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BANFIELD By Shell Cline W e're driving into Paris. It's circa 1997. And as the family car turns right off Highway 2 and onto Willow Street and dips down in the valley beside the Grand River, the thing happens as it always happens--the radio cuts out. Some FM pop/rock station based in Toronto, probably, and that's as far as it goes. All we hear is static. I start complaining. I want to listen to more of Third Eye Blind singing about a "semi-charmed kind of life." I'm seven years old. My older sister is 10. The complaining comes from me, only me, never from her. She's too good-natured for that. Going to Paris is going west, and going west means going away from the Golden Horseshoe, away from Hamilton and Toronto, away from certain, all-important radio signals, and I'm thinking those places are just Where Things Are. And everywhere else is Where Things Are Not. Except for my grandma. She lives in Paris. When the car goes left on a road, right at the main one, I don't imagine that anybody else lives in this town but her. I see them on their front lawns. But it still seems like they might 23