Tuesday, December 29, 2009
I woke this morning at about 3:00 AM. What caused me to rise from my slumber was the need to go to the bathroom. I attribute these early morning lavatory visits to the fact that my type-2 diabetes is out of control; the sugar levels are way too high.
As with most such early stirrings, I had a vivid dream just prior to waking. I was face-to-face with Rex Murphy of the CBC in the dream. He was recounting a story he had written about his Newfoundland home. I had the story in front of me. I could not tell whether what I had in front of me was a bound novel or nothing more than sheets of paper. Such was not made clear in my dream. But it makes no difference I think, for what was unusual about this story’s telling was that Rex was not only reciting the story from memory, he was singing it, as was I, from the bound or unbound script I had in front of me.
We sang as one, in harmony, to my amazement. I do not sing much, let alone in dreams. So, from the surreal perch in the back upper corner of my dream, I looked on to the sight of Rex and me singing from afar, while, at the same time, looking onto the outline of Rex’s face through my eyes. I don’t know if I was more amazed by the fact that I was singing or that I seemed to be in two places at one time, such are dream distortions.
The singing of Rex’s story, after only a few lines as I recall, came to an abrupt halt. We looked at each other with jaw dropping, eye popping, brow raising awe. After a moment, I can’t say how long, I broke the silence and said I thought the telling of a story in song, not as a song, but in the voice of song, whatever that means, seemed wholly natural to me. Rex agreed.
There was something about the story that leant itself to its singing, as easily as it did to being spoken. This might be true of all storytelling, I thought, for all manner of expression is poetic to some degree, and all poems can be sung like the birds do in the early morn or in the twilight hours of every day, or like the Psalms in the Good Book. All words can be sung, right? But I woke from my dream before this query was answered.
When I returned to my bed, quietly in an attempt to avoid disturbing my wife from her slumber, I could not return to the dream and continue my visit with Rex. Not unusual that. No, I began to uncontrollably think about other matters; namely about my grandfather, my mother, my father, and the stories of their lives.
My dad had just sent his children the cook book he and my mother began to put together when my mother was still lucid and part of the real world. I know not what sparked the compilation of recipes and accompanying stories about their discoveries and relations to our family. I suspect the reasons where twofold, all things coming in twos, as they do. One was to pass on to her children some of my mother’s essence and the other was to provide my mother with an exercise to focus her mind at a time when it was unclear what was befalling her mentally. The truth, I like to believe, is the former and I like to believe that the idea was germinated deep within the soul of my dad. Sentiment rests in the core of my father though few would know this to be so. He is outwardly reserved. But I have been told that still waters run deep, and my father’s sentimental surface waters are often still, though not always.
I do not know whether it was the arrival of the cook book or the crafting of my condolences to my friend whose father had just passed, or both, but my reflections on my granddad began with a promise I made to my mother; that being, that I would put together the story of her life and her family if she wanted. It was my attempt to do two things, all things coming in twos, as they do. I had hoped the exercise would help to focus her mind onto a task she enjoyed; that of telling stories. And the second was to have mom tell the stories she had told all of us kids as a record of her life.
There was always warmth, wonder, and wily mischief in my mother’s stories of her youth, her life with our father, and her children. There was also a great historical legacy in her tales as they covered a time from before there were very many roads, from before there were automobiles, and planes, and computers, and telephones, and radio. Her stories brought life and marvel to the past; they gave history a human face that was, at the very least, passed on to me, if not to all of us within our clan.
My mother’s gift of the storytelling art was one passed on most generously I believe to my brother, though all my siblings have the gift to one degree or another. It is, I have always said, the gift of being born Irish. And while I may have been the only family member to have kissed the Blarney Stone though I cannot be sure, it seems that my mother must have kissed it in another life and that my siblings have not all been truly forthright about their Irish wanderings. I wonder why I offered to tell the story of my mother’s life to mom, given that I am the least gifted storyteller in the family. But I offered what I offered when I offered it, and that is how it is.
My promise to tell the story of my mother’s life I did at one time begin to draft. It began with my grandfather’s death. As it was told to me, my grandfather, my mother’s father, passed away following an announcement in which he declared that he was going to take a nap. I imagine it went thusly.
My grandfather was sitting in the living room in his chair opposite the front window. He had been there for several hours, as he was every day for all the time we lived in the house. The chair sat kitty-corner to the fire place and was separated by a table from the living room couch which stretched along the wall that formed one half of the frame to the living room’s entrance. The entrance connected to the open area that followed immediately after the front door entrance way and merged with the dining room area. It was directly opposite the hallway that led to the main floor bedrooms and bathroom.
Grandpa’s room was the first on the left. It preceded the main floor bathroom. At the end of the hallway was my parent’s bedroom. All these rooms faced the front of the house. My sisters’ room, where all three slept together in relative harmony, something that dumbfounded me, was to the right of my parent’s room and next to it, opposite my grandfather’s room, was that of my youngest brother. My middle brother slept in the basement where a fifth bedroom had been constructed beneath my parent’s bedroom after I had left for college. It was at the end of the finished downstairs wreck-room that ran the length of the house from the stairs along the back wall. The other half of the basement, save for the small sewing room that was my windowless bedroom for many years, was the basement wherein one would find the washer and dryer, and the freezer from which I stole frozen Christmas cookies and ice cream to satisfy my cravings all too often in my youth. Those cravings, never satisfied, were never mastered, and now I pay the diabetes piper daily and nightly. Sins of youth! Hmm.
My granddad’s room was smallish. There was only room for a single twin bed. It lay along the hallway wall opposite the bedroom window which was large enough and elevated enough to allow plenty of the afternoon’s sunlight into the room without shining onto the bed directly. At the end of the room, at the foot of the bed next to the doorway that opened inward along the bathroom wall, was a dresser. And next to the dresser was a closet. At the head of the bedroom near the head of the bed, was a chair. On the dresser were items of daily concern to my grandfather; papers, mementos, and pictures of my grandmother and grandfather in times long past.
My grandfather, after rising from his chair and beginning to walk towards his bedroom in that elderly walk which was more than a shuffle but less than a sturdy strut, said to my mother, “Nez, I think I will go for a rest.”
My mother acknowledged his declaration from the kitchen where she had only just returned a short while earlier from doing some banking at the behest of my grandfather following an early morning breakfast conversation about his will, with an “Okay”; an “Okay” just loud enough for him to hear as he was leaving the living room.
My granddad then made his way down the hall into his bedroom. He sat on the foot of his bed and took a deep breath. Then, he fell back onto the bed. It was as though he knew he was going to pass at that moment; as if he knew that this rest would be his last; as if it had been planned; as if he had been given the privilege of seeing the moment of his death beforehand by the Almighty Himself.
My mother, a nurse from the time before she became a mother, had heard the last breath of patients many times before. She heard that breath and immediately ran to her father. Tears flowed lovingly from a daughter’s eyes to a father’s cheek.
The story of my mother’s life was to begin with my grandfather’s passing. Around my grandfather’s neck was a chain to which a locket was attached. Inside the locket were two pictures, all things coming in twos, as they do; one of my grandmother, my grandfather’s love, and the other of a man I did not know. I learned from my mother that the man in the picture was my grandmother’s boyfriend from before World War One. He, like so many others of that generation, did not return from the battlefields of Europe. Had he, my mother would not have been born, and my life and that of my siblings, and even that of my dad, would not have been.
For me, the locket made two statements about my grandfather and about the life he had lived, all things coming in twos, as they do. The first was a statement of love, and the second was a statement about the soul of my grandfather and the character of the man my grandmother married, and my mother loved. My grandmother was my grandfather’s true love; she was his rudder; his rock. Of this I have no doubt for my mother’s stories were filled with the expressions of that love in ways both stated and not.
As for the man in the locket, his inclusion next to my grandmother in an item kept so close to one’s heart spoke volumes. It said that my grandfather was well aware of the vagaries of fate; that he had a deep respect for the man my grandmother might have otherwise married had he survived the Great War. It said too that he knew and understood the cost of war in a profound way even though he himself did not fight in any battle overseas, though he desperately sought that opportunity but was continually denied for health reasons. The man in the locket’s sacrifice gave my grandfather a gift; that of love.
The locket around my grandfather’s neck at the time of his passing also told me that the Great War was more than just a large war fought between Empires. It told me that it was a personal war. The cost of the war affected every single neighbourhood in Canada and every single living soul in the country. Everyone knew of someone who was either killed or wounded in battle and those sacrifices affected everyone’s life. They shaped the nation in ways history textbooks and high school courses do not adequately tell.
World War One history is often told in broad strokes. It was the Great War, the war to end all wars, the last great European Imperial War. It was the war that ended innocence. It was the war that birthed the nation of Canada, turning it into a country and casting aside its Dominion conception. World War One was the last war fought on battlefields that were fields, not whole countries. It was the war that fully signaled the end of large scale face-to-face, hand-to-hand combat between men in conflict. The battles of WWI were battles fought with machine weapons using non-machine battlefield tactics and strategies. Out of WWI came the great divide between totalitarian Marxist, Leninist, Stalinist, communism and the forces of democracy, freedom, liberty, justice, and capitalism.
These are some of the lessons taught about WWI. But they do not capture the impact that WWI had on ordinary lives in ordinary ways. My grandfather’s life was altered by WWI. It gave him a wife whom he loved, a child whom he loved, and a story that shaped my mother, her outlook on life, my father’s life, and my own as well as that of my siblings. The locket on the chain that my grandfather was wearing around his neck at the time of his death was to be the beginning of the story of my mother’s life. And on this night when sleep would not come, I lay wondering whether I would or could fulfill my promise.
This last thought on this early morn, led to thoughts about my mother’s own passing. It has been on my mind more and more these past few years. What would I say in eulogy if called upon to do so? What could I possibly say that would be worthy and appropriate? Could I even fathom words to express my feelings or those of my father and my siblings?
Then the following came to mind. “Beginnings do not come easily, and they come less easily at the time of death; at the time of endings.” And so, I got out of bed lest I shake it to its foundations and disturb my wife from the vibration of my twitching feet. And I came to this place to record the events of this night’s failure to sleep.
I was not successful in my aim to avoid disturbing my wife, for no sooner did I set myself down at this computer and begin typing some words than did she come to my side, concerned about my well-being. She did return to bed, but not before telling me that she was there for me should I need her. Like my mother, she has a sixth sense that is astonishing; a sixth sense that is tapped into the souls and concerns of loved ones; a sixth sense that compels them to arrive just when a loved one needs their presence.
I am a very fortunate man to have such love and caring given freely to me without reservation. I am very fortunate to have been born into the family I was born, to have the parents I have, to have the siblings I have, to have known both of my grandmothers and grandfathers, to have been told the stories my mother told, and to know of the locket my grandfather was wearing at the moment of his last breath, for the story of my mother’s life was to begin with the passing of my grandfather, her father.
And so, the beginning has come at the time of ending. Will Rex approve? Will my mother? – may she rest in peace, in the grace of the Creator, in Heaven’s garden paradise never lost.
With this now penned and filed in a file folder for my benefit, I think it is time for me to go back to sleep, for when I awake again, there is much to do.
Good night. Sleep well. And may you find your own peace of mind in this befuddling and often tumultuous world.
BFG
Scrambled Thoughts 2.0 