Mr. Burden hated his British accent, bet we all loved it. Or at least I did. I also liked his moustache. Mr. Burden always talked about losing his accent, and this frightened me. I was nine years old.
One day I was over at Mr. Burden's playing with Daniel, his son, and Jon, my younger brother. They were both seven. Younger people have always liked me, and so have the considerably aged. Mr. Burden was a neighbor, about five houses down from where Jon and I lived with our parents, and a couple of older siblings.
The day I was playing at Mr. Burden's house, I used a word I had never used before, did not know it even existed, though I used it wrongly.
We were playing, Jon, Daniel and I. It was noisy outside as Mr. Burden was building a carport. I had never heard of a carport, so I kept on calling it a garage, to which Daniel would correct me. Carport always sounds British to me, in the way that lift and breather do. It was warm outside. We were all in shorts and in the driveway. Daniel had good toys. Toys with batteries that and wheels. He also had action figures. Jon and I were fighting over a battery toy, simply I wanted to play with it. However, the juices in the double as were almost used. I was old enough to understand something that that Jon couldn't. We decided to share the toy. We were in the front yard, near the three concrete steps that led up to a small platform where the front door to their house stood.
I turned the toy on, and watched it climb the stairs, the wheels slowly heaving it up towards the top stair. The toy was about a foot long, was divided into three sections, and each section had three tires on each side. There was a hinge between each section, which gave the toy its ability. Near the top stair, the toy would begin to die out, so I'd give it Jon. He'd try to use it, but it wouldn't work. This upset him. Jon has always been a person who likes to have what he wants. When he can't have it, he's frustrated until he has it. Once, he cut apart an accessory to a toy of mine. He had the same toy without the accessory. Five minutes after Jon had abandoned the toy, I would turn it on, and watch it go up the stairs again, slowly, the batteries revived somehow. We'd talk over the clamour from the carport.
After I got bored with the toys, the three of us went to the driveway to watch Mr. Burden build. He was a sweaty , six foot tall man, well muscled, a kind of nice jerk-face. The carport was nearly done, or at least its skeleton. The carport took up about a third of the driveway. We were at the front end of the carport, and Mr. Burden was at the back, drilling something into the frame, yelling at us to be careful, to watch for nails. Jon, Daniel and I yelled at each other. We were right up alongside a support beam that was held fast in cement and reached as high as the other garages I had seen. My house didn't have a garage, but did have a driveway. It was paved.
We were yelling at each other, saying nothing new. I reached out and touched the beam with the flat of my palm. The wood was coarse with slivers poking out all over it. I could feel the beam shake. I looked at the skeleton of the carport (yes I believe now that it was the skeleton), how each beam connected to each other, until my eyes fell on Mr. Burden at the other end with his drill. I understood what this was. The other two placed their hands on the beam, and understood as well. "What is it?" they asked.
I remembered class, from a few weeks before. I was shaking my leg, in need to go the washroom, but too afraid to ask. The boy in front of my asked me to stop, that I made the ground shake and that he was bothered. He said this in French, as we were in French Immersion. "Arretez, s'il vous plais. . ."
I took my hand off the beam and said, "Viprations." How I said, this I do not know. I had never used the word before.
By the time Mr. Burden finished the carport (it was a very nice carport) he decided to build a deck. Another thing we didn't have at my place.