Fearfully and Wonderfully Made Chapter 9 - “Black Friday” and other disasters

Things actually started off well.

In fact by the summer break I was fully confident in my ability to finish the course and become a teacher. I went back to Calgary for the summer, staying at a friends house while working a series of odd jobs through a student employment program.

Then after I came back to their house one summer day, and the city of Edmonton had been devastated by a tornado in a day they called “Black Friday.”

I spent the next couple of days trying to get a hold of my mother or brother, but at first the lines were down, and then they were overloaded with people trying to do the same thing.

As things turned out, my brother had literally escaped drowning in his car in a tunnel locally called “the rat hole” , and my mother had also managed to escape harm.

The thing I most remember of the tornado was coming back to Edmonton and going out with my mom, and finding a train engine tossed into a field like a tinker toy.

Then I returned to school, and that’s when I met Toni. She was a librarian at one of the libraries on the University campus, and from the first time I saw her, I was impressed with her. Despite having to be in a wheelchair, she had a radiant smile and a positive outlook that attracted me.

I managed to work up the courage, and asked her out, and to my shock, she actually said yes.

Soon, we were an item, and I had more hope than ever that in finding her, I would also find a solution to my gender issue as well.

I even wrote a poem to ask her to marry me.

She turned me down.

Despite this, we kept seeing each other. She was there to comfort me on the day I finally went and saw my father’s grave. She even allowed me to move in with her, although we had separate bedrooms and no intimate contact.

Not long after that, the schooling thing went off the rails - I started struggling to pass classes, and reached a point where they wouldn’t let me take the last practical class. At the same time Toni developed cancer and lost part of her tongue and the remainder of her mobility, forcing her into an apartment built to help disabled people, and she needed me more than ever, even if she didn’t want to marry me.

For me, it was like I was in the worst of both worlds - I was involved with her too much to actually try and get a girlfriend, but I was never going to be more to Toni than the person who helped her do her daily tasks.

But rather than confronting her on this, I just let the relationship wither.

It wasn’t all bad. Thanks to her, I participated in wheelchair square dancing, which was certainly interesting. For example, I was drafted to be a dancer because the club was short, and we did demonstrations in shopping centers. During one demonstration, I decided to not get out of the spare wheelchair I borrowed for dancing, and I learned first-hand how the disabled are treated. The best way I can put it is that a lot of people assumed that being in a chair lowered my I.Q. by at least fifty points. We even took a couple trips to the United States to meet other wheelchair square dance groups. On one of these trips we were late leaving Edmonton because of a snowstorm, and as a result had to draft every available able-bodied worker in Vancouver's airport to transfer the disabled members of the club from one plane to another.

Finally, one Easter, we had gone to her parent’s house for the holiday, and I heard her parents tell my little niece to “not be a Todd”, and I realized not only was I not loved by her, I was held in contempt by her parents.

I picked up my things, drove out of their driveway, went home, called my brother to help me, packed up my stuff, and left.
So there I was, no relationship, no schooling, and back living with my mother.

The next few years are a painful blur - I went from bad job to worse job, basically drifting without a purpose in my life. You’d think the gender issue would get worse under those circumstances, but you’d be wrong - it stayed at a steady, drip-by-drip-till-the bucket-overflows pace, with pretty close to the same number of good days and bad days.

Then things changed again ...

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