Category Archives: parenting

Living in 3 Time Zones: a matriarch’s tale

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There were stars overhead. A long-legged eight year-old had plunked himself down in the bed beside me. We could hear the revelers downstairs, but youngest and oldest, we craved rest. The stars on the ceiling glowed in the dark and I remembered sleeping under just such stars 20 years ago in Venice Beach, California, an ocean and a continent away. This is how far my family has spread. This is how far I have had to spread my arms to keep them – what? – not safe, for that is impossible. Let us just say “to keep them”.

Technology has made the job easier in the last 15 or 20 years. E-mail was a great help, so much faster that snail mail. Answering machines and FAX machines appeared. Then long distance rates started to fall, the mobile phone came along, and texting became possible. Distances were easier to bridge.

In Brussels last week, I watched the last episode of the BBC’s David Copperfield in which the Micawbers embarked on a sailing ship for a new life in Australia. Something had finally come up, as Mr Micawber so optimistically kept on saying it would, throughout his disastrous life. The villain of the story, Uriah Heep, was also on his way there, barefoot, chained to other prisoners, to pay for his crimes. His mother cried out, “My poor boy. I’ll never see him again.” Australia was just too far then, even supposing Heep lived to get released. Letters might be exchanged, but probably only two or three a year, given the time the voyage took.

In 1945 when my father moved us from the Eastern Townships of Quebec to Hamilton Ontario, my nine year-old self seriously doubted that I would ever get back to the mountains and the family I loved. Letters were posted and received weekly, but we had no phone. In the event of something momentous like a new baby brother, we could borrow the neighbour’s phone and pay the exorbitant long distance cost. In fact, we did return the summer after my brother Rob was born, in 1947.

Rob was the first family emigrant, hying himself off with a backpack at the age of 19 to explore the world. Our mother cashed in his life insurance policy to finance his getaway. By then it was a tossup whether our father would murder Rob or Rob would murder our father. All of the three older girls in the family harboured the same homicidal urge, but were not as capable of the deed.

Rob stayed safely out of reach of familial harm in Afghanistan, India, and Turkey, where various strangers had a go at him. Finally, he settled in Belgium. Where he had a phone which I could now afford to call to tell him our mother had been given only weeks to live. He thought it was a trick, and indeed, our mother survived against all odds for another 6 years. She had that ace in her pocket though -imminent death- and he came back for a visit – 3 years after he had left. He invited us to visit him and  2 years later I did, with my young family. We formed a friendship then that had not been possible before. So I began the process of long distance living. What time is it here? What time is it in Belgium or Italy or Sweden, wherever his career as a film gaffer took him?

Just when I got the knack of that, my daughter Julia took off for New York City. No problem, same time zone. But -what’s this? She’s off to the west coast. She’s getting married in Las Vegas. And so I began living in 3 -count’em – 3 time zones.

It’s quite dizzying. Whenever I want to talk to Rob, he’s already asleep. Initially, after I returned from Brussels last week, I woke up at 4 a.m., Eastern Standard Time, thinking it was already 10 a.m., and called him then. My daughter up on her west coast mountain would be snoozing away in her 1 a.m. world. As I acclimatized to Toronto time, I kept missing windows of communication. I ended up texting Rob while he slept and getting his reply when I woke up. Julia is beyond the reach of cell phone texts at present, but I catch her at odd moments as she builds the fire in early morning.

As I lay there on Christmas Eve, looking up at the stars, I thought about all the grandparents who travel great distances to be with their far-flung families and sleep as like me in children’s bedrooms. I thought about older women alone in their cars on lonely highways and on long distance flights. Like me, they may well count over 50 such trips and see the results in maturing children who know they are part of something bigger.

That something is family. I can’t help it. I have to communicate, to be there. Someone needs to hold the family together and time has made me the matriarch.

Let us Consider the Fortunate Fall Again

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Someone has just read my post Fortunate Fall: change the future in a blink, so I decided to reread it myself. https://115journals.com/2012/12/11/the-fortunate-fall-change-the-future-in-a-blink/ and https://115journals.com/2013/01/12/the-fortunate-fall-a-further-exploration/

Events connected with the initial family crises are gradually working out and, any day now, we will begin to see happy results become manifest. In the meanwhile, we have forged new bonds. Yes, it’s a cliche´ but those connections seem as if they were welded in fire. You can probably guess that they were cooled by salt water.

Now a young man is dying. When he came home as a 3 day-old baby, I showed his mother how to bath him. When he was 7, I remembered his curly headed, mischievous- self when I fell into suicidal despair. How could my death be explained to him? It couldn’t. So between him and the crisis line of the Salvation Army, I kept on living.

He doesn’t know that. Indeed at this point, he doesn’t know what is happening.

I am writing this to honour him because I cannot talk to him. What I am honouring is not just his worldly achievements but his inner being, his perpetual light that will not be put out by disease and death.

And to thank him for his shining face that gave me hope and kept me here to aid and comfort others in my turn.

High Anxiety: Eric Schlosser’s Command and Control

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SAMSUNG DIGITAL CAMERAOn January 24, 1961, a B-52 developed a fuel leak while being refueled mid-air. Unable to jettison the fuel inside its left wing, it went into an uncontrolled spin and began to break up over North Carolina. Four of its crew parachuted to safety. One died in the attempt and two died in the crash. The two Mark 39 hydrogen bombs it was carrying fell from the plane. In the process, various locking pins and arming wires were yanked out of one of them and the bomb responded as if it had been deliberately armed. The bomb hit the ground crushing crystals inside the nose, the firing signal. “But the weapon did not detonate.”  (246 Command and Control). A simple switch in the ‘safe’ position had saved the eastern seaboard from devastation. The other bomb, unarmed, hit the earth, part of it burying itself more than 70 ft deep, never to be found.

A news item in the National Post on September 23, 2013 telling that long-secret story indicated that Eric Schlosser had revealed it in his new book, Command and Control: nuclear weapons, the Damascus accident and the illusion of safety.

I snapped to attention. I remembered that day very vividly. I was in a state of high anxiety myself. I was about to give birth to my first child and true to the wisdom of the day, I was all alone in a cold room high above a wintry street, listening to the shrieks of the woman down the hall who definitely wanted “Momma Mia”.

I saw the day in an entirely new perspective. Instead of latching-on problems in mid-January 1961, I could have been dealing with radiation sickness in a semi-destroyed civilization.

I didn’t want to know that. And yet, knowing it, I rushed out to buy the book. The book seller said, if I liked Fast Food Nation, I would love this. I hadn’t read Schlosser’s best seller, figuring I didn’t need to be convinced that many people eat badly. I’m a born-again feeder myself, converted by bad health. And goodness, what a thick book – over 600 pages.

The framework story around which Schlosser builds his book is an accident in a Titan II, ballistic missile silo in Damascus, Arkansas in 1980, which began when a mechanic dropped a socket. Ordinarily, a dropped tool just ended up in the W-shaped support at the bottom and had to be retrieved. This one ruptured a fuel tank. Warning lights came on all over the command panel. The silo crew evacuated. Now it was impossible to say exactly what was happening inside the silo, except that it was dire. Schlosser feeds us this story bit by bit, concluding it at the end of the book. In between the Damascus chapters, he recounts the story of atomic weapons, the struggle to make them, to determine who would control them and how to use them. Throughout it all, the public was lulled as much as possible in spite of unbelievably inept handling, accidents and near misses, like the time the rising moon over Norway was mistaken for a fleet of Soviet bombers.

Schlosser’s research is topnotch. He seems to have interviewed everyone involved in the Damascus incident, for example and the many characters involved come to life because of the detail. If you do get confused, there’s a handy glossary at the front, not only of the major players, but also of acronyms and abbreviations.

Some of you will understand the physics Schlosser outlines better than I do. It’s true that at school, some of my best friends were physicists and I lived across the road from the university’s reactor, but, no matter how many times I am told the difference between fusion and fission, I don’t get it. I’m pretty much stuck at really big bang and lots of destruction and unimaginably big bang and destruction. The latter would be the Mark 39, H-bomb.

So my baby daughter came home un-radiated, never did learn to latch on, but took to a bottle readily enough. She learned to walk and loved her baby brother deliriously. They were both short enough to walk upright into the crawl space of our new house. That was a good thing because we were likely going to have to live there for weeks, drinking out of the hot water tank and consuming stockpiled cans of food, after the Soviet missiles took off from Cuba.

But that didn’t happen either.

Still Schlosser doesn’t want us to be lulled into a false sense of security. And I’m willing to inform myself when a book reads this well. I’ll finish it and then slip back into willful ignorance.

Mother’s Day

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95994044Here’s to all the women who are mothers but didn’t get celebrated (or not to their satisfaction).  Here’s to those who mother other people’s children. Here’s to bereft mothers. Here’s to those who want to be mothers but are not. Here’s to cat mothers and dog mothers. Here’s to all those of whatever gender who follow the Great Mothering principle of the world.

The crab apple blossoms made a fuchsia display of themselves next to the more demure apple blossoms this weekend in our town. Down by the river, the unselfconscious swans swam right to my feet.

swans

Once again Georgia loaned me her family, although I was chastised that, in fact, it was always my family and of course was and is. As it turned out all the men had to be elsewhere with other mothers or working and so we were seven women and a six month old baby girl at the round brunch table, one of us, very much a mother-in-training at 11. There was an almost-teenaged boy hiding out somewhere and two younger girls, who had written loving tributes to “the best mother in the world”. She needs that positive reinforcement. She is the only mother doing baby-duty.

One of the absent men had precooked most of brunch and a young aunt grilled the French toast. We had champagne.

trillium enlarged

Happy Mother’s Day!

Guess What Came Up at Dinner: Herman Koch’s novel The Dinner

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(If you plan to read The Dinner and you hate any kind of spoiler, walk on by. But if you don’t mind knowing a little, read on.)

A week or so ago, I got bent out of shape by the ending of Jo Nesbo’s The Phantom (115journals.com -Is this the end of Harry Hole?) This week it’s Herman Koch’s The Dinner, which has recently been translated from Dutch and published in English and has, from all reports, become a runaway best seller. In the first case, my reaction arose out of affection. Not so, with The Dinner.

The newspapers I get were coy in their reviews. One review in the National Post, recommended that potential readers should read nothing about the book, not even that review. Apparently, there was a surprise that we should not spoil. As I later found out other reviewers were more straight-forward, even allowing that Koch was true to his usual depiction of humanity. I wish I had read them first or had some prior knowledge of Koch’s other work. What I wanted badly when I finished was someone to talk to about the book. So far, I haven’t found anyone.

You’re it, I guess.

A reviewer for the Toronto Star called the narrator, Paul Lohman, “fairly reliable”. Excuse me? It is true that initially, I assumed the narrator and I had some opinions in common, a distaste for contemporary food pornography for one. The novel’s action is set in an upscale Amsterdam restaurant and each section is titled after a dinner course, ‘Aperitif’, ‘Appetizer’, all the way to ‘Digestif’. Reviews tend to quote the same sentence to illustrate what Paul (and I/we) disdain: the maitre d’ points with a bent pinkie finger and says, “The lamb’s-neck sweetbread has been marinated in Sardinian olive oil with rocket…the sun dried tomatoes come from Bulgaria.” (Alan Preston: The Observer) Makes you remember when your mother told you about the little children starving in China. In spite of the initial “civilized” opinions with which the reader can agree, it soon becomes evident that Paul is not as he portrays himself. As a history teacher, he has been placed on the non-active list. And, under stress, he is not to be trusted around a burning pan.

Two couples, Paul and his wife, Claire, and his brother, Serge and his wife, Babette, have met for dinner to discuss an extremely serious family matter. The only reason they have been able to get a last minute table at this exclusive restaurant is that Serge is a political rock star, about to be elected prime minister. According to Paul, Serge is a hypocrite, an egotist, a man without taste in food or holiday home. Certainly it would appear that Serge has used very bad judgement in locating this sensitive discussion in such a public venue, but I suppose, both families are trying to avoid their 15 year-old sons who are the subject of the discussion. A first person narrator requires the reader to agree to see events through that narrator’s eyes and this gets creepier and creepier as the novel moves on.

Suppose you are a parent. Suppose your child has done something morally wrong. How do you handle it? Do you consider your primary loyalty to lie with your family unit or do you take the wider human family into account? Do you consider the impact on your child’s future education and career or do you consider it necessary to right a wrong?

Once upon a time, my 7 year-old son pocketed his friend’s dinky toy at show-and-tell. He showed it to me saying his friend had given it to him. I questioned the culprit briefly and marched him to his friend’s door where son returned the toy and said sorry. I didn’t even wait to ask Dad his opinion. In my opinion, that was my son’s education. But of course, I am not labouring under Paul’s difficulty, an unnamed genetically caused anger-management issue. A number of reviewers thought that weakened Koch’s examination of our present day tendency to violence.

So what am I saying? Am I disgruntled that a whole book is taken up with a fruitless discussion of the sort of problem I think most parents would resolve in a heartbeat? Well, even I might have needed a few heartbeats given the viciousness of this deed. But what kind of people handle things as Paul and Claire do in the end? Is this what we have become?

Serge has his own idea with which the other three do not agree. While it is indeed better, he might have been more persuasive – he is a politician after all – and he pays a terrible price. Let’s just say that this is the last time he will get a table at this swanky restaurant and that will be the least of his problems. There is no nemesis, no natural justice, no neatly tied up ends in The Dinner. The female of the species turns out to be more monstrous than the male and their 15 year-old son is bound to become a monster of an entirely different order.

*****

I need to note that I felt compassion as I made my 7 year-old return the purloined toy. It was humiliating for him. But one of his best qualities now is his integrity.

For an update about the movie see https://115journals.com/2013/09/16/guess-what-came-up-at-dinner-update-on-kochs-the-dinner/

The Fortunate Fall: change the future in a blink

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Aunt Mae could see the future. It wasn’t a big deal to her. She didn’t tell most people. Only a few family members like my sister and I knew. Some outsiders knew and she got letters with strange postmarks and stamps in her mailbox that sat beside the main road 2 miles from where her tiny home sat under the mountain. Once in a while a big expensive black car swayed and bumped up the narrow dirt track and neighbours wondered why. Chances are it was a politician, a leader in government, a big business man maybe. She had those contacts, but she never took money. She did take a bottle of brandy, just as a house gift and purely medicinal, of course. She told us, Georgia and me, that if we had the gift, we must never sell it.

Anyway, it- fortune telling- wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. Sure she saw the mushroom cloud 2 years early and knew that nothing was going to stop that horror. She could live with it because she also lived with her Lord and her best buddy Jesus. When it came to individual fate, however, it was changeable. Sometimes she told what she saw in order to prevent it. Telling might galvanize the person into changing and changing it in the process.

So, yes, the future is changeable because human beings are. But sometimes change doesn’t happen until circumstances force it.

So she had seen this particular family crisis coming and cackled with glee. “It ain’t much.” But a woman of her faith could say that about the deluge, probably about the apocalypse, so I didn’t trust her. “You got to let your chicks out from under your wing. Let them out into the barnyard. They got to deal with that old fox theirselves.” And then I forgot. I put this “dire” warning out of my mind. Wouldn’t you? Besides she was very possibly just a batty backwoods hillbilly who’d made one too many trip to the brandy bottle and was stoned on Jesus.

Then last Thursday the event began to unfold. I booked passage. All our crises are transcontinental. Yes, there were enough airmiles. Yes, there was a direct flight. Yes, I could do 3 days planning and packing in an afternoon and leave in the early morning.

Of course I couldn’t sleep even after word came back that there was breath and life and a reasonable hope of complete recovery.

Sitting in a hospital room on the west coast, reading out loud to the patient from Malcolm Gladwell’s book Blink, I remembered something else Mae had said. “You can change your future in the blink of an eye.” She meant one moment’s inattention, one sudden impulsive decision. She warned Georgia and me about that. That’s how people drive in front of buses. Reason, logic, all our careful rules and practices can fall away and we act suddenly and dangerously.

Now here’s the miracle. There is a whole support system that can catch us in our fall. And it always works even though in the process we leave the physical plane. We felt this last year when a family member passed away, long before her time, and seemed to open a door into a great love when she went.

Neither Georgia nor I were able to sustain faith in Mae’s God so we pretty much knock about without that security and yet more times than we can count, we have felt that unfailing support as we do now.

There was no logical reason why things should have turned out so well. Coincidences maybe. Lucky breaks perhaps.

It has turned out to be a fortunate fall.

Motherhood: savage longing

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Robert Thurman, renowned Buddhist and scholar, and famous Uma’s father, writes in The Jewel Tree of Tibet about an unusual way to learn compassion. While you are sitting in a subway car or bus, look around and realize that everyone you see has, in the course of repeated lifetimes and in some form or other, been your mother.

But will we ever forgive each other?

Earlier this year, I bought Colm Toiben’s new book called New Ways to KIll Your Mother, a title that dismayed at least one mother I know.

Toiben is an Irish novelist and critic, who has written here a series of book reviews or essays in which he explores how we treat parents, particularly mothers, in our novels. He notes that 18th century novels rarely feature mothers. It is true that 10% of women died in childbirth then, but still, it seems unusual especially since motherhood was then beginning to be idealized. Yet “the novel is a form ripe for orphans”. He quotes Ruth Perry, a critic, who says that this “may derive from a new necessity in an age of intensifying individualism.”

(That darned individualism, so marked in 2 year-olds, and 14 year-olds, and … oh, never mind.)

Jane Austen’s last three novels have no mothers. Her great success Pride and Prejudice has Mrs Bennet, Elizabeth’s social climbing, hysterical, embarrassing mother, whose husband escapes into his study. (Wait, doesn’t that sound like someone I know?) Aunts were permitted in many motherless stories, including those of  Henry James. They might be kindly as Elizabeth’s or autocratic as Darcy’s, or manipulative, but they were surrogates, not the real mother McCoy.

The middle section of Toiben’s book concerns Irish writers, including the poet W.B. Yeats, whose essay is subtitled, “New Ways to KIll Your Father”. Yeat’s father, an successful artist sounds almost as annoying as Mrs Bennet. He confidently wrote from New York to explain a brilliant book he expected to write and publish to great acclaim. Yeats, who had put in a long and painful writing apprenticeship, refrained from dashing his father’s hopes -and thereby presumably killing him. Instead he waited a long while, during which time no such book materialized and then responded in a restrained manner.

J.M. Synge, Irish playwright (The Playboy of the Western World, Riders to the Sea) and co-founder of Irish theatre, had a formidable mother who preached damnation at all three daily meals and organized his short life when he wasn’t escaped to Paris. Much as he disdained her ‘rule’, he followed her every summer to the family’s summer place. And much as she, an Irish protestant, abhorred his atheism, she continued to give him house-room. Despite disdain, he kept on coming back.

“Samuel Beckett Meets His Afflicted Mother” tells us of the author of Waiting for Godot and his mother. Apparently, she tended to be depressed. (Imagine that -the Becketts were depressed!) Beckett eventually also fled to Paris and insisted on remaining during the Nazi occupation. He wrote the following in 1937 while his mother was away traveling: (She had of course left her cook in place and Samuel continued to enjoy life good food.) “I don’t wish her anything at all, neither good nor ill. I am what her savage longing has made me….. I simply don’t want to see her or write to her or hear from her…”

“Savage longing” indeed. Sound like a mother you know?

In the interests of full disclosure, I ought to admit that I am a mother. But, of course, you knew that.

A few weeks after I became one, I sneaked off to the doctor, leaving my newborn in the care of her father. There I sat and wept that she hated me already. Stupid man, he just laughed and assured me that soon we would be deeply attached. We were and we are – from time to time. Did I say that out loud? At present, we have entered a Pax Romana or a  long Victorian empire of peace. I have finally matured.

Her brother, on the other hand, is in a Beckett phase, although he is cordial enough at weddings and funerals. Funny how infrequent they are.

It is quite breathtaking when our beloved off-spring begin as they say to “individuate”. Humbling of course. After the momentary slights and cuts of childish insults, we endure a decade where we are ill-informed if not actually stupid, uncool, unfashionable and just generally out of date. We may or may not suddenly improve when the child is 21.

Apologies to Robert Thurman, but no wonder we have such a problem with each other! If we have all been each other’s mothers, we’ve got history.

On her death bed, my own mother had what looked like a large ruby on her upper lip. She was about to slip into a coma. She looked at me and moved her dry mouth silently. I wiped it with a wet cloth. Than she found her voice. “I need a present,” she said.

And my heart filled with compassion.

Sage Baby: Bad Titles follow-up

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A couple of posts ago, I ruminated about titles that get outdated by time, including George Orwell’s 1984 and my blog 115journals. I imagined that the three journals I have written since are seriously put out and I rashly promised journal 118 that I would mollify it by posting its highlights. Today I reached page 215, the last page. Journal 118 started on July 8th is now retired from active duty.

Let’s see what’s there.

Oh. My. Goodness. Anais Nin would have relegated its first part to her diary of pain. When she was mortally ill in Big Sur, as I remember, she divided her journal in two and kept the unpleasant stuff separate. I haste to add that my “pain” was more mundane and much alleviated by simple means such as a new regimen of supplements to replace the minerals I was short of.

Then I come to a dream I had in which I was a young doctor just beginning my residency when I learned that I was pregnant. The dream was suffused with love, warm, nourishing love for and from my husband, and a quickening sexual desire. I went out for a walk by myself on a rainy Sunday evening to relish this feeling. Oddly, I came upon my actual/ non-dream-life son in the course of this walk. He was working as a blacksmith -not of course in real life -outside his forge and raised his head only briefly to ask if I had written another book.

I seemed to be living an alternative past and seeing an alternative future.

When I looked at what the dream meant, I saw that I was dreaming of healing myself. The Sunday night walk could be seen as a sign I was now complete enough in myself to do so. Someone I told the dream to said I was dreaming about my “sage baby”, that gestation is a symbol of spiritual cultivation.

So I looked on the internet for “sage baby’ and found it was the name of a company that produces baby blankets, a name given to both boy and girl babies and the name of a musician. Not helpful. I imagined people sitting in a shamanic circle fashioning tiny doll babies out of sage leaves. Then I finally realized she meant “wise” baby.

Ah, a familiar idea. One of western civilizations most important festivals centres on the wise or sage baby, born in a manger. But it has seemed to me for some time that this is better understood as the birth of the Christ in the cave of the heart, in other words, our own soul discovering itself and knowing it is one with the divine creative spirit.

A book is another kind of sage baby and my real son was/is fashioning his own sage baby, in iron with fire.

So there you go, Journal 118. That is surely your highlight, an actual insight.

Isn’t it curious that in our dreams, we can be any age, possibly because we are not actually age-specific.

How’s your sage baby coming on?

The Hungry Ghosts: Chinese All Souls Festival

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As we approach the temple building in Chinatown, we can see smoke rising from the tiny courtyard, smell strong incense and feel a fine spray on our faces. Through the filagree of the metal fence we catch glimpses of red-robed figures and hear their chanting. My friend peels off at this point, allergic to such strong incense and smoke. Entering by a side gate, I come upon other chanters in light blue robes, coming down from the temple on the third floor.

Inside the tiny office area, I am pointed toward the English list. The Chinese list looks to be more sizeable. The man before me is busy adding a folded package containing a paper sports jacket, paper dress shoes and a paper cell phone to his bag of paper money. I know these customs having attended a Chinese funeral, although the deceased also received genuine Scotch whiskey to help her on her way. When it is my turn, I am greeted happily. “We didn’t know you would be here to burn your own!” But I eschew extras. I am sending only these ersatz silver and gold bars to my parents.

For weeks, we have been rolling this paper money at our tai chi club and sending it down here in huge green plastic bags. The money has been redistributed into the small parcels, such as the one I hold with my parents’ names and their memorial plaque number on the label.

“You know what to do?” asks the volunteer in charge of the English list and she proceeds to remind me, but I do know what to do. This is the sixth year that I have burned an offering.

“Why don’t you do it for Aunt Mae?” Georgia has asked me. Aunt Mae got us through our tough young lives.

“Aunt Mae doesn’t need any help,” I reply.

Perhaps our mother doesn’t either, for when she left, she never looked back. She went so completely and utterly that her leaving left me questioning my beliefs, questioning them all the way to a two-week hospital stay.

My father, on the other hand, hung around, offering, for example, financial advice: buy lottery tickets. Those who have read my memoir, Never Tell, will understand that he was the sort of parent, one is better off without.

I climb to the third floor, clutching my paper sack. Through the door to the temple I can see more blue-robed chanters moving about among what surely must be “graven images” of the Quan Yin and Confucius and other Buddist, Taoist and Confucian “saints” or holy beings. They are large and colourful and delight me, but today my business is in the anteroom where the memorial plaques are posted. Mine is #588 and easily found.

I stand gazing at this innocuous slip of yellow paper, bearing my parents’ names and the name of their native town -Hereford. How strange to see it here, amid these gaudy red and gold trappings, above this altar covered in dishes of food: fruit, pastries, rice, tea, pots with many sticks of incense, and beautiful flowers. Hereford of rolling green hills and low mountains, Hereford Hill that lies under slope-shouldered Hereford mountain and looks down over the Indian and Connecticut Rivers, a wooded place that is turning its back on cultivation now, turning back to dark and tangled forest.

I bow, the parcel tucked awkwardly under my arm. I choose a joss stick, light it on a candle, bow and stick it in the sand of an incense pot. I bow again. I don’t want to leave.

I am 76 years-old, but I am also 2 and 4 and 5. I am living through the Great New England hurricane and watching my parents build a load on the hay wagon and walking the dirt road with my mother and fishing the trout stream with my father.

If they were alive my mother would be 95. Her mother lived to that age. And my father, 98. But they have been gone for 44 and 24 years. Most of the family is profoundly grateful and it certainly has made life easier. No one else, Georgia or my visiting brother, wants to be here with me.

Downstairs, I am waved toward the back parking lot where a small iron burner stands ready. Two of my favourite instructors are there to feed the fire. They are my age, perhaps, although their wiry small bodies are in such good shape, it’s hard to tell and they are teaching another Chinese man how to do the tor yu as one of them pokes my bundle into flames.

I stand watching it burn, leaping up in bright gold and red flames, dying back to black ash and leaping into flame again. My eyes are watering. Must be the smokey wind.

I am feeding the hungry ghosts, my father who waited his whole life for a windfall, my mother who loved beautiful things -cranberry glass, cow pitchers (!), my father who sought some adrenaline high to fill the emptiness of his orphaned heart, my mother who sought solace, a gift to soothe her battered soul. And my own. My ghost is still more or less grounded here for the time being, but I know its tendency to wander, howling in the wilderness.

It’s all about me as usual.

Measured against the forests and the granite, the myriad lakes and waters, the un-reckonable ages, I am just a flame. These steadfastnesses support me, not I them. I can flicker and go out and reignite. I owe my life to Something greater.

When the fire has died down to black, I thank the men and walk through the back gate to my car, which still has a lot of time on the meter.

Septuagenarians in the Wilderness: part 2

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There is, thank heavens, no 15 minute wait at the train crossing. The crews apparently take the opportunity to climb down from their freight trains in this little town. Unfortunately, this means that the train’s mile-long tail blocks the road to the cottage. Today I quickly turn onto the road that runs parallel to the tracks and it changes from pavement to black top to gravel, getting ever smaller. Signs warn me repeatedly that the tiny dirt road is now private so what am I doing there and, moreover, I am ordered to stop for snakes and turtles neither of which I see. Finally, after the usual panic that surely I have missed the hidden turn, I find it and bump over rock and hillocks into a clearing in the woods where the cottage sits basking in the sun.

Beach picture from previous year

I step out of the Yarris into 95 degree heat with my usual grace after long sitting and hobble around until I can get things stretched and operational. Then I carry my Tim’s tea around the cottage down to the beach where I can see the others. On either side of the clearing, a 50 or 60 year-old wood of birch and maple and beech stands, unmoved and calming.

There are 4 children playing in the water and 5 adults sheltering under a white canopy, one of whom is my sister, Georgia, the founder of the feast, for it is Georgia who has rented the cottage with her carefully saved substitute-teacher’s pay.

The cottage can sleep 12 in its 2 bedrooms and loft, but there is also a brand new cabin hidden in the woods where the children and their parents are staying. It, like the main building, is fully screened against insect predation. Both have screened porches and the larger one has a big deck looking out on the lake.

A group of 6 has been there already for a week. Georgia and my older niece arrived yesterday. My niece moves from the bedroom she has shared with Georgia and re-makes her bed in the loft, not an easy choice to make because the loft is open to the noise of the main room below. She is honouring her elder.

The Wilderness Effect

I have shared houses with my daughter’s family and never experienced the wilderness effect in them. They were in Los Vegas, however, the last place on earth for the wilderness effect. Even though there were just as many people and emotionally charged events – a memorial service for grandpa and a wedding, there were no meltdowns. Plumbing disasters, inconvenient babysitting expectations, varying standards of housekeeping, but no need for interventions or group therapy sessions.

On the other hand, not one of our camping trips in the High Sierras passed without it. Others at the same campsite above the Kern River dealt with the wilderness effect by drinking copious qualities of beer and howling like wolves to scare off bears. In our camp, usually on the 3rd or 4th day, we found ourselves sitting in a circle listening to an older child express his angst or holding a screaming younger child or shaking heads in disbelief when gran nearly perished from insomnia. (Something about the altitude and all those stars wheeling overhead.) It must be all that fresh air, all this patient trees, the safety net of the family that brings it on.

In this case, it starts with wind. Saturday morning, Georgia has just come up from sitting under her new orange umbrella, 4 others are sheltered in the shade of the canopy and the children are hunting mussels in the lake. I am in the cottage with a view out the glass front. Suddenly, the umbrella’s neck is twisted and broken and the children watch in disbelief as a great funnel of sand flies up. Those under the canopy shield their faces. The canopy, metal frame and white cover intact rises, hovers six feet over their heads, turns on its side and speeds thirty feet across the clearing to land 15 feet up in the trees.

True the cottage sits at the end of a long stretch of water, wooded on both sides, that forms a wind-alley but this is ridiculous.

Much of the rest of the morning is spent debriefing and fishing the canopy down with oars.

Dinner at a hibachi bar, in a town an hour away, is scheduled this evening, to celebrate Georgia’s approaching 70th birthday. We have reservations for 14. Three more, including Georgia’s other grandchildren are expected to arrive soon.

I am on the screened porch when I hear an uproar from the cabin.  One parent arrives, very het up, seeking intervention. A passionate difference of opinion has arisen over appropriate child discipline.  The most objective of our group is sent forth to reason. One half of the blended family, having secured the car keys, departs precipitously, leaving the other half without transportation. A less objective person, that is to say a mother, makes the trek to the cabin. The remaining children and parent are whisked away for lunch in the aforementioned town.

Those of us left behind contemplate the wilderness effect.

I make a quick trip down the private road and over the tracks, to buy Georgia a bunch of Gerber daisies and a bottle of Moet & Chandron. I stow them in the cabin to keep them out of sight. When I carry them to the main cottage later, I meet an exasperated 7 year-old.

“What are they for?” she asks.

“They’re for Grandma Georgia’s birthday,” I reply.

“I guess you didn’t know my birthday was on Wednesday,” she says.

“I didn’t,” I reply. “Sorry. What would you like for a late birthday present.”

“I’d like to find my pink dress,” she declares and stomps away.

Alas, it turns out that her pink dress had been carried off by the departing parent in hastily packed luggage.

As a fitting end to a perfect day, the hibachi chef sets his hat of fire.

More to come.