Sept. 10: Magical places

That's me in that picture. The year was 1999 and I'd just been hired as the sports editor of the North Battleford News-Optimist. I'm standing on a hill overlooking Jackfish Lake, where I'd spent many a childhood summer. My maternal grandparents owned a cottage on the east side of that lake. The two weeks we spent there every year are among some of my happiest memories.

I wish my bum still looked like that.

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As Jackfish Lake is to my childhood, the roof of the old Rosebud Hotel is to my early adulthood. I was 18 when I became a student at the Rosebud School of the Arts, a small Christian theatre guild school in Rosebud, Alberta. I spent less than a year there; I was far too immature (and far too angry) to be a student anywhere. By all accounts, my one year in Rosebud was a bust but I still remember it with great fondness. I'm not sure why. I just do.

Here is the Rosebud Hotel:



I lived in one of the hotel rooms (it actually wasn't a hotel anymore) but my favourite thing about that place was the roof. There was a ladder attached to the side of the building and it led up to the roof, which was flat with a gradual decline so the snow could melt and drip off the back. Climb up there and you could see the whole town - the Rosebud Opera House, the hill where some people had spelt Rosebud in rocks and even included a smiley face, the community centre on the northern edge of the village (where floor hockey games took place once a week.) I would go up there with a notebook and write. I wrote a few plays there - all of them terrible. (One of them was called Unicorns and Lightning, which was supposed to be a retelling of the book of Esther, only it took place in a restaurant instead of ancient Persia.) Sometimes I wished I knew how to play the guitar. I thought it would be romantic for me to sit on the roof and write songs. All I could do was write lyrics and they were pretty bad too. One song was called The World is Beautiful When You Can't See Over The Hills - which sounds like an essay Jean Paul Sartre might have written.



Once I was up on the roof with my video camera and Doug Levitt climbed up to visit me. I have the video somewhere and I don't know where it is and this makes me sad. I went back to Rosebud a few times just to climb on top of the roof. I brought people with me too. I brought my best friend up there. When I was 25, I brought my girlfriend up there and the conversation we had convinced her to break up with me about two weeks later. I brought some other girls up there too but never to make out or have sex (I would have considered sex on the roof to be blasphemous since I will always regard Rosebud as holy ground.) Really, I just wanted to slow dance to Purple Rain.

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On the very southwestern edge of Quebec is a tiny town called Rigaud, which is home to Motel Belair. It is operated entirely by a middle aged Chinese lady whose husband may or may not be overseas. The motel is small and inexpensive, which makes it an ideal spot for me to visit when I want to have a writing weekend.

There was a time when, three or four times a year, I'd call the Chinese lady and tell her I'm coming for another writing weekend. "Room 4?" she asks. "Yes," I say. That's because room 4 is my magical room. The creativity flows in there.

Most people don't believe me when I tell them I'm going to Morel Belair to write. They think I'm going there to consort with prostitutes. I guess I can't blame them. Normal people don't spend all kinds of money to go to a motel just to write, but I ain't normal, honey. And as Tom Petty sings: "You don't know how it feels to be me..."

And those are 3 of my magic places.