LIGHT TRAFFIC

I forgot to tell you I went to Timmins last month, for work. Timmins is a mining community in Northern Ontario that has a lot of Native (mainly Cree) and French people in it. Two things I noticed about Timmins. 1) The entire town is low to the ground, as if the people who built it had their minds turned downwards, toward the mines, as opposed to upwards, towards the sky. 2) A popular activity seems to be sitting in parked pickup trucks, windows down, sipping Tim Hortons coffee. Timmies tailgate parties.

Timmins is where I spent 6 weeks training to become an airline stewardess, back when I did crazy things like become a flight attendant for Native-owned airlines with aerodynamic wild geese as logos. Me and 4 other girls all lived at the Days Inn Hotel (also for 6 weeks) and everyday we had “class” at the Timmins airport with this Cree woman called Marina who didn’t like me very much. I think she had a feeling I was a bad investment for them as I wouldn’t last very long. She was right. That woman had an interesting story, though, and sometimes she’d forget she didn’t like me long enough to tell me parts of it, tears in her eyes and a lit cigarette smoking away at her fingers, untouched.

She’d had a first son with a guy who treated her like shit and whom she kicked out, after some years. Maybe they were married, I forget. The son was 12 and very big for his age. She also had a tiny baby, under a year. The baby’s father was a man from Zimbabwe who’d come to Timmins to teach and had proceeded to disappear in the bush, possibly further up north. She’d lost track. The baby looked like him though, an awful lot, and that made it hard for her not to think about him all the time. I remember thinking the guy had a kind of name that was fun to say and that you’d miss saying it, out loud, the day he walked out.