folio : Barry McKinnon (1944-2023)
Barry,
You’ll remember this. It was the
nineteen eighties. Overwaitea was called
Overwaitea because it was a grocery
store known for giving customers more
tea than expected. It’s how they went
above and beyond, right? In Prince
George, that Overwaitea sat like a
huge, cocked eyebrow in the center of a
split asphalt parking lot, and in
winter, plows pushed snow into twenty-foot-
piles that hardened into formidable
glaciers that took almost eight months
to melt. By May—my birthday—those
mountains would be about half-a-foot
high, almost black with road salt and
grit, much like the glaciers on Mount
Rainier today. Prince George still had
snow back then. I longed for Archie
comics. Betty and Veronica. So hot! I
preferred Veronica with her dark hair
and candy-red lips. But what a
stone-cold bitch. Why did Betty even like her?
That spoiled rich girl had everything.
Maybe that was why. Betty got to do
all sorts of fun stuff because of
Veronica, didn’t she? Go on boats. Ride jet
skis. Sleepovers in the big house. But
Veronica wasn’t very nice, and they
fought over the same red-headed boy who
seemed to date both of them even
though they didn’t like to share. It
was sexy somehow, but how? I wasn’t ten
and stared longingly at the magazine
racks near the checkout counter. Fingered
the double digest. Overwaitea. Wow. A
true mid-century modern grocery store.
Before supermarkets. Before Walmart and
all the other big box stores took over.
Even the checkout counters were
different then, too. More like Lazy Susans
than the automated conveyor belts we’d
later come to know. Everything
was made of Formica, too. Remember? A
throwback to another another time.
Stopping the Clocks
Everything should stop, the collection
of dust upon itself. Hairdos Medusa’d.
Fingernails, forever blunted. But then there’s
so much that needs our care. The busywork,
sure—but also the children's lesson in grief.
After that first breaker, cork-like, we can
buoy
and living become again what’s ordinary.
The not-thinking. The thinking: Not
possible.
Possible. And when certainty sets down, it
can stay in town a while before she drifts.
Something lifts. Still, we stop the clocks
to mark the time—this kindness offered to our
dead.
Those who, seized with sorrow, might disclose
what ordinary meant that time time froze.
In Your Neck of the Woods (Choke
Chain, North Central, B.C.)
Robin, the English setter, wore it when
we
walked the back forty weekends with mum
who led him through the neighbourhood
to Moore’s Meadow where he’d gallop.
He was blue, imported from some
far-away
province on a plane; His choker,
silver,
shining, hung on a hook by our back
door,
then jingled around his long smooth
neck—
a thick chain you could slip your hand
beneath and pull. Birches sliced up
through
waist-deep snowfall, and he was wild
with happiness then. Ready to point.
He’d
puff, skitter ahead on those big,
black, popcorn-
smelling pawpads and honk when you
yanked.
When we unfastened him, he’d fly: our
charger
whose black-rimmed lips flapped as he
snuffed
the air for grouse. In the snowmelt,
you could
taste shit in the air: snow, dog hair
and ice; dirt
and road salt, and, later, snooze on
him. Sniff
the crook of his feathered foreleg by
the fire.
Elizabeth Bachinsky is a BC Poet who remembers Barry McKinnon well. Barry never
missed Liz’s readings, or drinks after, whenever she came to Prince George. He
was funny, acerbic, insightful, always supportive—clearing, in his own way, a
path for young avant-garde Canadian poets from the hinterland, just like her.
