November 11, 2007
11/11
In memory of my grandfathers, both of whom passed away this year, I’ve decided to cease my inner-struggle with Remembrance Day. For this day only, I will set aside my ambivalence between honouring vets of “the last good war” and my utter rejection of values which perpetuate modern-day warfare. Even though my fervent belief is that the greatest honour we could bestow upon our war dead would be to not go to war anymore; didn’t anyone else get that message from the entire twentieth century?
But I’ve read Marion Murray’s article on losing her son in Afghanistan, Christopher Hitchens’ story on the death of a soldier in Iraq, and I’ve realized my own inner-struggle does nothing to undercut the sadness of these situations. That my inner-struggle is meaningless in the face of reality, which is something I expect both my grandfathers would have told me. And so today I will remember, without condition. Except perhaps the hope that one day we will have learned something from all of this.
Pictured here is my great-grandfather’s grave in Belgium. He was killed in action in 1916.
November 2, 2007
And throughout all this time
“And throughout all of this time, each event flew down like a separate pattern threading itself through a bolt of cloth. Each moment hummed with energy, shifted and settled until assured its own space and shape. And then, some unseen hand darted a needle into the entire bolt and drew it together so that all of the patterns merged and no single image could be unravelled or pried off.” –Frances Itani, Remembering the Bones
October 23, 2007
The world is good
I can’t remember where I read it– in a letter, an interview, an essay or a novel– Carol Shields writing about reading obituaries, the stories you find there. The closest thing I can find now is the passage from Unless. Reta and her husband are walking through the cemetery: “Here is an inventory of relics and fashion and a sentimental embrace of death, invoking what may well be the richest moments in a lifetime, the shrine of tears and aching history”.
I don’t read celebrity gossip anymore, but I do read the death notices in The Globe every Saturday. It’s a bit morbid, I realize, and I do end up getting tears on the newsprint, but really I find what lies in the obits such an antidote to the rest of the paper, such marvelous stories. There are people in the obituaries who stay married all their lives. They leave behind their spouses, children, nieces, nephews, friends. They are proud, beloved, missed. And oh the details: they fought in wars, moved across the world to call this country home, had multiple careers, made great discoveries, loved their families, loved their pets, enjoyed their cottages, changed the world, taught school, told jokes and stories, and were the bravest, strongest, most loving, kind, hilarious, unique and vibrant person many people ever knew. Of course not all of these stories are so satisfying: young people whose deaths must leave irreparable holes in a family, those who leave behind partners and children after so little time. But still, there is so much love here, and it’s heartening. So little else is, and so I savour these things.
I love that due to brevity, how cryptic and mysterious these stories become– and how beautiful. On our trip to England in June we went walking through a churchyard in the Lake District, and I was so intrigued by the gravestone of a man who had been “village postmaster and pharmacist for 30 years”. And the man from the photo, that “observer of rainfall.” And these are ordinary lives. The last two weeks in the paper I’ve read about the woman who “never failed to stay in touch”, the longtime resident of Leaside who pursued his love of painting, the top-ranked junior ski racer, the man whose Parkinson’s prematurely ended his brilliant legal career. “She was a renowned expert on the history of children’s books and lectured widely on the topic.” “His top priority in the spring was that his son son raised his beautiful Royal Canadian Air Force Ensign to fly proudly on the beach.” She whose husband “was executed by the Soviets in 1945 during the siege of Budapest” and moved to the US to run her uncle’s hotel. “A great lover of family, friends, good music and a glass of red wine.” The woman who will be remembered “for her kind heart, generous spirit, wonderful sense of humour and her beautiful voice.”
And that this is the stuff of an ordinary life is really quite remarkable– perhaps there really is no such thing? Real life sends delicious shivers up my spine, and the world is good, or at least it can be.
October 13, 2007
Summer
I don’t very often refer here to the bad days: to the month spent waiting for test results, for example, or to when my husband was so bored at work, he couldn’t be happy while he wasn’t at work. I don’t very often refer here to the bad days, however, mostly because we don’t have them very often. Because my test results came back negative, and Stuart got a promotion. Because we have had an extraordinary summer full of good fortune, and now that the weather outside appears absolutely autumnal, I can look back and be so grateful.
Of course it’s not all just a given: you’ve got to know enough to appreciate the day you’re in. And as a Canadian I know that sunshine is fleeting. From that first gorgeous day in April I knew enough to put on some shorts, to go outside and enjoy it. But the rest, oh the rest. Any season that begins with celebratory High Tea at the Four Seasons is bound to be exquisite. Frisbee in Trinity Bellwoods Park with Curtis, High Park Picnics before we had leaves on the trees, backyard barbeques with so many friends, the garden born, lobster dinners, and city rooftop summer nights.
Our trip to England in June was a magical story, beginning with the car rental mix-up when we got a Saab Convertible instead of an economy car. That countryside: Yorkshire Dales, Lake Windermere, the Pennines in a thunderstorm, and the seaside. Bronwyn’s wedding on the village green. The night we drove four hours from one side of the country to the other, with Arctic Monkeys, Kaiser Chiefs and Rhianna on the radio, and there was family at the end of the journey. A week in which I ate scones and jam nearly every day.
This summer we were both working for the first time in over two years, and then suddenly my job became permanent and Stuart was appointed to a position that he loves. We had some money again, to get out of town or to enjoy town whilst we were in it. Trips to Toronto Island and the beach at the bottom of Spadina. To Massey Hall for Crowded House in August. Dinners out with friends, just because we wanted to. Our amazing Muskoka weekend back in July, with friends oldest and dearest. To Quebec for Susannah and Loic’s wedding, against the most gorgeous backdrop you could imagine. Trips to Peterborough to see my family, camping on the shores of Rice Lake, infamous Mothers’ Day drunken shenanigans. Montreal in September, and a whole new city to see. The trip on the train.
Summer stretched on this year, from April and into October. That’s seven months of perfect bliss– more than half the year, and we’re lucky just for that. And for the evenings which got colder and darker, and the crunch of leaves beneath our shoes. To wear scarves, and sweaters, and having knitting projects on the go. Oh for October, the best of both worlds. New shoes and warm jackets. To take long lingering walks, still holding hands without our gloves.
October 4, 2007
So much history
“Was there so much history in Britain that it could be treated casually? There weren’t enough glass cases to hold it all”. –Kate Grenville, Search for the Secret River
October 3, 2007
An ideal marriage
An ideal marriage I have discovered, as indeed I am longing to get through the nonfiction books in my stack, but I can’t bear to give up lies for too long. So I am reading two books at once now, nonfiction complemented by a collection of short stories: the former being Kate Grenville’s Searching for the Secret River, and the latter is Jack Hodgins’ Damage Done by the Storm. Perfect! Why didn’t I think of this sooner?
Grenville’s book is wonderful so far, though I am approaching it from a strange place having never read The Secret River. It’s asking a lot of the same questions as Bernice Morgan’s novel Cloud of Bone, but from an Australian point of view, about remembering and forgetting, and the price we pay for either. Even some of the scenes are reminiscent, which is strange for two books of nonfiction and fiction respectively. And just getting into the Hodgins (one story before bed, you know). I’ve read his A Passion for Narrative before, and am excited to see his theory in action.
I have also become a compulsive squash buyer. Soon this will have to stop.
September 28, 2007
Thinking back and forth
I’m now reading Elizabeth Hay’s Late Nights On Air, which is to say I’m positively bewitched. 100 pages from the end, and expect a review sometime tomorrow. I am positively enveloped; I’ve got butterflies in my stomach. To have a story so gripping and writing so good is rare, really. And the book has been doing strange things to me. “After a while it grew on them, on some of them at least, on the ones who would never forget, who would think back on their lives and say, My time there was the most vivid time of my life.”
That passage set me thinking about the most vivid time of my life, and last night around 10:30 I was digging through boxes to find my journal from September 16th 2001-May 31 2002. The exact dates were incidental, but that time was on fire. Anyone who was there would know that, and it seems I remember it very poorly upon rereading my journal. Stories and anecdotes I have no recollection of, which is strange. Though the writing is good– this surprised me. When I read my fiction from that period, I want to bury myself in my backyard, but the journal was really lovely in places. The stories it told were often sad too. Funny with vividness– I think it comes from the whole spectrum of emotions, confined to a small space. “My time there was the most crazy time of my life.” Vivid, yes, but I wasn’t happy. I remember those days epically, but they were tough to be in the thick of.
Whereas. Tonight, in my less vivid life, I arrived home with my husband, who takes the subway to my work every day so we can walk home together. “I need to read,” he said, when we got in the door. He is currently enthralled by Little Children. So we sat down on the couch together, books in hand, the kettle on for tea. A straight hour of nothing but books, tea, and biscuits, and perfect quiet. Elizabeth Hay has created something amazing. And the sweet bliss interrupted only to get up get the pumpkin risotto started.
September 21, 2007
You must
Because I read so much, so fast, I am quite well-versed at moving on. Books end, books shut. But one book has been positively haunting me since I read it more than a month ago. You might remember that I wasn’t so impressed as I read Vendela Vida’s Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name. I didn’t know where the tale was leading, and the narrative seemed lacking in complexity. The prose was good, but it was all so weird. Intriguingly so, though, and I read to the end. That end. It shocked me, as it was meant to. Not with horror, but with power. Vida took everything I’d ever supposed about fate, family, obligation, story, history, and she turned it on its head. The phrase still resonates: “And when I hear people say that you can’t start over, that you cannot escape the past, I would think You can. You must.” Nothing else has ever been so wise, and the power of that moves me to tears if I think too hard. Of course you must, and I cannot wait to reread the book, galvinized by its now-inevitable close.
September 21, 2007
Friends
Ah, friends– the sugar on my berry. I received an envelope in the post today from one of my oldest friends (“since we were girls” I am nearly old enough to say), inscribed with the same symbolism we used to affix to notes passed in grade nine math. Indeed, I am a great appreciator of history. But then also of new friends: what kind of a miracle are they? Is it not enough that I met brilliant people when I was twelve and was smart enough to discern they’d be good to know, but that I continue to meet brilliant people to this day? How could such a miserable bloody world manage to be so brilliantly peopled, and bloody all the same? That I do not know, but I do know that I came home tonight from an evening with a new friend, quite hysterical with joy. My new friend. All right, I’ve known my new friend for two years now, but for me most friendships require a while to bud. And in the last few months this one has bloomed, positively. La la la my new friend. Our conversations set the world on fire.
September 7, 2007
If memory were a colour
“Something of my grandmother was sealed here in ink: in her careful, controlled penmanship, in the choices she made over what to set down. She had preferred a fountain pen over a ballpoint; the evidence was here, in the flow of ink from a fountain pen, as she wrote this recipe on how to preserve a rose: Dip the whole blossom and stalk in melted wax, coating completely to seal from the action of air and the passage of time. If memory were a colour, it would be this blue, the colour of the ink my grandmother used to preserve her treasured memories from the wasting effects of time.” –Gail Anderson-Dargatz, Turtle Valley
