SUCH a cliche about dreams coming true

Starting with a cliché: Have you ever had a dream come true? Like, a dream you’ve had since childhood?

I opened the box of books, my books, What the Aurora Remembers in hardcover. My friends Chris and Cara came over to video it, because unboxing your box of books is a social media moment to capture! And I said stuff that, well, was true, and trite and clichéd, and true.

That moment, holding my book in my hands, was a dream come true. And what I thought about was discovering Anne of Green Gables and how that is the thing that made me want to be a writer. Anne Shirley (and Lucy Maud Montgomery, of course) made me want to be a writer. The dream of being a writer started with that red-headed girl sitting at a train station.

While it is probably true that the dream would have shown up, been articulated, even if I had never encountered Anne with an E, there would be some other book or story or epiphany, because there were lots of books around me and I did quickly become a voracious reader – I’m pretty sure most writers have an “origin story” book, and I’m equally sure that many many Canadian kids of my generation and later can cite Anne as that origin story.

But after watching that video of myself a few times, trying to edit it down to a social media friendly length (see result above! I figured out how to add music!) I got thinking about the origins behind the obvious one, which got me thinking about aunties. Two of my aunts, in particular.

The specific term “auntie” isn’t one we ever used in my family, but it’s entered the common lexicon and I kind of love it as a concept and an experience. I especially love it when I think about how it is sometimes used to lovingly refer to that eccentric, single, childless adult who might not be a “mother” but is a nurturer, a caregiver, a helpful soul who shows up in the lives of kids, or former kids, when needed. I’ve been lucky to have a few of those.

It was my aunt, Sister Doris, who gave me Anne of Green Gables, I think as a birthday gift or Christmas gift (my birthday is in late December, so gifts in December are usually treated as interchangeable in my head). Sister Doris was my mom’s twin sister. She was Sister Doris because she was an actual Catholic nun. Their brother the priest was, likewise, knows as Father Joe to all of the nieces and nephews. And probably his parishioners too.

Sister Doris was an elementary school teacher. She lived, most of my childhood, in a small community a few hours from my hometown, in a convent, teaching at the Catholic school there. She would be around a lot especially in the summers, when we went on family trips down to Grand Lake, or she’d join us for other vacations. I’m pretty sure she came with us on the visit to Prince Edward Island when we actually visited Green Gables and Charlottetown and the other Anne touristy places.

I don’t know why she picked up those books for me, probably she’d heard about them through her teaching. The internet tells me the edition I had was from 1968, and I would have got them around 1975. I think I was already reading the Bobbsey Twin books by then – gift of another auntie, our babysitter Mary – so it was pretty obvious I was a book kid.

But it was Sister Doris that gave me the books that gave me words, ideas, a shape to dream about for who and what I wanted to become someday.

The other auntie who helped unlock that dream was my aunt Margie, on my dad’s side. I didn’t see Margie as often, because she lived far away, in the big city of Toronto. She was also a teacher. I’d usually see her in the summer, when the Colton clan would gather at the family farm around Johnville, New Brunswick. But I remember at some point Margie came to visit us in Bathurst, and I think that’s when she gave me my first diary. It would have within a year or two of my reading Anne, I think? That’s pretty fuzzy. But it was one of those little hardcover diaries with a lock and a little key. And that’s when I started writing things down, my first little stories and secrets.

And fifty years later, I held my very own book in my hands, and remembered Anne Shirley and all those dreams. It’s weird, it’s wonderful.

I’ve had dreams, and hopes, and aspirations, come true before. And lots that haven’t come true, whether they just faded in importance or actually crashed and burned. But this is a special one – it’s the one that has held steady from almost my earliest memories. It’s a “who I want to be” dream, rather than a “what I want to do/experience” dream.

Holding the physical book in my hand is simply one end point on the timeline of that dream – because the thing about a “who I want to be” dream is that, looking back over my life, I lived into that dream many times. I might not have named it that, recognized it as such – but every story, every livejournal post, every post to the Pancakes forum and emails to friends from Spain in 2001 where I told the story of my travels, the one-act play, the short stories, the three or maybe four unfinished novels – that was all part of it. The life I was living, the career I had – that was also part of it. The book would not exist without that career, those years in Yellowknife.

So, anyway, dreams do come true, and sometimes you can hold that in your hand. Thank you Sister Doris, and Aunt Margie, and Mary, and everyone else who has nurtured this dream, knowingly or not, along the way.