Balloons

I had way more cousins than anyone else I ever met. I was the fifth grandchild and part of the Joanne-Daniel-Diane-Yvan-Denis-Chantal-Lison-Carole group. The younger cousins were just taggers-on: the brothers and sisters we couldn't always avoid.

The year we were 7, 8 and 9 years old, the corner store sold balloons for a nickel. They were tough to blow up, and we had to ask our young Oncle Pierre and Michel for help. But once they were blown up, they were marvellous: long, fat balloons that we could use as hobby horses, or swords, or witches' brooms. And they had swirls of colour down their lengths, making them much more exotic than the uni-coloured balloons we usually got. The cousin who gave up a nickel's worth of sweets for this balloon made us all jealous.

That was the year we all got a balloon as a gift on New Year's Eve when we assembled at Grand-maman Rose’s. We were excited, battling with our swords, scoring goals with our hockey sticks, floating in the sky on our magic brooms. The lead-up to midnight was filled with fun and food and races up and down the corridor. There was music and dancing with plenty of partners to go around. The house got hot and smokey, but the beef barley soup and the rice krispy squares kept coming.

The hinge moment – the moment of solemnity – came at midnight, when we all gathered together in the living room and my eldest Oncle Adrien asked his father to bless us all. The children and women all knelt, the men all in the more manly one-knee pose, and Grand-papa Meno gave us our blessing.

I call it the hinge moment because what came before was a crew of children full of energy and a crew of sober, watchful adults; what came after was a crew of grumpy, tired children and a crew of merry adults whose babies were asleep and whose drink or three gave rise to increasing silliness.

That year, Oncle Raymond’s silliness took the shape of a dare: whoever put their balloons on the tip of his cigarette without it bursting would get a nickel. And the lure of that nickel was great, as evidenced by the line-up: Joanne, Daniel, Diane, Yvan, Denis, Lison, Chantal, Carole and me. Oncle Raymond laughed his raspy smoker’s laugh as one after another the balloons burst.

Our precious gifts gone in an instant! There were no more hockey sticks, or hobby horses, or witches’ brooms. The fun was gone. We were inconsolable, wailing into our parents’ shoulders. I remember a glower or two thrown in the general direction of Oncle Raymond – but since he’d played the same trick on his own children, also inconsolable, the glowers weren’t very effective.

Oncle Raymond laughed at our expense and we were helpless in the face of his mischief. There was just nothing we could think of to get him back, and we sent him our black thoughts for weeks. The balloons lost their magic, and we reverted to getting penny candy from the corner store.

But every so often, as year after year we cousins met, reconnecting on Mothers' Day or New Year's Eve, or sometime in the summer, the subject of those balloons would come up. There would be a moment of surliness. It was a memory our younger cousins didn't share. They didn't understand why we would glower at Oncle Raymond. Joanne, Daniel, Diane, Yvan, Denis, Lison, Chantal, Carole and me - not one of us forgot.