Intimations of Mortality

Yesterday, I made myself wade into past Mays, but you can also get pulled into the past, yanked backward by a sharp hook of memory.  This morning, I found myself in a May when I was eleven, having the last birthday party of my childhood.  As I recall, it wasn't a terrific birthday party, and I was perfectly content in following years to simply take a friend to a movie, and eat at a diner or fast-food restaurant.

 My father, who was attempting a doomed reconciliation with my mother before disappearing from my life forever, had given me an inexpensive box camera, probably second-hand -- the flash wouldn't work.  We were living in the Gorge area of Victoria, BC, so I took my guests down to the local park where I could take pictures.  My sister, being nine and a pest, snuck into every single one.  Except this one.

Tori was pretty, way prettier than I could ever hope to be.  Because her surname had the same first two letters as mine, we were always in the same homeroom.  Our fathers knew each other, but we never mentioned this to each other, possibly because my father fell off her father's balcony at a party.  He was drunk, of course.  We had known each other since age nine, but only as well as two people who are in the same classes know each other.  The pool of people you know gets bigger as you move up through the school system, and she was at a different end of the pool.  I knew when she got married to a wealthy restauranteur, and heard not long after that that the marriage had failed.  Victoria is a small city.

When I saw the name in the obituaries this morning, I was a little surprised by the feeling of shock and grief welling up slowly like blood from a deep cut.  I thought of my mother who is at the age when familiar names in the obituaries are nearly a weekly occurrence.  I thought of Tori's parents who have lost two of their four children in the past two years.  (Tori's brother was a patient of my mum's after a devastating motorcycle accident put him in a wheelchair not long after graduation.)  And I thought of Tori, the pretty girl who came to my last birthday party on a windy, sunny Saturday in May during that rather sad year when I turned eleven.  She turned eleven a month after I did.  She died on her birthday last week, leaving a daughter a bit older than mine.

I feel diminished, and know this is only the beginning.

Fixing my little red wagon

This is, I believe, my eighth NaBloPoMo, and for seven of the eight months covered, I've gone wading through my old diaries to look at that particular month over the years of my misspent life. (Couldn't do August because I was in Victoria at the time, and my diaries were in Hades.) It's a surprisingly depressing exercise, because although I do stumble across happy memories, I also run smack into unpleasant ones, and frankly, that just makes the loss of the happier times sting more. However, I'm nothing if not slightly obsessive-compulsive, so I hauled out the dusty beaten notebooks to go through past Mays.

May has always been a problematic month for me, since I associate it with struggling to be ready for the summer and always falling short. When I was in school, it meant leaving the safety of the known for the unknown. It wasn't that I was particularly happy in any given grade, it was just...I'd gotten used to it, y'know? When I was in university, it meant my courses were over and now I was faced with the task of trying to get a summer job. Now, it's a case of setting up stuff for younger daughter, and never feeling I'm getting it right.

Strolling through those past Mays, I did find points of light:  younger daughter was honoured at district-wide school awards ceremony when she was seven; elder daughter was identified as gifted in a long-past May.  (Actually, the second item was a double-edged sword in the long-run, but how lovely to hear only positive things from a developmental psychologist!)  Most Mays, though, were just darn stressful.

I'm thinking in particular of the May just before the Resident Fan Boy got hired by the federal government.  He had been let go from a small private law firm the previous September and in fact, went in to apply for Unemployment Insurance benefits six hours after seeing his dead mother in her hospital bed.  Eight months of uncertainty followed.  We had just taken on a mortgage, of course, (no kids as yet, thank goodness) and I was midway through a part-time Master's degree.  Each month, we waited for the UI payments to be cut off, while I got what sub-teaching and short-term contracts I could.  By May, the RFB was in despair, and I was struggling to stay afloat emotionally and spiritually.  I attended Quaker meetings and was working myself through the Ira Progoff books on journalling, which included the concept of the seven-syllable mantra.  So I found myself writing way more revelatory diary entries than usual (frankly, I squirm a bit re-reading them) and making up seven-syllable meditations such as: "waiting for the fog to lift", "fork in the road will appear" and rather less obvious, "steps go down to the water" (from a school memory -- I was looking for meaning anywhere).

I was also listening to Jane Siberry, and her latest album at that time was Bound by the Beauty which included a song called "The Life is a Red Wagon" which seemed to fit just what the Resident Fan Boy and I were going through.  With a start, I realized that the title contained seven syllables.  A few weeks later, the long agonizing wait ended with the Resident Fan Boy's new job -- which eventually took us to Hades.

Watching the video so many years later, I'm startled to recognize younger daughter's face and mannerisms in Jane Siberry's performance.  Maybe there's meaning in that.

Maybe not.



You watch the slow train moving through the city late at night
adjusting back and forth against the darkness and street lights
I know that you're feeling bad but I'm glad you didn't lie
easy to get caught up...but you know,
you can always you can always
you can always walk away

the life is the red wagon rolling along
the life is the red wagon simple and strong
the life is the red...is the red...oh, it's no big deal
but when the feet are draggin'
Whoa-oh-oh-oh-oh...
you pull for me
and I pull for you

past the teeming marketplace and the blur of faces there
past the silent dockyards and the darkness looming there
maybe it won't work this time but that's the risk you take (and you want to
take it)
and just as long as it feels right doesn't matter
just as long as...doesn't matter
gotta feel good even though you don't know why

Land of my Victoria

Today, the Resident Fan Boy, elder daughter, younger daughter and I spent an hour getting out to a branch of the Nepean Museum.  Elder daughter has a job interview tomorrow and high hopes of getting last year's summer job back at the same museum, so she wanted us all to come to the Victoria Day Tea, presumably to make a good impression.  (All past evidence to the contrary.) We arrived, found a deserted white tent, and a beautiful old house, empty except for the sandwich board advertising the tea locked inside the front door.  It seems that the tea was yesterday.  Nothing for it but to spend another hour going back.

See, we're from Victoria, so Victoria Day means Victoria Day, not the Sunday before Victoria Day.  This is Hades, though, where organizers would, quite correctly, consider Monday as the day when everyone is hurrying to travel back to wherever it is they came from.  And indeed, the bus there and back carried many people lugging suitcases and bags. A powerful-looking man heaved two enormous bags into the space where the wheelchairs and stroller ordinarily go, kissed the hands of his elderly father and mother in her veil, and pressed his forehead to the back of their hands, before asking the bus driver to let him off.

In Victoria, BC, Victoria Day means the big parade.  If you've grown up in the city, you've marched in the parade at some point.  I marched three times with my school band, as did the Resident Fan Boy, and elder daughter marched with the Brownies.  It's a mile from the Mayfair Shopping Centre to Douglas and Humboldt, and the trick is to avoid the horse droppings. This coming week, the first sunburns of the year will be everywhere because the May sun shines in Victoria, but it doesn't feel all that hot, so you forget to take the precautions..

No sunburns in Ottawa, because we have the humid heat to remind us to wear sunscreen and hats, although it's nowhere near as warm as it will get in July and August. Downtown is crowded with tourists here for the last weekend of the tulip festival, but in our neighbourhood, we've been living in a ghost town.  The Victoria Day weekend means the opening of cottage season for them-that-has-'em.  Last night, I went out for a late evening stroll, and was rather spooked by the number of dark and deserted houses.  I couldn't help but wonder if this is also a wonderful season for burglaries. Tonight, I walked out again and the driveways were full of SUVs, with people in shorts putting out the garbage and recycling, and watering their gardens.  (The Victoria Day weekend is also the official start of Ottawa's very brief gardening season.)

I continued down by the Governor General's residence, the clustering of trees along the stone wall starting to look dark and forbidding.  Ahead, I saw a corner of setting sun reflecting off a glass tower of one of the quasi-Arts-Deco condos.  I fancied that the brilliant orange light might spread to the gathering dark clouds, but the most colour they achieved was a mourning sort of mauve.  I wandered home by way of the Rideau River, blundering into clouds of gnats, dreaming of long, mild May evenings in Victoria.  There'll probably be fireworks over the Inner Harbour tonight.

Here?  We're supposed to be in for a lightening storm...

When I was a little girl, I thought this song was about the city in which I grew up.  
Long ago life was clean
Sex was bad and obscene
And the rich were so mean
Stately homes for the Lords
Croquet lawns, village greens
Victoria was my queen 

Victoria, Victoria, Victoria, 'toria 

I was born, lucky me
In a land that I love
Though I'm poor, I am free 
When I grow I shall fight 
For this land I shall die
Let her sun never set

 Land of hope and gloria
 Land of my Victoria

Canada to India
Australia to Cornwall
Singapore to Hong Kong
From the West to the East 
From the rich to the poor
Victoria loved them all

Mariage blanc

While I understand that arranged marriages can be a success, I can't help but wonder if some of them are like my relationship with the city of Ottawa.

We first met almost exactly twelve years ago when I took then about-to-be-four-year-old younger daughter on her first cross-country plane trip to meet the Resident Fan Boy, who was already working in Hades while I attempted to sell our house in Victoria.

The trip had an inauspicious prelude when, in the flurry of last-minute preparations, I managed to lock myself out of the house with younger daughter inside.  I ran across the street and got a neighbour to phone my mum who had elder daughter at her condo a few blocks away.  Younger daughter, when my mum rushed over with an extra key, had not noticed my absence.  Then I had to rise before dawn, take a protesting and sleepy preschooler in a cab to the airport and spend five hours on a plane in the days before they had entertainment centres on the back of the seat in front of you.

I had left Victoria in the green and leafy splendour of early May, and first glimpsed my new home beyond the wing-tip of the circling plane:  brown fields with patches of frost.  The taxi took us past forests of flattened and grey tree trunks, victims of the Ice Storm of '98.

There followed six days of being driven around by a real estate agent through neighbourhoods that meant nothing to me, to see bleak brick houses that looked weather-beaten and grim.  We also made the rounds of museums and libraries, struggling without a stroller (I had lacked the courage to lug one on the plane), and I tried to imagine a life here in this city where my daughters would grow up.  We went to the local Unitarian church and my heart sank.  The sermon was a diatribe against Conrad Black (before his prison term), and reference was made to the beauty of a member's home and the fact that the choir had sung for the Governor-General.

We celebrated younger daughter's turning four in the hotel suite in which the Resident Fan Boy was living, and by the time we were readying ourselves for the flight home without him, the trees were finally showing green fuzz and the tulips were beginning to open.  I tried to push my doubts aside.  Surely, my home was where the Resident Fan Boy was.  Surely I could make this work...

Getting back to Victoria meant hauling my new four-year-old through three plane rides.  At Toronto Airport, she climbed up inside a play structure and I fought rising panic when I couldn't get her to come down.  I could see our flight boarding.

In Victoria, our cab took us past trees fully in leaf, blowing in a temperate and gentle sea breeze.  Flowers everywhere.   My relief was tempered with the knowledge that the next time we left, we would not be returning to our light-filled house.  The city that I had not chosen was waiting.  And you know, it hasn't even been a convenient marriage.  (No, Resident Fan Boy.  I'm not talking about you.)