My Life – searching for Love, Belonging, God and Myself
My first memory must have been the night of
January 9 or 10, 1953, stimulated by my lifelong urges to be an artist and to
win attention and approval: Glenn and
David watching admiringly in our breakfast nook as I drew a picture for Daddy
and Grandma Cheriton to take to Mommy who was in the hospital giving birth to
Ruth, the first of us born by natural childbirth, after Muriel had wanted that
in all previous births. Muriel declared
later that she had no preference of gender for any of her children except Ruth
since she thought “Poor Lorna, if she has three brothers.” Daddy called her Maggie Muggins, since she
was just as cute as the TV star. He
built her THE CORRAL, "the biggest play pen in the world" but Ruth
spent most of her time trying to get out to escape and play with us “big kids,”
who had the “Ark” a backyard land boat (about 20ft long, with bridge, helm and
mast) that Daddy built. Glenn had his
climbing tree (a cherry whose limbs were cut down to climbing-boy length). We also played on a swing, teeter totter, and
our sandbox, and in the back bush where David lost his jacket over one winter,
retrieved in the spring. A childless
couple living down the street had a little dog; “Pouchie's Mom” invited Muriel
and us kids over to watch TV – “Roy Rogers” and “The Lone Ranger,” a big treat
since we had no television.
My mother tried to get me admitted to Grade 1
when I was five years old since she saw that I was very ready for school. My father claimed that, before going to
school, I figured out how to multiply by using the calendar.
Unable to get me admitted to school before my 6th birthday,
Mommy arranged for me to take piano lessons with Mrs English who lived next
door. Another lemon that became lemonade
was my 6th birthday
party in July which was drenched in rain, forcing everyone inside, but Daddy
showed movies in our basement, saving the day.
In 1954, the year that I started Grade 1, my
father contracted Hepatitis A and was in St Paul's hospital for 3 weeks. He suspected a connection with Glenn and
David's playing in the deep ditches outside our yard and Glenn's much milder
illness.
Now that I have been dancing Contra, English
County Dance, Cajun and improvisional dance for decades and have recognized
that I am much more an extrovert than I appeared in my childhood, I think back
to the dance lesson in which the European dance mistress instructed each of us
little girls to dance down the hall solo, beating on a tambourine. I was so shy that I could not make myself do
so. My mother was watching and there
were no more dancing lessons.
In grade one, many girls celebrated that they
"used to have blonde hair." Knowing my hair had always been brown, I
had nothing to say. But one day when
parents were invited to school, my teacher, Mrs Shivers, saw Mom coming to
school with the boys and with Ruth in a stroller and exclaimed "Another
nice little brown-haired girl."
(Her awareness and sensitivity were such a contrast to my Grade 5
teacher who must have seen the long-running bullying of a girl larger and more
developed than the rest of us but did nothing to stop the bullying or to teach
us how painful it had to be for the victim.)
My classmates also took pride in being
"allergic” to many things, while I, having had no allergies except as a
toddler to the sap from dandelion stems, felt I must lack sensitivity.
Mom’s neighbor Beth Brown, not only asked Mom to
change the random way Mom hung laundry on the line and try to hang like items
together, but was known to say: "Oh
look, here comes the Goosey Gander Kindergarten." Perhaps a touch of jealousy that, while she
had two daughters, she had no sons.
I stole an eraser from my friend Lorraine's house, I think.
A highlight of my early life was that I stayed
with Grandma Cheriton when the rest of the family went on a vacation. She and I
went to a high school concert; I thought it was funny that the girl singers
made a lot of “s-s-s-s” sounds, probably because they were sopranos with high
voices. Grandma took me to two musicals
- “Naughty Marietta” and one other, both at the Stanley Park “Theatre under the
Stars.” My magical introduction to music
and theatre! Possibly Grandma took me to
the first movie I ever attended; it had a young woman trapped in a burning
house… as real to me as if it were happening in actual life.
After my best friend Dorothy and I had a fight,
I came home in tears and went to my room at the top of the house from where I
could look over to her house. Mommy told
me that if I did not stop my dramatic wailing, she'd give me something to cry
about. After I told her the cause of my despair, she took me over to Dorothy's
where her mother and mine helped heal the breach.
After I had scarlet fever, I returned to school
to find the school closed. As I was walking home, a girl classmate came out on
to her porch, wearing her black patent leather shoes with ankle straps (that I
so envied) and told me school was not on today.
I told her I knew (I did by then but wanted to save face by not crying
even though I was on the verge of tears). Getting home, I cried bitterly – my
mother helped me take off my outer clothes and, rather than tell me to stop
crying, tried to comfort me saying “Stupid Mommy, not checking if the school
was open.”
I was given a kitten by a girl older than me who
told me I had to name it something beginning with “M” since it was a tabby with
“M” on its forehead. I named it Muff. My
brothers cut off its whiskers to see what would happen and soon afterwards it
fell off the window sill where it was sleeping. “Meow....plop” became a family
saying.
When Muff went missing, I procrastinated against
my parents’ insistence that I go look for her, as if I feared discovering the
worst. When it was found, killed by a
car, my mother made me go look at the mangled body under the outside back
stairs... I defiantly decided not to cry, because I felt I was being punished
for my procrastination. Yet, that did
not cure my tendency to procrastinate.
After another small death, Daddy cut off the head of a hummingbird that
had hit one of our windows and been killed.
He put it in a tin box for me to keep the beautiful colors.
Another early hardening and closing off of my
heart: I observed that a sibling about
to get a spanking and crying “Mommy, Mommy, I’m sorry,” still got spanked. I decided apologizing was degrading and
resolved never again to cry or plead.
In early 1956 after my father
accepted a position with Wirtanen Electric in Edmonton, Mommy,
very pregnant, gathered us around her on the stairs to the basement and told us
that we would be moving to Edmonton where her mother lived and that we would be
having a new baby there. I can't
remember even saying goodbye to Dorothy and Lorraine.
Mommy
took Glenn, David and Ruthie by train.
Daddy, drove, taking me with him. In the Rockies Daddy showed me where the
Frank slide had obliterated the town. A
fun game he played with me and I loved was to have me warn him when the numbers
on the odometer turned to zero so that he could shut his eyes.
Not fun was when he rebuked me for saying “I know” and telling me I
should say, “Yes.”
I Know
that when I was 6
and traveling with my father
(one of the very few times
we did something together,
just he and I),
he introduced me to the marvelous game
in which my mission was to alert him
to dangerous zeros appearing on the odometer
so that he could “shut” his eyes
and avoid seeing the dastardly zeros
until one of the zeros changed to a ‘1’
and I could announce “It’s okay, Daddy,
you can look now”
In the mountains
not far from where the 1905 landslide
had obliterated a small town,
he alerted me
that the three 9s
were about to change to four zeros;
Having watched for that imminent event,
anticipating the blissful moment of warning him:
I said “I know!”
in emphatic agreement;
I know …
that he replied,
“It’s not polite to say ‘I know’
You should just say ‘Yes’ in affirmation”
I know …
that half a century later
I am most circumspect concerning
with which exclamations
I express agreement;
I know …
my friends
with children and grandchildren themselves
but unencumbered with that admonition
blithely say “I know!”
in emphatic agreement
I know…
I envy them.
In April
1956, our family was living with
Grannie, Mom's mother. Soon, in a
carriage in the living room, there was a baby wrapped in white, my new sister
Mary Olive. I cringed to think my parents
had given her “ordinary” names when they could have used what I considered
beautiful names: Barbara, Carole, Sandra.
Years later I came to appreciate the name “Mary” through its being the
name of my beloved sister and of the pastor and mentor who I admired.
My brother Glenn and I completed the school year
at nearby Bellevue Elementary School. I
was not aware of feeling traumatized by our move but one day the Grade 2
teacher held up my notebook to show how messy my writing was in comparison to
that of a boy whose neat book she held up beside it. I imagine my messy notebook was a symptom of
my stress about losing my friends in Burnaby and being plunked down in a new
school in April, so late in the year. At
recess there were skipping games I didn't know.
One girl told me I had a funny surname… but then she added that she did
too, “April May Bending, like bending over.”
The next winter I found that I was the only one of my contemporaries who
did not know how to skate, since Vancouver lacked the cold and snowy winters of
Edmonton.
In the summer we moved about a mile away to a big house in
the Highlands district. I began Grade 3 with a marvelous teacher, Miss Bell,
who encouraged all her students. I
recovered, did well and enjoyed school again.
Next door was a large family with a daughter my age, son
Glenn's, another son David's, daughter Ruth's.
Laurie and I became best friends through proximity. Tim, a year younger, had skipped a grade, so
was in Laurie's grade but did much better academically, was his mother's pride
and joy, and my bitter rival, especially in school.
In Grade 4 Mrs. Kindiak had much less control than Miss
Bell over the class, had to raise her voice in desperation and to use the
pointer to rap on kids’ hands or heads, once breaking her pointer over a boy’s
head, much to the awe and relish of the other children. She lived nearby and some of us girls would
call at her house to walk with her to school.
One of the rowdier boys, Allan McLean, would pelt us girls with 5-cent
rolls of chocolate-covered caramels as we came or went to school.
In Grade 5 some of us
kids were playing in the big entrance room when a fierce teacher, Miss Todd,
appeared in the doorway and commanded us to stop. Most ran away except Allan whom she caught
and me, who had been taught at home to obey authority. She marched us to the principal's office
where Allan and I stood across the desk from where she sat writing. Suddenly and unexpectedly, probably from
stress, I farted loudly and she looked up “What do you say?” Embarrassed, I obeyed, saying “Excuse
me.” Allan gleefully reported this to
our friends as if I had done it deliberately and heroically.
Our Grade 5-6 teacher,
Mr. Moyer, would put an “Einstein” question on the blackboard for those
students who finished their math exercises while others were still working. I loved the challenge and the triumph of
completing the Einstein question and considering myself intelligent.
For at least 2-3 years
a girl, Beth Simpson, who was tall and developed breasts earlier than the rest
of us, was bullied, with no intervention from any teacher. Kids slapped each other, declaring “giving
you Beth's fleas.” Eventually tiring of
being slapped, I made and wore a sign saying “I resign”...(meaning from the
game of slapping) but I apparently lacked the empathy to realize how cruel our
actions were. Our teacher, Mr. Moyer,
made the last month of school before summer vacation easy for us, and for him,
letting us read Readers' Digest magazines and do artwork (his specialty) the
entire month of June, rather than do any organized learning, but I cannot
forgive him that he never educated us about the cruelty of our bullying, which
he had to be aware of.
Christmases, Daddy
brought home a Christmas tree and it was he who always put on the lights after
which we children added the ornaments, a certain amount of competitiveness
motivating us. Gift-wrapped presents
were added to the tree during the lead-up to Christmas, but none unwrapped
until Christmas morning. We children
hung stockings made specially for Santa’s bounty and with our names on
them. Christmas morning we had to wait
until 7am to go downstairs; my goal was to seize the exact moment of 7:00am to
rush to the top of the stairs and call out “Merry Christmas” and be the first
to hurtle downstairs. Santa always left
a mandarin orange in the toe of our Christmas stockings. Our mother remembered one Christmas when we
were very young when a tricycle for David arrived with a missing or broken part
and Daddy stayed up until midnight improvising until it functioned right. We children all groaned that, before we could
open any gifts, we had to each have a pencil and paper to write down who gave
us what. Our parents required us to
write thank-you notes to the relative who sent gifts – the aunt who sent us the
Lifesavers Candy book which opened like a book and had lifesavers of many
different flavors, even butterscotch and clove… but also to the relatives who
sent shirts or socks, gifts which my brothers were angrily disappointed
in. Mommy often smoothed out and saved
attractive wrapping paper to re-use and I still have the impulse to do the
same. We burned other used wrapping
paper and I wondered long afterwards if my new yellow cardigan sweater which
disappeared might have been accidentally consumed by those flames.
About Grade 3-4, I
attended an Explorer group at the Baptist church – for
girls too young for CGIT, Canadian Girls in Training. Once I came home and used the expression “all
that crap” that I'd heard other girls use at Explorers to mean “all that
stuff.” When my mother rebuked me,
saying that “ladies do not use that word,” I was surprised and ashamed.
Grandma Cheriton offered to take each grand-daughter by herself on a
trip when she reached 10 or 11 years of age.
Apparently, she would have taken me at age 10 but my mother told me I
hadn't been good enough in behavior the year leading up to that. I could not think
of what I had done in the past year that was not good, although at age six I
had wasted a container of grape cordial by pouring it undiluted into glasses
for my little friends, all of whom left it undrunk. And sometime in my childhood I hit my brother
Glenn over the head with a chess board, after he had giving me unsolicited
advice about playing the game. I
would not give my mother the satisfaction of asking what I had done wrong or of
showing any disappointment.
The next year, when I was eleven, I was allowed to go,
but my mother insisted on cutting my hair so that Grandma wouldn’t have to deal
with doing my French braids. Looking back, I wonder why I couldn’t have
brushed my hair myself and put it into a pony tail. I no longer cried
when punished, but after my long tresses were chopped off at chin level, I
stood in front of the mirror, weeping inconsolably in true grief for my long hair. Now I realize
that the special treat of travel with Grandma was so unlike anything my
parents, growing up in the Depression, had enjoyed, that their deprivation as
children may have caused them to require me to suffer before I enjoyed
opportunities they never had.
Grandma and I traveled by Greyhound Bus from Edmonton to
Vancouver. I thought the best thing
about traveling on the Greyhound buses with Grandma were the grilled cheese
sandwiches, with pickles on the side, that we had for lunch in the Greyhound
bus station cafes. But really it was the rare time with Grandma all to
myself, a child with no memory of ever being without siblings. The worst
thing was overnights on buses with no bathrooms; I woke one morning with an urgent
need to go and longingly awaited the first rest stop of the day, yet intrigued
with Grandma’s question, “Number 1 or Number 2?,” designations I had not heard
before but I instantly understood
Daddy’s terms “wheeze” and “gruntin,” which I now imagine might have
been a farm boy’s terms, similarly needed no explanation nor any warning...somehow my siblings and I knew not to use those terms at school or
anywhere outside our family.
Arriving at Grandma’s house in Vancouver, we found there were no
breakfast foods, but there was frozen pie which we defrosted; it made breakfast
a special celebration. There was also a
friend of Grandma’s who came over with a vivid turquoise skirt and blouse that
had been outgrown by the friend’s grand-daughter, so was passed on to me, the
two grandmas agreeing that, at Disneyland, wearing that outfit, I would be easy
to spot, so hard to lose track of.
Disneyland was a magical place for an 11-year-old girl from western
Canada, with its rotating teacups big enough to ride in and cable car rides
above the fairgrounds. The only rebuke I recall from Grandma was her
telling me not to stare at an African-American woman in a Ladies Room, the
first person of color I had ever seen.
In California we stayed with Grandma’s sister Avis in San Diego.
Grandma and Aunt Avis laughed at funny things I said, so that encouraged me to
flourish as a youthful comedian with a naively innocent face, until Avis called
me on hiding my own laughing behind my hand.
That city’s zoo had a marvelous exhibit of live snakes of myriad types
that showed me the beauty of serpents and kindled my lifelong fascination with
them.
Another
encounter bewildered me: an elderly man we visited sat me on his knee in
private and wanted to kiss and fondle me; he gave me some coins and urged me to
write to him. I told Grandma none of
this and when we returned to Edmonton, she urged me to remember to write to
him. My father, also knowing nothing of
this, said, “She doesn’t have to write to him.”
Many years later, my father referred to him as a “harmless old
man.” I did not correct Dad but am
thankful that apparently he did not do the same to my sisters on their
visits. I do not understand why I did
not tell my parents or Grandma before my sisters’ trips to California with
Grandma.
CGIT (Canadian Girls in Training) met at our
church, the United Church of Canada.
During the school year, wearing sailor-like middies, we met weekly for
religious instruction and sometimes some crafts. I found the meetings boring, but, at age 11,
I went to CGIT summer camp for a week, lived in a cabin with 5 other girls, did
crafts that were a whole lot more fun, and swam every day. Camp was so different; I loved it and the
next year my parents let me go for two weeks. My mother told me that I was so eager that I
packed my bags weeks ahead.
When I arrived at camp, I was still afraid of
swimming as I had been ever since I was small.
I had not yet learned to swim but quickly began to hero-worship the
sports director, Lois, who was so vivacious and enthusiastic, outgoing and
confident,
though not classically beautiful, that I admired her to the point of having a
crush on her. I was so determined to win
her approval that I was in the lake practicing, not just during swim lessons,
but every time the flag was down signaling that we were allowed to go in. At the end of the first week, I took the
usual Red Cross Junior Lifesaving test but, while I was swimming elementary
backstroke, I heard the examiner calling my name. Instead of swimming in a straight line along
the shore, I had made a big arc and was headed out to the middle of the
lake. I did not pass that time. But at the end of the second week, Lois had a
huge smile when she called me up after supper in the dining hall to receive my
award.
From staying so long in the water practicing, I
always arrived at Crafts when most of the supplies were used up. But I made a name tag that I still have a
half-century later, using a “Z” turned on its side, for the “N” of Lorna. We wove baskets and some girls used so much
material that little was left when I arrived, so I wove a base of one inch of
solid weave, then improvised big loops on the sides of my basket. It came out looking great, both beautiful and
also a message to me that I still cherish… that I can create successfully even
when resources are scarce, rather than complain about those who have taken more
than their share. I gave the basket to
my mother who treasured it.
It was so
marvelous meeting new friends, especially the girls in my cabin. Some were much bolder than I was. Some girls strung a bra up the flag pole (so
brave and brazen!) As we stood early
morning to raise the flag, one girl talked in a loud voice about getting her
period for the first time and about all the blood. The counsellors were not amused about hearing
all the details broadcast so one leader shushed her.
.
We had a “backwards supper” that started with
dessert. Another night we each only got
one utensil to eat with. Each girl had
to reach up into a big bowl that a counsellor held too high for her to see into
and pull out one utensil. One girl got a
spatula, one got an eggbeater.... and the meal was, of course, spaghetti and
for dessert, Jello....so it was a challenge to eat. I also loved singing camp songs around the
fire as darkness fell. Even now, I sing
those songs to keep myself going when I am on a long hike and getting very
tired. After camp, my mother generously
let a girl from camp come over to our house, letting us continue our friendship
for the summer.
A
different camp experience was Dad taking his four oldest kids – Glenn, David,
Ruth and me -- camping to places around Edmonton. The two youngest, Mary and Kyle, stayed home
with Mom but had the treat of TV dinners.
En route to the Sturgeon River where we would find our own place to
camp, Dad would point out a commercial campground with store and playground and
pretend he was about to turn in there.
“No, no, Daddy, that’s too civilized!” we would exclaim. Dad would “acquiesce” and choose a wild site
near the river where we would set up our tent.
In the evening, we pagans, infused with years of Sunday School, danced
around the fire that Dad made, waving the “Staff of Righteousness” and “Tree of
Life.” Dad told Uncle Remus stories,
bringing to life Brer Rabbit who would beg Brer Fox, “Please don’t throw me in
the Brer patch! Eat me up or do anything
else.”
On these camping trips, Dad taught
Glenn and David how to shoot. Once he
told me to throw some sticks into the river for the boys to shoot at. I collected some and happened to throw them
where the current carried them some distance from shore. When Dad remarked that I had a “good arm,” I confessed that the river had helped carry them out. “Better to use brain than brawn,” he told me,
a welcome affirmation, even though I had not known the river would collaborate
to give me that “good arm.”
Eventually
Mary came on the camping trips and one evening Ruth and I went kayaking on the
river, taking Mary in my kayak. Dusk was
falling before we got back and Dad was not amused by our lateness in returning.
I can imagine his thoughts of having to return minus all his and Mom’s
daughters!
Our family
went on Sunday afternoon drives out into the country. Ruth and I liked collecting “writing rocks,”
pink or white sandstone that we could use to write on other rocks. Once we found a geode and ran to show it to
Dad; we hadn’t planned to argue about who it “belonged” to but he wanted to
know who had actually found it before he told us any more about it. We and the boys also panned for gold along
the North Saskatchewan River. My mother
would hand out some candy on these trips and I began saving it, storing it in
my drawer in the kitchen where each of us kids had a drawer. When my mother discovered my hoard, she
shared it among my siblings but that did not cure my tendency to hoard. (In my
forties, a therapist would tell me that had not dealt with the causes of my
hoarding.)
Summers, when we rented the McDermid cottage at Lake Wabumn, Ruth and
I collected more writing rocks, storing them under the cottage. Dad took us out sailing in McDermid’s old
white clunker of a sailboat. One chilly day I sat huddled in
the boat and, because I was older and had embraced stoicism, silent, while Ruth, a very chilled little
girl, pleaded, “Daddy, I’m cold.”
Having
grown up on a farm with his own horse Ginger playing a major role in his
childhood, Dad took us to the farm of an elderly bachelor farmer who had
horses. There Dad taught us the rudiments
of riding. My most vivid memory is of
being in old Mr Wilson’s kitchen when the lid of a cooking pot was removed, and I saw the bottom of the pot covered with flies. Dad says my expression was priceless. For another visit, I baked Mr Wilson fresh
scones in our cottage kitchen, since he had no one to cook for him.
I took
piano lessons from a woman who eventually had me take the Royal Conservatory
practical and theory exams. Except for
rare times, like when I played fun tunes like “Turkey in the Straw” and my
siblings danced around in the living room to my music, I did not consider music
pleasurable or myself to have any talent, so I got up early to get my
practicing done and over with. I got 98
on the theory exam but 58 on the practical so failed the practical by 2
points. That evening I hid away in my
bedroom; when Mom came in, I confessed, although without tears, “I don't like
failing.”
After earning my Red Cross Junior swim badge at
camp, I went on to earn the Intermediate and Senior badges fairly quickly. At 13, I was too young to take the lifesaving
course so began training with the East End Penguins competitive swim team. I was not a sprinter and never won races. But I would go to the outdoor pool every day
during the spring and summer at 7am, then to Grannie's for breakfast, and then
to school where my eyes, since we swam without swim googles, burned from the
chlorine of the pool until they would suddenly flood with tears and I'd get
some relief. People commented on my
beautiful tan, acquired so gradually with exposure to the very early morning
sun. During breakfast, I was too
embarrassed to tell Grannie that there were weevils in her oatmeal. But in the summer, when I would ride Mary to
swim lessons that happened while I trained; we both went to Grannie's for
breakfast and Mary did tell her. I had
no answer when Grannie asked me why I hadn't told her.
I always tried hard in races so didn't
understand when Mike (who coached with his wife Hope) pointed out my 50 yards
in a relay was slower than my 50 in a 100 yd race. I suspect my energy was going into frantic
effort rather than effective propulsion.
Once, when our family was at the swimming pool,
Dad challenged me to a race of two widths; he won but then asked me if I had
“let him win, “telling me I should not do that.
I had tried my hardest and that was as discouraging as my never winning
races against my contemporaries.
On
Saturdays we had games rather than strict training. During a game of “Pom, pom, pullaway; if you
don’t come, we’ll pull you away,” we had to get across the pool before getting
caught by those who were “It.” Those
caught joined the catchers. I escaped
being caught by crossing unobtrusively, often underwater, for crossing after
crossing. But eventually, caught by
Cheryl, a year older than me, I impulsively shouted, “I’ve got Cheryl.” The other “It” catchers came to my aid to
restrain her and I escaped. Of course,
that strategy only worked once and I was caught on the next round.
At the time, I was very modest getting
dressed. Wendy Parslow, who, like her
sister Corinne, was a great swimmer and won races and not nearly so modest,
commented on this, but I was unable to drop my towel and be like them so I
replied defiantly, “You can say what you want, but I'll do what I want.”
We Penquins traveled to some swim meets out of
town. There was a lot of waiting between
races and once Hope asked me about a novel I was apparently reading. I had put a novel’s cover on the chemistry
book that I was actually reading so could not tell Hope what I liked about the
novel.
My brother Glenn and I were both passionately
interested in chemistry and created a lab in Grannie’s basement. Dad would not allow one in our own house, a
decision affirmed one Thanksgiving when everyone at Grannie’s dining table
started coughing. It turned out we had
created sulfur dioxide which was billowing up from the basement. I especially loved making crystals as well as
mixing two liquids to produce a precipitate.
Once when Glenn and I took a small bit of our home-made nitroglycerine
out to explode on Grannie’s sidewalk; an intrusive neighbor who was too
frequently coming over to use Grannie’s telephone, came up the path asking
“Now, what are you children doing?” When
she heard we were exploding gunpowder, she turned and left, leaving us joyful
that we had not only influenced an adult’s behavior but saved Grannie an
unwelcome visit.
During one of our family’s weeks renting the
McDermids' summer cottage, an older girl explained to me about sexual
intercourse. I had already come up with
the idea that men and women would “fit” together but imagined it being done standing. On one of the trips that Laurie, who
passionately loved horses, and I made to the horse barn at the Exhibition
Grounds, a man asked if we knew; I claimed I did not and he took it upon
himself to explain it to us both.
Besides horses, Laurie loved dogs and especially
her black Lab named Shiner that she treasured until her parents made her give
it up, causing her true grief. I assume
her parents did not appreciate her love of animals, nor her struggle
academically in the same grade as her younger brother Tim who had skipped a
grade and excelled academically. “Rorna
and Raurie,” as another younger brother called us, resisted passively by hating
wearing skirts, preferring pants and chronically being late leaving for school. I regret how our paths diverged in high
school especially years later when I heard she had died of an overdose.
In Grade 7, I was in the music class that had a
“portable” (an outdoor, single classroom building) for “home room.” I tried to learn cello and French horn,
sometimes getting together to practice with the other cello student Luther
Martin, a thin studious boy whom my mother tended to call “Martin Luther”
although he was far from acting like a revolutionary.
Through Junior High School I got academic honors
but in Grade 9, I became keenly aware of where I placed on every test compared
to Laurie’s brother Tim. I thought we
were very closely matched but was amazed, when our report cards came out, that
my average was 92, considerably higher than his. In a Science class exam, I reacted against
the multiple-choice answers as simplistic and wrote my answer in detail in the
margins; I noticed our teacher stopped to read carefully what I had written. I
reacted against a “fill-in-the-blanks” test question on another teacher’s test;
he had lifted the phrase “the movement of water …is called” out of context; I
knew the expected answer was osmosis but refused to limit my answer to such a
deceptive one so added “river, stream, drip, waterfall, torrent, rain” and so
on until I ran out of space on the page.
About this time, I began to write poems.
The Prairie Crocus
The prairie stretches sad and cold
no colors of the spring,
too well remembering winter winds
and summer’s promising;
the floating paleness in the sky’s
shredded wisps of cloud
cannot disturb the old gray earth
from endless seasons bowed;
but there across the withered grass
vivid colors draw my eyes,
lure me near and burst to life
where yellow, white and purple rise;
bells of velvet petals,
spikes of new green leaves,
golden stalks within the petals,
offer beauty to the bees;
the sad old earth takes heart and feeds
its starving children – naked, scrawny trees,
tender shoots of grass sprout up,
snow is melted by the breeze;
long before all other flowers
make color far and near
the crocus shyly fades away
and hides another year.
When I qualified for the girls' basketball team
in Grade 9, I was proud, especially as our family's achievements were generally
academic. But Dad, less impressed by
athletics, warned me that academics comes first. After the Grade 9
“Departmental” exams, I was awarded the Governor General's
medal. On hearing the news, Dad
exclaimed “Just as good as your old man!?” and one night my parents took me out
to dinner to celebrate. After dinner, I went directly to swim training
at Victoria Composite High School and almost sank because of how much I had
eaten.
One night a friend and I were out on the
"sleeping porch" outside my parents’ bedroom, planning to spend the
night in our sleeping bags. We thought
it would be funny to use the phrase we had heard used with Ruth’s pet budgie,
"Come on, baby. Want a kiss?" We had to give up on the
porch and go back into the house before the boys would leave us alone!
In 1963 I made the transition from Highlands
Junior High School to the larger Eastglen Composite High School where I completed
grades 10-12 with academic excellence, obtaining the highest average in each
grade but still immature socially and emotionally.
Perhaps the most significant aspect of my three
years of high school was Grade 10 English, with the cool and hip 27-year-old
teacher WR so much younger than most of the other teachers and who talked with
us about significant issues and did much to expand our horizons. I had neither heard of nor read President
Kennedy's exhortation “ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you
can do for your country...” but,
after I expressed something similar, WR quoted JFK and expanded on the president’s
exhortation. After our class read a
short story about a character named Uncle Anaisas, who told a white lie to help
another person, I wrote an essay in which I argued that people who tell lies
that help others should be named Anaisases because they are so different than
liars who hurt. WR expressed
disappointment with most essays turned in but delight about that creative
thought (without attributing it to me). On Nov 22, 1963 when JFK was
assassinated, I desperately wished we had his class so that he could talk with
us about it – I felt lost. But it was
not on that day’s schedule.
Where I was When it
Happened
11/22/1963
My friend goes home from
school for lunch,
comes back with news
“the president’s been
shot”
I laugh, but it is not a
joke
Say something, teacher, help us through
but that is nowhere in the
plan.
9/11/2001
My
husband starts to drive away
but stops the car, comes back with news
“A plane has hit a building
maybe Middle East?”
television’s blind window shows disaster,
our structured world giving way,
two people holding hands,
leaping from the blazing tower.
I flee from the unflinching eye
Cannot escape the image
of bodies falling,
falling forever in my mind.
12/14/12 Sandy Hook
With tears for kids your
grandson’s age,
you tell the news; it
strikes us dumb
for each one slain was
someone’s child.
In Grade 10 Phys Ed class we had to run a half
mile. The girls so good at sprinting
dropped out and walked but I kept on running and finished first. Out on the track, I was embarrassed that WR
saw me running in in my ugly green bloomer Phys Ed costume. My not dropping out meant I was put in the
girls’ half mile at the track meet. I
ran hard, but not knowing how to pace myself, I faded towards the end, finding
no more energy to pull up from my depths; another runner passed me before the
finish.
In the summer of 1964 our family traveled across
Canada by train, bought a station wagon and
trailer in Oshawa, Ontario, drove down to the USA to visit Mom’s
brother Ken and his family and to take in the New York World’s Fair. We explored the Maritime provinces of Canada
and finally drove back to western Canada. In 2017 Dad recalled telling someone in Edmonton about the plans for
the trip and they said he must be crazy, saying, "Six kids in a car across
Canada? They'll kill each other!"
Before
the trip each of us “older
kids” (everyone except Kyle) was assigned a province to research. Mary was
helped to write a letter to the tourism board of PEI to request pamphlets and
maps of that province. She seemed
pleased to be included in what the "big kids" were being assigned,
having spent most of her life until then
being, with Kyle, one of the "little kids." I remember being less than
enthusiastic about the research, probably because it was assigned. Like
the other jobs Dad assigned us each Saturday, it had the flavor, especially to
my adolescent self, of requiring obedience, of “knuckling under.” The
first of the Cheriton children to move into adolescence, I felt Dad required an
obeisance that threatened the integrity of my emerging self. Although I was
an honor student, member of the girls’ school basketball team and stayed out of
trouble, Dad apparently considered himself betrayed by the change from
worshipful little daughter to increasingly independent teenager. Cool
distance and resentment created a wasteland between Dad and me so prolonged
that I noted in my journal of our trip the exceptional and astounding
occurrence that Dad and I sat talking companionably on the train the day we
left Edmonton headed east for Toronto.
Dad had told me that, with our being away a major part of the summer,
I would have to pay the fee myself if I wanted to take part in the competitive
swim club’s daily summer training for the part of the summer we were in
Edmonton. I chose to pay it and considered that a small but significant
step towards independent adulthood.
Arriving in Toronto, our family of eight stayed with Mom and Dad’s
friends, Mrs Harris welcoming us with a
big bowl of cherries. At home, the special treat of cherries always came
with the stipulation of “how many a customer.” But Mrs Harris told us we could
have as many as we wanted, making her forever to me the epitome of generous
hospitality. After this memorable snack, we took a walk that included
passing through a park with a fountain where many coins sparkled in the pool.
Next morning, I went out for a walk, not going
to the park but, when I returned to the Harrises,’ Mom asked me if I had got a
lot of coins. At that moment she and I were strangers, she assuming I had
shamed her by going back to scarf up coins, while I felt her question on my
return shamed me.
In Oshawa, where they could get
a better deal than in western Canada, our parents bought a station wagon and
trailer which we embellished with the sign that read “8 Cheritons – New York
World's Fair or Bust.” There was another sign that Dad made that was either
on the car or the trailer: "Edmonton to Halifax
via New York World's Fair." Mary recalls Dad saying that the "8
Cheritons" sign prompted someone at a campground to ask if we were a
circus group. Dad said that they had
originally planned to just rent the trailer but later decided to buy it for the
return trip. It now rests out at Lake Wabamun on the sailing club
property.
Once we were traveling on the highways in the new station
wagon, Mary and Kyle became experts on cars they saw and they competed to
be the first one to identify and announce the make, model, and year of each
one. Especially exciting was when a rare car ---like a Ford Frontenac,
only sold in Quebec -- was spotted. I brought and read The Rise
and Fall of the Third Reich much of the time as we drove, naively surprised
when Dad rebuked me for doing so, also becoming nauseous while reading of Nazi
atrocities against Jews.
After driving down to visit Mom's brother Ken and his
family in Pennsylvania, Mom and the three youngest children stayed with Aunt
Barbara and her two youngest, while Dad and Uncle Ken
took Glenn, David, our cousin Wendy and me to the New York World Fair. Mary
recalls being
peeved about not being "old enough" to go to the World's Fair (“more
a case of being left behind than imagining what I'd be missing since I had no
idea!”) but enjoyed the consolation of eating Lucky Charms cereal (and removing
all the marshmallow bits for later consumption) and watching Captain Kangaroo,
which we didn't get in Canada.
At a restaurant for breakfast, I accidentally spilled a strawberry
milkshake all over the front of my clothing and had to clean myself up as best
I could in the Ladies Room. No rebuke from Dad, perhaps because he was
dumbfounded ...or else realized I was punished enough by the consequences,
having to wear a somewhat sticky outfit the rest of the day at the fair.
I believe it was also at that restaurant where some angry words were
exchanged between my cousin Wendy and me, no doubt incomprehensible to Uncle
Ken and my Dad, who fortunately did not get involved which could have made
things worse. Years later, I realized I
was likely jealous of Wendy focusing so much attention on my brother David,
probably because she had no brothers herself, while I wanted her to be my
“friend.”
At the World’s Fair, Glenn carried the homemade flag of 2
outer bands of blue with a 3-headed red maple leaf centered over a white
background
… which he had made and advocated as the new Canadian flag. 1964 was the year of the great flag debate and Canada was
choosing among several designs for its new flag to replace the current but
overly-British Red Ensign.
We stood in line to see Michelangelo’s Pieta, on loan
from Rome. A moving carpet took us slowly past the pure white masterpiece
of maternal mourning set against royal blue velvet in a darkened cavern.
The experience was so fleeting yet profound that I bought a postcard of the
Pieta, but the image was disappointingly yellowish and ordinary with none of
the sacredness of the original.
When we returning to Canada and visited Dad’s brother
and his wife in New Brunswick, the contrast with the Harrises could not have
been greater. Aunt Betty offered no refreshments, food or drink, but
deigned to let us stay in their unprovisioned cabin by the beach. Aunt Betty's lack of
welcoming had to be a real low point for Mom who had the most work of anyone
during our travels.
That unwelcoming environment held a painful experience
for me. Perhaps because of Dad’s critical judgment of
me, I increasingly resented what I felt was Mom’s coddling of her youngest,
Kyle, then four years old. Eventually my envy erupted into asking her why
she let Kyle get away with so much. Her reply still stings me with shame,
“Everyone else is criticizing me; you might as well, too.” I did not
reply but wish now I had known how besieged and unappreciated she felt. I wish
that I had been mature enough to support her.
A plaintive
journey taken only in my mind during that summer's family travels after Grade
10 was to France, the country that rumor among students had it that WR had
gone. My fragile adolescent self could not risk investigating those
rumors lest I betray the intensity of my feelings. All I could do during
the journey in eastern Canada, when I felt myself an isolated and an alienated
stranger in my family, was look east down the train tracks and imagine starting
down those tracks towards the Atlantic and an ocean-crossing boat.
Much later
I wondered if the intensity of my feelings distorted the reality.
I shut my
eyes and cannot see
The image
of my friend in front of me
Before my
pulsing eyeballs all is black
Until my
brain builds the image that it lacks
Not
content to copy from the world
It spreads
a gamut of color, now unfurled
Until the
picture is a stranger to the man
Built up
more near a god than mortals can
My god!
Should you return and let me see
You shrink
to human size and frailty
I could
not love the image now made old
Nor the
shatterer who once did form the mold
Better you
should live lonely in my dream
Than
reappear, your laugh the sad requiem
Of both
this fancy and my love for you
Often the
false friend is dearer than the true.
I know he sparked intense, if grudging,
admiration in his high school students.
He was a subtle mentor luring us to think and question more broadly than
in our childhoods, providing a bold model of adventurous adulthood Among our little coterie of “brainy,
intellectual misfits (Jim, Karen, Fred and me), Karen was brave enough to go to
talk with WR outside of class. Once WR
offered me the invitation that “I’m in Room 222 if you ever want to talk,” but
I could not trust my involuntary shaking in his presence to let me approach him
on my own. All my longing for an admired
mentor became aroused towards the one adult who stood out in a desert lacking
models for me to follow. At the end of
Grade 11, when I won the award for Grade 12 Chemistry, he wrote me a letter of
congratulations, which I quietly treasured.
Half a century later, I wish I could have overcome my terror of
appearing so vulnerable. I wish I could
have talked with him about my dreams, goals and fears.
Uncle Camon, who had two daughters but no sons, watched greatly
impressed as Glenn and David dug a cave in the beach sand. Mary was
thrilled to be invited down into the cave but “couldn't understand” why Dad,
unimpressed, ordered them to fill it in before it collapsed on someone.
One night’s camping in Nova Scotia was made miserable by mosquitoes
biting us. Ruth and I, assigned to sleep together, spent that mostly
sleepless night, co-operatively and giddily composing new words to a hymn,
producing “All things black and horrid/all things buzzy
and small/ all things weird and ugly/ the devil must have made them all.” The disagreeable night had the silver lining of
rare companionship between sisters who had an intense but unacknowledged
rivalry between us for most of our childhoods.
Also, like much of my traveling, that night had the memorable intensity
that lifts the worst of my journeying into treasured memories. (And
Questions: Where did everyone else sleep
at night? Glenn and David in a tent? Did anyone sleep in the back
of the station wagon?)
Along the ocean, I was entranced by the tide pools, miniature aquatic
worlds of exotic creatures. (In school
in the fall, after we returned to Edmonton, I wrote ecstatic descriptive
paragraphs about them and planned to become a marine biologist.) In the harbors, we found big pulsing jellyfish and somehow
acquired a beached one, which we named Mr Diller, and who traveled with us in a
pail of sea water until his demise.
After Dad telling us of the beauty of Peggy’s Cove, we saw it
ourselves and climbed on the huge, weathered stone outcrops. In Halifax harbor, we saw a Corvette, the
same type of vessel on which Dad had served in the Canadian navy during World
War II.
When we were in Ottawa
and visiting the parliament buildings, Glenn attracted the attention of
the Royal Canadian Mounted Police by displaying his homemade flag. Dad
had to intervene and do some explaining so that they would not confiscate
it. Also in Ottawa, standing in line to
visit the Parliament buildings, we kids noticed the sign that no shorts were allowed
so we older three clustered around Ruth thinking we were preventing the
authorities from seeing that our eleven-year-old sister was wearing shorts.
In Grade11, rumor had it that WR went to Europe, so far away for a
young adolescent hero-worshipper desperately needing mentoring. Asking knowledge adults where he’d gone would
have revealed my feelings so I suffered my loss alone.
My best friend, Laurie, had more
reason than I to be unhappy at home, never measuring up to Tim, her mother’s
favorite. Conspiring to leave home together, we went to buy black hair
dye from Woodward's Department Store, planning our disguise. When
we saw the price, we shoplifted it. A female store detective apprehended us at the
exit and we were taken to the store’s inner offices where police and my father
were called. Either store staff
or police went through our purses and found late slips stolen from the school
office. With us thoroughly busted,
Laurie began to cry. One police officer
repeatedly asked my name and when I started to spell it, not intending any
defiance, he rebuked me for insolence, which I had not intended. This disrespect of us made me harden
emotionally and I resolved not to cry or show any emotion.
Dad arrived and told me how stupid I'd been. Riding down in the elevator, one cop said
something supportive of me, possibly realizing I had been punished plenty and
was likely to face further punishment at home.
As I went into the house, Mom’s first words
to me were “I’m disappointed in you.” I would not give any of them
the satisfaction of my reacting with remorse, but realizing the hazards of
conspiring with another person, resolved to act purely by myself.
As punishment, I was grounded for several weeks, until
Easter. I said nothing but that evening
hid a pair of Glenn's old trousers and old shoes in the garage. Next morning, I
told Laurie that I would be staying after school for basketball practice. Instead of going to class at all, I went to
the gym lockers, changed my clothes to boy's attire and, emerging into the
strangely empty hallways, left the school and caught a bus across town to the
southern edge of Edmonton. From there, I began walking south along the highway.
The shoes, too short, hurt my toes and, by the end of the day when I turned
onto the access road to the airport, my toenails were black. In the
airport, used by many fewer people than the planners had anticipated, I
discovered a remote alcove where I hid and slept fitfully until morning.
Resuming my journey south next day, I realized
that wherever I was going, I could not walk the whole way. I
began hitchhiking and making up alternate stories for my life, such as I
was a farmer’s son, but I was temporarily stymied when the driver asked how
much land my family had and I answered “a quarter section” -- the driver was
jolted by the unusual amount for that area.
Reaching Calgary’s train station, I stowed away on a train, not knowing
its destination but fervently hoping it was not going to take me back to
Edmonton.
To my great relief, the train headed west. When the conductor made his rounds and asked
for my ticket, I had an excuse each time, “My mother has it in another
car…” “It’s in my bag which I don’t have
with me just now.” I avoided him until
he opened the door to the ladies’ room at 3am and found me. I admitted immediately that I had no ticket
and he put me off the train at the next stop, a small town in the Canadian
Rockies. A half century later, I do not
agree with his setting a young adolescent girl off by herself in the middle of
the night, but I imagine he was annoyed with me for my subterfuge.
Continuing to pretend to be a boy, I again
hitchhiked down the highways of the Fraser and Columbia river valleys. With at least one kind driver, I claimed to
be repenting after running away and that I was going back home to
Vancouver.
When I reached Vancouver, I phoned Grandma
Cheriton. The woman who picked up was
obviously prepared in case I phoned. She
told me Grandma was at Auntie Lorna’s. I
made my way across the city to Langara Street.
I’m sure now that Lorna Garrett called my parents as soon as I made
contact but she wisely had me join her family for supper before asking, after
the pie, “Don’t you think you should call your parents?”
Auntie Lorna was perceptive enough that, knowing my great love of cats, she gave me a full and
feminine skirt decorated with large prints of felines, luring me back into
girl’s clothing.
But next morning, before anyone was awake, the adventure of my
journey called me: I put on my brother’s clothes again and went down to
the harbor, accepting a fisherman’s invitation to go out with them on their
boat. But unlike my departure from Edmonton, I wrote and left a note for
my aunt telling her where I had gone. In Edmonton, I felt I had
outgrown the cute and adoring childhood that evoked parental love, and, as an
awkward adolescent grasping her way towards adulthood, was no longer a child
that my parents loved.
In the very few days I was with them in
Vancouver, Auntie Lorna also took me with her girls and Grandma when they went
shopping. In the store, I gazed at the
vivid-colored nail polish, the one type of make-up I loved, but I neither
touched nor bought any. I now imagine
that Lorna deliberately chose to take me into a retail establishment to help me
make a new start after the shoplifting.
All too soon, Grandma Cheriton and I returned to
Edmonton by train. When I came into our
house, Mom knelt and, putting her arms around me, wept. I stood stoically, not showing any
emotion. Now, I would kneel and embrace
her, perhaps weeping myself, but then part of my reason for running away was
that I felt I was no longer a child and that my parents had given up on me to
focus on the younger, more affectionate children who still needed them.
Dad and some of my siblings rebuked me for
causing Mom worry and pain. Mom
expressed concern that I had caused the Garretts an extra burden just before
they were to leave for England. I had to
repay Grandma $14 for my train ticket. I
was not normally a snoop but soon afterwards I happened to find a letter from
Lorna Garrett to my parents. She urged
them “not to be too hard” on me. I wish
I had that letter now; she appreciated my struggle. I do have the memory of her understanding and
kindness.
Was this first journey alone running away from where I felt no
longer loved…or traveling towards Grandma who had whetted my appetite
for travel? Whichever it was, I apparently returned to “normal,”
excelling academically in Grade 11 and 12, despite losing weight drastically.
During the summer after Grade 11, I took part in a science week at
the University of Alberta with other high school students who were interested
and had done well in science. We lived
on campus and no doubt some of the sessions stimulated some students towards
careers in science. But my strongest
memory was being induced to skip a session and play hooky by Bill Kelly who
somehow overcame my habit of doing what authorities expected of me.
Bill and I kept meeting after the week and one evening as we walked
back to my house, he asked if he could kiss me.
Startled by the change from being egghead rebels together, I answered,
“Another evening.” The next time he saw
me to my home, he asked again, and I answered playfully and
suggestively, “It’s not the same evening.”
In our Health and Guidance class, we did
exercises writing what you wanted to be when you grew up. I wrote “astronomical physicist” because it
sounded like an intellectually challenging career and also because it was not
usually pursued by females. I was a child who went into the bathtub a girl but
emerging would slick my hair back and, resembling my brother David, go
downstairs and announce to my parents that they now had four sons. My paternal grandfather had valued “nippers”
over “maids.” My father taught his sons
woodworking and to shoot. My mother
generally acquiesced to my father, being his support infinitely more than he
was hers. In my paternalistic family I
wondered about the incomprehensible error God made in giving me my one life as
a woman. Looking back a half-century as
a woman who enjoys clothes, woman friends and marriage with a man, I wonder if
-adolescent Lorna would have chosen to change genders if she had been aware of
and had accress to that option.
With no guidance either from parents or
teachers, I missed out on scholarships including one to Queen's University in
Ontario, which I would have been very eligible for and which would have provided
the practical life education, to an immature and naïve young person, of living
away from home. When I went to register
for first year at the University of Alberta, I found so many fascinating
classes that I registered for 9 rather than the usual 5 – including art,
English, history as well as the organic and inorganic chemistry, and calculus
of my biochemical major.
Calculus was incomprehensible to me, despite my
excelling in algebra and trigonometry in high school. Anorexia, which had begun in high school, was
the culprit, I believe – I carried a lunch back and forth, day after day, without eating
it. During 8am history class I suffered
severe hunger pangs but after they subsided without my giving in to them, I
carried on for the rest of the day. Years
later I feared I had destroyed brain cells by starving them, lowering my actual
intelligence.
All the reading and experimenting that Glenn and
I had done in our chemistry lab resulted in first year chemistry boring me with
its repetition of what I’d already learned.
But the first year’s flying survey of human history from earliest times,
taught by Mr Elwood, captivated my interest.
For the first time, I took part in small group evening seminars where we
had discussions, one provocative one dealing with Machiavelli’s ideas.
I was a scrawny and intense student peering to focus on the
blackboard from the back of a theatre-sized auditorium whose organic chemistry
professor, at the end of the academic year, asked if I would like to work in
that lab over the summer. I had already
been offered and had accepted a job in the Biochemistry lab where, despite my
majoring in that field and aiming for a career in it, I was to find the work
with test tubes disappointingly repetitive and boring.
Other repercussions from my loss of weight were that I almost passed
out on getting out of the University swimming pool after one swim… and, when I went to give blood at the Medical
Sciences building, I was refused because of weighing too little; I left the
blood donor clinic feeling completely defeated in my campaign to exist on as
little as possible.
After working half the summer in the Biochemistry Department, in the
second half of the summer after my freshman year, I went to Italy on a summer
archeology course. Since our flight to Rome left from Montreal, we
students had a day at Montreal’s Expo '67. My parents had already visited
Expo and Dad gave me detailed advice about how we students could make the best
use of our day. Naively, I was unprepared for the others’ lack of
enthusiasm for the educational experience; they went to the bar while I ran
myself ragged trying to do everything Dad had recommended. When I finally made it to the airport, I was
shocked to see my image in the bathroom mirror – intensely startled eyes
staring back at me from a sunburned face, above a skinny stalk of a neck.
After dinner on the plane, that stark, emaciated scarecrow with
hollow, exhausted eyes fell into exhausted sleep over the Atlantic. As the night brightened into sunrise and we
approached Europe, I woke feeling re-born.
My feeling of being born again was heightened when we landed in the
unfamiliar “Old World.” My first evening in Rome, I walked out into the
streets and into a Catholic church where the dim light, candles, smell of
incense and relics of saints – a piece of bone, a bloody sponge – were an alien
but fascinating world far from the western Canadian Protestant Christianity I
had grown up with.
Assigned to room with one of the hippest young women, I had no reply
when she exclaimed, “I thought I’d get you as roommate!” Now I see myself, that intense, studious
misfit – almost a different species from the cool crowd.
Another serious student was an older student, a university librarian,
who was left ashen from fatigue by our field trips to sites such as the Roman
Forum in the fierce midday heat of July.
Although ravenous for experience, I found myself more interested in
the current Rome than the ancient… and made trips by myself as far afield as
the Castelli Romani,” the towns in surrounding hills. On one early trip, I stood searching in my
phrase book for how to ask, “Where is the train station?”
while Italian men wolf-whistled at my
scrawny, boyish form and approached me
asking “Spousa?” (“Are you married?”)
while I stood naively perplexed about what they wanted.
As part of the course, we made field trips: to Herculaneum which, like Pompeii, had been
buried and preserved by the ancient volcano, and to Naples, where women from
the less than affluent neighborhood where our bus disgorged us, came towards us
wearing grinning and somehow sinister masks, perhaps testing if they could
scare us.
On one field trip we met a group of Italian students who invited us
to lunch with them. Lunch was three
hours with good food, with wine and guitars and singing – a hedonist feast
unlike anything I had experienced and a world away from bag lunches I’d carried
to high school and university.
Encountering European masterworks of art in the museums, I felt my
ignorance of humanity’s history and I passionately wanted to abandon university
and just study history from the beginning of our human journey, including
reading the Bible from cover to cover, so that I could understand the
references in all this art.
Courses, credits, graduation and an eventual career held no concern for
me. More interested in exploring
than in academic study, I eventually asked to withdraw from the course, leading
the disappointed Professor to voice his regret to me of having let a first-year
student into that upper-level course.
Another young woman, Beth had somehow overlooked my idiosyncrasies to
become a friend). She and I decided,
after the course ended, to travel together to experience something of northern
Italy and France. One of our dinners had
to be memorable to our French servers when Beth stirred sugar into her red
wine.
In Venice, we went out to the island of Murano, famous for its
glassmaking and I bought my mother a piece of blue and gold glass, managing to
carry it unbroken on our travels and bring it home to her where she treasured
and displayed it for decades.
In Paris, Beth was robbed by
gypsies once when she was on her own.
The next day, when I saw a pack flapping pieces of cardboard and
approaching me, I yelled in a loud voice and very fractured French, “Go to
hell; I’ll call the police.” Despite my
fracturing French grammar, my outraged ferocity dispersed them.
After our flight returning from Italy, my diarrhea, perhaps food
poisoning from a recent seafood dinner, made the airport hallway from our
disembarkation to Immigration Control an endless corridor for my vulnerable and
rumbling innards. Seeing my gaunt form, my mother arranged an appointment
with our family doctor who informed me somberly, “People die from this.”
My journey in the years from age 16 to 18 had taken me into the physical and
psychological terrain of anorexia nervosa.
I have a vivid memory, from my second year of
university, of Mom bringing me milkshakes as I drew out my angst in
self-portraits in our attic. One theory is that anorexics crave
mothering. I had one visit with a psychiatrist during which he had me
draw a picture of a person. When I
hesitated before giving the drawing some hair, he asked me why I’d stopped
drawing and I answered that I hadn’t decided whether the person was a man or a
woman. I left feeling agitated,
traveling back from the north side of Edmonton, 109St, to our home on the south
side. Though I did not discuss the
appointment with anyone in my family, I had no more sessions with the
psychiatrist; years later when I asked my mother why not, she replied that I
seemed so much smarter than he was that there did not seem any point. After I started to gain weight, I felt I
would never have the will power ever again to go without food as I had to
become so thin, but later a therapist told me that sufficient stress could set
me on that path again.
Boring labs versus a fascinating first year
swoop through human history led me to abandon my draw towards science. Entering my second year of university, I
transferred into the history program, inspired not only by the fascinating
sweep of history I had enjoyed in my freshman year but also by the summer in
Europe exposing me to the culture and history of my forebearers.
I had
trouble concentrating, as I’d had with Calculus the year before. During this
period of my re-gaining weight, I found it harder to concentrate than the
previous year when I had been starving myself.
I greatly feared I had damaged my brain through depriving it of
nutrients. In a huge fall from my high
school achievements, I neglected to read assigned reading for the Canadian
History class and got a failing grade on one test, which shocked me into at
least keeping up with assigned reading.
The following summer Dad offered me a job in his
engineering office as receptionist and office worker. He initially offered me $250 a month, then
told me he was reducing it to $225, that $250 was too much. I felt that I would not argue my worth if it
was not recognized by others, perhaps because of pride and because of our
family’s exhortation not to “toot one’s own horn.” My reluctance in defending my own value would
cost me repeatedly in the future until, in 1984 after I returned from Asia and
was doing housework and otherwise assisting a woman addicted to Valium. She had agreed to $7 an hour but then wanted
to reduce it to $5. By that time, I was
able to tell her I would not work for less than we had originally agreed on.
In contrast to my excessive restraint in eating,
Dad's secretary Gertie, was trying to diet and to resist the Boston cream pie
that she craved. Occasionally she gave
in and brought an entire pie to the office.
Whatever I learned about secretarial work from
that extremely competent secretary of Dad’s pales in comparison to my seeing
how vividly she lived, with dedication to her work, her boss and the firm,
despite struggles especially over her weight and with her letting herself
indulge with gusto.
Once I told a caller that Dad was in a meeting,
although I realized he would want to be interrupted for that caller. It was Gertie who went to tell Dad, who came out of
the meeting looking pale and harried, and I had a secret pleasure of seeing him
vulnerable to someone more powerful than himself.
I did gain weight, returning to apparent
normalcy and the next summer, 1969, I traveled across Canada. I had
become vegetarian during the previous academic year but on the very first leg
of my journey, heading west, I abandoned vegetarianism when I reached Jasper
famished and did not hesitate when offered a hamburger – delicious!
Through the Rocky Mountains at Jasper, to Prince
George, and then Prince Rupert on the Pacific coast where I met up with my
father’s youngest sister and her husband. Linking up with Joyce and her
husband Rob gave me the exhilarating experience of a counterculture lifestyle
so much more relaxed and accepting than my family’s. Their free-spirited hedonistic life could not
have been further from my parents’ traditional middle-class and strict
family-raising.
They took me on their fishing boat traveling
from Prince Rupert down the coast to New Westminster near Vancouver,
where Joyce and Rob lived in a squatters’ shack on the waterfront in New
Westminster, British Columbia.
When I became seasick, Rob had me take the wheel while Joyce made salmon
sandwiches which we ate, drinking red wine – an amazing cure that relieved my
nausea. In New Westminster we were
relaxing in their squatters’ abode on the dockside when a friend of theirs arrived
celebrating that he was going to “get married” that night. I was perplexed by the timing until Joyce
explained that was code for “shacking up for the night.”
Crossing to the Queen Charlotte Islands, I
stayed with Duane and family, distant relatives of Grandma Cheriton. Theirs was a home with a rambunctious set of
children who play wrestled with their dad, a far cry from my own father’s
admonition about the living room, “This is not a gymnasium.”
Going out each day to explore, I remember
Duane’s serious admonition not to enter the Indian graveyard, since native
people could take that as a sign of disrespect.
Perhaps curiosity compelled me to enter but I was silent and ashamed
when Duane rebuked me for it.
A happier memory came from his kids and me
walking on the logs floating in the harbor.
One of the younger kids fell off a log and I ran over, jumped in and
held the child up until Duane came to help us out.
Traveling east, I visited Dad’s sister eldest Olive,
who was raising two boys with her husband Del on a wheat farm in southern
Saskatchewan. Olive earned my admiration
by making homemade root beer in her kitchen.
I visited and stayed with a friend of my mother’s in
Ottawa, then traveled east to the Canadian Maritimes. From Halifax, on the Atlantic coast, I
returned west on the train – 3 nights in coach class resulting in a headache so
fierce that I resolved “Never again.” Sleeping
accommodation is a necessity, not a frivolous luxury I can do without.
About to graduate from university in 1970, I found
myself eligible for a graduate student scholarship. With a keen appetite to
escape the “Ivory Tower” of academia, I learned I could use the scholarship for
a year’s study in Japan. Hazel Jones, my
Japanese language and history teacher, helped connect me with Waseda University
in Tokyo and with a Japanese family with whom I could stay for the first month
I would be in Japan, I felt the yellow brick road to Asia open before me.
Before the opportunity to study in Japan emerged, I had
gone, late in my fourth and final year at the university, to the Students’
Union Building to hear about a charter flight to Europe. I left with a
$110 one-way ticket to London and a plan to travel with Gail, Rick and Jerry,
undergrads who I had just met at the Students’ Union Building that afternoon
when we all went to hear about the charter flight. That evening at the
dinner table, I used a break in the arguments amongst some of my siblings to
announce my one-way travel plan. I was
rewarded by my mother’s enthusiastic surprise and support. I imagine she
responded to my positive news, as well as to the disruption of the
arguments. Did she also long to escape?
Platonic playmates in Europe, we rode the Paris subway
to the end where, stranded when trains stopped for the night, we slept on the
Metro platform until trains began again in the morning. The following
nights we stayed at a youth hostel where dismal food studded with what looked
like black flies quickly persuaded us to dine out --- on fresh bread, cheese
and wine from the markets. In every country we visited, we climbed to the
tops of buildings, including the leaning tower of Pisa: Rick’s photographs were all of rooftops and
cows. In Munich, we rented a Volkswagen which I drove on the autobahns
and amongst construction which was being built in anticipation of the 1972
Olympics. I drove spasmodically and
jerkily as I was getting used to the clutch. Much later, I came to recognize
this tendency of mine (from a childhood where I had learned to suppress fear)
of refraining from acknowledging when a venture is too risky, shutting down my
doubts and plunging myself into a situation.
When I returned to London, Gail, Rick and Jerry flew
back to Canada while I waited for the money, first payment of my scholarship,
so that I could pay for the rail trip on the Trans-Siberian Railway that I had
booked from London through the Hoek van Holland to Berlin, Warsaw, Moscow,
Irkutsk, and Nakhodka from where I would take a boat across the Sea of
Japan. Naively, yet resolved not to worry, I asked the travel agent what
would happen if my money did not arrive before the train’s scheduled departure
date. He replied simply, “You won’t
travel.”
The money arrived. Getting off the train for a day
in West Berlin, I went from that city’s modernity, crossing the Berlin Wall
into East Berlin’s traditional European and pre-war architecture. Returning to West Berlin, I was conscious of
the many Germans unable to make that journey. (Years later, after the
Soviet Union and the Berlin Wall both collapsed, I sat at a diplomatic dinner
next to a high-ranking German general who told me he had flown halfway around
the world to be present and witness the Wall come down.)
After a day off the train in Warsaw, I continued on to
Moscow where the huge, gray Stalinist
buildings served to further dampen my non-existent interest in living under
Soviet Communism.
On the Trans-Siberian, my solitary travels merged into
companionship with young travelers from Europe, the United States and
Australia. Their quickness to criticize their governments, especially
pronounced after the Vietnam War, was such a contrast to young Russians'
reticence to voice any criticism of their government. Traveling Russian
families unwrapped and shared their food with us, filling the companionable
compartments with the pungent odors, including of strong pickles. In the dining car, I quickly abandoned the
greasy dinners and chose instead the deliciously rich soups and hearty
breads. At the end of the railway car, I
found there was always a samovar of strong tea which I poured into one of the
nearby glasses. I’d place the hot glass
of tea in a silver cup-holder with handles, add some of the rich red preserves
of fruit, and carry it back to my compartment.
Opening the windows was the only way to lessen the
mid-summer heat and the odor of the pickles but that meant coal smoke drifted
in the open train windows from the steam engine. Getting off the train at Irkutsk in Siberia
for a day was a welcome respite.
Back on the train, I opened a window at dawn as we
passed the huge Lake Baikal, possibly
the deepest in the world; it was magical in the rose and coral sunrise, but the
cold wind in my face gave me a severe cold by the next day.
I also got off when we stopped at smaller stations
where local women on the train platform sold boiled eggs and local
blueberries. Buying a basket of blueberries, I took them to my upper
bunk, needing a nap because of my bad cold. I woke foggy-headed and
headed down the corridor for tea only to hear the enraged Gonzilla-Grunhilde
conductress bellowing down the corridor towards me waving the blueberry-stained
sheet. My foreign friends calmed her with promises of my compensating her
for her extra work she would have to do washing the linens.
The train journey ended in Nakhodka, a nearby
alternative to the military port of Vladivostok which Soviet authorities had
closed to foreigners. I made a boat
crossing to Osaka, Japan. On deck under
the star-studded sky with a young American who I had got to know on the train,
I felt I could drop my virginity into the Sea of Japan; he was more
restrained.
I had agreed to take the bullet train to Tokyo with
another young traveler but then was invited to go by car with another
group. Staying with the original
commitment resulted in standing for the whole journey in a crowded train, but
less discomfort than the guilt I would have felt had I changed my plans.
Arriving in Japan, I felt I’d reached Nirvana.
Treated as an honored guest in their country, I felt special for one of the few
times in my life. Even daily neighborhood life was full of marvelous
surprises – eating the raw fish of sashimi and sushi, being drawn into the
neighborhood Obon festival.
Seeing me, a foreigner in the crowd lining the streets, the men carrying
“omikoshki,” a palanquin
carried on the men’s shoulders, garbed me in a “hapi” short jacket and had me
join them carrying the omikoshki. Shopkeepers from the small businesses lining
the route came out offering warmed sake which quickly melted my mind into the
communal celebration. Having felt myself
to be a loner and misfit most of my life, being honored and so included in the
community made me feel I had arrived at the place I was meant to be.
Living with a Japanese family for the first month, I
learned that they had given most of their assets to the Emperor in loyalty
during the Pacific War with the United States, a glimpse into the nobility and
sacrifice on the part of people who had been our enemy. I spent the rest of
the hot humid month of August studying Japanese language with instruction from
the family’s grandmother and taking multiple showers each day to cool and
refresh myself.
Later, in the autumn, I studied Japanese language at
Waseda University with other foreigners, and learned, often by making mistakes,
some of the subtleties of Japanese -- that some words were used only by men,
others by an adult or other “superior” addressing an inferior. For instance, I picked up the word “meshi”
from hearing young Japanese men to refer to food, then found Japanese shocked
when I used it, as if ladies did not refer to dinner as “chow” or “grub.”
Sharing a house with five young Japanese women, I found
myself startled each time I looked in the mirror and found myself looking so
different from them. I tended to forget my foreignness.
My scholarship, adequate for study at my home
university, was stretched thin by my traveling to Japan and living in
Tokyo. Traveling around the country during the winter break from
university, I found myself on Christmas Day with no money for supper. I
had come into a restaurant from the falling snow outside with some young Japanese,
but, with an almost Oriental sense of honor, claimed I was not hungry.
The middle-aged woman serving the group solicitously poured me hot green tea
which warmed my hands, innards and heart. Another evening, coming into a
hostel, my hands were so stiff and cold from being gloveless for hours that I
had to grasp the pen in my fist to sign my name.
Waiting for a late evening train in a small town, I
walked to the train station to be sure I knew where it was, then went to a
cafe/bar to pass the time. A man who had
been drinking, offered me a ride to the station, but I kept declining. Finally, I relented and let him drive me but
I recognized at once when his truck turned off the road to the station, so I
opened the door and flung myself out. He
stopped the vehicle, got out and hurled karate kicks at my head. “So, this is it,” I felt myself surrender to
what felt inevitable, being knocked out and raped. Then a secondary impulse rose in me and I
realized I could scream. I did and, down
the street, doors opened. The man leaped into his truck and sped away. I limped to the train station, where my train
had already left and spent a night with severe headaches lying on the hard
bench. Looking in the mirror, I took a
photograph of my bruised eye sockets but, in answer to people's concern,
maintained that I had been in a car accident.
In a country where I had been treated so hospitably, I felt could not
shame my host Japanese by telling about the one person who had abused me.
Even living frugally, my scholarship money was
stretched thin before my studies finished at Waseda University, and I had to
plan the cheapest and most direct route to return to Canada. But that spring I received the news that my
father's Aunt Ruby had left her modest estate to be divided among her
great-nephews and nieces. For me, it was
the gift of just over a thousand dollars that let me travel from Japan through
Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong to Hawaii to Los Angeles and back to Canada. How I wish I could thank her for that
gift! It let me hang out with young
Koreans in a night club in Seoul, all of us profoundly absorbed in Simon and
Garfunkel's “Sounds of Silence,” that song speaking so eloquently to young
people despite our growing up on opposite sides of the Pacific Ocean. Her bequest let me experience Taiwan's
mountains as well as the dense city of Taipei, as well as the ancient walled towns outside Hong Kong, where old women
still dressed in traditional black trousers and tiny slippers. In Hawaii I took a surfing lesson, in Los Angeles
I marveled at huge supermarkets filled with such an array of packaged goods and
so foreign to me after my year in Asia with its small shops and open-air
markets.
In Edmonton, I found I had been accepted as a junior
officer in the Department of External Affairs (In Tokyo I had encountered a
notice that led me to taking the exam and having an interview at the Canadian
Embassy.) My experience in Japan had
fired me to spend my life traveling; a life in academia looked too pale in
comparison. Only later did I realize
that I was drawn to immerse myself in a foreign culture whereas diplomats must
represent Canada rather than go foreign by immersing themselves in the foreign
culture. Traveling home from Japan, I had
forgotten about the exam and almost missed the deadline to accept the position.
After Mom gave me the letter from External Affairs that
had been waiting for me, I hastily accepted the offer and traveled to Ottawa
where the Department put me up in a hotel for several days. Along with a large group of newly recruited
junior officers, I attended orientation briefings where we were admonished,
among other things, never to let
ourselves get into the position where someone could blackmail us.
Delayed getting to one briefing, I was escorted there by
a blond, curly-headed young man who I immediately developed a crush on, because
of his handsomeness and thoughtfulness.
At a later meeting, he read a love poem, which showed me his sensitive,
romantic nature. Doubly smitten, I had
the letdown of discovering he had just become engaged to his secretary.
We young officers often got together for evening
parties and quickly had to institute the rule that anyone mentioning something
about the “ P’s” (Personnel or postings)
had to put a quarter in the Penalty Jar.
I was first assigned to the DFD division which dealt
with disarmament issues and where I was tasked with answering letters from the
public. Often this meant a “cut and
paste” of paragraphs from briefing papers.
I genuinely liked everyone in the division and my biggest regret is that
I bought a charm for the bracelet of one of the secretaries and somehow, out of
nervous shyness, neglected to give it to her, eventually returning it to the
store where I’d bought it. I invited
other young officers for lunch in my spacious office but discovered that they
were being assigned or discovering for themselves much more significant work
than I had in my prestigious-looking office.
When Mom and Dad came for a visit to Ottawa, I could
see that Dad was genuinely impressed with my office, a large one in the old
Langevin building, facing the Parliament buildings. By the time they visited, I had moved into an
apartment as roommate of a young woman not in External Affairs. When my parents arrived, exhausted from the
travel, Christine invited Dad to take a rest on her waterbed; when Dad thanked
her, she replied “Anytime” and we all had a laugh at the implications.
Michael Garrett visited on St Patrick’s Day which
concluded at our office with us all enjoying Irish coffee. He invited me for a drink afterwards, I
believe at the Chateau Laurier. After a
very pleasant visit with him over a drink, I was sailing high from the two
drinks and unwilling to just go home, so I floated down the street of boutiques
beside the Rideau canal and locks and, in one, bought a long, copper-red,
wide-wale corduroy, glamourous evening
coat.
Despite my traveling around the world before joining
External Affairs, I was a naive young woman when I went to New York City during
a session of the United Nations. One
evening, I went alone, in a
sailor-inspired blouse and pants,
to the soda fountain on the ground floor of our hotel. Naturally,
I was approached by men, asking “your room or mine.” Later,
I was severely reprimanded by a more worldly-wise young woman, a fellow junior
officer, who informed me about the slave trade in abducted girls and women.
After six months, we junior officers were assigned to different
divisions for varied experiences. I was
assigned to one dealing with science and the environment. Six months later I joined the division of
African affairs at a time when apartheid was a major issue in Canada’s
relations with South Africa. After I
wrote an appendix to the report written by our division’s head, he told me that
my appendix was a problem, better written that his report, another sign of my
naivete.
In 1973 Canada hosted a Commonwealth Conference and we
junior officers were each assigned to help the delegation from a specific
country. I was assigned Zambia where
there had recently been the issue of two young Canadian women murdered at the
spectacular Victoria Falls. The Zambian
president kindly took the initiative to have a conversation with me that would
be a boost to the career of any young officer.
At the end of the conference, the delegation presented me with a
necklace and pendant made of Zambian copper.
But, living in the hotel
to be close to the delegation, I suffered such anxiety that my gastronomic
tract went into revolt. For one meeting
I recall dressing my best and even doing my hair; when I came out of the
meeting, rain was falling and rather than seek shelter I walked directly into
the downpour, the waterfall transforming me into drowned rat but washing away
the intolerable tension. At one point, a
more senior Canadian diplomat asked me to arrange a car for him (unrelated to
my responsibilities to the Zambian delegation).
Probably because of the stress I was under, that request slipped my
mind. Discovering too late that I had
neglected to arrange the car, I could only phone and apologize; he thanked me
for phoning. When Christine began a diet
of avoiding carbohydrates, I joined her and became only too successful, once
again losing a lot of weight.
At
one point I moved into sharing an apartment with Bodil Jensen who had joined
External Affairs in a later year than I had.
One evening we were approached by our neighbor Yvan Jobin, another young
officer, with tears in his eyes, telling us of the coup in Chile and murder of
democratic president Salvador Allende. The US had a major role in
overthrowing Salvador Allende because they feared that Allende would
push Chile into socialism, and that the US investments in Chile would
be taken over. I was struck not
only by the depths of Yvan’s distress over the event but also that he was much
more in touch with current news while I had not heard of the coup until he told
us.
In her toast written for my wedding in 2005, my fellow
junior officer and friend Bodil declared that the Department of External
Affairs of the 1970s was not ready for two strong-willed western Canadian
women. (She left External Affairs after
one posting, to Olso, Norway, and
entered law school, becoming a lawyer in the Northwest Territories and later in
Quebec.
After resigning from External Affairs, I lived for a
while in the Pestalozzi apartment building where my brother Glenn was living
and running his photography and printing business out of a basement cubicle,
printing counter-cultural flyers and booklets that main-line publishers would
not consider. Later I moved into a co-op
house of Carleton University students out in the Carleton area and began to
volunteer at a daycare center and later at a center for autistic children, both
huge changes from working with adults in official situations.
For Christmas 1973 our parents paid for Ruth and Mary
to come to Ottawa where Glenn and I were both living. David and his girlfriend drove from Waterloo,
Ontario, in a snowstorm in his MGB convertible.
I cooked a goose for Christmas dinner, and we marveled at how much fat
emerged and how much the goose shrank.
Offered hash brownies by some of the students living in the house, Mary
and I partook while Ruth abstained.
Thoroughly stoned, Mary and I sat feeding individual twigs of the
Christmas tree into the fire and watching the glowing snakes of incandescence
writhe up into the chimney. We went with
my housemates on what felt like an endless walk in the night; I felt paranoid
towards the others of the household and, with Ruth not coming on the walk, felt
Mary was the only person I could trust.
A
Bad Trip
My companions in their black coats
Among the mute trees
Beckon me;
These witches smile
Like gingerbread dwellers
But their footsteps down unending
streets
Through the dark night of Mars
Lead to the river's cauldron.
Will they push me for their ravenous
entertainment?
My excuses are chicken bones
Held through the bars
For them to feel.
Turning,
I run for hours
Without crossing the street,
Holding tight the lid on my panic.
While I was still working with External Affairs, a
stocky young man dropped by my office declaring that I had won a ticket to the
opera “Cosi van Tutti.” Not interested
in dating, I declined but later found that he had stuck the two tickets in the
doorframe with a note saying that, if even if I did not attend the opera, the
tickets would not be used by anyone else.
Perhaps my frugal upbringing led me to phone him and accept the invitation
after all; he then told me the invitation included dinner beforehand. During the dinner, we found so much to talk
about that we found ourselves late leaving for the opera. Rob declared we would write off the opera
tickets and just stay and talk, again impressing me with his extravagance. Thus began an eighteen-year on-again,
off-again relationship.
After I had left External Affairs, I learned that Rob
had traveled from New York City where he was assigned to the Canadian United
Nations delegation for the autumn General Assembly. He had driven all the way and arrived at our
co-op house in Ottawa planning to surprise me but I had gone on a canoe trip
with the Youth Hostel group for the long Thanksgiving weekend.
Living within easy biking distance of Carleton
University, and with students, I began dropping in on the lectures in the
Twentieth Century Poetry class. The
simple elegance of poems of the poets who became known as Imagists fired my
creative juices with the urge to make poems myself. I had written a few as a teenager and now
writing became an outlet for processing my experiences and my angst.
The following academic year I registered in English
Literature at Carleton and, because of the courses I had taken for my Bachelor
of Arts at the University of Alberta, I was able to earn my second BA in a
year. One memorable experience came from
my phoning to excuse myself from a seminar because I had a severe cold. The professor said, “That’s too bad. We were going to discuss your work.” At that, I got myself dressed and went to the
class and found the stimulation of my work being discussed helped me feel so
much better that I used that precedent in the future, almost always making
myself continue with my regular activities despite feeling sick, in hopes of
the activity enlivening me as if I were healthy.
During that year at Carleton, I moved out of the coop
house and became a roommate to a journalist who was working at the Ottawa
Journal and finishing her degree.
Theresa and I became friends despite being very different, she
boisterous and direct, me diffident and uncertain. When her mother came from Newfoundland to
visit, I made tea using only one teabag for the teapot; before Theresa’s mother
realized that I had made the tea, she loudly rebuked Theresa for forgetting to
make good Newfoundland tea (strong).
Mom came to Ottawa for my graduation and met Theresa,
who was the first person to point out what she considered one of my strengths,
my tendency to look at issues from an oblique angle and come up with ideas
different that other people, a trait our pastor in Bennington noticed and
remarked on years later.
While Rob was working as a young diplomat in Washington
DC, a mutual friend planned to drive to Washington and invited me to ride
along. I had just finished exams at
Carleton and spent a completely sleepless night before the trip, bought the Oka
cheese that Rob had requested, and slept in the car on the way. When we reached Washington, the cheese, which
should have been traceable by its characteristic strong odor, had disappeared;
none of us ever figured out what had happened to it.
Rob, gallantly, had rented a small cot for me. After a few days, he and I took a motor trip
around the southern United States in his MGB convertible. The Okefenoke swamp on the border with
Georgia lured me in for a swim in the root-beer-colored water; only when I went
to get out did I see the sign, facing the water, “$5oo fine for molesting the
alligators!”
Charleston, South Carolina, was a genteel southern
city, where a tailor sewed Rob a suit (to replace the one that had blown away
out the back of the convertible without our seeing it) and trusted Rob to send
him a cheque after his getting back to Washington.
During the summer of 1976, I spent time in Alberta and
also flew to Victoria, British Columbia to visit Rob, who was at his mother’s
home where he had grown up. We drove up
to the Butchart Gardens and stopped for Indonesian food for lunch. Pulling back out onto the highway, we were
hit broadside by a car traveling at high speed.
I regained consciousness by the side of the road with a man standing
over me praying for my immortal soul, which made me so indignant that I
regained defiant consciousness. Taken to
the Victoria Hospital, I was violently sick to my stomach and wondered if I had
damaged my brain through concussion.
Later, I found that someone had stolen the $10 from my purse somewhere
between the emergency room and the ward.
After a few
days, the hospital allowed me to fly back to Edmonton on the condition that I
check in with a doctor there. Mom picked
up my battered self at the airport saying,
“Poor Norn.” A day later, when I went by myself to the University hospital, I
sat merely suffering and enduring in the Emergency Department for what felt
like ages. Finally, when the head of
Neurology saw me, he saw the beginnings of Bell’s Palsy from a slight fracture
in my skull and had me immediately admitted to the hospital.
I recall that Dad asked harshly, “Who is this guy who
was driving?” but when he came home from work and found Rob sitting with his
guitar on our front steps, Dad appreciated that Rob had changed his flight back
to Ottawa in order to come to Edmonton and find out how I was. Rob was surprised that I was back in the
hospital. There I shared a room with a
middle-aged woman, with whom I felt a camaraderie as patients despite our age
difference. Applying my remedy for
colds, I carefully, slowly and painstakingly dressed as nicely as I could each
morning to raise my spirits.
I was in the Neurology ward, and it took several days
before someone noticed that two pieces of my collarbone were wandering
separately until my skin. Medical staff
applied a sling, but the bones
healed with a thickened lump between them that remains a permanent vestige of
the accident. Mom’s girlhood friend,
Auntie Edna, who had been my Latin teacher “Miss Thompson,” came to visit
saying “You’ve been through a lot, Lassie” which felt not only Scottish but so
affectionate that I nearly wept. Ruth
came to visit with her friend Glenn who brought her red roses and me yellow
ones; I found him handsome and gallant in his cowboy hat and with his slim, manly form, a lift
to me when I was feeling so broken.
I went home with a device that had two electrodes which
I had to place on different areas of the left side of my face and deliver
shocks that were to stimulate the nerves back into functioning. Whether I could overcome the paralysis of
half my face was unknowable and as I faced the possibility of permanent
paralysis, I felt a fatalism and blamed myself for taking the trip to Victoria,
especially as I was unsure about the relationship with Rob.
I had applied to the Master’s program in English and
Creative Writing at the University of Windsor so I moved to that city in the
fall. Sometime after the semester
started, I began to feel sad and, most discouraging to me, unable to concentrate
enough to take in anything I read. When
I went to the university clinic, a sympathetic doctor diagnosed depression and
prescribed me a medication that I thought later was named Elavil. The several weeks before it took effect were
difficult but one morning, I felt like the lights had been turned on, life had
a different flavor, and I could again
concentrate.
Fortunate to share a house with a couple, Charlie and
Susan, and a single man, Matthew, I had a “family” home life fairly close to
the campus. One of the English
Literature classes was taught by well-known novelist Joyce Carol Oates, known
on campus by her married name, Mrs Smith.
In contrast to the extreme contortions in her fiction, she was demure
and soft-spoken, arousing my
suspicions that she might be secretly gathering material from the less guarded
people around her for her stories.
One woman in my creative writing group was from the
southern United States and, on first hearing her poetry, I cautiously asked if
she liked Dylan Thomas since her style reminded me so much of his. Far from being insulted or defensive, she
exultantly declared she loved his poetry.
Some of our classmates judged her work harshly, even cruelly; its
exuberance, even in describing sexual encounters, was such a contrast with
their pared-down styles.
One evening I received a phone call from my parents
informing me that Mom had been diagnosed with colon cancer. Trying to process this news, I went out to
walk along the river, with Detroit on the far side of the broad expanse of
water. I reasoned to myself that Mom had
brought me up sufficiently that I would survive losing her now that I was an
adult. I then called my parents back and
offered to fly back to Edmonton to help them, an offer that apparently
surprised them but which they accepted.
In the days before I flew to Alberta, I needed an aperitif of vermouth
to relax my stomach enough to be able to eat supper.
Mom had asked that her surgery be delayed just long
enough that she could attend the opera for which she had tickets. When she asked me if I would be there when
she would wake from the surgery, I felt honored. The afternoon of the surgery, I kept phoning
to find out when I could be allowed to see her.
Every time I was told “Not yet.”
Eventually I could not bear to wait any longer, drove over to the
hospital and found, to my dismay, she had already regained consciousness. My memory is dreamlike of her on a hospital
bed in the middle of a vast room. She
looked so aged and frail that I felt faint and had to lie down on the cool
floor in order not to pass out. My
sister Mary came in and also felt faint so, when the medical staff came in,
they found Mom on her hospital bed platform with two daughters below her on the
floor.
She was given a full dinner far too early, leading to
an agonizing night with her passing out on the bathroom floor. Once she came home, she was wise enough that
she would undertake a task but hand it over to me and go to rest if she needed
to. She paid me the compliment of saying
it was a huge help to her that I didn’t stop her from doing tasks but would
take over when she needed to give them up and rest. For me, being able to help manage the
household empowered me with a sense of being needed and valued, although, when I went to change
the sheets on Dad’s bed, he said I didn’t need to because he was “a pretty
clean guy.”
I had continued to pay rent for my room at Charlie and
Susan’s home with the understanding that the room would be kept for me. But when I returned to Windsor, I found that
Charlie had rented my room to someone else.
Feeling no other recourse, I moved out all my possessions when no one
was home and left with the key and no forwarding address. When I phoned Charlie, he was livid at my
subterfuge, outwitting him, and threatened dire consequences. I had the satisfaction, as I’d had as Dad’s
employee, of rattling someone who had possessed power over me. I had moved in with an older woman; Charlie
had no way of finding out where I had gone, so I let him stew in his anxiety
about the key before I mailed it back to him.
Pauline and I had a companionable relationship despite
our age difference. When she told me
that her daughter’s use of recreational drugs had led to a permanent change of
personality, this became a powerful warning to me, prevailing over my curiosity
about the amazing trips drugs could offer.
Mom recovered from the surgery and took a course of
immunotherapy medication that she had to keep in the fridge and add to orange
juice to drink each day. While glad she
was spared the repercussions of chemotherapy or radiation, I feared she could
be the victim of random trial allocation and perhaps not getting the best
treatment possible.
Not only did she recover from the cancer, but I believe it
inspired her to live life to the fullest.
She flew to Windsor by herself, even though Dad chose not to come, to
attend my graduation. She met Rob, who
had also come to my graduation and commented to me, “He has beautiful
eyes.” Going out to dinner to celebrate
and having the heady experience of their both having traveled to honor me, I
noticed, as I talked excitedly, that the two of them had finished their salads
while mine was only begun. When I asked
Mom and Rob if the restaurant staff were waiting for me to finish before they
brought our dinners and got the affirmative, that was the first of many
experiences of finding that, if I talked, fellow diners would finish long
before me, perhaps especially because I had been taught as a child not to talk
with my mouth full of food.
With my Master’s completed, my “third degree,” (as Mom
called it), I needed to apply for jobs.
Receiving an offer to work with the Extension Department of the Royal
Ontario Museum, I moved to Toronto.
Initially I found an apartment near that city’s Chinatown and
market. Early morning noise so
interrupted my sleep that one day I drank expresso coffee to perk myself up and
spent the day in high-caffeinated gear exploring Toronto’s ethnic areas. Ruth visited, staying with me in that tiny
apartment before I moved out to The Beaches, a much more residential area from
which I rode the streetcar into downtown to work, not at the main museum
building but in a non-descript building closer to the waterfront.
My mother came by herself to visit me in Toronto,
another instance I believe of her newfound commitment to living vividly and not
hesitating to seize experiences even if Dad was not interested. For the first time, I experienced how much
fun she could be on her own as we related more as sisters or friends than
mother and daughter.
A co-worker, Wendy, and I, working under supervisor
Ken, prepared contracts for sending traveling exhibits to various museums
around Ontario. Ken, whom my father
would have labeled a “fuddy-duddy,” tended to hover and micro-manage… which I
hated. My naïve ignorance about how to
relate to an authority figure cost me dearly; I happened to mention that a
travel agent friend of Rob’s had a way of securing deals on flights to Europe
but when Ken asked me about it for his wife and himself to take advantage of, I
had to tell him that I was not at liberty to tell the details because Rob’s
friend had told us the information was only for us. The relationship between Ken and myself must
have been the reason my probationary period of six months was not
extended. After my last staff meeting, a
colleague, Mary, complimented me for my gracious leave-taking to my
colleagues. But after work I went to a
downtown skating rink where I skated around and around with tears streaming
down my face. I felt very alone with no
one I could share my failure with. Years
later, I find myself envious of how Hamilton’s grandchildren can turn to their
mother with their anxieties and struggles and how she not only advises and
comforts them but does not see the twists in their lives as failures.
Moving out of my basement apartment in the Beaches, I
held a tag sale and one of the strongest memories and lessons for me was that,
after the sale, when I was in the shower, exhausted, someone knocked at my door
asking for a lower price on an ironing board. I acquiesced without argument, just wanting
it over with, but realized the tactic of the would-be buyer waiting until the
seller’s defenses were down and resolved to be mindful of that in the future.
With no more reason to stay in Toronto, I moved back to
Edmonton and then seized the opportunity when in 1979 Rob invited me to join
him on his next posting in Hong Kong where he was to study Mandarin Chinese
prior to a posting in Beijing.
Leaving
North America for Asia
Before
going to the airport
to fly to
Asia
I stop at
a beach
in blouse
and skirt for traveling
I am
overdressed
everyone
else in shorts and bikinis
with
roller skates and skate boards
swooping
down a street
to the
beach
I walk
down concrete steps
shed my
shoes and stockings
go to
stand
at the
edge of the ocean
fishing
lines hang from the pier
waves
crash broken water up my legs
then
retreat
splashing
my skin
slipping
sand from under my feet
surf
boards arch over waves
beyond
them
evening
silhouettes Catalina Island
I gaze
beyond the island
watch
boats heading west
towards
the horizon
sun
sinking
into a
darkening ocean
planes
rising into sunset
as I will
do within hours
venturing
off the edge
of my
known world
At
the Airport
Rain on
tarmac
makes
giant pools
reflecting
illuminated signs
dark
windows
mirror
departure screens
outside
no stars
in the sky
but
airplanes flash lights
creep
along runways
roar acceleration
climb into
night
waiting
for another voyage
always
leaving a known place
for an
unknown
I wonder
if I will ever come through the darkness
and take
the risk to land
From
the Plane Window
Looking
down
to the
cloudscape
above the
ocean
that
extends
as far as
my eyes can see
I feel I
am looking
through a
glass-bottomed vessel
on
cotton-batten
extending
to the horizon
looking
at the
intensity of sky
all around
me
I feel
there cannot be
any blue
more vivid
any clouds
more seductive
solid
enough to walk on
First
Glimpse of Asia
Fishing
boats
look alive
bobbing on
the waves
but on
islands
half
obscured by clouds
fields
roads
towns
are too
distant
to show a
human face
bombers
during the Pacific War
brought
death
over these
green
alien
beautiful
mountains
I begin to
encounter
islands of
the “Divine Wind”
kamikaze
where my
experiences are
yet to be
unpredictable
sacred
Rob met me at the Hong Kong airport with beautiful
purple and white orchids. We lived
initially in a vast, motel-like apartment on the far side of Hong Kong island
from the main city. We looked out from
the balcony down the mountainous cliffs to the ocean shipping lanes with
transport vessels passing regularly.
Many of the multitude of rooms we never used; it was a relief when we
moved to a smaller, more suitably-size apartment above the Central District.
With Cantonese being the language of Hong
Kong, Rob’s increasing fluency in Mandarin was frustratingly ineffective in
that city. Because of my difficulty
mastering Chinese tones, and because English was spoken widely, I did not
attempt to learn either language. I
explored Hong Kong districts, including the markets and harbors of the far side
of the island, and the outlying islands of rural countryside, temples, and
beaches. Taking the ferry across from
Hong Kong Island, I explored the mainland areas of Kowloon attending many
cultural performances of dance and other arts.
I traveled by train into the New Territories adjacent to the border with
the Peoples Republic of China. There I
found walled villages where peasants were still living a traditional rural way
of life; older women, some with bound feet, dressed in black trousers and
shirts with big-brimmed black hats to keep off the sun. As in my travels,
photographing became a way of processing my experiences and I also began
writing poetry again. As a preschool
teacher at an international kindergarten, I got involved with bright youngsters
from a myriad of countries, one little boy telling me all about the
pterodactyls that fascinated him.
At
the Kwan Yin Temple
I climb
the rock-studded mountain
past
squatters' shacks
to a
temple
where Chinese
women fervently address
the Kwan
Yin goddess
a temple
attendant
gives me a
cluster of incense
lighting
the sticks at a candle
I put one
in the mouth of each lion
guarding
the entrance
and one on
the altar
facing out
over the city
the
burning incense
mists the
city below
skyscrapers
housing
estates
and harbor
my
requests of the many-layered goddess
come
forward one by one
prayers
gathered around each flame
January
ferry from the Island
Alone, I
shiver from the cold
on the
ferry's open deck
returning
to Hong Kong
from an
outer island
through
overturned deck chairs
the
mountains of the island
are
silhouettes
against a
red sunset
in summer
I sat indoors
reading of
places to go
while
people who crowded this ferry
after
relaxing on warm beaches
now crowd city buses after work
in winter
I search the beaches
getting my
shoes full of sand
and my
pockets heavy with weathered rocks
choosing
to be out of step
out in the
cold
Taking
Pigs to Market, Hong Kong
When the
four pigs are let out
their
noses sniff the dirt path
outside
their pen
one puts
its snout
into the
wire cage
thrust in
front of him
prodded,
he enters
finds the
far end tapers
to the
shape of his snout
squeals in
panic
each pig
does the same
investigates
discovers
for himself
his own
panic
only the
last pig
before
half-way in
fights his
way back out
turning
despite blows
climbs
half over the cage
turns and
turns again
into the
blows
rather
than into the cage
it is his
first and last battle
inevitably
his opponents
trick his
head in
shove his
body
the
black-trousered woman grins
crinkling
leathery skin
showing
gold teeth
she and
the old man
poke a
carrying pole
through
the space
between
the pig's snout
and the
end of the cage
they upend
the animal
and set it
on the scales
a sagging
pale
and
squealing mass of flesh
jammed
against the wire cage
by its own
weight
trapped
doomed
and alone
the pig
who fought
is first
to be carried away
at least
not left
propped
against the wall
of its own
shed
where young,
pink-eared piglets
descendants
of fierce wild boars
grow
delicate swirls of hair
above
their small eyes
Gravestones,
Hong Kong - Five Fragments
Down from
a heavily-trafficked road
the
Chinese cemetery
is a
silent hillside city
terraces
of granite and marble
gravestones
with
photographs hardly weathered
I climb
down
as rows of
faces
mounted on
stone
watch me
move
old man,
young woman, child
all
unmoving
open-eyed
a silent
gallery
raising my
fear
sending me
fleeing
up the
steep slope
*****
In this
city of dead
I imagine
myself the only life
hunted by
relentless ghosts
the harsh
wasteland
offers no
sanctuary
the
tombstones
are
obstacles to flight
opportunity
for ambush
the
uninvolved spectators
beyond
caring
offer no
aid
I
entertain the bleakness
of death
*****
Row on row
of empty niches in the wall
only one
is plastered over
and
covered with a photograph
a woman
tapes a plastic cup
filled
with red flowers
to the
plaque
over her
husband's ashes
a glazed
photograph of his face
looks out
on two
people burning candles
and a silk
flower left
in an
empty niche
*****
Behind the
row of monuments
the
retaining wall crumbles
moss grows
in the cracks
a vine
creeps down over mortar
a black
and white butterfly
hovers
over orange blossoms
ants
dragging the bodies of dead insects
make
traffic patterns on the rock
*****
Where
gravestones
are
blackened with age
the
inscriptions faint
the
portraits in weathered marble
made
gentle and mysterious with time
bodies are
planted in the earth
souls
looking out
to the
misty island mountains.
Rob flew back to Canada for Christmas with his mother while
I, unwilling to spend the money or leave Asia so soon, took a trip to
Thailand. My first experience with Thai
coffee and tea convinced me that they were horrible, but, staying in a YWCA in
the outskirts of Bangkok, I woke and swam in the pool, then went to breakfast
of rich dark coffee and papaya with lime, all luxuries that made the Y a
heavenly oasis for me.
Businessmen
Doing Tai-chi in a Park
Separated
by spaces of park
their
business jackets
blown by
the wind
hang on
branches
the men
turn and lean in slow motion
among
trees frozen in postures
of the
same timeless dance
in a slow
sweep
a man arcs
his sword
through
the air
lifts his
foot,
points his
toe
steps
carefully
over an
invisible obstacle
parries an
unseen foe
By the end
of Rob’s academic year of language study, unable to make a commitment to him, I
sought a way to a meaningful career of helping others and decided I would
pursue nursing. Exploring that option, I
requested and obtained an interview with a nursing director; what I recall from
that interview is her telling me she could tell more about me than I could
about her; I still wonder what.
We
are Invited to your Successor's Apartment
We lived
among
slender
ceramic figures
ivory
animals
silk fans
old books
porcelain
vases
and red
silk poppies
here
in the
kitchen
we made
coffee
our wok
sizzled
we leaned
against the counter
gesturing
with chopsticks
our bodies
came dripping from the bath
the bath
is now empty porcelain
the
apartment sparsely furnished
with Scandinavian
pale wood
and
earth-colored rug
this place
was ours
for a
moment in time
;kwe were
guests then
as we are
now
Taking
and Leaving
We make
plans
for the
journey
get our
visas
stroll
through
the
Embassy garden
to the
gate
and the
road
beyond
he reaches
for my arm
hopeful
I slouch
nonchalant
body and
mind flaccid
I could
take or leave
his
reaching for my arm.
Ankle
Bracelet
On our
vacation in India
I buy an
ankle bracelet
in the
market
the vendor
uses pliers
to press
the connecting rings
so the
chain won't slip off
the amulet
encircles
my leg
as if to
ward off
our
impending breakup
back from
the market
I run to
him
across the
beach
like a
child
eager to
have him notice
the
adornment
he smiles
approval
but the
bands
grate sand
into my legs
when I
swim
out into
the ocean
silver
spikes dig into my skin
I stop in
deep water
to break
the chain
Easy Choices
In the restaurant
amongst the balmy breezes
of a South Indian resort
he makes my choices easy
calls over the waiter
“Bring this woman the best”
after dinner
I kick off sandals
dance barefoot
in a silver dress
on the unblemished floor
my head on his shoulder
imagining romantic
ever-afters
but I exchange all that
for traveling alone
to northern India
for crowded buses
cheap food
and stark lodgings
my fingernails dirty
clothes worn for a week
heavy-booted as a peasant
feet cold from wet snow
I climb slowly
up the steep hillsides
of
Himalayan mountains
unable to go through with
his decision to marry
Chinese Coolie
As if I were a Chinese coolie
making my way through narrow
streets
I carried his love for me
like a burden
what he offered
what I wanted
were two packages
swinging from opposite ends
of a shoulder pole
I juggled my burden
until the passage became
constricted
then I dropped it
After
returning through Japan, I was in Edmonton when my father was in a serious car
accident driving to Wabumn. He almost
lost his left leg and would have problems with it from then on. In the hospital,
Dad was on painkillers so strong that he sometimes spoke of “beaver tails” and
other incomprehensible topics.
Recognizing that I sometimes am too preoccupied to pay attention to what
is going on around me, I assumed the accident was at least in part due to my
father’s preoccupation not being focused on the highway. I even found myself wondering what life would
be like for my mother if Dad had not survived.
Visiting
Grannie, who now lived in a nursing home, and who had loved me and each of her
grandchildren so unconditionally, I took a 150-year-old autographed album to
share with her. Troubled about my
relationship with Rob, I talked with Mom’s close friend, Kay Bernard, and met
her beautiful white dog, Boots. I skied
cross-country that winter of 1980-81 with Mom to Mayfair Park, with Kyle to Gold Bar and Rundle Park, and I went skating on Mayfair Park’s frozen lake. Bill Kelly was back in Edmonton, had become
a successful accountant, took me out to play racquetball, and for Christmas
bought me both a wine-colored velveteen suit and a silk dress. Mom declared the gifts too much for me to
accept but Bill refused to take them back.
Dad commented that he could understand men’s attraction to my beautiful
blonde sister Mary but was somewhat mystified by their attraction to me; maybe
it was my enthusiasm, he concluded.
I received
a letter from Rob inviting me to Peking.
(Later he said that he knew I could not refuse a free trip to
China.) I remember that, in excitement
and anticipation, I danced to the music of ABBA around Mom’s kitchen in front
of her and Ruth. More soberly, I applied
to a course at Victoria Composite High School – Teaching English as a Second
Language.
My January
27 flight via San Francisco, brought me to Hong Kong in the midst of Chinese
New Year with its festive red decorations.
Rob had arranged for me to stay with his colleague Robert and his
fiancee Beverley. My first night in Hong
Kong, which is about 12 hours ahead of Alberta time, I was awake most of the
night as were the two cats. During my
visit, a group of us took a trip on Robert’s boat Serendipity to the island of
Po Tai and walked to the temple, much as I had done exploring the islands when
I was living in Hong Kong the year before.
But unlike my frugal trips, we enjoyed a lunch feast of seafood. Back in the city, and planning to photograph
in Beijing, I bought both a wide-angle and a zoom lens.
The
evening after my February 3 arrival in Beijing, Rob took me to supper at a
restaurant named #9 which was popular with diplomats. Dining with Rob, a secretary, (Helene) and another diplomat, Joe, I
began getting to know the Canadian Embassy staff and their families. Seeing me at the embassy pool, Joe exclaimed
to Rob that I was the only woman he knew who looked better out of clothes than
in them. Although never accomplished
with makeup or fashion, I did look elegant in the Chinese gown tailored from
deep blue-green silk that Rob bought me.
Using a
bicycle loaned me by an embassy wife, I rode all over Beijing, exploring and
photographing. Narrow alleys with people
squatting over charcoal burners surprised me until I heard the description of
Beijing as a conglomeration of villages.
During early and evening walks in Ritan Park, I saw old men with birds
or crickets in portable cages and people doing Tai Chi or eating fried
dumplings. I got to know the market
locals frequented and the “Friendship Store,” designed for foreigners to buy
Chinese goods. Many items were generally
unavailable until a big arrival, say of lemons, would cause a rush to obtain
some before they were all gone.
I met an
especially handsome and fashionable couple, Debbie and Pierre and became
friends with Debbie whose stunning looks and blonde hair attracted stares
whenever we went out together. She hated
those stares but country people who had never seen foreigners were always
coming to Beijing and had never seen anyone like Debbie.
I had
lunch once with Beverley but quickly realized she was a man’s woman; her focus
was on men, so I did not feel the rapport I enjoyed with Debbie. Beverley taught karate to Embassy kids and
developed a large, devoted following with kids far
from their home country’s sports. She
and Robert, who now worked at the Canadian Embassy Beijing, were married at the
Summer Palace, a park of lakes, flowers and statues – a beautiful and exotic setting
for the wedding and reception.
We had to
bid farewell to diplomats leaving to return to Canada; one declared he had
mixed feelings about leaving: “Joy and Elation!” I appreciated the humor in his remark but
felt content myself to be in Beijing and part of the Canadian diplomatic
community: there was tennis, volleyball,
morning runs, swimming in the embassy pool, evening films such as “Indiana
Jones and the Temple of Doom,” at the Embassy, my biking to the Temple of
Heaven and Lama temple, shopping in the Chinese Department store on Wang Fu
Jing where I bought the paper goods I was so fond of, and exploring the Theater
Shop where I bought traditional, embroidered, silk trousers and jackets. During secretarial work at the Embassy, I received news of the birth of my first nephew, Michael Grant
Gorman born to Mary and Chris on February 25.
Typing a letter for a diplomat, I felt proud to be able to draw his
attention to the impossibility of scheduling a meeting on February 30. One day, Rob put a stuffed panda on my
typewriter at work, which inspired me to write a story about a cat bear
(another name for panda).
Rob secured a small motorcycle for me so I explored the
city that many described as more like a collection of villages than the capital
of a major country. While communist
China had discouraged the practice of religion, numerous temples stood
testimony to Buddhism's role historically in China. Fierce lion gods at the entrance, a terraced
sculpture in a courtyard representing the entire world, blue-faced warrior
Tibetan gods -- all fascinated me with their graphic representation of
Buddhism's spiritual world.
The Temple of Heaven and the Forbidden City the
imperial palace in the center of the city) also fascinated me with their
history and traditional architecture, especially as ordinary Chinese could
visit where formerly only the emperor and his elite were allowed. By 1981 they
were places to visit for leisure, like the parks, where people gathered at dawn
to practice tai chi and old men brought their birds, in cages, also in the
early morning, to listen and compare cricket chirping and birdsongs.
In
Ritan Park
Trees
stand here for decades
ceramic
figures parade like lemmings
endlessly
off the pavilion's roof
but this
child
held in his
father's arms
churning
his feet and laughing
is
present only now.
In the markets, I heard a cacophony from a big globe of
fist-sized, loosely-woven balls. People
were bending close to listen and I realized they were choosing which cricket
they liked enough to buy.
The
Temple of the White Dagoba, Beijing
In market
lanes piled with charcoal
outside
the temple courtyard
chickens
scurry
small boys
clash with sticks
old men
smack down chess pieces
fruit
tumbles multicolored
from
vendors' scales,
fish
glimmer in pans
crickets
sing
from
clusters of wicker balls
as buyers
bend close to listen
beyond the
market's fleeting images
and
transient lives
a white
dome of eternal marble
inside the
temple courtyard
floats
towards the clouds
under
massive eaves,
wind moves
tiny bells
that hang
along the roof
I bend close
to listen.
With my love of treasures and costumes, I explored the
theatre shop where I bought some traditional silk jackets and trousers.
Antique
Store, Beijing
The room
is rich with scrolls
tasseled
lanterns glow
cascading
from the ceiling
tall vases
painted
with silk-gowned figures
reach
upward elegantly
if I sat
at that table
where
dragon breathes fire at dragon
carved in
high relief
watched
the world through the glass
of these
ornate windows
ground ink
on ancient ink stones
lifted
from silk boxes
I could
write something lasting
with
strokes from an Emperor's pen
Antique
Ink Stone
In a
Chinese antique shop
I am drawn
to a
beautiful box
covered
with embroidered brocade
closed by
ivory tabs
I open the
treasure
its hinges
are red ribbon
stretched
diagonally
to hold
the lid open and vertical
over the
white silk interior
red
sealing wax
marks as
antique
the
enclosed
green-black
ink stone
even the
price is reverent.
I
was recruited to teach at the Pakistani School attended by children of third
world countries (as opposed to the International School attended by children of
American and European diplomats, a much more prestigious place to be a
teacher). Having children of varying
degrees of fluency in English, and in ages from first grade up to adolescents,
all in the same room, was a
challenge. I tried to enrich their
schooling by showing them photos and stories from some of Rob’s coffee table
books, by taking them to the zoo,
and by having them over to the Canadian Embassy for a swim in the pool. I loved seeing the African boys exulting in
the pool, but one Canadian diplomat strongly objected to my bringing
third-world children to swim.
One
day, while riding my
motorcycle, I was stopped by the police.
Lacking enough Chinese to understand what I was accused of, I
nevertheless understood that they wanted me to leave my motorcycle with
them. A crowd gathered around us and I
hung onto my bike, sure that, if I surrendered it, I would never see it
again. Eventually, I saw an opening,
hopped on my bike and zipped through, heading straight for the Canadian Embassy
compound.
In
light of the events of 1989, I feel a poignancy about riding my motorcycle
numerous times across the vast square of Tiananmen Square. Once I had a ticket to view Mao Tse-tung's
body, but gave it to a foreigner who was despairing of getting to view Mao,
whereas I had strong misgivings about viewing a dead body.
Taking a
train to the city of Datong showed me dry landscape with gorges, a feudal landlord’s
walled county seat and the local walled temples. Traveling to the Yungang caves, I saw a Kwan
Yin temple (to the goddess of mercy) and the upper and lower monasteries. Traveling to the “Fragrant Hills,” I saw the
temple of the Azure Clouds and the Source of the Law temple, names with such
lofty aspirations. Traveling to Mongolia with embassy staff, I experienced
the fierceness of strong winds blowing across the gravel desert. We slept in a yurt made of horse skins.
A
Night in a Yurt in Mongolia
We pull
closed
the
dwarf-sized door
against
the storm's
cold wind
and rain
inside
the
crisscross frame encircles
a floor of
quilted bedding
and small
hot stove
where we
warm our hands
pour
steaming water from the kettle
sudden
thunder
the lights
flare out
a young
Mongolian
bursts in
with candles
they
flicker through dust
blown in
under the
horsehair felt tent
thick to
the touch
protection
against
the desert's gale.
Another
trip, west to Xinjiang, showed us how different the Arabic-looking Moslem
Yuigur people are from the Han Chinese.
When we visited a village of Kazaks, I was invited to ride one of their
horses and galloped away from the round yurts towards the distant mountains a
ride of wild bare-back freedom.
We
English-speaking foreigners laughed about the slogan of the China Travel
Service, “We serve you right!” With
bureaucratic glitches all too common, the slogan was appropriate, but a CTS
guide was mandatory when foreigners traveled.
When I left Beijing to explore more of China, a woman CTS guide was
assigned to me, but before long, without my trying to escape her, we lost each
other and I continued solo, using hand signs to communicate because of my lack
of Chinese language. The highlights of
my solo trip were the beautiful gardens of Nanking, the boat trip up the
Yangtze River and the sight of mountains in Guilin province that looked just
like the mountains in Chinese paintings.
However,
during my time from February to November 1981 living in Beijing, I also contended
with colds and flu, and blue depression which led Rob to comment, “You have sad
eyes, Lady.” In
November 1981 I left China for an interview in London, England. Applying for the position was a gamble, and I
knew on leaving the interview, that it had not been a success. I had given up my community in Beijing, I was
on the other side of the world from family and home, adrift in Europe as winter
set in. Suddenly no longer part of the
respected diplomatic community, I was a lonely outlaw. Feeling lost during nights of insomnia, I
telephoned a crisis line one night. Next
morning I was asked if I were phoning my family in Canada, which would have
created an expensive phone bill. I
recall watching from a distance as Anglican priests entered a church, and I was
tempted to run to ask them for help, but the help I needed was direction in my
life, so I held myself back in restraint.
Traveling
to visit a museum in England, I found it closed for the day, but a door
unlocked, luring me to slip in. An alarm
went off but instead of fleeing, I chose to stay and peruse the museum until
the police arrived. They took my name
and details; I told them about the door, and I returned to where I was staying
without telling anyone of my brush with the law.
When
I left England to travel to Germany, I arrived in the midst of the pre-Lenten
Fasching festival. People were wearing
green and orange wigs, and the carnival atmosphere was an ironic contrast to my
bleak outlook. Going to the Hofbräuhaus
bar in Munich to ensure that I did not miss out on the “beer experience,” I
fortunately made myself stop and not take a sip until I decided whether I would
accept the handsome German’s invitation to go skiing with him from his mountain
chalet. I decided to decline and stayed
with my resolve despite his continued urging.
When I left to get the train back to the hostel where I was staying, he
followed me, still trying to convince me and, when the train arrived, he
grabbed and kissed me so aggressively that I needed no more evidence of what
accepting his invitation would entail.
In
Italy, I was shocked by how much more expensive everything was compared to my
1967 summer in Rome. In Greece,
traveling by train to visit the oracle at Delphi, I felt so desperate for
coffee that I got up from where I was in conversation with a traveling couple
and went in search of coffee. Returning,
I found them gone. I had missed the
Delphi station but needed no oracle to tell me I was on a desperate and risky
journey from my failure and towards the unknown future.
In
Istanbul, staying in a traveler’s hotel, a local man insisted on giving me a
massage. Whether or not I understood
what “massage” was a euphemism for, I kept declining until he wore me down, and I agreed. What he gave me was a massage that did not
become sexual for me, although he expressed amazement that I remained so
passive whereas other women he had massaged he claimed had become
orgasmic. How ironic that, while I was
staying at that same hotel, Rob phoned me and we arranged to meet in India
where he would take his vacation so that we could have time together.
Among
the other travelers I got to know were two men and a young woman. We made plans to travel together by bus to
Ankara, but I had misgivings about being around her heavy smoking and, after
suffering so much insomnia, about an all-night bus trip. I thought I was just being up-front and
avoiding future misunderstandings when I spoke to her about my discomfort with
her smoking, but the guys told
me she was hugely upset. I chose to back
out of the trip but, the evening they left, I found myself out in Istanbul
streets with a Turkish fellow who was bewildered by my inconsolable
weeping.
Shortly
thereafter, I left Istanbul in the early morning, hitchhiking to Athens, desperate
to escape the pain of my regret at missing out on the trip. (My mother at least once commented on my
overworking my guardian angel. Had she
only known!) The driver of a large
transport truck was the one who picked me up.
He was Tom from Holland and all he asked of me was that I buy him a
drink for his birthday when we would reach Athens. On reaching the city, we did go out to a
night club where I wanted to buy him dinner as well as his birthday drink but,
instead, he bought mine.
From
Greece, I crossed to Egypt on a boat loaded with passengers including a lot of
traveling foreigners like me who had chosen the least expensive option,
sleeping out on the deck. The deck
proved so crowded and noisy that I abandoned my attempt to sleep there and
started exploring the ship. I came to
doors below, one of which opened onto a state room with an alluringly
comfortable-looking bed. I slept a
luxurious night on top of the covers and,
in the morning, fluffed the pillow
where my head had lain and slipped out.
Now I think about the consequences had I been discovered by a crew
member from one of the countries where lone women are considered fair game.
In
Cairo, I stayed with my diplomatic friends Debbie and Pierre, who were now
posted to the Canadian Embassy in Egypt.
I swam in the Embassy pool, experiencing how frigid the water and how
chilly Cairo in March can be before the summer heat. Alone, I visited the pyramids and the Egyptian
Museum where I was startled to notice a museum guard come up behind me and,
apparently taking me to be fair game, he pressed hard and sexually against me
as I stood contemplating a bust from antiquity.
On
my flight from Cairo to Bombay, perhaps excited about traveling and
anticipating seeing Rob, I happened to get talking with a young male traveler,
whose reply was rather cool and condescending, so I was surprised as we
deplaned in Mumbai that he suggested we stay together in Mumbai. I had the satisfaction when I told him that I
was continuing to Delhi, of letting him know that I was not “coming on to him”
in my earlier friendly greeting. All
that world of frugal backpacking travels fell away when Rob met me wearing his
“handsome” suit, a light blue flattering outfit.
In
contrast to my European travels, we stayed in first-class hotels, where the
flavor of India was in costumed hotel staff, hired dancers and musicians
playing traditional music, and in flavorful mulligatawny and curries. Rob extravagantly bought me a beautiful white
and red sari, we danced outdoors and I swam in the ocean in Kerala, southwest
India. Ultimately, I was still unwilling
to give up my adventuring travel; I would have become a diplomat but did not
want to become a diplomat’s wife.
Soon
Rob’s vacation was over, and he flew back to
Beijing.
Easy
Choices
In the
restaurant
amongst
the balmy breezes
of a South
Indian resort
he makes
my choices easy
calls over
the waiter
“Bring
this woman the best”
after
dinner
I kick off
sandals
dance
barefoot
in a
silver dress
on the
unblemished floor
my head on
his shoulder
imagining
romantic
ever-afters
but I
exchange all that
for
traveling alone
to
northern India
for
crowded buses
cheap food
and stark
lodgings
my
fingernails dirty
clothes
worn for a week
heavy-booted
as a peasant
feet cold
from wet snow
I climb
slowly
up the
steep hillsides
of Himalayan mountains
unable to
go through with
his
decision to marry
Chinese
Coolie
As if I
were a Chinese coolie
making my
way through narrow streets
I carried
his love for me
like a
burden
what he
offered
what I
wanted
were two
packages
swinging
from opposite ends
of a
shoulder pole
I juggled
my burden
until the
passage became constricted
then I
dropped it
A
Westerner Reads Two Personal Ads in an Indian Newspaper
“Parents
seek
doctor,
engineer or lawyer
for
fair-skinned
accomplished
daughter
English-educated
with
unblemished
character
horoscope
and full details necessary”
“Brother
seeks for sister
divorced
with one child
a suitable
partner
caste and
creed immaterial
substantial
dowry
paddy
field and
two acres
of high land
plus
jewelry”
fair-skinned
Western-educated
roaming
daughter, sister
very
accomplished
in
escaping suitable partners
no
encumbrance except herself
seeks.
While
still in Dehli, I happened to meet a Kashmiri man who told me I should come up
to Kashmir where his family would give me a job. Since the plains of India were starting to
become hot, I bought a bus ticket and endured an overnight trip to Srinagar, the
Kashmiri capital. No doubt Mohammed was
astounded that I took him up on his offer.
The
Himalayas were still in early spring and cold, so there was no work in his
family’s tourism business. I stayed with
his family on their houseboat and made some trips out on shikara boats, similar
to gondolas, which were water taxis poled by locals. Of course, other shikaras approached, seeing
a foreigner to whom they might sell their jewelry. I felt I had scored treasure with the several
necklaces of vintage beads,
but Mohammed told me later I’d “been had” and paid too much.
On
one fateful shikara trip with Mohammed, he stopped at a beautifully ornate
houseboat with carved wood inside and out.
It was the home of Isaac, a self-taught medical missionary who had
abandoned his investment banker career in England, taken the biblical name, and
brought his own medications and tools to heal impoverished Kashmiris and also
to save their souls by teaching them about Christianity. He had given up closets full of suits and
shoes. The wealth he had accumulated
investing enabled him to buy medicines and to have the ornately beautiful
houseboat built to his specifications.
Isaac
invited me on board and served tea.
While we drank tea, another shikara paddled up with an ashen-faced
Kashmiri woman. Isaac gave her
medication and later told me that she had cancer and would be dead in six
months. He invited me to stay with him
on his houseboat and that felt to me like a heaven-sent gift, that I could
become a good person by serving others and redeem myself from the pain I had
caused Rob.
Isaac
gave me his bed, a gorgeous, carved double bed in the center of the boat while
he slept elsewhere. Towards the bow, two
other young travelers, Graham from New Zealand and Wolfgang from Germany had
their bunks. Graham was so devout that
he would spend whole days fasting and in prayer.
From
the Same Pot
In
a mountain hut
we
eat rice
from
a single pot
the
born-again Christian
the
old Kashmiri man
and
myself, the doubting seeker
the
young traveler
pulls
off a knitted sweater
lifts
his face
towards
the mountains
thoughts
on Jesus
the
old man
spreads
his woolen cloak
presses
his forehead
to
the ground
rising
towards Mecca
Bandaging
a Wound
Another
protege of the medical missionary
a
born-again Christian
earnest
young man
sets
down his unsullied backpack
and
takes out his first aid kit
pristine
white and red
privileged
to re-enact Jesus' healing
he
kneels to tend the blistered foot
of
the Himalayan innkeeper
who
overcharged him
for
a sagging bed
dim
room
and
faded quilt
the
innkeeper
wears
his weathered skin
and
ragged cloak
like
the mountains
wear
their forests
earth
and age
ground
into the crevasses
torn
from its sterile covering
the
antiseptic bandage
makes
a startling white cross
on
the mountain man's
wounded
and calloused feet
Wolfgang
was more easygoing; he and I spent a day in companionable ease in our swimsuits
cleaning the outside of the houseboat.
Later,I was jolted that Isaac rebuked me for lack of modesty; my swim
suit was a one-piece and not provocative except probably to Isaac.
One
day, Isaac asked me if I masturbate. I
just stared at him, astounded at his audacity in asking such a question of me,
and he told me that had been the practice he found most difficult to give up
when he gave his life to Jesus.
Early
in my stay with him, Isaac brought a bouquet of flowers to me for my bedside. I brought them out to the common area to be
enjoyed by all. This I suspect was the
“test” that he later said he’d given me and that I’d “passed, done perfectly”
although he refused to tell me what the test was.
The
test I did not pass (in his eyes) occurred the day we four made a trip by
shikara to a lepers’ colony. Isaac told
me to wear sandals to show I had faith, but I chose to wear my heavy work boots
to protect my feet from possible infection.
We brought our lunch but worked straight through until 4pm, providing
pills (although Isaac told us many patients hide them in the earth to save
them) and skin cream (Isaac pointed out that the cream was unlikely to
penetrate the layers of dirt on patients’ skin).
As
we paddled home, the question of lunch came up and Isaac said anyone who wanted
could eat something; he and any others would wait until we got back to the
houseboat and could bless the food.
Having starved myself as a teenage anorexic and knowing how depriving
myself of food left me confused and until to think clearly, I ate several
boiled eggs. On reaching Isaac’s
houseboat, I energetically set the table and made tea, glad I had the energy to
serve the others. I was genuinely
shocked that Isaac was angry that I had not waited.
After
Graham and Wolfgang had left us, Isaac and I made a trip to a village outside
Srinagar where I got talking to a young male traveler, not suspecting that
Isaac would regard my conversing with outsiders as a betrayal. When he planned another trip to treat villagers
in a mountain village, I decided to take all my possessions with me, in order
to keep my options open. Before we had
gone far, Isaac discovered he had forgotten something at home so we turned back
and, to his fury, he discovered on entering the houseboat that I’d taken
everything I owned with me. When he
questioned me, I replied simply and with neither excuses nor embarrassment,
“Yes, I’ve taken all my things.”
Perhaps
I was finally acquiring some smarts about people. In that mountain village, events led to my
deciding to leave. Isaac warned me that,
if I left, I would lose all awareness of ever being touched by the Holy
Spirit. Now, I recognize so many of the
signs of a cult leader’s attempts to control, but then, half a world away from
any family or friends, I needed all my idiosyncratic independence and courage
to walk out and down the mountain.
Before I was down the mountain, I stopped to rest under a sheltering
pine tree, and I felt the Grace of the Holy Spirit flow toward me, confirming
to me that I’d made the right choice.
In
the Himalayas
Running
away
from
marrying
the man
who loves me
I travel
to lose my
selfish ego
among the
Himalayan mountains
in Kashmir
I
encounter a medical missionary
dispensing
medications
and Christianity
to sick
Muslims
he invites
me
to join
his mission
sick of
myself
I see an
invitation to change
into a
good person
caring
about others
he sees
my
acceptance
as his
invitation
to save my
soul
meaning
I must
surrender my ego
be
"One in the Spirit"
believe,
think, feel
as he does
he sees
Satan
in
questions I ask him
in mail I
receive
in my
talking
with other
travelers
he seeks
to isolate
suppress
my questioning
tame my
idiosyncrasy
crush my
ego
every
skeptical synapse of my soul
looks askance
at the
submergence
of being
"One in the Spirit"
he
threatens that
if I leave
his remote
mountain hut
I will
lose all awareness
of the
Holy Spirit
I never
liked the Holy Ghost
to me it
is Hocus Pocus
but when I
now sit alone
under a
pine tree
in a
valley of the Himalayas
on the far side of the world
from
friends and family
Who gives
me this certainty
that I am
not lost?
with Whom do I walk out of his orbit
and down
the mountain?
Who pours
into me
the Grace
I feel
streaming
from the cathedral sky?
Before
I left Kashmir, I began walking across the valley to an ashram for yoga
sessions led by a slender young Australian man and for meditation sessions led
by the ashram’s guru, an Indian. One day
the Australian and I hiked up a nearby mountain and were so desperate for water
that we scooped muddy liquid from a tiny pool.
When we finally were back at the lodge, we each drank copiously from the
house hose.
My
naivete led me one afternoon to allow a young Kashmiri man in my room just below
the attic; the one part of our conversation I recall is his telling me he could
rape me then and there, although he did not.
I am also horrified that I accepted the invitation of a group of
townsmen to come to their darkroom one evening for a portrait session. Not accustomed to anyone thinking I was
photogenic; I asked several times during the gathering when would the
photographing begin. The half dozen men
must have decided that I was an innocent child, at least mentally, and had the
mercy to left me go, neither photographed nor raped.
I
loved visiting the Mogul Gardens, beautifully manicured gardens of flowers and
waterfalls where Kashmiri families would stroll in their finery. Once, very hungry, I was on the point of
asking a picnicking family for food but felt it would be too humiliating. Another time, two young Kashmiri girls
approached me; the darker-skinned girl especially wistful about my fair
skin. Her lighter-skinned friend would
have much better marriage prospects.
I
met another young man who Isaac would no doubt also have labeled one of the
“dead people.” Not “One in the
Spirit.” His practices of meditation and
rituals drew me into a platonic relationship and, his decision to travel to
Ladakh suddenly made me aware of a new frontier and kindled my urge to discover
it. He negotiated a ride for the two of
us with two Indian drivers driving a transport truck over the Himalayan
mountain passes. The beauty of the high
mountains struck me. Their remoteness
struck me when the drivers collected and cooked wild mushrooms for a
supper. Terrified of taking the risk to
eat them, I was relieved when one of the drivers accidentally knocked over the
frying pan sending the mushroom into the dust, no longer edible.
In
the Buddhist kingdom of Ladakh, so different from Kashmir’s lushness, the land
was dry, monasteries were prevalent and the people looked Tibetan. On my own again, I stayed in a home whose
family rented rooms. A sign near the
shower asked us to conserve water since the family brought in all water on
their backs. Living at 13,000 feet, I
visited a monastery at 14,000 feet elevation; when I sat outside for lunch and
started to take the lid off my small tin of peanut butter, the lid sprang into
the air from the different in air pressure.
Many of the monks had not chosen the monastic like but been given to the
monastery as boys by their families and had a keen interest in seeing and
obtaining western gadgets such as wristwatches and radios.
As
autumn approached, Ladakh’s high plateau became colder. I returned to Kashmir which, by October, was
touching winter. With no heat inside
buildings, Kashmiri men carried braziers with hot coals under their fulsome
wool cloaks. At night I curled my body
up inside the old Indian army sleeping bag I had acquired back in Delhi.
When
Graeme, the yoga instructor at the ashram across the valley, wanted to head
south to escape the increasing cold, he and I went together, stopping in
Amritsar at the Golden Temple, a profound experience, especially at night with
the lights on the gold of the temple and its reflection in the huge courtyard
pool. Sikhs in turbans carried swords,
both turbans and sword being symbols of their religion. After my being in that sacred space, the
bloody events of later years struck me as even more tragic than if I had not
experienced the Golden Temple’s mystical allure.
One
of my most challenging but rewarding times in India resulted from Graeme’s
desire to spend ten days in a meditation retreat at an ashram not far from Mumbai. I was terrified by the prospect of spending
such a long period of time mostly in meditation. Ultimately, I resolved to challenge myself to
do it. With my history of anorexia, I
was also very apprehensive about the schedule: breakfast, then a noon meal and
no food after that until the next morning.
I was afraid I would be hungry in the night and unable to sleep. In the early days of the retreat, I secreted
some bread from breakfast in case of midnight hunger pangs. But the long stretch between lunch and next
day’s breakfast proved not a problem because with each day, I ate more slowly
and much less than previously. I was
intensely aware of each bite, concentrating solely on it. One morning I was surprised and felt somewhat
ridiculous finding myself with a piece of banana in my mouth but neither
chewing nor swallowing it. I had slowed
down so much physically.
We
were not to talk to others except to the guru if in a private conversation with
him. Between meditations one day, Graeme and I passed each other on the path
from the outhouses. Neither of us
acknowledged or greeted the other, unsure, as we learned later, whether the
other would welcome it.
Uncomfortable
physically and mentally in the multi-hour meditation sessions, I found myself
dealing with fierce anger without my knowing any specific cause. After enduring for days, I finally asked for
an interview with the guru who told me calmly that anger was a common
experience in these retreats of intense meditation.
While
most of each day was spent in sitting meditation, concentrating first on our
breath and later learning to scan our bodies, taking our awareness from head to
toe, the guru would deliver a lecture once each day in the late afternoon. During one lecture he pointed out, “you are
the only one sitting here who is physically uncomfortable and agitated in
spirit. Everyone else is close to
enlightenment.” The burst of laughter
from nearly a hundred throats united the group of us.
One
afternoon I did absent myself from the meditation and did yoga in the grass,
learning later that such long grass is a favorite habitat for the local cobras.
To
my amazement, I survived the ten days of inactivity and inner work. When we left the ashram, I felt bombarded by
the loud noise and commotion on the streets outside. In the next days, I wrote an article on my
experience and was astounded, after using literal cut-and-paste techniques in
writing my university papers, that the essay flowed out of me, needing no
reorganization. I wish the mental
stability and the practice of meditation had stayed with me, but my frugal
travel and active lifestyle soon disrupted my practice.
We
traveled to Madras where we stayed in a large boarding house, Broadlands, with
multiple floors housing frugal travelers.
Graeme and I would do yoga on the roof in the early mornings before the
sun made the day sweltering. We each
took lessons from a woman yoga teacher a bus ride away. We often went for lunch to a large
cafeteria-like space where you ate tali, a platter of rice, roti (flat bread),
dal (stewed chick peas) and curry with your hands, washing them before and
after at a communal tap.
In
Madras, I went for a swim in a public swimming pool; the water was green, but I assumed safe
if I didn’t drink it. Indian men
gathered to watch me, even though my one-piece swim suit was the same,
unprovocative one I’d worn cleaning Isaac’s houseboat roof. Probably Indian men were unused to seeing
Caucasian women in swim suits. Not long
after this, I developed a severe ear ache and had to go to a Madras doctor who
excavated my ear canal. Ever since, I
have needed ear plugs even when swimming in clean pools; without earplugs, I
get an aching in the mastoid bones.
Crossing
to Sri Lanka, formerly Ceylon, we saw evidence of the unrest between Tamils and
others that would shake the country in later years. We stopped in one town to take lessons in
batik from a local woman. With my camera
not functioning, batik became my passion and I sought out the varied styles in
each country I was in from then on -- Sri Lanka, India, Malaysia and
Indonesia. (In
Malaysia, batik often involves waxing outlines and then painting, rather than
dipping fabric into the dye. In
Indonesia, metal stamps are often used to press was patterns onto the fabric.)
Graeme
and I shared expenses, taking turns managing the money. When his ran low, he prepared to return
home. He packed the “dancing Shiva”
statue that he had bought and carried with him on our travels and sent it home
to Perth, Australia. I offered and lent
him $400 to fly home, which Dad learned much later after I was back in
Canada. I had no doubt that Graeme’s
integrity would ensure he repaid me; I was rewarded seeing Dad’s surprise when
Graeme’s cheque arrived for me in Mom and Dad’s mailbox.
Alone
again, I bicycled from Madras to the nearby town of Pondicherry. It was August and I recall the delicious
sensation of the cold water given me at the Aurobindo ashram that was my
destination. I had the use of an
apartment in the ashram for a time and experienced the variety of religious
experience there; for instance, one foreign woman sat all day like a statue in
a public plaza. The handmade paper made
at the ashram was so distinctive and beautiful that I bought a variety of
stationery and small notebooks. When I
went to move out, I took my discards to a nearby trash bins and was shocked to
see several Indian men close in to check out scavenging opportunities before I
was even back in the apartment.
With
my camera’s malfunction and my having seized the opportunity to take a few days
instruction in batik in Sri Lanka and later back in Madras, batik replaced
photography as my medium of expression.
I was so intensely into batik that I kept coming to those studios and
doing more batik, even after the instruction was over. I was oblivious that I was outstaying my
welcome until the woman who had taught, presented me with a bill for an extra
$25, declaring that my time with her was OVER.
I crossed
to Nepal by bus and spent time in Kathmandu and in the western town of Pokkara,
with the gorgeous peak of Annapurna dominating the horizon, then returned to
India.
Just
as I was about to leave India for Malaysia, a man staying at Broadlands asked
me to take an envelope to a specific travelers’ hostel in Kuala Lumpur. I wondered at his entrusting what he said was
the $400 inside to someone he barely knew.
I delivered it and, staying at that hostel, I was shocked to see the
envelope sitting in the lobby mail cubby holes where anyone could have taken
it. I asked the hotel manager to put it
in a more secure place for the intended recipient but never did look inside to
see if it contained money or just a note, “Gotcha!” Was it drug trafficking money or a test of my
integrity? Should I have refused the
errand since I didn’t know its result? I
wished I knew! I also wished I had my
sandals repaired before leaving India, since everything was more expensive in
Malaysia.
In
Malaysia, I met a Roman Catholic nun who gave me a small booklet which
presented prayer as a conversation between oneself and God, not a one-way
conversation. The nun was planning a
weekend away for a group of domestic workers, all Chinese women who had been
abandoned by their parents at birth and had been raised by an orphanage. These middle-aged women were focused on
food. They prepared elaborate and
delicious meals but, before one meal was finished, they would be planning and
arguing among themselves about the next meal.
My healthy appetite showed appreciation for their cooking, but their
insatiable hunger for what food could not provide was starkly evident.
After
the weekend, I was about to take
my leave when the nun presented me with a stunning long batik skirt which she
had seen me admire. Some 38 years later,
I have both the skirt and the booklet, which I have re-read several times,
thanking her repeatedly for recognizing the hungers in me.
For
part of a week, I stayed in a Buddhist retreat colony in the Malaysian
countryside, trying to manage without my usual coffee in the mornings since I
had no place to buy or make coffee. A
long-term resident in the colony, a German woman who had her own hut, impressed
me because she had apparently lived in Burma meditating in a cave. One morning, she invited me into her hut and,
to my surprise, she made and offered me a coffee and herself had a cigarette,
saying there are more important things to use one’s mind for than craving
coffee or a cigarette. One night she
pointed out to me the beauty of the full moon reflected in a pail of water; I
immediately began to exclaim but she shushed me “No words!” indicating that I
should just be in the experience of the moment, not render it into words. Thinking of words, while it was not compulsory,
I attended a two-hour talk by a monk, given entirely in Malaysian, of which I
knew not a single word. I realized
leaving before it ended could be taken as an insult, so I sat, likely
benefitting from the 10-day practice in India.
When
I crossed to Indonesia, the source of batik, I saw and learned something of
traditional techniques, including using metal presses loaded with molten wax to
print patterns of resist on fabrics that then were dyed. Living in the city of Solo, I heard
performances and practices of the xylophone-like gamelan musical instruments
and attended performances of shadow puppetry enacting traditional stories.
I
arrived in Singapore just at the time of Chinese New Year when everyone gathers
with their families and little is open publicly. This was a lonely and desperate time for me;
I finally went to a hospital crying uncontrollably and a nurse asked whether I
had been “rapped.” Some decades later when a friend’s daughter was desperately
homesick while studying abroad and my friend asked for some encouragement for her
daughter, I emailed the daughter and shared that experience.
Waiting
for me at the Canadian High Commission in Singapore was a letter from Rob, who was back in
Canada and sending a “final notice” that a woman was aggressively pursuing him
and that he would surrender unless I returned to him. This “last chance” ultimatum propelled me
into buying a ticket through Hong Kong to North America. The standby (only ticket available)
necessitated my going to the airport and sitting there until almost the last
minute in case a seat might become available on the midnight flight. Hours of uncomfortable uncertainty sitting on
the airport floor, but I felt I at last had a destination and a plan.
Back
in Ottawa, living with Rob on Stanley Avenue, in park-like surroundings, I had
a phone call from medical authorities asking if I was working in any food
industry. I had apparently picked up a
dangerous parasite while in Asia that I could have transferred to others via
food (if I were not so conscientious about handwashing).
I
met Fairlee, a woman friend of my brother Glenn and began taking on some of her
housecleaning when Fairlee had more that she could handle. I also was hired as a companion and Girl
Friday to a woman trying to recover from addiction to Valium and who needed to
recover from having everything done for her.
It was she who tried to reduce my pay from $7/hour to $5 and aroused my
determination never again to be undervalued.
Cleaning
the apartment of two gay men, I came across their book, The Joy of Gay Sex but
kept myself from looking into it. One
afternoon, after I had finished cleaning and left, I remembered something I
needed to go back for. Not wanting to
disturb the man working at home, I went into the apartment quietly but suddenly
he was hovering over me with a 2x4 block of wood and a desperate expression on
his face, having thought there was an intruder.
Another day when I was about to take out the trash and discovered it was
already gone, he told me he had already taken it out. I was on the verge of using Grannie’s
expression, “I thought the good fairy must have taken it.” Thankfully,
I caught myself before that slipped out.
I
discovered an art history class at the University of Ottawa within walking
distance and indulged in dropping into the lectures after my
housecleaning. Although keenly
interested in art, I was often so tired from housecleaning that I would fall
asleep in the darkened lecture hall as the professor showed slides. During my housecleaning gigs, when I felt
exhausted, I would take a short time-out then have coffee and chocolate to get
myself going again.
Rob
sang in a choir and for the upcoming concert, tried to rent the required
tuxedo, but the rental and deposit were so expensive that I suggested we look
in the second-hand stores. In the
Salvation Army store, we found a tuxedo that fit and looked new; Rob bought
that, and a dress shirt to go with it, for $33.
When
Glenn married Huda Abaid, a woman who had immigrated to Canada from Iraq, a
Justice of the Peace officiated, but the couple chose to have a family service
as well and asked Rob to officiate at that.
They incorporated Muslim elements into the ceremony. Mom and Ruth came from Edmonton, and Huda
painted the hands of her mother and sisters-in-law with designs in henna.
I
joined the Ottawa Photography Club and took my images (many of early spring
streams in flood) to the meetings. For
Christmas, spent in Toronto with Rob’s mother, Rob gave me “the lightest part
of a tripod, a cheque to buy one. On the
club’s weekend trip to Peterborough, Ontario, I was captivated by a field of
red poppiess and made landscape photos instead of my usual travel photos. I was asked to be part of the next year’s
executive board but had to decline since Rob was to be posted to New York
City’s Canadian Consulate. To pursue my
photography, I signed up for courses at the International Center of Photography
run by Cornell Capa, the brother of the famous World War II photographer Robert
Capa.
When Rob
left for New York, I flew to Alberta for time with my family. I biked to Fort Edmonton, went berry picking
with Mom and Kay Bernard, attended performances at the new, experimental Fringe
Theater and had time at my parents’ cottage at Lake Wabumn.
Heading to
Jasper in the Rocky Mountains, I went to Mt Edith Cavell and Maligne Canyon,
hiked Athabasca glacier and took part, one of only two students in a climbing
workshop offered by the Blue Lake organization.
The two instructors took us up challenging cliffs and once, on a wall
with some 200 feet exposure below, my legs began stuttering like a sewing
machine. I remember saying, “Legs, this
is not helpful.” My legs settled down
and I continued climbing. Later I
learned the phenomenon is common enough to have the designation, “sewing
machine leg.”
Arriving
in New York September 17, 1985, I had at least a week before the photography
course would begin, so I took a drive in Rob’s little white MGB convertible
upstate and into New England to see fall foliage. Although it was early for fall foliage, I saw
beautiful early autumn countryside and learned how much more photogenic the
landscape is in rain than in bright sun with its extreme contrast of light and
shadow.
That
autumn my sister Mary, who delights in New York and is always energized by the
city, came to visit. She and I indulged
in coffee and dessert at The Tavern on the Green, saw the Broadway musical Big
River and explored Chinatown,
Staten Island ferry, Grand Central Terminal, Coney Island, and attended the
Columbus Day parade. Invited by a professional photographer to a
portrait session one Sunday morning, we arrived at the closed studio and
finally realized that clocks had been set back the night before.
ICP’s
emphasis on photojournalism led me to shoot many images on the streets of New
York – festivals which I came to enjoy, street people, St Patrick’s and
Columbus Day parades, and the Halloween Parade in Greenwich Village. I loved photographing both the preparations,
inflating the huge balloons during the day before and also the parade
itself. Christmas lights and Macy’s and
other store windows’ creative displays also drew me to photograph them. Once, at our corner of York and 72nd
St, I saw a taxi and a car shortly after they had collided. The taxi’s doors were open and, in the mode
of photojournalist on the spot, I stepped forward and photographed the
middle-aged woman sitting stunned in the back seat. Now, I regret my lack of empathy and wished I
had turned away from her vulnerability.
One
instructor at ICP irritated me both with what I felt was condescension and with
his amorphous pronouncements about photography.
I was fortunate to meet and talk with a woman staff member who helped me
endure his seminars. Later she put me in
touch with a professional photographer for whom I served as assistant. Another instructor was a successful commercial
photographer whose real-world experience was invaluable: “If your lab ruins
your negatives and you change to a different lab, sooner or later that second
lab will ruin something.” “Always have
backup equipment and be ready to shoot,” he said, showing us the image of Jack
Ruby shooting Lee Harvey Oswald, “Wait, Mr Ruby, wait until I charge my flash!”
I
took part in a weekend workshop about nude photography during which I marveled
at the courage of the models, male and female, especially when the instructor
said, “If you are preoccupied with seeing a man naked, go up and inspect his
penis so you get used to it.”
Despite
knowing that photographic chemicals can be toxic, I found in the darkroom it
was difficult for me not to rip off my gloves and rub a developing print with
my hands to warm it and bring out the dark tones. This hands-on responding to immediate
developments appealed to me more than careful tests of alternate exposures.
I
especially liked experimenting – turning on the overhead light to solarize a
print into unexpected reversals of light and dark, using sepia and other
toners, combining images in double exposures or montage, or using black and
white negatives in the color lab to make strange, monochrome images that I
later used as illustrations for a fairy tale I wrote.
Especially
after I bought studio lighting equipment, I was also drawn to making portraits,
of my parents, my sister Mary and brother David when they visited and of
families living at River Terrace and various Consulate employees and their
families. My making self-portraits was likely an attempt to discover who I was
as well as to have a photographic record before I aged further. In at least one self-portrait, I looked like
a young boy. Experimenting, I burned and
torn and collaged some of these self-portraits.
One
assignment was to make a collage out of materials gathered on our way
home. I found a wooden liquor box, ideal
as a container for the multitude of other things and pictures from magazines
that seemed placed in my path on my mile bike ride home.
In
the summer, I was offered a scholarship, that is the opportunity to take part
without fees in a summer course on making handmade books. I made the cover from a batik I had made in
Asia, with the cover and pages on the topic of women. It included my photographs taken around the
world as well as art I clipped. Decades
later, the book
is still unfinished and has no back cover. I have continued to find it difficult to do
art if I am not in a class with other people.
The
Consulate offered me the very part-time job of Community Liaison Officer,
producing a newsletter to connect the Consulate with families of
employees. Later a woman offered me work
preparing for a conference in Albany; she apparently saw some ability in me
that she mentored to emerge
despite noticing that each time I encountered her, I gave the impression of
having only just met her, I believe a sign of the stress I was under. Later, I did data entry for the Tourism
Section. I also became the person who
greeted visiting Chinese academics arriving at Kennedy International Airport on
the World University Service program. I
sometimes drove to Kennedy in Rob’s MGB and drove the Chinesed academic to
their hotel.
Rob
had chosen to live in River Terrace, a new high rise, because it was to have a
swimming pool, essential for me to work out the pressure and tension I felt in
my head almost every day. When the
pool’s opening was greatly delayed, I got a membership in the YWCA and it was
there, passing the common lounge where people were watching the television,
that I first learned of the 1986 Challenger disaster.
After
River Terrace’s pool opened, the chlorine was so strong that the aqua-colored swimsuit I
wore for my first swim turned lime green.
I swam so regularly, usually plunking myself in the hot tub to relax
into a mokus state, then plunging into the pool and swimming until I worked out
the day’s stresses, that the Recreation staff included a profile of me in their
first newsletter. I regret not keeping a
copy of the newsletter; at the time, I thought I was chosen merely for swimming
almost daily and that I did not deserve special notice.
As
Mom and Dad’s 40th anniversary approached, someone in my family
suggested each of us siblings prepare a short video which would be put together
into one piece for our parents. I loved
the process of writing a rhyming poem and selecting images to go with it, then
of the editing session with a professional to complete my piece. We siblings were all invited to the surprise
party that Kyle had arranged in the luxury hotel where he worked. Mary and Ruth were in on the surprise and
David was to act as MC. I was undecided
about going, largely because of encountering so many of our parents’ friends
who had known me when I was growing up and to whom I felt I could not justify
my life and apparent lack of success. I
chose to stay in New York earning another $1000 doing data entry at the
Consulate. Rob actually bought me a $700
last-minute ticket but, deciding not to use it, I was alone in our apartment
the night of the party. Much later I saw
photos of Mom’s joyful shock on realizing the banquet room was full of their
friends.
Friends
and relatives visited us during our four years in New York. Mary and her husband Chris came with other
colleagues for a medical conference. She
came again with her friend Darlene, both times visibly relishing the city as an
adventure away from family responsibilities.
Ruth came and on one walk together a man kept bothering us until one of
us said “We’re lesbians!” My cousin Cynthia visited in the middle of her
medical studies. On the Staten Island
ferry returning to Manhattan, I looked at the clouds above the city skyscape
and felt very close to my Aunt Lorna as if she were watching her daughter and
her namesake niece together. David
visited and we made photos of his playful posing with the gymnastic statues in
the courtyard. Kyle and I visited the
Empire State building where I made photos of him and his shadow and
reflections; I was and continue to be intrigued by such “alter egos.” Before my uncle Michael Garrett visited, I
warned Rob that Michael was not a talkative man but, over dinner and the
evening, he and Rob had an extended and engaging conversation, so different
than family gatherings where chatter and interruptions dominated. Rob’s mother visited from Toronto; she and I
took the sightseeing cruise around Manhattan.
Mom and Dad visited,
and I took them to what I considered one of the great happenings of New York
City – the Halloween parade. Mom
photographed using the Konica camera which I had won in a Maclean’s photography
contest and given to her; her images emphasized patterns and had a playful
quality.
My
insomnia one night led to my getting out of bed and lying on the kitchen
floor. Rob woke and came in, saying, “I
love you, but you are hard on yourself.”
I recalled his saying when we were in Beijing “You have sad eyes,
Lady.”
My
angry frustration led me to take risky action against cars, especially taxis
that stopped in the middle of the crosswalk, forcing me and other pedestrians
to go around them. More than once, I
walked over the trunk or hood of a car, my sneakers not scratching the vehicle
but enraging the drivers; at least one got out of his vehicle to yell at
me. Riding my upright bicycle all over
the city to visit art and photography galleries, I was able to make many stops
without using a lot of transit tokens, but sometimes drivers would swerve close
to me or yell as their vehicle passed me.
Once, a carful of men yelled as they swerved close to my bike, startling
me, but then had to stop for a red light at the next intersection. I speeded up, got to the light before it changed
and stood with my bike in front of their vehicle for a whole cycle of traffic
lights, trembling with rage and aware of risk but defiant of their angry
yelling at me to get out of the way.
Despite
Rob’s love for me and his generous caring for what he sometimes saw as his
“wounded bird,” my unhappiness caused me great uncertainty about going with him
on his cross-posting to NATO in Brussels which was coming up in the summer of
1989. I had become friends with a woman
who often talked about her therapist so I asked Marilyn if she thought Millie
and I would be compatible as therapist and client. It was a huge step for me to overcome my
reluctance and embarrassment to phone Millie and request an appointment. A considerable subway trip took me to
Brooklyn and my first appointment. Rob
and I had been hosting friends of his from Newfoundland who were visiting with
their two children. Telling Millie of
the parents asking their children what kind of restaurant they wanted to go to
for supper, I said, “I was never that important to anyone.”
“Did
you hear what you just said,” Millie asked.
My
relationship with Millie became enormously important to me. I approached each session with apprehension
about what I would tell her, how vulnerable I would become and how I would make
use of the time to justify the expense of therapy.
You dim the Lamp
You dim the lamp
and in its gentle shadow
words venture cautious
and then creep closer
you strike a light
the cigarette
taps off its ashes softly
not to interrupt
what I am saying
to the red glow
held
in the fingers
of your hand.
My
bicycle, ridden all over New York’s busy streets, and I, stopped in Central
Park under a tree one day in the spring of 1989 and the decision finally became
clear to me: In that quiet time alone in nature, I realized I would not move
with Rob to Brussels.
I
saw him off at LaGuardia airport, watching his back move off into a separate
future, then returned to Manhattan. I
had several days to pack up my possessions during which I set up the tent I had
used in my New England explorations at the beginning of our New York
posting. The tent served as a cocoon
into which I could retreat from the large, mostly empty apartment I had shared
with Rob.
I
had investigated ads for roommates and arranged to move in with a woman in
Astoria, across the river in Queens. I
found a notice for guys with a truck to move my possessions and we agreed on a
rate per hour. The move completed, I
invited them for pizza after which we drove back to Manhattan. During the ride in their truck, they
presented me with a bill for much more than I had expected, including the time
eating pizza. When my objections had no
effect, I merely opened the truck door at a traffic stop, got out and walked
away, having paid them what I thought was fair.
Rob
had helped me apply for a position at the Canadian Consulate, assistant
librarian in the library, officially called the Information Center, a job which
would give me an income until I decided what I would do next. When I told Millie that it was such a lowly
position compared to what I might have achieved by that point in my life, she
replied, “You have to start somewhere.”
Weekdays,
when I headed out for work at the Consulate, I would stop on my way to the
subway to buy a corn and a bran muffin from the local bakery. I rode the “N” train from its final stop
“Ditmars,” across the Queensboro (59st Bridge) and underground to 49th
Street from where it was a short walk to the Consulate.
The
work was challenging. Every morning the
reference librarian, Judith, and I had to scan both American and Canadian
newspapers for articles about Canada and Canadian American relations and anything
of interest to the Consulate officers.
We would make copies of those articles to circulate to the diplomatic
officers and then forward the newspapers to them. At 9am the phones began ringing with callers
wanting answers to questions on a vast array of subjects. If the question dealt with business or
immigration or a subject dealt with by one of the officers, we would transfer
the call to them. Otherwise, we had
files and reference books and I learned the important thing was not to have all
the answers but to know where to find the answers. Still, I took pride that, as the one Canadian
among the library’s three staff, I could answer questions such as “What is
Boxing Day?” and “What are Saskatoon berries?” without consulting any
reference.
Our
lunch hour was exactly 12 to 1pm since the public was welcome to come into the
library in the afternoon to use our resources and ask us questions. We had to keep statistics on how many
questions, phone or in person, were about postal codes, tourism, education and
numerous other subjects. Towards the end
of my time at the Consulate we began to use computers. For me the job was challenging because
especially because it required skills I had not previously developed: working with the public, adhering to a 8:45am
to 5pm work day with a specific hour for lunch, reading newspapers and
magazines for content and researching questions in the fields of business,
tourism and Canadian-American relations, meticulously keeping statistics,
accepting that I was at the bottom of the library’s totem pole with Curtis, the
library director, and Judith both above me.
I
had a lot to learn about interpersonal relations -- Judith became very
resentful when I used what I thought were my superior writing skills to edit a
piece she had written. Tension increased
between Judith and me with her hypochondriac tendencies, her hypoglycemic need
to open and eat a can of tuna in the half hour before lunch, suffusing the air
with a fishy smell that I hated.
Thankfully, that fever of resentment broke one day when we each reached
out and did something considerate for the other.
Another
transformation happened when I decided to discard the prevalent attitude that
dealing with the public was a burden: I realized that attitude, common in public
servants, made the job more unpleasant, so I began to serve the callers and
visitors with a real desire to help them.
I was rewarded with greater satisfaction and pride in my work. After Judith resigned and left for other
work, Curtis promoted me to her position.
One
caller who insisted on something that I could not provide was angry enough to
call Curtis and complain about me. I
appreciated that Curtis always had to keep in mind that the library budget and
staff could be cut if the Information Center (Library) did not justify its
existence to the Consulate officers and Canadian government. Curtis had been in the army and was strong on
the “chain of command,” including in the library, but he had the wisdom first
to explain his concern to me and then to have his superior, the Cultural
Attache, speak with me. To my amazement, the Attache, Anne Garneau, focused less on the
incident than on my hopes for my future.
She even came out to Astoria for supper with me at a Greek restaurant in
that ethnic neighborhood of delis, moussaka, and lemon potatoes.
My
friend Marilyn was seriously considering applying to a program to become an art
therapist at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn and asked if I would like to go with
her to a weekend workshop at Pratt.
Throughout that Saturday and Sunday, we made collaborative painting and
poetry on huge pieces of paper on the floor with everyone supporting and
encouraging each other. Attending it
burst open my enthusiasm for self-expression through art made with inexpensive
materials and with no thought as to whether and how the product would be
judged.
After
that weekend, I began making art on my own and writing poetry, both of which I
often took to show Millie. I wrote a
fairytale which I illustrated with altered, non-realistic images I had produced
from black and white negatives but using the color lab at ICP.
Taking
my Poem to my Therapist
I fear she will think
“Like a cat
bringing a dead bird
to lay on the back porch
my client brings a poem each week
by herself
is not enough”
this is my answer
to myself and to her imagined scorn
“Beyond posturing
beyond neurotic elaboration of pain
my poems are made
like steps in snow
going somewhere
and despite my fear
and self-protecting disparagement
the making
and the showing
has become more crucial
than the intangible
potential of perfection.
One
Friday evening Marilyn and I looked in the New York Times for an activity for
that evening. We noticed a “country
dance” being held in the basement hall of a church on 13th
street. When we arrived, the dance was
already in progress, and a number of men quickly asked us to be their partners
even though we were completely inexperienced.
I found the music lifted my spirits, the attention of men eager to be
our partners made me feel beautiful and desirable, the dancing was so much fun…
that I came back repeatedly for the Friday and Saturday evening dances. So often I arrived after a draining week at
work and my always-hovering depression, but the contra music and dance lifted me
out of the blues. I took note of one
man’s tee-shirt: “I come/I flirt/I dance/I leave.”
I, too, relished the
interactions with guys without expectation of romantic follow-up.
One
man, who danced in
wooden shoes, asked me to dance
and suddenly the atmosphere changed as a group of the leading people in charge
approached and asked us to leave. I
stood confused by the sudden change from community spirit, and the organizers
of the dance apparently realized my predicament. “You didn’t come with him?” Daniel had been hassling women and using
crude explicit language to them. He was
ejected but waited outside. I am forever
grateful to the handsome blond man from the band took it on himself to walk me
to the subway to avoid Daniel hassling me further.
I
encountered Daniel later at weekend dances to which I traveled and where he
repeatedly asked me to dance with him.
At one dance, I relented, but, as soon as he used inappropriate sexual
language with me, I told him I would never dance with him again, and I walked
away. I have wondered if he saw me as
vulnerable, perhaps because was not sufficiently rude to him initially to
discourage him, that he persisted for years until I finally spoke so definitely
to him.
Friends
from the dance, like Sol and Martha,
repeatedly told me I should go to the weekend dances held in various locations
away from New York, but I was so frugal
that I contented myself with the $7-8 dances in Duane Hall on 13th
street. Eventually they lured me to the
weekend New England Folk Festival outside Boston, where they had hospitality in
the home of a fellow dancer. The group
of half dozen folks staying with her stayed up well past the end of the dance,
talking, making music, drinking wine.
For me, the all-absorbing weekend was so marvelous that I wrote a poem
celebrating contra dance:
I walk all alone
through day after day
searching for healing
while I work, when I pray
always surprised
when the band starts its song
how daffodils bloom
where all was so wrong
how the first do-ci-do
washes out pain
like a morning in springtime
a shower of rain
what is it in dancing
that helps me let go
to swirl in the currents
to move with the flow?
when I dance with a partner
who adds twirls to a swing
our bodies converse
our creation takes wing
the eyes of a stranger
reflect my delight
enclose my aloneness
put stars in my night
I guide a new dancer
I flirt with a friend
I laugh at my mis-steps
celebrate winter’s end
when I dance with companions
I feel balanced, not odd
I share my aliveness
with other fragments of God.
Single
men were often in shorter supply for these weekends than single women like me
who often found themselves on a waiting list as I did for a weekend dance to be
held in New Jersey in mid-March 1992. By
Thursday of that week, I’d decided to
cancel so I could make alternate plans,
but the Consulate work was so intense that I neglected to do so and early
Friday I heard that I was in. After work
I met Sol, Martha and Evie for the drive across the Hudson.
I
don’t remember anything remarkable about the Friday evening dance but, during
the Saturday morning contra, my partner and I were dancing up the line when a
man progressing down the line with his partner for that dance, introduced
himself to me as we passed, “Ham Topping.” After that contra session was
finished, I planned to go to the workshop introducing an African-American
tradition of making rhythmic music by beating with your hands on various parts
of your body. Ham went with me to the
workshop and did percussion vigorously enough that he apparently had bruises on
his lips when he went back to work on the following Monday. I have wondered how his colleagues reacted to
his bruised lips if he told them he had met a woman at the dance that he was
interested in dating.
Sol
and Martha had warned me that they planned to leave early Sunday afternoon,
before the dance weekend was over. When
Ham offered to drive me back to New York, I gladly accepted the chance to stay
and dance more. On the drive back, we
talked of our mutual interests in active outdoor pursuits, hiking and canoeing.
As
I recall, our first date was his invitation to a contra dance on Long
Island. That Friday, I took the Long
Island Railroad after work out towards the end of Long Island. I arrived at the arranged station and watched
as passengers quickly disembarked and disappeared. Alone on the platform, I had just enough time
to begin wondering if I had misjudged the man when it became apparent that we
were waiting at opposite ends of the platform.
Hamilton
endeared himself to me: he had brought
fruit to tide me over until we would reach the seafood restaurant where he had
arranged for us to have dinner with his adult daughter Adrienne. He and I then went to his local contra dance
at Smithtown.
Another
early date was hiking one Saturday,
also on Long Island. As the day advanced, I became hungrier
and hungrier and eventually raised the question about lunch. A man who often skipped lunch while working
or hiking, he had not brought lunch and I had not brought any of my usual
“emergency supplies” with me. He did
have a box of M&M’s with him, and I devoured them.
He
and a group of male friends had planned an early May hiking trip to the
Adirondacks, and he invited me to join them.
Friday late afternoon, after work at the Consulate, I stood on the
corner of Avenue of the Americas outside Rockefeller Center until their car
picked me up. New York City was blooming
with springtime – red and yellow tulips down the median of Park Avenue, flowering
trees in Central Park – but the Adirondacks were still in late winter, deep
snow that we post-holed through and raging streams of meltwater.
Adirondack
Hike
I have kept myself free
of romantic entanglements
since the last bruising encounter
so why did I agree to a hike
with this man?
he has dated women
from singles groups
whose idea of hiking
is strolling
hand in hand
in the park
when magnolias are in bloom
his test
of whether I am
a rugged outdoors woman
does not faze me
accustomed to enduring
Rocky Mountains and Himalayas
I know the wrong side of crevasses
and parched places
where the only water
is precious spoonfuls
from mud puddles
in the Adirondack wilderness
our feet post-hole in April snow
we sink to our knees
in crystalline mush
old snow
slippery mud
our steps up the mountain
slip back down
I begin
this journey again.
On
one hike, I stood hesitating on the bank, realizing once I committed myself to
crossing, there was no stable place to stop until I reached the other
side. I plotted my route then plunged
ahead, counting on dynamic balance to keep me from falling. Weeks later I wrote a poem expressing the
wish that I would live my life like I crossed that river.
Crossing a Spring Flood River
Hesitating to follow him
where he leaps from stone to stone
across a stream in full spring flood
I stand
tremor shaking my nerve
surrounded by winter’s old snow
like my own frozen energy
stubborn crystalline snow
thaws into spring
emerging from under ice
releasing spring torrents
finally, I launch myself
mind purged of all
except the next step
right foot on this stone
left on the diagonal ahead
no rock to stop on
until the other side
on the new bank
I look back
I want to live my life
like I crossed that river.
I
had brought a green pepper as a vegetable that could survive travel and be
added to our supper dish. After supper,
using my experience camping with Dad and my siblings, I gathered cones to use
as pot scrubbers for my dishwashing as I crouched by the stream.
Another
weekend, Hamilton invited me to go canoeing with him on the Esopus Creek. It was in spring flood high water so I was
impressed when Hamilton had us stop on a small island so that he could go to
the far end of the island and scout the river ahead for dangers. I stayed back holding our canoe when I saw
what looked like a paddle floating by; I threw myself forward and grabbed it,
then realized it was one of our paddles which had escaped. Later, when I learned a man had drowned that
weekend, his canoe capsized and pinned against a bridge abutment, I appreciated
Hamilton’s healthy sense of caution scouting the river.
Much
later, I learned that Hamilton had gone to various singles’ groups and
encountered women who declared they loved hiking but later it emerged that
hiking to them meant a Sunday stroll in the park. Not until then did it occur to me that
Hamilton may have been testing me.
While
Hamilton had been divorced for six years, his mother remained hopeful that he
and his ex-wife would reconcile. Knowing
that I would not be welcome at his mother’s for Christmas, Hamilton arranged
for he and I to stay Christmas Eve at his boyhood friend’s A-frame cottage
nearby to his parents. He would join
them and his family without me for his parents’ 50th anniversary
celebration on December 26, 1992.
When
we reached the A-frame, it was frigid, having had no heat. We each scrunched as small as possible in the
bed to conserve our body heat.
In
the morning, Christmas Day, we set out cross-country skiing, discovering too
late that we had left our lunch on the A-frame’s counter. Stopping to visit the Bucks, a family
Hamilton had known from childhood, we were invited in and sat chatting with the
Bucks, all large, heavyset individuals.
Newly baked cookies were aromatic on a plate attracting my attention
during a long conversation. Eventually
their dog approached and one of the Bucks asked, as the dog opened its mouth to
receive it, “Would you like a cookie?” I
said, “Woof.”
“Oh,
would you like one, too?” I sure would
and they were delicious!
After
skiing back to the Red Carpet Motel, we had Christmas dinner in the motel
restaurant, almost the only customers, and the meal all the more delicious from
our day’s exercise and our missing lunch.
The
day after Christmas, as we had planned, Hamilton dropped me at the Deer Run Ski
Hill while he went to join the celebrations.
I bought a $40 package of lift ticket, ski lesson and rental of
equipment. I had not skied since the
early 1980s in Ottawa and the Gatineau Hills; my scrabbled-together ski attire
made me look like a complete beginner.
The “group” lesson had no other clients; I was taken out by two instructors
who coached me up to my being able to ski down the dreaded “Head Wall,” which I
recognize now, was likely only easy Intermediate level in difficulty.
I
skied fanatically, intensely,
despite the bitter cold, until the last run when I descended and found Hamilton
and his elder daughter Stacia, a former ski racer, waiting. Through some confusion in the family’s plans,
they drove to Hamilton’s mother’s home.
Noticing me in the car, she exclaimed, “You!”
Thrilled
with my intense day of skiing, I did not feel excluded from the
celebration. During the following years
of accompanying Hamilton on visits to his parents, his mother accepted me,
including at Thanksgiving and Christmas gatherings. With a damaged shoulder from a car accident,
she let me set her hair. I wrote her
news of our doings in Guatemala in 1994-5.
Just before Christmas 1996 she had a heart attack. Hamilton and I drove to the Fox Hospital in
Oneonta, New York, and spent Christmas Eve in a motel room with Hamilton’s
sister, Diane.
We
had days of sitting around the hospital and, with the stress, Hamilton began
smoking again, which he had given up years before. On the Saturday following Christmas, I was
able to have a swim in the nearby Y pool.
A long energetic swim and then going to a shopping center where I bought
a pair of purple suede gloves was the hiatus I needed before the night of
crisis.
After
I was back in Pauline’s room, a woman doctor came in to ask Pauline whether she
wanted extreme measures taken to resuscitate her if she had a health
crisis. Pauline replied, “No,” but I
felt she was giving the expected answer and not what she herself wanted, so I
asked Pauline again and she replied, “Yes,” she did want whatever could be done
to save her life. I expect that doctor would have liked to
strangle me then and there because that evening, when we were in the cafeteria, we
heard the public address system call “Code Blue… Schmidt family.” Pauline had just had another heart
attack. As a relatively new additional to
the family and not a blood relation, I held back until the silence at her
bedside became too much, no one had anything more to say. Then I went forward to her bedside and spoke
of how well she had launched Hamilton and Diane into their lives, how much she
had given to their lives and to her grandchildren, how much she meant to them
all. When medical staff arrived to
perform a procedure, they sent away the family but had me stay until they
wheeled her to a separate room.
Perhaps
the procedure was to implant a pacemaker, but they emerged with the sad news that
it had not been successful. Then began
the long night’s vigil. Awake until 3am,
I was so grateful for the swim and escape from the hospital that helped me
endure the endless night. At 3am I was
tired enough that I found a secluded corner and briefly fell asleep. Waking, I joined Hamilton and family for the
remaining vigil as her blood pressure slowly dropped to zero without her
regaining consciousness.
We
left the hospital in the early morning as a new day was beginning, but no sign
of how the family’s lives were forever changed.
During
the memorial service, I overcame my fear of seeing a dead person and stood
beside where she lay, handsome and at peace.
Then I went outside and walking the streets, cried without restraint. Later, at home in Bennington, when Mom
phoned, I again began to weep, suddenly overcome. I think Mom was speechless, not having
witnessed my weeping since I was a young child.
Two decades later, the grief I felt for my own mother was during her sad
decline as the end approached and not after her release from the suffering of
Parkinson’s disease.
After
those early outdoor adventures together, Hamilton came into Manhattan to dances
at Duane Hall. We also went to dance
weekends such as the Flurry in February, the New England Folk Music Festival in
April and NOMAD in autumn. I encouraged
Hamilton to try English Country Dance which I’ d been encouraged to try by
David, a man I had dated very briefly.
David and a woman also from the dance community had been a couple, so
wrapped up in each other that they fascinated me, and I envied them. When she chose someone else and they broke
up, he seemed very lost, then asked me out.
We went to a Greek restaurant in Astoria where he glanced at the very
reasonable menu and told me it was too expensive, even though I expected to pay
my share. When he rose to leave, I
followed, embarrassed, and took it as a sign that I was but a pale substitute
for the woman he had lost. (My growing
intuition that led me to drop him was confirmed years later when, at a dance
Hamilton and I attended, he had the audacity to whisper in my face what he
would like to do to me sexually.)
As
I had struggled to adapt to English Country Dance’s choreographed dances and
moves when with David, so I saw Hamilton struggle
when I led him into trying that more challenging form of dance. Slowly Hamilton and I both improved, grateful
when thoughtful experienced dancers indicated subtly rather than with a loud or
forceful rebuke. We eventually made the
giant step of attending the spring Playford Ball, first driving over to a
warehouse of gowns, for weddings and other occasions, where gowns were $5 each.
My
roommate Cheryl suddenly decided to move out, leaving me with an apartment
costing $700 per month. Although it was
a big chunk of my salary, I decided to stay for the time being. My sister Mary came to visit and I was able
to take her to my favorite place, the flat roof of the three-storey building
from where we could look across to the Triborough Bridge and Manhattan.
I
met my neighbor Hannah, a vivacious red-headed Scot. Hannah, her woman friend Donna and I had
“chick chats” during which the bold and extroverted Hannah spoke freely of, for
instance, how different her current boyfriend, then husband’s, penis was from
the husband she had divorced.
Hamilton
suggested that I move with him into the house on Long Island that he was
sharing with his daughter Adrienne.
Although I agreed, I was so obviously stressed on the day we were moving
that Hamilton suggested we call it off.
But, when he appeared from the attic of the Long Island house, shirtless
but wearing a woman’s blonde wig, I abandoned my apprehensions and decided he
might be fun to live with.
From
the house in Valley Stream, Hamilton would drive me to the train station each
morning for my Long Island Rail Road ride into Penn Station from where I would
walk the half or 2/3 mile to the Consulate.
When I returned after work, he would be waiting in his Forest Ranger
uniform and truck, a major change for me, used to being a loner and to
wistfully looking at other couples meeting each other.
In
1991, before I met him, Hamilton had taken a leave from work to through-hike
the Appalachian Trail. Pushing himself
to hike as far as he could each day, he tore a muscle in his leg and had to
leave the Trail but, with his plan to retire after 34 years as a forest ranger,
he intended to complete the AT. His
other immediate plan for his retirement was to serve in the Peace Corps. He invited me to go with him on the AT and,
not wanting to miss the opportunity for an adventure, I decided to resign my
position at the Consulate. During my
five years working in the library, I had succeeded in persisting through
challenges that required strengths that did not come naturally to me but which
I had to develop. I had learned to
collaborate with colleagues, to accept superiors’ decisions, and to take pride
and satisfaction in what I had considered work so much lower than my ambitions
had been in my high school career.
Our
preparation for the Trail meant my buying good quality hiking boots, a good
quality and comfortable backpack and sleeping bag. For much of my life I had chosen the frugal
option and suffered through the consequences – borrowing a cheap, belt-less
pack for a multi-day backpacking expedition in the Canadian Rockies and
discovering why good packs have a waist belt (I improvised one with my trousers
belt but still suffered aching shoulder muscles throughout the trip). Spending my money to get good equipment was a
new and heady experience. At home, I
laid out what I planned to take and,
packing it with a full water bottle, walked around our house, seeing if I could
manage the 27 pounds.
Hamilton
and I left on the Amtrak train for Harper’s Ferry, West Virginia where we had a
room booked in an elegant old inn.
Leaving New York, I had a sense of unreality and of a major chapter in
my life ending.
The
morning after reaching Harper’s Ferry, we took another train about 10 miles
south to the shelter from which Hamilton had left the trail in 1991. I made photos of Hamilton smelling the
blossoming bushes to show his mother my carrying out her instructions to “Get
him to slow down and smell the flowers.”
Carrying only day packs, we hiked north back towards Harper’s Ferry but,
despite the light load, I began feeling worse and worse. Everything in my body ached. Hamilton started going a stretch ahead of me
on the trail and holding out his arms for me to come to him for a rewarding
hug.
When
we finally reached Harper’s Ferry and our hotel, I gave myself a hot bath and
went to bed, not joining Hamilton for dinner.
The next morning the weather had changed; rain was falling heavily but
we donned our rain gear and headed out.
Before we had gone far, I picked up a branch from the ground to use as a
walking stick. Soon I picked up a second
one, finding they helped me feel balanced, that I was hiking with my whole
body, as I felt driving the MGB with clutch and gears as well as accelerator
and brakes. Despite the heavier load and
foul weather, I felt healthy and enthusiastic, the misery of the day before all
gone. Much later, I began to suspect
that first day’s physical agony was a manifestation of emotional turmoil,
perhaps inevitable grieving for the life I had left.
When
we reached the first shelter, Hamilton was cold, perhaps hypothermic. He got into his sleeping bag while I made hot
tea and a hot supper. By the next
morning, he had recovered, and we continued
north on the trail some describe as the “Long Green Tunnel.” In some areas gypsy moth larva hung from the
trees apparently seeking cool breezes but also dangling in our faces and
nipping our skin.
We
met hikers such as the vigorous young men whose trail names were Lionheart and
Stranger and who hiked 30+ miles in a day,
and much slower hikers like Moxie Turtle of whom it was said, “Moxie, if you
were going any slower, you’d be going backwards. Often by the last few miles I was tired and
struggling to keep going, so I was amazed,
when we reached one shelter,
to see a young man energetically jumping around collecting firewood to make a
campfire. Front-seat Finn had got his
trail name when he was seen beside a driver covering the distance between
shelters the easy way.
Hikers
were always comparing miles covered in a day as well as comparing
equipment. With no chance of competing
in the miles-per-day rivalry, I chose writing as my forte and wrote in the
logbook of the shelters we stayed in.
During the long hours of hiking, I made up rhyming verses, many of which
were alternate words to hymns or campfire songs, but all relevant to our
experience hiking.
In
Duncannon we stayed in an old decrepit hotel where most hikers stayed. We had to rummage in a hall closet to find
pillowcases. Finding a “mother lode” of
them, I stole another to make myself wing-like sleeves to cover my arms that
were breaking out in a rash from the combination of sun and pain killer. I had been prescribed Naproxen for my aching
hips that protested their role as beasts of burden carrying the extra weight of
my pack). In the town of Boiling
Springs, we went into town, planning to get provisions, stay in a nice
comfortable Bed and Breakfast and treat ourselves to a half-gallon of ice cream
each, the traditional way to mark reaching the half way point of the AT. We found all B&Bs closed; Hamilton was
unable to get a ride back from the grocery store, and the weather too cold to enjoy
our ice cream.
In
another town where we booked a motel for a break from the Trail, we bought, for
our suppers, the “special” in a deli which included choice of drink. I chose Mountain Dew thinking it was like
Ginger ale, not aware that it contained caffeine; I did not sleep that night. In the morning, hungover from lack of sleep,
I felt so miserable that I could only put one foot in front of the other,
enduring the day, regretting that we had stopped in that town and that I had
“wasted” the treat of sleeping in a real bed.
I resolved never again to drink Mountain Dew.
Reaching
one hovel of a shelter, Hamilton suggested that we hike another three miles to
a hiker hostel where we could get a shower and sleep in bunk beds. I agreed,
but those were among the longest, most aching three miles I have ever
experienced. Finally, at the hostel, we
each had a can of soda and an ice cream bar, “trail magic” from our host who
specified “one per customer.”
The
230 miles through Pennsylvania were also difficult because of the rocks, many standing on
edge making our feet sore from walking on them.
Being away from news, for us the O J Simpson media event was only a few
vague whispers from other hikers. We
were also surprised and caught off-guard one mid-day, when the sky turned dark,
not realizing it was a solar eclipse, as ancient people had been long ago.
One
late afternoon we arrived where Icebox and Folly, older hikers from Britain,
had set up for the night. We had got to
know and like them from other nights on the Trail but, still feeling energetic
and with the late afternoon sun lighting everything in golden glow, I voted for
our hiking further. In the next few
days, we heard they had left the trail because of painful joints becoming
unbearable. I had mistakenly assumed we
would see them repeatedly in the following days. Do I too often act as if there will be
another opportunity if I pass one by? Do
I too often second guess my choices, expecting that whatever decision I make
must be the wrong one?
I
faced a similar difficult decision. Pain in my hips was constant from carrying
the extra weight of my pack, and Hamilton declared that I was not meant to be a
“beast of burden.” Each day I consumed
“Vitamin I,” ibuprofen, the hiker’s painkiller.
From an orthopedic doctor, I had been prescribed two big leg braces
which Hamilton referred to as my “horse collars.” The doctor had also given me a prescription
for Naproxen, which produced a skin rash when I was exposed to the sun. I was a strange sight, wearing a simple
cotton dress I had bought in India, wings made from the pillowcase to protect
my arms from the sun, sheik’s headdress to shield my head from sun, horse
collars on my legs, heavy leather boots on my feet.
0ne
evening I was so exhausted and aching when we stopped for the night that,
washing myself at the edge of the river, I fell and cut myself. I could not imagine being able to continue
hiking in the morning. Better than any
medication, the blessing of sleep!
Waking next day, I was as ready to hike as any other morning…though not
as ready as Hamilton, who would wake, get up quickly and pack up noisily (to my
ears) banging pots and pans. I would
groggily make my instant coffee and escape with my cup to the refuge of the
woods until I was ready to face his energy and eagerness to get hiking and make
the next shelter as early in the day as possible.
Reaching
New York state, we experienced the extreme heat and humidity of east coast
summer. Carrying our heavy backpacks up
hills increased our bodies’ heating up and sweating, which I endured, longing
for the next break. Whenever I came to a
large flat rock, I would lie down on it, my pack still on my back but no longer
a weight on my body. One lunch, beside a
river, the cold water felt delicious on my face and hands but the cheddar
cheese I pulled out for our lunch, that I had so looked forward to, was
unappetizingly dripping with grease from the heat.
A
colleague of Hamilton’s and his wife had invited us to visit them in New York
state. The wife even offered to drive me
out to the bus station if I wanted to leave the Trail. That night, as we camped in a shed, I
agonized internally and to Hamilton about the decision. I have always been able to endure, even put
myself through punishing situations.
Giving up before completing something started was the hardest part, especially
since it meant acknowledging defeat while Hamilton was still ready to forge
on. Hamilton did not try to influence my
decision; he recognized that carrying the extra weight on my back required me
to take a steady diet of ibuprofen to deal with the pain in my hips.
It
was wrenching to leave Hamilton and travel home but, once inside our Long
Island home, having a shower and a refrigerator with cold food and drink felt
like heaven. I had just a few days of
bliss before Hamilton phoned and asked me to come back to the Trail to support
him for the remainder of his hike.
I
felt I could not refuse. Tearing myself
away from the comforts of home, I drove our Mercury Marquis, a former police
car, north to meet Hamilton. Our days
now had the pattern of Hamilton’s carrying only a day pack with food, water and
rain gear, while I carried the tent, breakfast and supper supplies, cook stove,
my camera and other indulgences including books and my journal. I would meet Hamilton at an agreed spot after
his hike each day, often arriving late because I would find so much of interest
as I explored the nearby area – a farm with screaming peacocks displaying their
tails to drab and uninterested pea hens lured me to take peacock portraits; a
street fair intrigued me with a booth of earrings made with birds’ feathers and
tiny bones from roadkill.
When
Hamilton entered the Hundred Mile Wilderness in Maine and I would be on my own
for several days since there were no road crossings where I could meet him, I
drove off from where we had been camped, planning to indulge in rafting a local
river. Only a few miles down the road I
stopped, realizing Hamilton had neglected to take his food bag. Even though it was only a few miles to drive
back, I realized I could not possibly catch up to him if I tried to hike in
after him. I drove back, unsure about
what to do but, noticing a young couple about to head into the Wilderness, I
asked if they would be willing to take his food bag since they would meet up
with him at the next shelter. They
agreed, which put my mind at ease. When
I met Hamilton several days later, I learned he had managed to get adequate
food, even before he received his food bag from the young couple, by digging
clams with another hiker and trading a shoe insole for candy bars.
We
reached the foot of our destination, Mount Katahdin, and spent the night before
our ascent with Yankee Buckeye and another hiker we’d got to know on the
Trail. Ascending the final mountain the
next morning, I repeatedly stopped to photograph the captivating views of the
ridges draped in mist while Hamilton’s drive was all for getting to the summit
and the completion of his 2200-mile Appalachian Trail hike.
From
the Trail’s end, in our rough hiking clothes,
we made a quick jump back to “civilization” to take part in the wedding of
Hamilton’s daughter Adrienne to Philippe Zimmerman. Hamilton wore his top hat to complete his
transformation from long-distance hiker to father of the bride. This was the beginning of my belonging in a
new way – I think of Adrienne and her sister Stacia as daughters-in-law rather
than the strictly correct “step-daughters,” since I had no hand in their
upbringing.
When
Adrienne and Philippe’s first child, Sophie Rose, was born May 23, 1997,
Hamilton and I were on an introductory white-water kayaking course. Possibly her birth occurred while Hamilton
was upside down in his capsized kayak, an unexpected eddy having flipped his
boat. On first seeing Sophie, I thought
she looked like a tiny bird. Her mother
was nervous about holding that precious tiny package, but I felt confident to
hold her, recalling my carrying Kyle when he was a baby.
Once,
when Adrienne and Philippe were visiting us in Bennington and were out for the
evening, leaving Hamilton and me looking after Sophie, Hamilton fell
asleep. I felt sleepy, too, but Sophie
was completely alert, her huge blue eyes so vivid and alive. She was happy as long as I stayed awake with
her and did not put her down. Later,
when I told my mother about the experience, she exclaimed, “When they are
awake, they are so awake!” Mom was happy
that I was having these experiences with a baby especially as I had not had my
own children.
When
Adrienne and Sophie, a toddler, visited us one summer, Sophie toddled naked towards the water at
Lake Shaftsbury with her hair a cloud of curls, inspiring a woman nearby to
exclaim, “She’s beautiful!”
Her
sister, Corinne Ruth, born 22 months later, February 1999, was a sweet-faced
doll who grew into a beautiful blonde little girl. Sophie’s pronunciation of her sister’s name,
Cori, became what everyone called her.
With my new name, “Yorna,” given me by both little girls, I felt myself
become, less the technically-correct “step-grandmother,” than a beloved “aunt”
relating to Hamilton’s grandchildren without having any of my own. Playing with them, taking them for walks, I
tended to follow their lead except when safety required more intervention. The girls had an art corner in their parents’
home where we three made paintings and objets d’art. When I took them on a walk from their grandmother
Nana Joyce’s home one Easter and one needed to pee, I introduced them to “Okay
to pee here in the woods” rather than rush the distance back to Joyce’s home.
Their
brother Jacob Benjamin, born June 5, 2001, looked very much like Sophie did as
a baby, I thought. The girls, Jake, and
I sometimes played in the playhouse in their New Jersey back yard. At our house, Jake, as a toddler, climbed on
the cellar bannister, while I stood nearby ready to catch him.
At
the time of Jake’s birth, Hamilton and I were on a trip traveling in Maine and
the Canadian Maritimes in Ham’s diesel truck with our kayaks on top and bikes
attached to the truck. We stopped in
Acadia National Park where we went to the top of Cadillac Mountain and biked on
the park paths. In Nova Scotia we
visited Peggy’s Cove which my family had visited on our 1964 travels.
Outstandingly
vivid for me was kayaking south of Peggy’s Cove in my raspberry-colored kayak
in the ocean below the high cliffs that held sea caves at their foot. I paddled past numerous caves, hovering
outside and evaluating each before I decided to enter one that I considered
safe. Being inside the green sanctuary
as patterns of light played on the rock walls was truly a spiritual and
religious experience, being held in a womb of the earth. I treasure this beautiful experience in one
of earth’s “thin places” although Hamilton later pointed out that a rogue wave
could have caught me inside the cave.
Another
intense kayaking experience, also in Nova Scotia, happened when we were parked
for the night on the bay opposite the fortress Louisburg. I woke much earlier than Hamilton and decided
to kayak along the shore. Eventually
reaching the beach outside Louisburg, I landed and explored the rocky shore. When I turned around to go back to my kayak,
I saw with a shock that it had been carried out by the rising tide. My first instinct was to plunge into the bay
and swim after it, but I saw that it
was being carried away too fast for me to catch it. The water also was cold enough that I
realized I could become too chilled to save myself despite my being a strong
swimmer and that I could drown. I noted
that, from the direction of the wind, the kayak was likely to be washed up on
the far shore if I left it to take its own course.
I
walked into the fort, carrying my paddle, feeling like an invading alien
approaching Louisburg from the back, especially as the fort was not yet open to
the public. I explained myself to the
few staff I encountered. I had a long hike
back to our camper where Hamilton had woken and was shaving, his day just beginning,
while I had already had more than enough adventure for the week.
Ham
drove me in his truck along the shore road I’d walked. I watched for the raspberry color of my kayak
and spotted it amongst the reeds. We had
chosen the easiest recovery method. I
climbed down from the road and paddled my kayak back to our camp.
After
driving the beautiful Cabot Trail on Cape Breton Island, the northern part of
Nova Scotia, we crossed by ferry to Port Aux Basques on the southwest corner of
Newfoundland. We drove north as far as
the Viking settlement on the northern tip of the island and visited the remains
of what was likely the earliest European settlement in the Americas. Leaving our truck in Newfoundland, we crossed
by ferry to the Labrador coast where we stayed in a Bed and Breakfast. Before leaving home, we had considered
driving through Quebec to reach that remote coast, but the 550 miles of unrelieved
forest discouraged that plan.
When
we drove back into the United States, a helpful US immigration officer, seeing
that I was not a US citizen, asked me how long I planned to be in the USA and
mentioned that he hoped it would not be more than six months. He obviously saw that we were a couple and
helped me avoid an answer that could have denied me entry to the US, as my
mother had long feared would happen.
My
tendency had long been to take a risk and not focus on the consequences but
tell myself, “It will probably work out”—no doubt a strategy from my childhood
to overcome my fears. I have lost count
of how many trips I made, between Canada and
the US, while living in the
US as an illegal alien after my diplomatic passport expired. Except when crossing the border, I could
forget my undocumented status because I had roots and a niche in the community
of Bennington where I was accepted in our church, Green Mountain Club and town,
not looking different than the majority of people and with only a slight
Canadian accent. However, on one trip
returning from Alberta, a US immigration officer in the Edmonton airport,
apparently suspicious, questioned me, then put me in a small room alone where I
waited as time got closer and closer to my being late for my plane. Realizing that if I “broke” and confessed,
that confession would be reason to deny me entry to the US, I waited it
out. The officer let me go to the plane
with barely time to catch my flight.
The practical solution was that Hamilton and I marry; I
would then be in a much better position to obtain a green card and later US
citizenship. But I had long been
terrified of the commitment of marriage.
Apparently, as a very young child, I had asked about the difference
between my brother Glenn and me.
Receiving the answer that girls grew up to be mommies and boys grew up
to be daddies, I answered that I did not want to be either; I wanted to grow up
to be like Auntie Olive, who (at the time) was unmarried. After I grew up and was on a drive in the
country with a male friend whom I felt was overly intense in his feelings for
me, he offered me a wedding ring; I was afraid, no doubt unreasonably, that he
might kill me if I refused. While living
in Long Island, Hamilton and I had a serious, alienating verbal fight which I
happened to mention to a woman friend of his.
She told me “You have to realize Hamilton will never marry again.” When I replied that I did not want the
commitment of marriage, she exclaimed, “Then you are perfect for each other.”
After some years together, Hamilton would begin a
conversation suggesting “Maybe we should get married,” but he would usually
talk it out and come to the conclusion that we were fine the way we were. Unsure if I wanted that commitment, I would
usually contribute little to the debate, but I resented hearing it. At some point, I believe Hamilton suggested
we make a decision the following year.
When the next spring arrived and I found myself reluctant to raise the
subject, I asked to speak with our pastor about my own hesitation. She asked me what I believed I would be
giving up by being married... and
whether I would indeed have to give up those aspects of my life. I took the conversation home to Hamilton who
seemed reluctant to talk about the issue, and merely said “Let’s just do it.”
After the decision and before I phoned my mother to
tell her and make it official, I threw myself on the floor in a room where I
could be alone and prayed that it might be the right decision. On hearing the news, Mom was quiet for what
felt like the longest time, perhaps wondering if it was really true or whether
we might be “pulling her leg.”
With my love of creating in words, I wrote most of the
wedding service with parts for my siblings.
Hamilton ‘s daughters Adrienne and Stacia stood up with him. I included one of my poems comparing Hamilton
and me to trees in autumn that had grown separately then become
intertwined. In Mary Lee-Clark’s message
to us during the ceremony, she spoke of how my poem mentioned all parts of the
trees except roots. Later, I pondered
her remarks and modified my poem to include roots since Bennington is the first
place I have ventured to put down roots and Hamilton the first man to whom I
could make that commitment.
We are Autumn
We are two trees -
trunks separate
for the first five feet
then intertwined
We are arms -
reaching around the girth
of a giant tree;
we are moist moss
and dry lichens -
symbiotic!
We are rough bark
and slippery needles,
we are dry leaves
whispering to each other,
we are October’s blaze
and November’s muted colors
We are loose rocks
careening downhill,
we are weathered logs
carried by the river
We are sweating uphill
and lying with sunlight
on translucent eyeballs -
opening to see
distant purple mountains
We are roots growing into the earth
in this place
that is our home
and will be our shroud
We are an autumn couple
walking together.
The morning of July 7 began with Hamilton’s
granddaughters walking up to the nearby cemetery with Mary, Ruth, Hamilton and
me, picking wildflowers from the ditch on the way, then picking more growing
wild around the cemetery. While we were
picking, Glenn and family arrived,
his daughters Noor and Sherry joining the floral gathering. Later those two beautiful and
fashion-conscious nieces of mine did my makeup.
Back at our home, Kyle led the decorating of our back
yard. The weather forecast was uncertain, so we considered
holding the reception in our church’s social hall, but Hamilton ultimately made the
courageous decision that we would set up in our garden.
At the conclusion of the ceremony, Hamilton danced me
down the aisle to the song “It had to be You” played by organist John Riddle, who gave us
beautiful music through the service. I
was unaware that he was substituting for his wife Cindy, organist and bell
choir director whom I ‘d asked to play for our wedding and for whom I’d bought
the book John said she would like. Don
Bell videotaped the ceremony as his gift to us, letting me appreciate the music
and the ceremony later.
Outside the church, I saw my mother, whom Mary
Lee-Clark later told me was “so proud,” talking with our friend Lynn. So many
friends and relatives were sharing our celebration, such a marvelous contrast
to my years of feeling a loner and a misfit.
When Hamilton and I returned to our home, the garden
was transformed into a magical festivity of blue and white table décor,
bouquets of flowers and suspended lights.
Our caterer took care not only of feeding our guests but even brought me
a plate, as I was floating far too above the ground and involved with everyone to
think about eating. Roger read Bodil’s
toast to the bride, written from our shared experience of university, work with
External Affairs and our more recent reconnecting of her family of four –
husband Bernard, son Etienne, daughter Madeleine – with Hamilton and me.
Late evening, I was surprised to find I was still
wearing my elegant, heeled pumps, not
having even found them uncomfortable as I sailed on the blissful boat of family
and community support for Hamilton and me.
The next morning, July 8, twenty-one of us made the
four-hour drive to the camp on South Lake that Hamilton had for the week of
July 8-15, as a member of the North Harpersfield Hunting Club (though
apparently no one has shot a deer in the last 30 years. Hamilton’s diesel truck pulled our 1972
trailer, which we set up on the lawn for my parents. We filled all the beds and had a tent
outside. I stood barefoot and in a long
dress cooking at the industrial stove.
During one meal, someone showed a square of white fabric and the
question arose “What is this used for?”
We challenged ourselves to come up with one hundred uses, of which I
recall one was “emergency shroud.”
My brother Glenn and his son Ross swam out to the
sandbar in the middle of the bay. Cori
stood talking with my father in his lawn chair.
Mom, Adrienne, Sophie and I played Scrabble, one of my mother’s favorite
ways to play with words. The day after
we arrived, I went to lie down after lunch; Sophie came into the bedroom to
read to me and I woke up hours later, no doubt finally able to relax after the
excitement of our wedding. Dad noticed
Jake and I out on the party boat docked at our pier and soon after commented to
me, “Things have worked out for you.” I
expect this surprised him after decades of my wandering without marriage or
career.
Ruth stayed after everyone else left and paddled a
canoe with us at Old Forge, where we went for a day. My back was still sore from a strain during a
pre-wedding paddle on the Deerfield River, so I sat, a casual but regal
Cleopatra as Hamilton and Ruth paddled.
Another day, we three paddled our kayaks around the South Lake Bay, the
first time in years that Ruth and I spent time without the whole family.
From 1995, when Hamilton and I moved to Bennington,
memories held chronologically melted into themes. Rather than recalling what happened in
specific years, I see strands of different yarns of my life woven into the
fabric of my finally settling and putting down roots.
I thought depression first descended on me after the
1976 motor vehicle accident when I was pursuing my Masters of Arts at the
University of Windsor. Now I see that my
anorexia may have been an early precursor inadequately resolved, that sprang
out in a different form. The medication
given me by the university clinic doctor so miraculously let my mind clear and
become able to concentrate again that, when later episodes of depression
struck, I spent decades searching, trying to get back on that medication. During those decades, I relied on swimming
almost every day to relieve the tight bands that exerted pressure on my
temples. Taking risks and surviving them
also gave me temporary relief, as did extreme physical exertion. But none of these stopped my fear of being on
the open 42nd floor of Riverterrace or my fascination with the
Consulate’s file on suicide. I felt I
would not choose to end my life but, in imagination, art and writing, I toyed
with it.
In the late 1990s, I finally made the change from
trying different prescriptions authorized by our family doctor to making an
appointment with a psychiatrist. I got
in through my willingness to drive to Latham, NY a winter day when weather had
caused scheduled patients to cancel. The
psychiatrist, after learning of depression running in my family, merely added a
second medication to the one I was taking, avoiding a possibly lengthy
withdrawal from the one before I could try another. Eager to attach the depression with all guns
blazing, I asked if he would recommend talk therapy as well. He replied, “No. My experience is that, as soon as the patient
starts feeling better because of the medication, they drop the talk
therapy.” I laughed but in surprise
because my therapy with Millie had been so hugely important in my life.
Finally, taking an antidepressant that worked, lifting
me out of a constant struggle to avoid being dragged down in depression, I
found my life less a chronological progression than a weaving of multiple
themes that have been part of my life now settled in the town of Bennington –
my search for the Divine, my connection with Nature, Travel, Dancing, Swimming
and Family which I am exploring in separate writings.
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