it would all go away. Then came the car.

“Gregory, I’m going to buy a GTO. A Mitsubishi GTO. It’s from Japan,” she told Dad after a quiet dinner one evening.

Dad and I looked at each other, and said nothing.

“Red,” Ma continued. “With the steering wheel on the right. Like in Britain. That’s how they drive over there too, in Japan. On the right. There’s a car salesman in Goderich who tells me he thinks he knows how to import one. He Facebooked me.”

It was all too much for my brain to handle. While Dad and Ma started to battle it out, I stepped out into the cool autumn twilight and walked down our quiet suburban street. For some reason, I focused on the squirrels.

Two black ones chased each other in front of our home, circling like whirling dervishes until one broke the pattern and raced up a tree.

Ever pay attention to squirrels? No wonder people use the expression “squirrely” to describe other people who’re fucked in the head.

As you approach one, it darts toward a tree and tries to hide at the back of the trunk. Then its little head pops to the right and left to see if you’re still there. If you approach, it’ll fly straight up the trunk and lose itself in the leaves.

Or, there’s my favourite — watch what a squirrel does when a car approaches. The big-tailed rat — a squirrel’s a rodent isn’t it? — will dash out in front of traffic and realize it’s in trouble. So what’s it do? It starts a manic left-right, right-left runner-on-base-in-trouble manoeuvre before deciding, inevitably, to go back toward the (usually longer) direction from where it started. And where it started is usually where its little life ends.

Doesn’t make sense, of course, but then the poor bugger is probably scared shitless and can’t think straight. Hell, too many of them get caught in this baseball-like force-out situation and before you know it, the squirrel’s dead, its mouth open and a disgorged red thing splattered onto the street. All because it couldn’t, or wouldn’t, just cross the damn road!

I kept on walking, right out of our pastoral suburban boring existence to busy Queen Street where the cars rush past you and the sidewalks are too narrow. I watched the traffic rush toward me — I always walk on the side facing traffic — and started to think about the linearity of life. Of how cars and their drivers obediently follow the rules of the road. They drive in the correct lane, at (usually) the correct speed.

(Except my Nonno Carlo who drove his big Buick with tunnel-vision stubbornness. Eyes arrow-straight ahead, hands clenching the wheel, head refusing to turn left or right. Pity anyone who dared cross his deadly path.)

I thought about all those drivers who follow all those rules. Chaos ensues when someone cuts abruptly from one lane to the other or when a driver disobeys a traffic light, and yet it rarely happens.

I know, I know. Now I’m starting to swerve off course.

So Ma ended up getting her 1990 Mitsubishi GTO, repainted candy apple red with the steering wheel on the right. Dad refused to watch as she drove down the road and turned the corner far too wide.

About 15 minutes later, the red car veered back toward the house, Ma hanging out the right window and waving her right arm wildly as she steered with her left.

She whipped the car to the right toward our driveway and smacked it straight into the garage. Boy, Dad was pissed! It was like a volcano dormant for 25 years suddenly exploding. It cost a small fortune to get a bricklayer to fix that mess and repair her car.

Ma continued to switch things up. She started wearing her purse on her left arm instead of the right. She would wear her watch on her right wrist. She began tilting her hat to the right.

One night after they entertained some friends and Dad had had too much to drink, Ma waited till he went to bed and shaved off the left half of his moustache. When he woke up, she convinced him he’d done it himself.

Well, that was the start of Dad’s transformation, I think. At least that’s when I started noticing it.

Dad decided he liked the half-moustache look and shaved off his left eyebrow. Then the left side of the hair on his head.

He would switch up his clothes, turning his pants around so his backside faced the front. He did the same with his shirts. He swapped his left and right shoes. Dad started eating his food with the fork in his left hand, awkwardly stabbing at his meat.

He started to love his side of the bed and refused to come out of his room. In fact, he took over the room. Ma would bring him food and knock on the door. Dad would grunt in a voice not his own and demand that she leave it there. I didn’t see him for days.

I remember watching one night when he opened the door and — I swear it! — a furry paw reached out to grab the dish. Now don’t look at me like I’m crazy too.

I begged Ma to call you and have you intervene. Honestly. I know you probably aren’t allowed to treat family but I was desperate. She was stubborn though and pretended that this was just part of normal family life.

This went on for several days but felt like weeks. We never saw Dad. He was sounding stranger and stranger. His voice became hoarse and then started to sound inhuman, like Frankenstein’s Monster. We heard him bounce against the bedroom walls, the door, maybe even up against the ceiling. I’m not kidding. We would ask if he was okay and he would bark out something, making it clear he wished to be left alone.

Then, one day when Ma went to bring him his food and knocked on the door, there was silence. She called out his name and knocked again. Nothing.

I remember Ma looking back at me over her left shoulder, eyes wide with fear.

“Do something!” she said.

I grabbed a toothpick from the kitchen and inserted it in the tiny hole in the door knob to release the locking mechanism. I took two quick breaths, turned the knob and slowly opened the door, expecting the worst.

“About time you came in,” said Dad in perfect English, his voice the same as ever. Looking…normal.

He lay on the bed — the right side — a big, broad smile on his face. His head turned to the left, to the right, to Ma, to me — expecting one of us to say something. We stood there, our silent mouths opened in disbelief.

“I think it’s time we got back to normal again.”

Dad’s hair grew back and he started to wear his clothes the usual way. Ma went back to wearing her purse on her right arm. She wore her watch on her left wrist again, started tilting her hat to the left.

And we sold the red Mitsubishi GTO and got a Chrysler minivan. Boring brown.

Eventually, Dad came into my room and sat at the edge of my bed. I hadn’t gone to school in a couple of days, hadn’t left my bedroom in fact. I stayed under the covers and would not open the blinds of my window. I never let my parents come into my room, especially after their latest left-right looniness turned my world upside down, but for some reason I made an exception this time with Dad.

“You know, son,” he said, “parents can sometimes be more confused than kids. Hell, your uncle makes a very good living treating them. We may seem like we always know right from wrong — or right from left, for that matter — but that may be just a mirage. Sometimes, we just decide to turn things around and see what happens. Then we find out we were best the way we were. I think that was the lesson your mum learned. Things are back to normal again now, son.”

Yeah, as normal as fuck.