After about a decade of intermittently trying to sell their place in Lac la Hache, my parents have finally succeeded. With my parents currently not in the area, it was my duty to take the last remaining relics they wanted to keep. There’s one missing relic which I was unable to locate; a life-size cardboard version of myself.
Somehow it had stayed there through numerous past renters when I went to check on the place in the previous years. At last, however, it seems to have disappeared.
Old keepsakes generally have some sort of memory attached to them. For me, most of the things I took out, from old clocks to awnings or old pots did not. For one thing, I had plundered the house already when I moved back to the Cariboo. For another, my mother had already taken many things out on earlier occasions or dumped them on me and my siblings. The life-size cardboard me that lived there for so long did have one particular memory attached.
It was summer and I was in Vancouver for a photoshoot for Bootlegger. I was in my late teens at the time. Instead of a hotel, they had put me up in the UBC dorms, which largely functioned as a hotel in the summer. The place had a living room, kitchen, one bathroom and normally three occupied bedrooms.
In the morning, getting ready for a photoshoot, I decided to have a quick shower. I got out of my bedroom and crossed into the bathroom. When I got back out I dried myself off and went back to the bedroom which, to my shock, was locked. Because it was normally a shared space, the bedrooms had individual locks which I hadn’t realized or remembered when I had gone into the bathroom.
Now having only a tiny hand towel, I was faced with going to the front desk unclad to ask for the spare key.
In a further twist, the front desk was undergoing renovations for the summer and consequently, they were servicing guests at the front desk in the building across the street. So there I went, early in the morning traversing the street in Vancouver armed solely with a small hand towel.
Luckily, it was so early the streets were still largely empty. I shuffled across and after some suppressed giggles by the receptionist, I made it back to the room.
Fortunately, I am now definitely wise enough to never let anything like that ever happen again. Who am I kidding, people better watch out on my next holiday…