some of this is true

And then there was the week I had asthma, the week when my lungs felt very small and I coughed violently and a doctor later told me I could have become very sick indeed if things had turned out differently.

I must have been about 10 years old, maybe younger, and it probably started even before we left for Golden, B.C., a small mountain town three hours away where we would be camping for a week with some of my parents’ friends. I was already coughing but it’s probably just a cold, we thought, and that’s no reason to cancel a holiday, and I wasn’t about to miss a week of riding my bike through the municipal campground or swimming at the nearby recreation centre, my eyes stinging with chlorine, because of a little bit of coughing. And besides, we no doubt thought, it will be gone in no time.

But of course it quickly became worse. I would cough frequently and loudly, and the coughs would come in waves, again and again and again, coughcoughcoughcough, with no time in between to breathe, and inside each coughing fit I would think if I could just stop for a second, just hold my breath or something, I could concentrate and pull myself together. When I wasn’t coughing my breathing was loud and my lungs felt the way they do when you’ve run a very long way, but I hadn’t run anywhere.

We went to the clinic, where I continued coughing in the waiting room during a gray afternoon and I was very much looking forward to a cure. The woman who checked me over seemed young for a doctor, which when you’re 10 doesn’t mean much, she could have been 25 or 40, but she made me feel at ease and I could tell we were getting somewhere when she put a cold stethoscope on my back and told me to take a deep breath in. I wanted to ask her what it sounded like, I wanted to ask if I could have a listen, but instead I just kept breathing, dutifully following her instructions, because I didn’t want her to miss anything.

She stood back. Then she paused to think for a minute.

“Let’s bring your dad in here,” she said, with a sort of friendly seriousness, and she brought my dad into the examination room, which had colourful posters on the wall and reminded me of a classroom.

“It looks like Jamie has a mild case of asthma,” she said to both of us, and then very gently explained what that meant, that my airway is swelled and that makes it harder to breathe and not to worry because it’s not serious and I would need an inhaler from now on.

After each coughcoughcoughcough I would take a few puffs, and I liked the strange taste of the steroids flowing down my windpipe. In between coughs and in between puffs, my parents’ friends would stand very still and quiet, and they would lean in and listen to me breathe.

“You don’t have asthma,” one woman boldly claimed with more sarcasm than someone should use when talking to a sick child. “You’re not even weasing.”

A few people told me this, that their children had asthma or their niece had asthma and that this was not asthma, but they’re not doctors, I thought, and this is only a “mild case” so the symptoms are surely different and what do they know, anyway. I wouldn’t let them rob me of a diagnosis because if they were right then I would probably be coughing like this forever.

Coughcoughcoughcough. Puffpuffpuffpuff. This went on for days, back and forth, the sound of my lungs convulsing followed by the pressurized hiss of medicine rushing inside.

By the time we made it back to Calgary both my parents had joined the skeptics, but I persisted, and I didn’t let the inhaler out of my sight, although I’ll admit that after nearly I week even I had my doubts.

It took Dr. Sparkes — who has been our family doctor since before my brother and I were born, who saw me through premature birth and meningitis and seizures and tonsillitis — less than five minutes to repeat what had become an all-too-common phrase with an all-too-common tinge of sarcasm: “You don’t have asthma,” he said, while shaking his head.

There were more stethoscopes. There were X-rays. There was a blood test, which involved a very large needle.

The next guess was pneumonia, with a “mild case” of whooping cough, which I was told would have become far more serious if I had just kept puffing away on that inhaler, which I promptly threw away. I stayed home for two weeks filled with antibiotics, and the whole time I was wishing this would have happened in the fall, during school, which I would much rather miss than two weeks of summer, but eventually the coughing stopped and I’ve never taken so much pleasure in breathing, like I was drawing in all of the hope in the world.

The worst part about being sick sometimes is the getting sick, when you can feel your body collapsing in on itself in real-time, each minute feeling a little worse than the last, and there’s nothing that can be done to stop it.

I started today a little stuffed up, but otherwise fine, and I felt mostly upbeat carrying on with the day, eating some cereal, practicing on my keyboard and reading the newspaper. By lunch my throat was starting to ache and my nose was already raw from blowing it. I left for a coffee shop to do some work and also just to get out of the house, and in a few more hours it was the same, but worse, and by this time I also felt very tired.

And here we are, a few hours later still, and I have taken several of the pills the pharmacist recommended, the main side effect of which is excitability, which at the time seemed better than drowsiness, but part of me wishes I could just lie down and wake up far into the future when my body will have fended off this attack and I will have conquered this the way I conquered asthma or pneumonia or whatever it was that knocked me off my feet for two weeks when I was 10.

He’s about my age, about my height and weight, too, but everything is put together differently. He’s been at this for a while, obviously, and he knows what he’s doing. He looks up at this enormous black machine, which is actually named the Gravitron, and has a look on his face like he’s about to conquer it.

A few feet away, I sit down at an oddly angled seat, and cumbersomely put my feet up on the pads in front of me. A picture on the side shows an emotionless man demonstrating proper technique, and his legs are a glowing red. I set the pin into the 50 slot, or maybe even 60, because I’m feeling bold. I take a breath and start counting to 15 . . .

I grew up living on a cul-de-sac, which is just a semi-circle of pale-coloured homes and yards, and in the summer we used to have block parties. Our front yard had a choke cherry tree and a wild rose bush, and the front lawn was steep enough that a GT Snowracer could gain a modest amount of speed before skidding onto the pavement or, worse, into a parked car.

Most of my friends played sports, like football or soccer or baseball, and some even had their own playing cards, which I always thought was weird, but I didn’t play anything, at least not in any organized way. I guess I just wasn’t interested, maybe I just didn’t like the competition, or, more likely, perhaps I was simply embarrassed by my athletic ineptitude. I remember being made fun of when I admitted I didn’t know what offside meant in football, and I’ll admit I still don’t really know entirely.

The single-storey and two-storey and split-level homes in our suburban cel-de-sac were glued together by lush green lawns and flower beds. And even though I wasn’t an athlete, when the two brothers a couple of doors down and Brandon three doors in the other direction, and Jesse from across the back alley would play football, using the lawns as a sort-of curved field, I would jump at the chance.

I remember tackling and getting tackling in the pouring rain, sliding in a swamp of grass and water and mud. I remember the sting of catching a football thrown hard. Arguments about yardage and whether the counting (one-Mississippi, two-Mississippi . . .) was too fast or slow. I remember being thrown down, my back landing squarely on the corner of a sidewalk step, and not being able to breathe.

And we’d find other ways to use the space. Baseball and hoping the tennis ball didn’t smash through anyone’s front window. Soccer and launching the ball into the light above a neighbour’s front door. Hide-and-seek, which isn’t a proper sport, but it might as well have been, because we’d run and run and run, thinking we were escaping something very dangerous.

I’d skateboard around the cul-de-sac, which sometimes meant kneeling down and using my hands to push, because I liked that. We’d ride our bikes around the Dirt Hill a few blocks away, where we’d ghost ride our bikes down the giant slope, or we’d ride fast to the 7-11, where we’d buy slurpees and microwavable burgers, which I loaded up with pickles and hot peppers.

I played sports in gym class, of course, but I was the kid more interested in chasing ladybugs around the field as an unnoticed defenceman than trying to get that stupid ball in the net, because I just didn’t see the point. I joined the Grade 7 cross-country team because my friends did, and I was sure to let everyone know how hilarious I thought it was when I’d finished in near-last place. We won a single game all season when, in Grade 8, I was on the school’s volleyball team. And in Grade 9 I placed sixth (out of eight) in the 400-metre sprint at the citywide track-and-field meet. My lungs felt like I breathed in chlorine gas, and my heart sounded like bombs going off in perfect, hurried rhythm.

The first time I ever remember working out was in Grade 10 gym class, where we learned to use some of the machines and were made to feel ashamed if we couldn’t bench press our own weight. We measured our body fat. We were forced to do something called the 12-minute run, which is exactly like it sounds, and we were graded on how far we could run in a dozen minutes. My grade was low, obviously.

Two months ago, I joined a gym, which is in a mall, which is downtown. The woman signing me up asked me about goals, and I didn’t know what to tell her, so I said I wanted to be able to walk up Duke Street for once without being out of breath, which was at least enough for her to move onto something else. She asked me to rate the importance of losing weight, of sleeping well, of being alert, of a good memory, of a sense of balance, of nutrition. I said seven out of ten — a nice average number, I thought — to nearly everything, and thank god she moved on. When they try to sell you the towel service or classes or sessions with personal trainers and nutritionists, a good way to get them to stop is to say you don’t have any money, even if it’s not true, because there’s not much left to argue about after that.

I go a few times a week, and I always feel silly, trapped in the gazes of people who no doubt know better, but then I realize that most of them probably feel the same way, that some of them probably never played sports either and some of them probably chased around ladybugs and some of them, like me, would probably still dread being judged by how far they could run in 12 minutes. And some of them, like me, I’m sure, just want to walk up Duke Street, on their way home from the gym, no less, with some air left in their lungs.

When I was in the fourth grade, our music class performed Yellow Submarine by the Beatles. It was a welcomed break from the standard songs of grade-school music recitals, where Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree is about as exciting as things get. And I know our teacher, whose name escapes me, was quite proud — a young and hip source of inspiration, she no doubt thought, still capable of surprising herself. This is how I always remember Yellow Submarine, the way we take ownership over anything to which we have even the vaguest connection.

Music was always among my favourite classes, and around the same time I joined the school’s choir. I was never much of a singer, to be sure, but I sure loved belting those songs out, my shrill voice happily buried under the talent — and there was real talent, there always is — of others.

I remember learning to play the recorder, songs like Ode to Joy, and I remember those all-too-common days when I would forget to bring my own recorder to school. On those days, we had to pick an instrument out of the bucket of milky disinfectant, afraid to open it up and take a peak, knowing there was probably an old piece of gum stuffed inside, and always unable to resist the urge. We would always squeal in disgust, but we were never surprised.

Music was always around me growing up, but I was never musical. Camping trips to B.C., and my parents’ friends turning the campfire circle into an impromptu unplugged concert, the intimacy of smoke blowing into your face as you try to sing along. Long drives winding through the Rocky Mountains, with Love Me Do playing in the car, probably annoying my family with my overly enthusiastic accompaniment.

I started playing the guitar when I was 15, after winning a single free guitar lesson on the radio for correctly identifying a short clip of music as Spoonman, of course. I started teaching myself, later taking lessons in some guy’s basement two communities over in Castleridge, and then going it alone once again. The first thing I learned to play was part of Come As You Are by Nirvana, and the first full song was something, I think, by Soul Asylum.

I wrote poorly crafted songs, my whining Counting Crows-inspired voice shouting out obvious teenage metaphors, which at the time I thought were very clever. I even recorded a six-song CD using the music department’s studio in Grade 12, and played (and lost) the talent show that year. It was then that I retired from my brief stint as a 17-year-old recording artist (forever undiscovered, apparently).

I’ve always wanted to play the piano, but never took the time to learn, dejected by my inability to read music, and wondering if I had the co-ordination to make my hands do different things at the same time. I fumbled around here and there, and could play simple versions of Joy to the World and When You Wish Upon a Star, and that song from that Tom Hanks movie, but that was about it.

A few weeks ago, I woke up and apparently thought it was about time to try out the old ivories. I bought an electric keyboard and signed up for private lessons. My time slot immediately follows a 10-year-old boy, who I imagine is far better than me. My repertoire so far is nothing short of impressive: Ode to Joy (we’re going full circle, aren’t we), Amazing Grace, Turkey in the Straw, Yankee Doodle — you get the idea. Real classics. My music illiteracy is improving, too, and I can even manage a chord or two with my left hand as my right hammers away at Deck the Halls.

For what purpose? — well, I’m really not sure. I guess there doesn’t have to be one, learning for its own sake. I don’t foresee a long-anticipated follow-up to my self-titled 1999 debut, but I guess you never know. Everybody thought the Beatles had stopped recording, and then they want ahead and released Free As A Bird.