Well, I feel terrible that it's been this long again. I wouldn't surprise any of you reading this for hating me for my inconsistency. But if there's one thing I'm consistent about, it's inconsistently but incessantly updating this! And that has to count for something, right?
So, here we go! We have another interlude, and then I'll release at least some of the tension from that cliff-hanger I left you with. Also, just as an aside, this 'little' story has now hit twenty-five thousand words in length!
Before I forget, I've started a new story! Don't worry, I'll keep working on this one, but I had an idea and I just had to run with it. So, if you like my writing, please give it a look? I'd love to know what you think of it! It's over at
The Gate's Key.
Don't forget, I love to hear what you think of this story too, so if you have an opinion, question, comment, criticism, give me a shout! I love reading them!
Now, with all that out of the way....
Interlude II:
To begin with, let me start off with my name. My name is the far-too-Scottish-for-a-Canadian Malcolm Ruaridh MacDonnell. Before you ask or hurt yourself, I usually spell my middle name Rory, even though my birth certificate disagrees with me, just because it's always a trick getting people who aren't Scottish to pronounce it right. You may well ask now why I have a Scottish name if I'm a Canadian? My mother and father, bless their crazy hearts, were both from Scotlandas am I, though I'm really more of a Canadian at this pointand named me accordingly. I should, perhaps, mention that to be precise my name given me by my parents was Màel Caluim Ruaridh Mac Dhòmhnaill, and that it was only thanks to a merciful clerk in the naming office that my parents were convinced to spell at least two of my names the ordinary way.
I know what you're probably thinking, between my consonant-riddled mess of a name and Niels' foreign-letter riddled name, pronouncing anyone's name in this story is a handful. Don't worry. Mine is really easier than it looksthat isn't to say Niels is easier though. I still have trouble with his, and he's spent ages trying to teach me.
I was born in Aberdeen, Scotland, but brought up in Prince George, British Columbia, although I don't boast about that. It being the unofficial dandelion capital of B.C. isn't much to boast about, really. I was born all of 27 years ago in the family home, with my godmother acting as support, doctor, and midwife to my mother.
Up until I was fourteen years old, my mother worked as a seamstress in a small tailor's shop she started and my father worked in the papermills. I had a fairly uneventful childhood, really. I was an average student, never really trying that hard, but never flunking out. I got high enough marks to get into the more advanced classes, but never so high as to be thought brilliant. Anna can confirm, and would wholeheartedly were you to ask, that I am in no way brilliant. As she once said of meand I'm working through a translator here, so I don't know if it's exactly what she said, but bear with methat if I were any dumber, I would put pants on my head and milk a jackass. She may have been annoyed at me at the time.
I never was a big sports-fan, but I did a bit of track-and-field around the edges. As I'd mentioned before, I was a bit of a pudgy kid. The only thing I could really say I was good at when the teachers got out the sporting equipment was the sharp-things and the heavy-things. Javelin and archery were my favourites, and I was decent at shotput. But some miracle of physics which I will never be able to explain, I was able to put the shot farther than most of the jocky kids in my grade in middle school. I still claim that as my biggest athletic achievement to this day, as it happens.
When I was fourteen, just a few weeks after my mother's birthday my father began to have difficulties at work. My life changed on that day. He was fired from the mill a month later and was at one point confined to hospital. I didn't completely understand what had happened, but I now know that my father had been schizophrenic for many years. My mother explained to me that he had always had a quirky way about him, staring at the patterns on ceiling tiles and listening to the fuzz between radio stations intently. He always put it off as him trying to 'See into the beyond!' and laughed, but it became apparent as I found out what was happening, that they had been the signs of his problems.
There's a large stigma in our society about mental illness, and you're probably going to jump to the conclusion that he became violent, or started hearing voices telling him to do heinous things. He didn't. He has never lain a hand on myself or my motherwell, in truth, I was spanked as a child, but I'm sure I deserved it, even if I don't remember why. He is one of the gentlest men you will meet. You'll know what kind of man he was when I tell you that he would be forever ferrying out the smallest of ladybirds and spiders from our house in the safety of a glass topped with card.
His problems had a great effect on my family. He became suspicious of my mother, telling me from time to time that he was sure she was up to something. He ended up being unable to work until our doctor found him the exact medication cocktail to balance whatever switch had gone awry in his head. My mother, not always a patient woman, spent more time at work during this time, and I'm not sure she's quite forgiven him to this day for cracking our perfect family dream.
But we managed, and by the time I graduatedwith Distinction, so take that, Anna! Hah!my father had become the calm smiling man that I had grown up with. He still collects a certain amount of money from the government for his disability, but he manages. I think that the story of growing up with some small but important hardship is always destined to be not one of triumph, but one of managing. It's not always pretty, but the pieces of the puzzle eventually fall into place, even if it's not the place you were expecting.
After school I left home and went to the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. It wasn't the first time I'd been to a big city, but it was still a change that I wouldn't shut up about for weeks. Whenever my mum called to find out if I had had a sock emergency and needed her to courier me more over, I would talk a blue streak about all the things in Vancouver. I always knew that cities were big and bustling, but I never really realised how much stuff was in a city. Every weekend I went to some new place in the city and found that I really wasn't all that into going to class.
My parents had saved up a fund to pay for my education, so I had money for tuition for at least a year, but half way through my first year I was coming to the realisation that I really had no idea what I would do with a degree in English Literature, and with the amount of money I was spending on it, I really should know what I was going to make money with my degree. At the end of my first year, I dropped out and enrolled in night school at a small college. Within a few years, I'd gotten my certification in Library Sciences. During that time I'd worked full-time at a series of coffee shops, bookstores, grocers, and one particularly 'enjoyable' job working in a cider factory.
The time I spent working in the cider factory was probably the most enlightening job I've had. Working for eight hours a day working a machine whose sole purpose is to mash apples beyond recognition teaches one both patience for the unpleasant and a strong desire to work somewhere else. It was that drive that led me to become the youngest manager in at least a decade at my local library. I'm not really proud of being a university drop-out, but I've made something of myself, at the least.
You probably want to know something about my love-life during all of this, don't you? That's right you do, you horny little monkeys, you. I tease, of course. You're not monkeysmonkeys can't read. Now, there's not anything to report until I was well out of highschool. Don't get me wrong, I looked longingly at any attractive man who crossed my path, but I was, as it happened, paralysingly shy. I admit, I had terrible self-esteem when I was young. As I grew up I began to realise that frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn about what other people think of me. In some ways, being short was one of the best things to happen to me. When you have to be a bit of a tall poppy figuratively because you're never going to be one literally, you learn to ignore the sidelong looks you get when you act a little silly in public.
My 'dry spell' as Anna puts it ended when I met Ryanor to be more precise, when Ryan met me. I was working at a small coffee shop downtown and a customer came in. He was handsome and had a smile you could see from here to Québec. He came up to the counter, ordered a large coffee, wrote his number on the fiver he gave me, grinned and winked, and walked back out with his coffee in-hand. After much handwringing and fretting about it, I called him. He turned out to only be here on a study grant, and after a happy year together, we agreed to split.
During that year, I discovered not only that I could be proud of myself, even if it's just for little things, but I could also be confident that I actually wasn't repulsive towards men, and that if I looked, I could find another man to spend my time with. Ryan went back to Alabama the next year, and I went back to being single. Instead of continuing on as I had, I took the chance to do something about the flaws I saw when I looked in the mirror.
I lost weight, I got into better shape than I had ever been in school, and I even got some definition while I was at it. I went to gay bars, and even managed to try to flirt a time or two. Of course I was terrible, but I got by. I managed, I suppose. And I found another boyfriend after a while. In fact, I had a couple. They weren't important to this story, and they never drifted through my life for long, but they were still an important part of me growing fully into the man I am.
You already have heard the story of how I met Anna, and she helped me out a lot through a particularly nasty breakup with a particularly asinine man. I won't tell her story again, because it's bad to repeat yourself too much, but needless to say, once she burst into my life, she's been an integral part of it ever since.
I still go every year in the spring to visit my mother and father, just in time for the dandelions to be in blossom. My mother no longer works in her little shop, having sold it for a tidy sum. My father still plays the part of foil, calming my mother down when she works herself into her fraying frets. They still talk like they were in their...our homeland, but I stopped that long ago when we moved here. But for the week I spend with them and the two or three weeks after, I sound once again like I'm not just their child, but the child of Aberdeen's granite streets. And the yellow of the dandelions and the blue of the sky which usually paint my voice become the greys and steels of granite and sea. It's perhaps the closest I've come to changing who I am. I guess I'm lucky that I get to be those two people, even if one is sleeping deep inside somewhere for all but a few smiling weeks a year.
So I suppose that fills you in on the story of one Malcolm Ruaridh MacDonnell; or if you catch me in the right month, the story of a Màel Caluim Ruaridh Mac Dhòmhnaill instead.