New Music, Old Brain

One of the many things that perplex me is the content of contemporary popular music. Clearly this is much beloved of everyone born after World War II. In the past I was able to understand and appreciate some of it, but I am totally baffled by the latest music. I search for melody and find none. I listen to the lyrics, and if I can make them out, they are still incomprehensible. Why is this? Is my brain so set in its ways, so adverse to new things that I can no longer appreciate the new?

I was sitting in church with a good friend, my age, when I noted in the bulletin that we were going to sing, “Come in, come in and sit down, you are part of the family.” I was quite tickled because I know how much he dislikes the hymn. I try to be open-minded about these new hymns, but oh how I miss the old ones. On the rare occasion when we do sing one of these old ones, I will often find tears appearing in my eyes.

When our son got married, our daughter-in-law had a lovely thought. Because my father couldn’t be there, we would sing his favorite hymn, "Immortal Love", by John Greenleaf Whittier. “We may not climb the heavenly steeps to bring the Lord Christ down.” She photocopied the words and music for the guests, but the organist played an unfamiliar tune that my brother and I couldn’t sing, a terrible disappointment. I then realized how much the tune and the words belonged together.

Often before the organ prelude Irma Brewer would play a few of the old hymns on the piano. Last week she died, and a week from Sunday, in her memory, we are going to have a hymn sing an hour before the regular service. I wouldn’t miss it for the world.

Stages Along the Way

I see from writing this blog that in my memory I divide my life into stages. The first stage, childhood, ended in 1952 when I went off to college and became peripatetic: college, Texas, Connecticut, and North Carolina.

In 1965 we moved to Canada. This third stage, the period when my life was immersed in children, my own and the neighbours’, finished in 1978. In that time also I began to write regularly, four novels.

In 1978 the fourth stage began when my son went off to university, beginning the emptying of the nest, heart-rending but satisfying too. By 1984, the three of them had left, coming back of course for periods, but essentially, gone.

My first published novel came out in 1982. In the next twelve years I had five novels out, taught full time at UNB for a brief period, was on several Canada Council juries, traveled throughout the Atlantic Provinces, to Ottawa and Toronto and Minnesota, was writer in residence at two universities, had two different offices away from home, and began to write arts journalism.

In 1994 the last of the five novels came out, and my husband retired from UNB. My father died in 1997. I seem to have been marking time in this stage, as if I really don’t know where I am going and where I will arrive. Lately, though, I am feeling as if I am close to arriving at the inn of this sixth stage, have rested for many nights, and am about to start out on the seventh stage, perhaps the last. Since March, on this blog, I have been tracing my way from birth, in no particular order, just as memories come to me. I am going to re-read the blog from the beginning and re-read the five novels, to see if I can discern something in this tracing that would give me a hint about the next stage.

The Miracle Cactus

The Miracle Cactus

Twenty-four years ago, on the occasion of the launch of my first book, a friend gave me one of two cactus leaves she had brought back from California. It was a special and rare cactus, she said, and would produce beautiful flowers. I planted it; it took root and grew. For nineteen years it produced a lot of green leaves but no flowers, and then, inexplicably, buds appeared and indeed the resulting flowers were spectacular. For the first two years, it blossomed once a year, but now it blossoms three times a year. As far as I can remember, I did nothing different to induce it to bloom. We would comment on what an ugly plant it was, but because it was a special gift, we did not have the heart to throw it out. Was it our loyalty and patience that prompted it to produce? Even after five years, Bill and I are still amazed and pleased each time it blooms.

The Hubba Hubba Night Club

I mentioned The Hubba Hubba Night Club in a recent post. When I was 10, my parents bought a beautiful late Victorian house. It had a two-story barn of the kind that was usually built in the village proper, with clapboards that had to be kept painted. Inside there was dark wood, huge beams, mysterious little closets, holes and a winding staircase to the second floor. My father used the first floor as his woodworking workshop. Upstairs there were trunks filled with treasures: a Gibson girl style jacket, green with black velvet. A maroon 1930ish evening gown. A fez. A Russian type fur hat. High heel shoes. A beautiful cloisonné stamp with the initial of the previous owner, N, other small pieces.

My best friend Ellie and I played their endlessly. I invented many scenarios, but the one I remember best is The Hubba Hubba Night Club. We scrawled the name in chalk on the door to the stairs. It is still there. It goes without saying that a ten year old living in a small Massachusetts village had never been in a night club. How did I even know such things existed? As I remember, our play consisted of our dressing up in the costumes, and singing and dancing.

Someone suggested that we get dressed up and walk the two miles to entertain a woman in the village, Isabelle, who had awful arthritis that completely crippled her. It was not long before the high heel shoes gave us blisters, the Gibson girl jacket was unbearably hot. We accumulated an entourage of boys on their bicycles intrigued by this parade. We got to Isabelle’s house, were welcomed enthusiastically by her mother, and ushered into the bedroom. I had never before seen such obvious suffering. We became shy, but we soldiered on, singing and dancing. I can’t remember which songs we sang, just that one of them was about a tropical isle. I think these were some of the words: “See the pyramids upon the Nile, na na na na na a tropic isle. Just remember na na na na na, you belong to me.”

The bedroom was on the front of the house (I think it must once have been the living room), and I could look out and see our entourage – Bobby Peterson and Richard Haberman are the only ones I remember – waiting for us, eager to hear about our adventure. Isabelle seemed to enjoy our performance. The mother served us kool-aid, urged us to come back again, and we said we would, but we never did.

Stephen May

Stephen May

Our friend Stephen May has an exhibit at the Beaverbrook Art Gallery this month and one at Gallery 78. The images below and above are from the Gallery 78 web site. He did the drawing of me that appears in my profile. I needed one for a short story being published in The Fiddlehead. The editor had decided that instead of photos, she would use drawings. I bought the drawing, and he obliged by framing it. We have two other works of his. One is a self-portrait and one is a drawing of our son. Stephen is widely regarded as one of the best artists in New Brunswick. His BAG exhibit was curated by our Lieutenant Governor, his Honour Hermenegilde Chiasson.

Stephen May

Differences?

One Word (aka Zhoen) left a comment and a link to a newspaper article about my last post. She disagrees with my conclusion that women are different from men. I should elaborate. I would agree that women and men are essentially the same, that humans are essentially not much different from apes, or dogs, or ants: living, breathing, consciousness-filled creatures whose reason for being is the big mystery we would all like to solve and alas never will. But the gender differences I am talking about are incremental and small in the great scheme of things. Yes, it is true that these differences have been exaggerated, “over inflated,” and it is thought that this exaggeration is generally to the detriment of women.

The article quotes a psychologist saying that boys want to play with boy toys and girls with girl toys so there must be some deep biological difference. Our son played with GI Joe dolls and our daughter with Barbie dolls. In both cases the joy seemed to be mainly in constructing and creating: scenarios, forts out of cardboard boxes, dresses out of bits of cloth and ribbon. Our daughter remembers playing Barbie’s on Patricia’s back deck when she was about 10 and thinking, “Right now I’m as happy as I am ever going to be.” My son remembers the joy of playing in Dan’s basement with their accumulated GI Joe equipment. I must get them to tell me how exactly they played. Where exactly did the joy reside?

And while I am at it, I will try to remember where the joy resided in my own childhood games. Why was playing Sardines so exciting? Croquet? The Hubba Hubba Night Club?

The Female Brain

I have wondered about the profound change that came over me when I had my first baby. No woman expects this, and it is impossible to convince anyone until it has happened to them. One woman, who had expected to be able to go right back to work after her baby was born, said to me, “They told me I would be able to have a family and a career. But they lied.” When I read The Female Brain this change was made clear to me. “Motherhood changes you because it literally alters a woman’s brain—structurally, functionally, and in many ways, irreversibly.” For example, at the birth of her baby huge doses of the hormone oxytocin are released into the mother’s body, and the hormone is maintained by the physical connection to the baby. This hormone gives a woman a great high. When the physical connection is severed the hormone decreases and the stress of the lack is great. The oxytocin is further stimulated by holding other babies. I could have sat still holding my grandchildren for hours, the pleasure was so great. There is no joy comparable. The profound change of giving birth also affects the way a woman views the world, altruistically. I am simplifying the book of course.

But what happens as the woman gets old? These hormones dissipate; there are no more grandbabies or they live far away. And the great revelation for me in reading the book is why I no longer feel as if I want to take care of everyone. This deficiency has been making me feel guilty. When I read the chapter “The Mature Female Brain”, I thought, Eureka, yes this is how I feel and why I feel this way. This is why some post menopausal women fly the nest. In tracing my way from birth, I find I am now in an amazingly different frame of mind, wanting to look after myself, do things I want to do. I remember thirty years ago I was driving for meals on wheels, tending to every forlorn creature in sight, reading manuscripts for all sorts of people. At one point I realized I was burning myself out. In fact, I landed in the hospital.

The idea that women aren’t different from men (“biology is not destiny” is one way it is put) has always seemed to me to be ridiculous. How could they not be different, built so different, with such different hormones. One day after I had gone through menopause, I thought, in a flash of insight, This is the way men feel – no changes, no PMS, always the same. It was wonderful.

I have read three reviews of The Female Brain, one a so-so review and two slams. The reviews concentrate on Louann Brizendine’s use of generalizations of the pop culture variety, with no real scientific back-up. Women are more social, talk more, that sort of generalization. I ignored that part of the book. What I found so interesting was the more scientific account of the hormones in different stages of a woman’s life. Yes, it is true that her imagery was a little over the top: the woman’s brain was “marinated” in the hormones, for example. I don’t think women are better, more social, talk more, etc. but I do think there are probably reasons that there are not many women composers but there are many women novelists. Women are different from men, and the “political correctness” that makes it impossible to say that aggravates me.

Foolish Fantasy

Sometimes when I am overwhelmed by people, responsibilities, a houseful of disorganized stuff, I engage in a little fantasy. I run away from home with only the bare necessities and get a room (for some reason it always has green walls) where I read and write and have no contact with people.

I was thinking of this daydream this morning because we have a guest whose life is exactly that. He lives in a motel room, has only one friend, his barber (and he is nearly bald), and only three relatives, Bill and I and his brother from whom he is estranged. He carries the sum total of his possessions with him in a weekender bag, the kind that airline stewardesses drag behind them, and in a pillowcase which is about half full. He takes either a bus or a taxi where he needs to go.

The next time I begin my fantasy, I must remember what that kind of life would actually be like.

The Beta Version

I have migrated to Beta Blogspot, thanks to the recommendation of ukbookworm, and I am now supposed to be able to do wonderful things. I haven’t yet figured out what. Fiddling with the technical end of the computer is relaxing for me in the way that doing the crossword puzzle is, but exciting also, the way no crossword puzzle could be. I am now on Instant Messenger, thanks to my son and his WebCam, two other marvels. According to The Female Brain what is missing is the actual physical touch. More about that later.

Whoopee

When I got back from Maine, I had a lot of catching up to do, reading the blog posts on my list, back nearly a month. I had to read them because of my insatiable curiosity. My kids have always kidded me about this curiosity about other people’s lives. “Who’s their doctor?”, they mimic me. This is a practical question, the only way really to find out who is a good doctor and who is a mediocre one. You have to be roundabout in determining this. At one point I heard many tales of a back surgeon who was bad. Eventually, probing, I realized that the many tales was just one tale of a person who had a bad experience and had broadcast this widely. Probing further, I discovered that the surgeon in question was really very good. Fortunately I have never had to use this information because none of us has had to have back surgery.

Blogs do give me some of that same kind of information. For example, today Anecdotal Evidence writes about Isaac Babel, one of the few notable Russian writers I haven’t read, giving me the urge to find one of Babel’s books.

Reading some blogs is very much like reading published journals, the ones of May Sarton, for example. After I had read one of her journals, I read some of her poetry and one of her novels, Anger. They are not nearly as good as her journals. In fact, she writes about the experience on which the novel is based in one of her published journals. This is so much more immediate and unmitigated. In the blogs, I follow the adventures of a man moving into a new house, of a woman with a new baby and still having time to homeschool her children, of the comforts of a woman having a toothache, the details of ordinary lives, but with those details thought about, philosophized over.

A while ago I went through my blog list and took some off it because it was becoming unmanageable to read all of them daily. Recently I added two. There are millions of English blogs (since I am unilingual, those are the only ones I know) and I have only found a tiny percentage of them. I am sure there are many that I would find fascinating if only I could discover their whereabouts.

Because I took as my theme, tracing my life from birth, I do not write about the day to day as much as others do. Saturday night Bill and I watched the end of the Detroit Tigers game where the young players were so excited by their victory that they ran out into the stands and squirted champagne at the fans, unadulterated joy and high spirits. Wonderful. A few days ago the new premier put the first Aboriginal to be elected MLA into the cabinet as Minister of Justice and Attorney General. The Aboriginal MLA was so excited that he used the word “extremely” many times in the newspaper interview. Today in a quote of a few sentences he again used the word three times. Is he going to do a good job? I would bet on it. High spirits and joy and thoughtfulness. Ah yes.

Yesterday we had Thanksgiving at our lake camp with part of our family and some friends, a delicious meal, a beautiful warm day, leaves turned, great company. While we were there our daughter phoned to say she was to be in a commercial in which she has to swing from a chandelier, shouting “Whoopee.” "Whoopee," I say.

Being Reminded

In the Globe and Mail this morning is a thoughtful column by Neil Reynolds, the second in a series about an economics book by Dan Usher. Reynolds is one of several excellent Globe columnists, world class, in my opinion. He, Rex Murphy, Margaret Wente, and Christie Blatchford all have the ability to look at the world with fresh eyes and let me see various sides of any discussion. My idea of a good columnist is that he/she surprises me. When I read many columnists and letter to the editor writers, I know what they are going to say on any side of an argument.

Neil Reynolds was the editor of several newspapers. When he was the editor of the Kingston Whig-Standard, he made it into a newspaper with an excellent reputation, especially for its coverage of the arts. Later he became editor of the New Brunswick Telegraph-Journal, turning it into an exciting paper. He hired several investigative reporters who uncovered all sorts of skullduggery. He created a Saturday magazine, The New Brunswick Reader. Near its beginning, he asked me to write for it, and for two and a half years I wrote weekly articles on craftspeople and artists. I even had the heady job of selecting the photo for the front cover.

My education in the arts began when my friend Joe Sherman became editor of ArtsAtlantic in 1979. Because he couldn’t find anyone from NB to write about the arts, he enlisted me. I had not been educated in arts and crafts, although my father was both, so I was reluctant to write. To compensate for my ignorance, I spent an immense amount of time educating myself on the particular art or craft I was to write about. It was my first foray into becoming an autodidact, quite exciting. Later I was asked to write an introduction for a book on NB crafts. Reynolds, a lover of crafts, read it and asked me to write for the Reader. I had always wanted to have a weekly column, and although it was immensely time-consuming, I enjoyed the job. Bill and I traveled all over New Brunswick interviewing artists and craftspeople. The ArtsAtlantic and Reader experience has been an important part of my journey from birth to where I am now. I should write more about it. When my father got sick and we were spending a lot of time visiting him, meeting the Reader deadline became too hair-raising, and when Joe left ArtsAtlantic, there was no one to badger me out of my inherent laziness.

Being Lulled to Sleep

We have a new radio station affiliated with ESPN. It is broadcasting the baseball play-off games. Last night I went to bed at 9, put the light out, snuggled down, and prepared to listen to the Yankee/Tiger game. I lasted for the first half inning and woke up at 12:40 in time to hear that the Yankees had won. I began to remember my mother. She would go to bed with a snack and a magazine to listen to ballgames. In those days she could even get minor league games, and as a consequence she knew all about the rookies who finally made it to the major leagues. My dad worked nights, and after my brother and I left home, she would be by herself. We didn’t even have locks on our doors. She loved baseball and the radio broadcasts must have been a great comfort to her. A game has a plot, interesting characters, a soothing jargon, my own partisanship and yet its outcome has no dire consequence.

Communion

Today is World-Wide Communion Sunday, a fine idea. This got me remembering various communion services I’ve attended. In the little village church of my youth, we went to the altar and kneeled, receiving the bread and little silver glasses of wine from the minister bending over us from the other side of the altar. The choir came down from the choir stall to sit in the front pews, where we had a good view of the soles of the kneelers’ shoes. Once when I was about twelve or thirteen, my friend Ellie and I saw that one of the soles had a hole in it. We got to giggling, and the more we tried to stifle the giggles, the worse they became. I was pleasantly surprised today that I could recall the event without embarrassment.

When my brother was in seminary, he decided to conduct a Watch Night Service, complete with communion, on New Year’s Eve, using John Wesley’s program. It was memorable for many reasons. First of all, the church wasn’t heated, it not being a Sunday. My brother determined to have the sanctuary lit by candles, so there was the strangely moving power always provided by such unusual light and shadows in amongst the pews and altar. There were only a few people there: our mother and father, Bill and I, and a few of our parents’ friends. One of the women had just undergone a sadness, I can’t remember about what, and afterwards she told our parents that the ceremony had touched her deeply. The service was very long, perhaps two hours. John Wesley never spared his congregation. He used to preach outside the collieries to the miners coming off work, and he would preach for an hour on, for example, justification by faith.

Once when my sister-in-law was having an operation, I went to look after their children, then about 6 and 8. After school I set out a snack for them, grape juice and cookies. As they were drinking the juice, the younger one said, “Aunt Nancy, you gave us the communion juice.” They thought that was a great joke. Afterwards my brother explained that he kept Welch’s grape juice in the refrigerator so that he could bring communion to the sick and shut-in.

When I first came to Fredericton, I was charmed by the communion. The members of the board of sessions would come to us in the pews and serve us cubes of bread on silver plates and little glasses of juice carried in silver cases. We would hold the cubes of bread until everyone was served and then eat it all together. After we had all been served the wine, we would drink together, and then you heard clink, clink, clink as everyone put down the glass on the holder on the back of the pew. Now we usually go up to the altar, dip a piece of bread (sometimes a piece of pita bread) into the wine, communion by tinction, it is called. There is available a rice cracker or water for those with allergies. Today we did it the old way.

Sometimes in church, my tears spring up, often for no reason I can discern. Today they had something to do with gratitude – just a flash of thanksgiving accompanied by tears.

But Not For Long

We are off to Maine again. I won’t try to post because I would rather spend my half hour allotment on the library computer reading other people’s posts. I am trying out Poor Mad Peter’s suggestion about getting rid of spam so that all of my time won’t be spent deleting.

I Have Returned

One of the characteristics that I have had to deal with from birth is that I concentrate very deeply, but only if I am in such a situation that I can safely do that, that is, that I won’t be awakened from that concentration abruptly, that I won’t be needed. When I am reading, when I am writing, I am deeply away from my usual life, not in a trance, but really in another, separate world. The obverse of this is that I easily get scattered brain in the middle of the chaos and confusion of ordinary life. This is getting worse as I get older and can be stressful. I feel as if someone has taken a spoon and stirred up my brain. Perhaps having my brain stirred is a good thing. I recently have been trying to relax in this condition, although I still require moments of the concentration to remain on an even keel.

I concentrated deeply on raising my children. I know that the stress would have been unbearable if I had had to raise children while working a full time job. When we were having our house built with a limited budget, we could have had a kitchen big enough to eat in or a tiny kitchen with a living area big enough to eat in. I knew that I wouldn’t be able to cook if there were distractions during the crucial moments so I opted for the tiny kitchen. For some reason inexplicable to me, play pens are now out of favor. I think to myself how do women cook if they have to watch a baby as well?

A few months ago I conducted a writers’ workshop, the first one I had done in a long time. I discovered that I was no longer capable of concentrating on the job at hand the way I had been able to. It was a painful, panicky experience. I couldn’t gather up all the strings, search out the right words immediately, reach back and find the right examples. I knew then that I would never conduct a workshop again.

However, this summer at our camp for three mornings I was able to concentrate from 5 AM when everyone was asleep until they woke up about 7, and I wrote a short story, the first original writing I had done in quite a while. I was relieved. Maybe I don’t have any more novels in me, but perhaps I can winkle out a story or two.

Mother and Daughter

Big excitement here. Our daughter is coming home for ten days. We only heard yesterday – she has been trying to figure out a good time to come, and yesterday she found a window of opportunity. We will spend some days at Slow Loris – she loves it almost as much as our son does. She is the only one of my relatives who regularly reads my blog. Or at least the only one who comments on it.

I have finished my review. It’s too bad I don’t get paid by the hour, or for that matter, too bad I don’t get paid at all.

Family and writing have made up the major portion of my life. I do some volunteer work – less now than before. I used to teach. I read. I used to have an herb garden. Friends.

Because my mother went into a coma before she died, I never said goodbye. She couldn’t give me her last wishes, so I made them up. I knew she that there were three things she worried about. One was that I wouldn’t tweeze the hairs from my chin, one was that I would drink too much, and one was that I wouldn’t dress my daughter in “cute” clothes. I regularly (I almost wrote “religiously” because that is how I feel about it) tweeze the hairs, I am a complete teetotaler, and for as long as she would let me, I dressed my daughter in “cute” clothes. She was five when my mother died, and she became very firm about what to wear by the time she was seven and that didn’t include “cute” clothes. However, I never did stop spending effort and money on keeping her as my mother would have wished.

In Other People's Heads

One reason, I feel, that my blog-novel isn’t working is that there can be no back and forth with a fictional character. One of the most pleasant surprises I have had in blogging is the back-and-forth. I hadn’t expected that. I notice that some blogs don’t allow or invite comments. There must be a good reason for that, but the blogger is missing something exciting. Some time ago, the Scribbling Woman mentioned that she got some unwanted comments, but continued allowing them anyway. The idea that I am part of a vast blogosphere is exciting. It is great fun for me to read the other blogs that I read regularly and am disappointed when there is a hiatus.

I belong to two writers’ groups. I have the same kind of interest in the member’s bi-weekly offerings. There is something about writing that connects me more directly than conversation does with the other people in the dialogue. We have had e-mail for a long time now – ten years? We stay more closely in touch with those with whom we exchange e-mails. In one instance, we got on a family group e-mail because everyone in the group just hits the “reply to all” button. We have met most of the people in that group, but we only know two of them well – the others we know only because we have heard our two friends talk about them. I feel as if I have been admitted to an inner circle.

I noticed when I was teaching creative writing that the members of a class would become close and would stay in touch even after the class was over. Often the class would be the first experience the writers had to share their work, heady stuff, they would tell me.

William Ernest Hocking, whose book, The Meaning of God in Human Experience, changed my way of thinking, has a wonderful section about how people know each other. He says that people express the thought that it would be wonderful if they could know another person from the inside out – share their thinking, their feelings, be inside the other’s head. We do in fact because when we think we are using the things of this world, so that sitting in a room with someone else, we know a good deal of what is going on in their head – seeing the furniture, witnessing the other people’s expressions, hearing the voices, smelling the smells. This is true also about reading someone’s thoughts, especially if we perceive these thoughts to be candid, authentic.

Over in “This Space”, the blogger quotes John Banville:

“There's a notion that we writers are interested in the world; that we like the peculiarities of people and collecting characters… Fiction gives the illusion of showing how we live - but it is a thing in itself. Great art looks and smells like the world, that's its trick. But the work of art is always about the work of art."

That’s the great thing about a work of fiction. You are getting exactly what is in the writer’s head. Yes, of course there is re-writing and editing, but essentially you are catching a glimpse of the imagination of the writer.

Genes

In church today, in keeping with the theme this summer of having lay people talk about their faith, the speaker was a Biblical scholar, and her focus was the subject of her PhD thesis, the book of Ruth. She had some interesting points to make that I had never considered. The book starts out Once Upon a Time and thus announces itself as a story rather than history. Because Ruth is a Moabite, she is surprised that Boaz is kind to her, a foreigner. What I didn’t know is that the legendary foundation of Moab is chronicled in the Bible: Lot’s two daughters seducing him so that they can have a child. The Moabites come from that ignominious beginning.

Our speaker didn’t say this, but I was thinking that from a genetic point of view, Ruth was wise to go into Judah to find a mate. What a great thing it has been for North Americans to have the genes of many countries. I come from a small village, and I can’t think of one of my contemporaries who married someone from the village. I have read that there is something in women’s makeup that prevents us from wanting to mate with our brothers and the boys in our neighbourhood are too much like brothers. We don’t often marry the proverbial “boy next door.” The aim of our complicated method of reproduction seems to be to have as many different kinds of unique individuals as possible.

I have noticed that people often speculate that a child looks like so and so or acts like so and so. It is interesting to try to figure out which genes are responsible for making us what we are. My mother-in-law, husband and daughter all have the same wiry hair and dark blue eyes. On the other hand my brother and I are left-handed, but our parents were right-handed. We don’t look like either of them nor do we look like each other. I would think I was adopted except that I have my mother’s feet. My daughter does too. I also like mayonnaise, as my mother did. My parents-in-law both had a strong addiction to cigarettes, as does my husband. This bad gene is more than compensated for by his getting their smart genes.

More About Houses

We moved into our house Sept. 1 forty years ago. We had gone to stay with my parents while it was being built. When we left, it was a hole in the ground. When we arrived back, there miraculously was the house. I can’t reconstruct what image I had of it as we waited that summer in Massachusetts, but of course it was nothing like the reality. Although I got along well with my parents, who bent over backwards to make our three month stay pleasant, I was so happy to be back, to be settled, to have our own home. I was tired after the trip and after getting the beds and the crib set up. After the kids were in bed, I stepped out on the front stoop. It faces northwest and as I looked out over the trees across the street, I was startled to see northern lights, the first I had ever seen. They were, I thought, a sign that all was right with our world, that we had done the wise thing in building this house. The house was too small, mud surrounded it, and we were only the second house on the street so there were no neighbors, no streetlights. But in a few years we had finished basement, constructed a lawn, and eight years later we had an addition put on which alleviated the crush. Neighbors moved in with 53 children, and the city made a park and paved the street.

Over the years we have made many changes: the most recent ones are to have the back deck screened in and to have the washer and dryer brought up from the cellar to the back hall.


There have been moments when I have detested the place – its basement filling up with junk, its walls, ceilings and windows always covered with tobacco goo, and its leaks that let water come into the basement and through the ceiling. I am often overwhelmed with trying to keep the place clean enough to satisfy the health authorities if not my aunt, with the horror of even the most basic renovations such as painting. But it is surely true that it has been as much a part of my life as are my husband and my children, and I can hardly imagine living anywhere else.


In my parent’s homestead, my bedroom was over the kitchen and leading to it was a steep stairway with no banister, quite treacherous. The strange thing is that 60 years after I had lived there, even when my knees got creaky, I could go down those stairs without worry. It was as if my body knew those stairs in its very bones and in the synapses of its brain. I lived fulltime in that house for only eight or nine years. How deeply then must this house, that I have lived in for 40 years, be ingrained into the synapses of my brain? Often people who must be transplanted to a nursing home die within a few months. Changing abodes is perilous business.

On Creating a Home

Over in Another Country/Walker (now called Pilgrim), Poor Mad Peter is chronicling the buying and creating of a home. I think that for most of us making a home is our single most satisfying creation.

Friends of ours bought a rather scruffy house on the banks of a lovely little river. A while ago they put on a small addition, designed by the wife, and the difference it made is amazing. Now there is a view of the river, of the bird feeders, of a magnificent tree. The house reflects their personalities too, their art collection and the art they both make.

Another couple have a house that the two created together: her weavings, antiques from both their ancestral homes, their son’s woodblock prints, a wonderful room that his carpentry created as her studio. On our street is a house that was quite plain. The new owner invented a color scheme, did landscaping, made an unusual deck. The siding he wanted was too expensive, so he literally invented another cheaper one. He changed plain Jane into something quite handsome.

Unlike most creations, a house is a collaborative affair, usually between the spouses. When the kids come along, they contribute too. Our son made a mural on the wall of his bedroom that depicts various characters in the Chronicles of Narnia.

Another friend designed a house that his son-in-law built, along with help from various members of the family. The chimney of the fireplace is so tall (twenty feet?) that his son had a hook put in the top so they all could practice rappelling.

I have already written about the camp our son created, Slow Loris.

Our local newspaper regularly has an article about someone's home, and often it is disappointing. The photos show a house straight out of a woman's decorating magazine with no stamp of the owners, no indication of the owners' personality.

Bill and I have been lazy for quite a few years about re-inventing our house.

The things of this world

One of my favorite quotations is by St. Augustine, “Love calls me to the things of this world.” Richard Wilbur uses it as the title of a wonderful poem. The idea that we are kept tied to this world, even in the midst of tragedy, by the things of the world is to me, one of the most profound of truths. When I see a child entranced by a bug – a white caterpillar with a black stripe down its back or a luna moth – I remember that I myself don’t spend enough time with what the world offers. There are moments of grace, however, where the world jumps up and slaps me: the time several years ago when Bill and I went on our first walk of the spring and came upon a patch of yellow flowers. Afterwards we found out its name, coltsfoot, and learned that it is the earliest wildflower of our region. Richard Wilbur wakes to the sound of the clothes line pulley and to the look of sheets hanging on the line. A moment of grace.

Structures

I have been re-reading Ernest Buckler’s Ox Bells and Fireflies. I have compared the book I am reviewing, When I Was Young & In My Prime, to Buckler’s book. Both books are structured in small chunks, bits and pieces, unified by running themes, with little narrative thrust or plot. Buckler says straight out that his is a memoir, but he also suggests that it is fictionalized. Munce’s book, although a novel, strongly suggests that a lot of it is memoir, that the details are remembered, not invented. Both use the anecdote, rather than the scene, as building blocks. Munce uses many forms, much like Viktor Shlovsky and Guy Davenport do: prose-poems, a government pamphlet, an auctioneer’s patter at a farm sale. Both are interested in memory. A unifying theme of both is birds.

Many blogs do proceed by anecdote and by their very nature are structured in bits and pieces. Litlove, over at Tales From the Reading Room, is ruminating about the form of the blog, the blog as genre. A blog’s inherent structural difficulty is that it is read backwards. The writer begins at the beginning, with his first post, but the reader is reading only the latest installment. Of course a reader could go back to the beginning and read straight through to the present, but probably not many do. As a blogger, how do you use this backward quality? If a blog was made into a book, would it start at the beginning, at the blogger’s first post, and continue to the last one? This would destroy the intention, wouldn’t it? In a journal made into a book, the reader reads from the starting point to the end. There is usually a structure – a year in the life of, the constructing of a home, a journey.

The writer of the blog isn’t going to conform to an overall structure and probably isn’t going to envision an end. Some blogs do have a unifying theme – cooking, or making dresses, or homeschooling for example, but most have various concerns and passions.

Bad Food

My gastronomic experiences in Nova Scotia ran the gamut from the one at Fat Frank’s in Halifax to one in Shelburne. I ordered salt cod because I hadn’t had it since I was young. This was the most inedible meal I have ever been served. The chef had no idea how to cook salt cod; he had merely heated it up. Salt cod that has not been soaked and re-soaked and cooked and fussed over is like cotton fiber, or the choke part of artichokes or milkweed pod fiber. If I had tried to eat it, I would have surely choked. When I pointed this out to the waitress, she saw immediately what the trouble was. She brought me another meal and didn’t charge us for either mine or Bill’s.

Once in Maine I had a bowl of fish chowder (ordinarily one of my favorite dishes) that didn’t have even one tiny speck of fish in it. I am not exaggerating. That however was edible. To be fair to Shelburne, the most delicious fish chowder I ever had was in that lovely town.

In rural Quebec I had spoiled chicken. Even though I had never tasted spoiled chicken before, I recognized it after only one bite. It has a disagreeable vinegary taste to it. The waitress didn’t speak English, so I used my French: pointing to the chicken, I said, “Poulet est mauvais.” Our kids thought this was hilarious, and the phrase has become part of the family lexicon. The waitress did understand me.

Fifty years ago, in Austel, Georgia, we stopped to eat at a Greyhound bus station. There was hardly anything on the handwritten menu, and when we ordered, the waitress whispered, “I wouldn’t order that if I was you.” What would you suggest? She told us. The meal was awful, but I can’t remember what it was because for fifty years we have wondered what the other meal would have been like.

The most disgusting meal I ever saw was one Bill was served. We decided to try the new Brazilian restaurant, but when we arrived, they apologized over-profusely, saying that they didn’t have anything that was on the menu. They suggested two things they could make. I had one, Bill the other. I don’t remember what I had because the appearance of what he had was so astoundingly repulsive. It was an egg dish, the eggs barely cooked, with a plain tomato sauce over it. The tomato sauce mixing with the runny bright yellow yolk and the transparent white of the uncooked albumin turned my stomach. Bill didn’t mind it, he said.

Writing A Review

I am nearly finished writing a book review. Every time I agree to write one, I say to myself, Never again. Fortunately, I liked the book, When I Was Young & In My Prime. I understood and appreciated what she was trying to do. Next I have to write a review of a book I didn’t like. I never agree to write reviews of books I don’t like – what’s the point, I think – but somehow I got myself into this. What is more, it is about a subject I knew very little about and so have had to do a lot of reading to bone up. That part is good. Once I was in a writing group that was open to anyone, and as a consequence there was a lot of awfully bad writing. One of our group, an accomplished poet, editor, teacher, could always find something good to say about any poem. What he would say would be true, too, and helpful. I have tried to do the same, but it is difficult to do, requiring much concentration.

Something Happened Last Night

Every year about this time, my mother-in-law would say, “Something happened last night,” meaning that the weather overnight had changed from summer to autumn. We would nearly always be visiting her in the middle of August. Summer school would be over, the boys’ baseball or later their jobs would be finished.

Last night something happened. Up at Slow Loris they had a fire in the wood stove. This morning here in town the outside thermometer read 7 degrees Celsius, 44 Fahrenheit.

When Canada changed to the metric system, we found it difficult to get a handle on Celsius. Eventually we discovered that we used Celsius for the winter and Fahrenheit for the summer. Bill says that is because zero, rather than 32, is a rational base for understanding freezing, whereas Celsius doesn’t have the fine gradations needed to understand hot weather. The car we bought 2 years ago has a thermometer in it. I printed out a chart comparing the two systems. I will say, “It’s 22 out.” Bill will say, “What’s that in Fahrenheit”, and I will get the chart out of the glove compartment.

When I was young, my father measured the distance from our house to Gilson’s store, exactly a mile. I walked it often and so knew in my bones what a mile was. The post office was halfway there so I knew what a half mile was. I will never know what a kilometer is.

Reading Faces

Last Sunday, at the Camp of the Slow Loris, I fell out of a hammock, or to be more precise, I fell out trying to get into the hammock. I plunged face down on the forest floor, pushing my glasses into my nose. I had two superficial scrapes, which bled at first and scared my son, he thinking I had lost an eye. The next morning I had developed a black eye, but the glasses themselves didn’t get bent or scratched, my nose was intact, my vision fine, and my eyes not bloodshot.

A few days later I took a self-portrait with my new digital camera to send in e-mails as a joke, but my grandchild saw it, was “scared”, and had a “bad dream” about it. The neighbour’s child saw my black eye, was visibly shocked and presented such an alarming picture to the parents that the wife brought me over food. Another neighbour said I looked so awful that I wouldn’t be able to go out of the house for two weeks. My daughter wrote, apologetically, that she was going to delete the photo because it looked so “harsh.” She was not amused, I could tell.

Various charitable agencies often use a photo of a sad child or a child with bruises in their ads that ask for donations. In our newspapers a while ago, there was a child with a birthmark that made her face look as if it had been bruised. She actually had been mistreated, but not on her face. The photo was used over and over, a lie in one way. We do judge a person’s mental and physical health by their face, no doubt about it, and a child must learn that very early.

Last month my aunt phoned me to complain that I hadn’t worn my one false tooth to have breakfast with her. “You look awful without it.” I have always been vain about not being vain, but these experiences have taught me a lesson. Now that I am old, I do owe something to my friends and relatives to assure them that I am in good health. Of course they worry if they think I am not well. I did have a breast cancer removed nine years ago, but knock on wood, I have been free of cancer ever since and in general I am in good health. I guess I need to show it.

St. Johnswort

St. Johnswort

St. Johnswort is easy to identify because its leaves have transparent round “windows.” In England it was smoked on bonfires on St. John’s Eve and then hung in doorways to keep out evil spirits. St. John’s Day or St. Jean Baptiste day, June 24, is important around here because our river was discovered by Champlain that day, hence the name.

I have noticed that St. Johnswort has become a popular herb for those who dose themselves. I have heard people (always women) give out herbal information as if it were scientifically proved. My herb books are fascinating reading but definitely not scientific. Once I heard a woman in the health food store giving advice about preparing a tea from the mistletoe she was selling. Mistletoe is poisonous, affects the heart, and was used to cause abortions. The herbalists were usually women and their clients were women. In the past many different herbs were used to cause abortions. I think many of these must have worked by causing ruptured blood vessels.

The strength of the herb is determined by where it is grown and in what soil. Water hemlock, poison in some climates, can be eaten in other climates. It grows wild here in the ditches of the road to the golf course.

The Family Circle

My aunt phoned last night, and we got talking about her father. I have written about him before, the early Jehovah Witness. She described how special the time with him was when they would kneel at her bedside to say her prayers. He would say, “Who do you want to bless tonight?” She would name the usual people and sometimes add someone new. This is a lovely picture, isn’t it? I am assuming he did this with my mother as well. I wonder why she didn’t do it with me. The closest my mother and I came to naming people was to induce me to eat she would say, “This spoonful is going down to Grammie. This spoonful is going down to Aunt Tempie.” The idea that there was an intimate circle of relatives and friends who should be blessed or fed was early ingrained in my aunt’s mind, my mother’s, mine. My mother expanded that circle to include many of the walking wounded of the world.

Toad at Slow Loris

A Garden Path

Bill, our son and I were up to our camp over the long weekend. I have written about the place before. It is a beautiful spot. The cabin itself is incredible, built by our son and his friend. The beams are made of the large cedar trees that had to be cut down in order for us to have a septic field. Gradually we have introduced amenities – a deck, wooden walkways to the shore of the lake, a dock, a platform down by the water, hot water, stove and fridge, ingenious double-decker beds that are a double bed on the bottom and a single bed on the top.

This weekend we were building a path designed by our son, to go around the side of the cabin and link up with the walkways. The paths are lined with cedar logs, filled with rocks. This required shoveling the rocks into a bucket and carrying it to the path. Top soil and then wood chips will be put over the rocks. I had more exercise in one day than I usually have in two weeks. I am not good at exercising for itself, but I love to exercise when it involves having something substantial at the end. I think many people my age feel this way. It is surprising to me that so many young people exercise for its own sake – walking briskly in all kinds of weather, walking on a treadmill in their cellar, or going to a gym. The franchise Curves spread like wildfire throughout North America on the principle of jumping on and off machines to lively music. If someone could invent an exercise routine where something was actually accomplished, I think it would become popular.

We haven’t been able to settle on what to call the building: cabin or cottage? For me, cabin has a romantic ring. A cabin in the woods. Thoreau’s cabin. We do have a name for the building: Slow Loris. This comes from a piece of art that Bill made and which hangs in the living room. It is of a Slow Loris (a kind of monkey creature of the sloth family), made of thick gesso, painted pink, with large red beads for eyes. Bill fell in love with the beads at a yard sale and had to figure out how to use them.

A Perfect Moment

The most superb meal I have ever had was at Fat Franks in Halifax sometime in the early 80’s. I had gone to give a writers’ workshop there; the organizers had given me a meal allowance, but I hadn’t used any of it. I decided to blow it all on one meal. Someone told me about Fat Franks. I began with the single best thing I have ever put in my mouth, saffron soup, a plain cream soup flavored with saffron. At the time I had never tasted saffron, just read about it. I had a delicate, perfectly cooked Coquilles St Jacques for the main course. It had an ideal blend of flavors. I had never had the dish made by anyone else but myself. The dessert was Bavarian cream so subtle that it required my taking one bite, waiting, taking another.

As soon as each course was served, a fat man in a chef’s hat stood in the doorway watching me, staring at me, Fat Frank himself, I figured. When I had finished each course, he would disappear until the waiter brought the next one. I wondered why he was watching me. Did he think that because I was alone, I was a restaurant critic? Could he tell by what I ordered that I would enjoy the food? Was my delight evident? As I was eating the Bavarian cream, he came to the table and commanded, “Eat it all.” Yes, I said, I am just slowing down to enjoy it fully. The meal cost $21, quite a price for that time. As I was leaving, the man I presumed to be Fat Frank helped me on with my coat. I said something complimentary. He beamed.

Alas, Fat Franks had closed by the next time I got to Halifax.

How To Become Refreshed

At the beginning of summer, our minister gave out a form titled, “How I find my sacred balance”, to fill in and bring back in September. We are to describe how we use the summer to refresh ourselves, to become rejuvenated. I have never found the summers to be refreshing. There is no schedule, for one thing, and I have always thrived on a schedule, more so as I grow older. For most of my life, the year began in September because school began then. Now that my nest is empty and my husband is retired, there is no beginning, no ending. Much of the time I feel as if someone has taken a wooden spoon, stuck it in my brain, and stirred energetically. I used to be rejuvenated by writing, always in the morning, from 9 to 12, when the kids would be in school and even after they left home. Now I don’t have anything that compels me. Every once in a while, depressed, I make out a vigorous schedule, type it out in a large font, post it in several places -- and don’t follow it.

New Brunswick Food

When we came to Fredericton, we discovered some wonderful bargains in food. One was butter. The dairy industry had persuaded the government to enact a bill that protected butter so that it was just as cheap as margarine. What is more, it was delicious butter. Butter now is more expensive than margarine, but after years of real butter, I can never go back to margarine. A brand of Sussex NB butter has consistently been named the best butter in the world in international competitions.

Another bargain was smoked salmon, in the US an unaffordable luxury. I concocted a dish which I fed to every American visitor. It was really just a cream sauce with smoked salmon, modeled on creamed finnan haddie, a dish my father loved. I found out that there were two kinds of smoked salmon. Cold smoked salmon is like lox, smooth, sliced thin, put on bagels, or crackers with cream cheese. Hot smoked salmon is more like cooked salmon, thick. I used the hot smoked salmon, served with boiled potatoes. It is one of my favorite dishes.

I discovered fiddleheads, available in May and June, picked along streams and rivers. They are the unopened fern buds of the fiddlehead fern, shaped like the head of a fiddle. Boil them; serve them with butter, or butter and lemon juice, or hollandaise sauce. When we would go to visit my parents after university got out, we would take my father a big bag of fiddleheads.

We discovered the Saturday farmer’s market. Mr. Merrithew had delicious liver. The liver was so good that people lined up at his stall as soon as the market opened. Eventually, getting Mr. Merrithew’s liver involved the strategy the three pigs used, getting up earlier and earlier to beat the wolf, until finally people would drive out to Keswick to his butcher shop Friday evening. He was a tall man with the largest hands I have ever seen.

Twenty years after we arrived, the Patels began to sell samosas at the market. Since I first tasted Mrs. Patel’s samosas, I have had those of many other cooks, but none ever compare. The Patels are now threatening to shut down their operation because others at the market complain that their long lines interfere with other businesses. Unbelievable.

For a number of years Bill had a garden plot in a community field presided over by Dr. Dorothy Farmer. From that plot we had tiny new potatoes: the essence of potato.

Eating and Cooking

As long as I can remember I have loved to eat. I do remember, however, that my mother would try to get me to eat by feeding me, saying, with each spoonful, “This is going down to Aunt Tempie, this is going down to Grammie.” I take it from this memory that I wasn’t a good eater when I was small.

My brother and I didn’t have many rules, but one was inviolable: no fighting or arguing at the table. Supper was to be a pleasant occasion. We weren’t forced to eat anything we didn’t like, although we were urged just to try it. I remember once when I refused mushrooms, that my dad said, “Someday you will love mushrooms.” And he was right. We always ate well, even when money was tight.

My father did the grocery shopping. He had worked for a while in a grocery store, learning to be a butcher, and so he knew how to pick out meat. He liked trying new things. He would go all over Lowell and vicinity for special items: one place had pure peanut butter, another liverwurst, another pickled kielbasa, another good corned beef. Way before such things became popular, we had sour cream, pita bread, Lebanese cheese. Often my brother and I would go with him. Sometimes he would get some exotic treat for us to bring to school. I remember bringing kumquats to school for my first grade (we had two grades in a room, so it was for the second grade as well.) Needless to say, the kumquats weren’t well-liked, although my classmates remembered them for many years.

My mother didn’t teach me to cook, so when I got married, I had to fend for myself. My father helped out by buying me cookbooks. I came to love cooking, especially new dishes. Early on, I made a dish of tuna fish and grapes. “Hot grapes?” my husband said, incredulous. Once I bought a pork shoulder and began to cook it when we got home from work. I kept looking at it; it kept being pink. About 11 PM, we went out to a restaurant. It cooked all night, and in the morning it was still pink. I am not sure when I finally realized I had bought a ham, not a pork roast.

Hope Springs Eternal

Hope springs eternal in the human breast;
Man never is, but always to be blest:
Alexander Pope, The Essay on Man

I was lying awake this morning at 4, thinking about my poor rejected novel. I decided to get up, and in the peace and quiet of an early Sunday morning, go at it again. While I was working on the Anthony section, I was struck by the peculiar diction, awkward, and then remembered that I had written the original draft in the first person. When I changed it to the third person, I thought that because it was from his point of view, in his voice, the diction would be all right. But reading it this morning, I realized that it wasn’t. I dug up the old first person version. That is better.

The rejected novel is much too long for “literary” fiction. No small Canadian publisher could afford to print it. There’s no doubt that the members of our writing group have liked the Anthony section a lot more than they have liked the other sections. Bill suggested I cut everything but the Anthony section, but I hated to give up what after fifeteen years of working on it had become the central structure of the novel – the story of various people in an apartment building, how they become a family, how they interact. This morning I think I have found a way to keep some of that but still make the novel short enough, and still feature the Anthony section. The novel that had been rejected was 111, 000 words. This new version will be about 40, 000 words, more a novella than a novel. I am feeling quite hopeful.

Sherrill Grace has written an interesting book about Malcolm Lowery. She studied his manuscripts of Under the Volcano and describes his method of re-writing. He added phrases, stuck them in the middle of existing sentences. It makes the novel denser. I will go fish out Grace’s book. When I was teaching creative writing, I would often use her description of Lowery’s method. I think that what I need to do with this new version of the novel is just that – add phrases rather than whole sentences.

Tracing My Writer Life

It was many years before I understood that I had surrendered myself to the chief temptation of the artist, creation without toil. W.B. Yeats

In 1980 or so, my friend Peter Thomas inherited Fiddlehead Poetry Books from Fred Cogswell. He decided in 1981 that he wanted to start a fiction imprint, Goose Lane Editions. He needed a first manuscript, he knew I had been writing novels, and he asked me if I would submit one to him. I chose two of the four I had written and submitted them. He chose Flora, Write This Down. I had been writing for fifteen years without any desire to publish, just for the pleasure of writing, and if Peter hadn’t asked me, I might never have got up the gumption to try to publish.

My novels are definitely not plot-driven, mainly because I am deficient in plot construction. I begin with an image, a scene, an idea, with no notion of where the novels will go. When people learn that I am a writer, they invariably ask me, “What kind of novels do you write? Mystery? Romance? Detective?” I have to answer, “Literary novels.” “What are they about?” I don’t have a good answer for that, but usually I say, “About different kinds of family.” If I had been born 20 years later, these plot-less novels would never have been published, and this life that I have been tracing would have been very different. Once when I was discouraged about writing, I said to Bill, “I don’t want to be a writer anymore.” He said, “What are you going to do? Send out an announcement that you are no longer a writer?”

Now I am once again discouraged; I am old; I no longer want to be a writer. But the thing is, the novels are out there. Unread, true, but still out there, so alas, I am a writer whether I want to be or not. I have been working on a novel for 15 years, writing, re-writing. Back in 1981 I would just have abandoned it and gone on to something new and exciting. But now, after all these years, it seems that the thing can’t rest until it is published. In its various shapes, I have sent it to two publishers, who wrote nice things about it but still rejected it, and one agent, who agreed to hawk it, but couldn’t.

Like Yeats, I have yielding to the temptation of creation without toil: this blog.

Ladies Mantle

Mrs. Todd

A long time ago I read Sarah Orne Jewett’s The Country of the Pointed Firs. I loved it from the first sentence, and I love it still. I wondered what the herbs looked like that Mrs. Todd, the herb lady, grew or collected in the wild, so I started an herb garden and grew those herbs: pennyroyal, elecampane, thoroughwort (also known as boneset), borage, wormwood, southernwood, thyme, balm, sweet mary, mint. Most of them definitely weren’t herbs you could use in cooking. I bought herb books and read up on the lore.

Over a period of twenty five years the garden had to be uprooted four times, and after the fourth, I decided I didn’t have the physical energy to begin again. Many of the herbs, however, were hardy and continue to thrive beside the fence, along the house, or in the top soil pile where they can’t be mowed down.

I used the lore of the herbs in Flora, Write This Down. I became interested in other medicinal herbs as well: tansy, angelica, comfrey, ladies mantle, and I learned to identify many others in the wild, St. Johnswort and yarrow for example.

The Country of the Pointed Firs is by far the best of Jewett’s books. It seems as if it must have been inspired by a higher power.

New Camera

My husband and I bought a digital camera as a present to each other for our 50th anniversary. The photo below is one of the first I have taken with it. Bill spotted this nest (wasp?) attached to a branch of a tree in our backyard. I used the zoom capacity to get the photo. I am curious what kind of a nest it is -- we watched it for a while but saw nothing coming in or out. Another Country and sbpoet manage to put stunning photos on their blogs -- wonderful colors and resolution. Something to aim for.

Musing About Our Church

Over a period of perhaps six years, eight retired ministers have joined our church. Am I right in thinking that this may suggest that somehow we have become a pretty good church? Maybe it is hubris to think that. Knock on wood, but we seem to have been free of controversy for quite a long time. Partly this is because one of the United Churches in our area has an ultra conservative minister so that many of its members have joined our church. Thus, we are becoming more and more homogeneous. The church has become a lively place with much good work being done. Good works are important, but the people of the congregation have to be fed spiritually as well, and we have two excellent preachers, an annual retreat, and an interesting weekend seminar among other feasts. What does make a good church anyway? Part of it, as I wrote in a previous post, is having a community, a family, with a common purpose. The congregation has to be pushed out of complacency but it also can’t be led into constant bickering.

The Ethnic Groups of China

A friend has given me a most wonderful book containing descriptions of the various peoples of China, perhaps 450 different ethnic groups. Bob gave it to me because he had just re-read my The Irrational Doorways of Mr. Gerard, and was reminded of my fascination for little-known tribes, especially those of Russia, the Middle East, and China.

One of the groups discussed in this book is the Diao, 2000 people, one of the minorities of the province of Guizshou. It is said of these Guizhou minorities that “the making of her traditional dress continues to play an important part in a woman’s life. Each tribe’s dress has its own background story which reflects that group’s customs, history and beliefs. Cultural identity is therefore maintained by the making and wearing of the garments.”

My father’s mother died in 1913 and so lived all her life wearing a long dress. Long dresses have occasionally become fashionable in my lifetime although they have never become mandatory. When I wear one, I have to be extra careful not to trip, especially on stairs. I wonder if women tripped and fell more before 1918 when wearing long dresses went out of fashion. I am exceptionally clumsy so perhaps I don’t represent the norm, but wearing a long dress to do chores must have been awkward. My mother’s mother lived to 1985, and thus she wore short dresses most of her life. She did always wear dresses, though, never slacks. Both of my grandmothers were professional seamstresses, that is, they sewed for other people for money.

If I were to sew my own dress to tell the story of my customs, history, and beliefs, what could I make? What could my grandmothers have made? The cloth I would use would have been woven in another country – Thailand perhaps. At the moment I am wearing a pair of jeans and a t-shirt. Is there any seamstress in the western world who makes her own jeans? I’ve never seen a pair of homemade jeans.

Have we women lost something, being so far removed from the creation of what we wear? And from what we cook? We surely have gained time. Part of my fascination for little-known ethnic people is trying to figure out how they maintain their distinctiveness. How do they keep their language, for example? Most of the peoples in this book do speak mandarin Chinese in addition to their own language. I still have my Massachusetts accent, but I notice when I go back to visit my hometown, that most of the young people speak "American."

Superstitions

I was thinking about superstitions last night when the waitress brought our fortune cookies along with the bill. My husband has a superstition about reading the fortunes in the cookies, or in fact about any kind of fortune-telling. I was thinking of a time, perhaps fifteen years ago, when a new acquaintance came to dinner. He brought his tarot cards with him and after supper proposed to do them for us. Bill performed what I can only describe as a filibuster, talking, talking, bringing up subject after subject. This was so unlike him, because ordinarily he is quiet and patiently waits his turn, that I immediately knew what he was doing – preventing the tarot card reading. It worked; Gordon went home without reading the cards. I had heard about tarot cards and was curious, but I knew that if I expressed any interest in them at all, Bill would be upset.

When I reminded him of the incident last night, he said he was remembering it too, and the word filibuster was the word he also was thinking of.

Of course he isn’t foolish enough to think that a fortune cookie would indeed be able to tell his future, but as he has explained it to me, he thinks that when people are told something about the future, that it does influence the way they live their lives. This is especially true if the fortune is bad. I reminded him that fortune cookies nowadays never have anything gloomy in them, so he read his. I have already forgotten what the cookies said.

I have superstitions too. For example, when I spill salt, I have to throw some over my shoulder. Part of doing this is so that the gods won’t think I am guilty of hubris. Perhaps going to church is superstitious too. I go regularly but occasionally miss a Sunday. However, if there is some crisis in the family, I will go for sure. My husband’s most insistent superstition is to say to me, “Be careful. Drive carefully. Call if you get into any trouble. Have you got your cell phone?” as I am going out the door on a sunny summer Sunday morning to drive the 2 or 3 miles to church. He does the same when our kids drive off after a visit home. For them he usually adds, “Do you have enough gas?” He is an exceptionally intelligent man (people routinely describe him as a genius) and well-educated (a PhD). No one describes me as a genius and I only have a BA, but I’m pretty smart. Why do we do this?

Deep Thoughts

Quite a few years ago Dear Abby had a long running dialogue about which way was best to hang the toilet paper – so the paper was draping on the outside or near the wall. I don’t usually read the column, but someone mentioned this ongoing discussion as being an example of frivolity. Not long ago a friend of mine, a microbiologist, strenuously exhorted me to install the toilet paper with the hanging paper furthest from the wall so the paper wouldn’t touch where bacteria and fungus breed, the bathroom being a damp and warm place. This seemed sensible, and ever since, I have installed the roll thus.

Later I noted to my daughter that very few people will actually install the toilet paper if they happen to arrive as the old roll is used up. They will leave the new roll on the counter or the back of the toilet, presumably for someone else to install, or perhaps because it doesn’t seem worth the effort for anyone to hang it. She had also noticed this.

Putting away the dishes this morning, I got to ruminating about the process. Most people, I have noticed, put away the glasses upside down. Why, I wondered. Why put the part that is going to touch your lips onto the perhaps dusty or germy shelf? Perhaps everyone but me has completely germ-free, dust-free shelves. Perhaps they don’t want dust from the air to accumulate in the glasses.

In the kitchen I have a small terrycloth towel to wipe my hands and a separate dish towel (in New Brunswick called a tea towel) to dry the dishes. Most people, including my husband, don’t make a distinction and wipe their hands on the dish towel and if they are helping me with the dishes, grab the hand towel.

I have always envied people (usually men) who don’t have to spend any brainpower on such perhaps frivolous matters, although I did read once that D.H. Lawrence loved to wash dishes.

The Good Samaritan

I have a new hero, Roseanne Smith.

This morning in the Globe and Mail there was the story of Ms. Smith:
“When Rosanne Smith and her husband, Armand, stumbled upon Curtis Dagenais on Tuesday morning lying in their hay field with only a water bottle at his side, one of the first things the man accused of killing two RCMP officers wanted was a hug. ´He probably hasn't had a hug from anybody in his family for probably 25 years. He has been abused physically and mentally for years and years and years,’ Ms. Smith said yesterday during an interview.”

The Smiths “coaxed” Dagenais into their kitchen and talked to him for 6 hours, trying to convince him to turn himself in. At one point he talked about suicide, but Ms. Smith persuaded him that wasn’t a good way out of his troubles.

Imagine the compassion and the physical courage it took to give the man a hug, to coax him into their kitchen and to talk to him for 6 hours. I had tears in my eyes reading the article. Going through the newspaper is usually a very dispiriting activity, but every once in a while, you come across evidence of the potential goodness of humankind.

Last Sunday in church I read the scripture lesson, the story of the Good Samaritan, and the minister preached on the story. Roseanne Smith gives this world-shaking parable new life.

Wishing I Were Proust

My class at Mount Holyoke celebrated our 50th reunion in May. I didn’t go. I've worried over why because my four years at Mount Holyoke was a tremendously important chunk of my life as I am tracing it. Every day there produced a revelation, especially in the first year. I’ve written about this revelatory nature on May 25. I did go back for two reunions, but I found them very draining. I wasn’t reliving my years there at all – I was trying to keep up with the present. Who were these people? Trying to match them as they now were to what I had known was exhausting. The act of remembrance was distressing. Because I had lived “out of the loop” for so long, I would have known only one person in present time, my roommate, who happens to have a cottage a few streets over from the cottage we inherited. What’s more, she is the kind of person who wants to keep up with old friends, who has a magnificent memory for names and events.

I have always lived in the present. I do look back, of course, but I have a poor memory for details. Certain events do stand out, perhaps because I have told the stories over and over or have written about them, or have used them in my novels. My husband has a wonderful memory and one of his greatest pleasures is remembering the past, talking about it. He can remember many things about my past that I can’t, and in fact I say it is as if he has lived two lives, his and mine, and I haven’t lived one.

I don’t really look very far into the future either. For example, at the moment I am looking only as far as the beginning of October when we will come back from our September stint in Maine. My aunt tells me that she enjoys looking forward to an event, preparing for it, almost more than the event itself.

I have tried keeping a journal or a plain diary, so that I can look back and remember, but the keeping will become more and more sporadic until at last after a week or two it ceases. I have got into the habit of keeping necessary dates -- when we got a new furnace or a new roof. I write down birthdays in my dayrunner.

I keep several different types of lists of “things to do.” The mother in my first published novel, Flora, Write This Down, keeps lists, and as she gets older, she keeps more and more elaborate lists. Over 25 years later, I find myself doing the same thing. That is weird.

Resurrecting the Old Community

My neighbor and good friend Jack is trying to resurrect our old street community. He collects for two, even some years three, good causes, and introduces himself to the new people. He has made a chart with the name of each family. Last year he had a party for the whole street. Most of the neighbors were enthusiastic about the project, brought tons of food and drink, helped out with the setting up and the taking down of the tables, and washed the dishes. I met three families I hadn’t known before.

In May a new family moved in beside us, and they are very friendly and obviously lonesome. Twice the wife has brought us some of their native food. They have two lively children. How lovely to have children around. As one of our neighbors said, Having only old people around is gloomy. It reminded her of death and sickness.

My parents didn’t visit the neighbors – the neighbors visited them. It was always the gathering spot for the adults, and then for my friends and the friends of my brother. I just realized, I am like my parents. People come here. I don’t visit them. Last night, sitting on our porch, the new neighbor said, poignantly, “Why don’t you visit me?” I realized I had to make the effort, but I don’t really know how “to drop in.” I can hardly think of how it can be done. Changing the lifetime habit of mind is going to be difficult. The lady across the street comes to our house two or three times a day, has a cigarette and a cup of coffee. She has done this for the 6 or so years she has lived here, but I have been in her house perhaps only 10 times.

Our little corner of the street, five houses, is now quite a friendly spot. Because I grew up in a little village where everyone knew each other, I do long for a close-knit neighborhood, so I am grateful.

Getting Through Trouble

The last two years we spent in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, where Bill got his PhD, was a difficult time. When I look back at those years, I wonder how we got through them. The trouble started in August of 1963, when I was 7 months pregnant. Our 3 year old son was playing in the neighbor’s sandbox and came in with gunk on his hands. I looked at the box – an animal must have vomited in it. I phoned the pediatrician who said to bring the three kids in. He looked at our hands to see if there were any cuts where rabies might have entered. The neighbor’s kids had none, our son and I had some. Should we have the rabies shots? The other pediatrician had been present in a hospital where they had made the decision not to give the rabies vaccine and the man had died of rabies. It was determined we would have the vaccine, a shot each day in the muscle of the abdomen. The doctor explained that they were especially painful shots but that after a few days our pain threshold would rise and they wouldn’t be so painful.

The day of the doctors’ decision, the campus police chief came to look in the neighborhood to see if he could find the sick animal. He saw something under our flimsy graduate student house he thought might be an animal, went on his hands and knees to retrieve it, and my hopes soared. But alas, it was only a piece of cardboard.

My brother and new sister-in-law were on the road after their wedding, coming to visit us on their honeymoon, and they arrived just as the awful decision was being made. They were a tremendous comfort to us, although I often have said to my sister-in-law that with such an omen on her honeymoon, she would have been justified in turning right around for home and having the marriage annulled.

I have written about the birth in my post of May 6. My mother had come down to look after our son near the due date, but the baby was 3 weeks late. She and my father had never been apart for more than a few days. On Friday, November 23, we brought the baby home. My husband took our son to the football parade, but when he got to the site, there wasn’t a parade, only people milling around. He inquired and was told that President Kennedy had been shot. In the meantime, our neighbor came to tell my mother and me the news.

On Saturday night, my father went to visit a friend. He was distraught over the death, apparently had too much to drink, and was in an accident on the way home. He nearly died. My mother had to fly home the next day. As the days went by and it became apparent that he was not going to die, we settled down.

We had done our Santa shopping through the Sears’ catalogue. The presents didn’t come, didn’t come, and finally on Dec. 24 Bill went to Durham to see what was the matter. Only one of the presents we had ordered had arrived, a metal racing car, the kind the child gets in and pedals, the present I had ordered from my parents. Bill set out to buy for Santa. He came home with wonderful gifts, a tent, a policeman’s uniform, a life-size dum-dum, a long horn like a medieval page would blow. The car had to be assembled, there were missing pieces and most of the parts that were to go together couldn’t be made to fit, and it was complicated, and about 3 AM, after an argument, Bill went to bed, but I, saying to myself that it was my parents’ present, soldiered on. The car never did work.

On Christmas day my cousin and his girlfriend, also PhD candidates, came by and of course had to blow the horn. After they left, our son complained of sore cheeks. He had mumps. My cousin and his girlfriend got them, the girlfriend having to be hospitalized with mumps in her ovaries.

Several days after Christmas, we drove back to New England to visit our parents. I’ve written a poem about the horrendous trip, the only poem of mine that has ever been published. We drove through a blinding snowstorm; our son was restless with so little room; we were exhausted and worried.

Community

Religion is more like a response to a friend than it is like obedience to an expert. Austin Farrer

We lucked into a wonderful community. We bought a small (1000 square feet) house in a new subdivision. Ours was the second house built on our street. We chose the plan from a book of small house plans put out by the Canadian government, and since we didn’t have any money, having just come from graduate school in the USA, we chose the smallest. That the government would put out such a book seemed unusually thoughtful. The builders, two brothers, were the kind of men that makes New Brunswick so special – humble, honest, conscientious gentlemen, using the word gentlemen with all its best connotations.

Soon there were people who turned the street into a real community, with carol sings, coffee parties, baby showers, birthday parties. The house of our next-door neighbor became the hub for the adults, with people stopping in for tea frequently. The wife kept us all informed of the goings on, a gossip in a good, not a mean way. A few months after Christmas one year, our youngest son said, “There isn’t any Santa Claus, is there?” “Who do you think brings the presents then?” “Dot?” Dot was this next door neighbor.

Ours is the most humble house on the street, but none of them is grand. The house has served us well, although eight years later we put on an addition. We again got lucky. The woman who designed the addition did a super job, convincing us that it wouldn’t be much more expensive to have a two story addition – a bedroom half in the ground with a room up above. This extra room that we didn’t expect is a lovely room, with large windows on all four sides and a lovely view of our backyard, right now lush with its grove of deciduous trees.

My daughter once told me that playing with Barbie dolls on the deck of one of our neighbors, she thought to herself, I’ll never be as happy again as I am right now. The two builders had designed the subdivision with a park in the middle, and it became the hub of the community for the children. The kids played baseball there, and in the winter the city made a skating rink.

Over the 40 years we have lived on this street, I have often thought of the concept of community, of what makes a good one. In the beginning, there was nothing but mud, and we all had to make lawns, a miracle really, and the kids played on the muddy street, road hockey (new to us), constructing dams and rivers. The builders had also designed the street with two curves, to make it difficult for cars to speed. Most of the residents were New Brunswickers, although there were 8 families “from away.” There were 5 professors, a lawyer, a doctor, two teachers, some businessmen, but most of the men worked for the NB government. Only one of the women worked outside the home, although the rest were plenty busy with volunteering, art, serious hobbies, church.

Of course there were sadnesses. There seemed to be an unusual number of deaths from cancer. Kids got into trouble, but an astonishingly high percentage of them turned out fine. People have moved or died over the years, and the 53 children have all grown up and gone. Of the original 25 families, only 10 remain. That is sad too.

Silas Marner

I have just finished re-reading Silas Marner. My husband remembered that Silas had been a member of the Plymouth Brethren. There was no mention of it in the book, only that he had been a Dissenter. A scholar perhaps has determined that the brand of Dissenter was Plymouth Brethren, but I can’t find any reference to that.

I had forgotten so much about the book. I had forgotten the wonderful character, Dolly Winthrop, forgotten that it was so short, forgotten how masterful the plotting is. One of my writer friends in an e-mail today said that a strong plot was now considered old-fashioned. Is that true? Gilead is a wonderful novel, widely praised, and it doesn’t have much traditional plot.

Out of the main stream into a little brook

A strange twist along my way from birth is that I have not participated intimately in the most important issues of my lifetime. My grandfathers were too old to be in World War I, my father too old to be in World War II. I did have uncles and family friends in World War II, as I have written in a previous post, but the war didn’t really hit us. My parents were affected by the depression, but I was too young to feel the effects. I grew up in a small village, and going to the movies involved quite a trek. We went seldom; I didn’t see the movies that influenced many of my generation: The Wizard of Oz or Fantasia for example. I didn’t really begin to watch television much at all until I was 50.

I was deeply affected by one great sea change, that of children of ordinary parents being able to go college. I was the first of my family. By the time my cousins came along, going to college was the norm. My husband was in the Air Force but in between conflicts. We had been in Canada three years before the great struggle over the Vietnam War broke out. We missed the revolution of draft-dodging, bra burning, Chicago protest, long hair.

I am grateful that I did take the road less-traveled by, to New Brunswick, at the time of a great outpouring of the arts here. I was in on the beginning of an influential writers’ group, of the establishment of the Maritime Writers’ Workshop, the Writers’ Federation of NB, and the alternate Gallery Connexion. I was present at the birth of some wonderful novels and powerful poetry. I didn’t have to submit my work, I was asked for it. There was a wonderful sense of excitement here, of things moving. Not only was I, a stranger in a strange land, allowed to participate, I was welcomed.

When we came here, I was unformed, really. I had been educated, I was a wife and a mother, but in a sense, my life was just beginning. In a few years I had become a writer and a bonafide member of a renaissance.

When I go back to my native land, I feel out of place. I feel like Rip VanWinkle, waking up after 40 years and finding myself in unfamiliar territory. I am not, nor ever have been, a complaining expatriate, loathing my native land. I admire it for all it stands for, for its good, although sometimes naïve, intentions. When I hear criticism of the USA, no matter how well-deserved, I want to say, “But my people are not like that.” I am still, however, grateful and amazed at what a success for me personally and for our whole family, our Canadian journey turned out to be.

God's in his heaven

In an e-mail, my friend Ted commented on my blog entries about God’s presence and absence, about God holes. Here is some of what he had to say:

I know Peter Short preached sermons about God being absent, and in genocides, etc. it looks that way, but it’s just a matter of epistemology isn't it? I feel God’s always here, though my sore toe might keep me from paying attention. As I withdraw from all committees and as much responsibilities as I can, I’m neglecting people and sometimes, often, it feels as if God is all there is, and I don’t respect Him much. I blame God for everything; he can’t get out of it. But his answer to Job: esthetic, works every time. Even with the 6 rotting ducks and 2 cormorants that washed up on my shore this last week -- which I had to put in garbage bags. Rank, but I can't help being Whitmanesque about little rottennesses. I have spells of despising humans; I CANNOT understand how some people like the music they obviously do, and I think it’s evil that they do and think that God is gravely remiss. His damned plenitude -- just goes too far. God’s presence is what gets me.

Yesterday was a lovely day, bright blue sky, perfect temperature, long phone calls from loved ones, and a delicious seafood buffet at the Lord Beaverbrook Hotel. To top it off, our new sweet neighbours, finding out that it was my birthday, brought me over some of their wonderfully exotic, exciting food. It did seem as if “God’s in his heaven --/All’s right with the world.”

72

I turned 72 today. My kids and other relatives will phone. My husband will take me out for supper. I had hoped that I would be edging toward being a better person as I aged, but alas, I seem to be getting worse, more crotchety, less patient, and more opinionated. I am not kinder. My father had a series of strokes when he was about 85, and he gradually turned from a gentle, kind man into a raging man. At that time I was often reminded of Dylan Thomas’ poem, “Do not go gentle into that goodnight,/Old age should burn and rave at close of day;/ Rage, rage against the dying of the light.” Just yesterday I re-read the poem on mentalmultivitamin. I had forgotten that it was addressed to his father.

Plymouth Brethren

My friend Ted, a regular reader of my blog, has sent me these quotations from Don Akenson’s An Irish History of Civilization, volume 2, about the beginnings of the Plymouth Brethren:

“The moment of creation is when John Nelson Darby, Anglican priest and avocational ascetic, came down from the Wicklow mountains in 1827, broken in body, unstable in mind, incandescent in belief. He created a tiny religion in Dublin, whose chief characteristic is everything that the Church of Ireland is not. His Brethren are not ordained, not salaried, not corrupt, not accepting of dogma. They are committed to a literal reading of the Bible, and what a reading it is…"

"These people extend in England into the Plymouth Brethren and of course they fight with each other…"

"William Bell Riley… becomes one of the two strongest figures in the American fundamentalist movement, an unswerving promoter of John Nelson Darby’s literalist and apocalyptic reading of the bible, and the godfather of the twentieth century’s most influential preacher, the Rev. Dr. Billy Graham.”

Off the topic, but not too far

I looked up comic blogs by women recommended by another blogger. I didn’t find them very funny, an age thing perhaps. I usually have the same opinion of women stand-up comedians. Their method seems to be to mention private parts, say the f word, or complain about their mothers. That was funny some time ago, but the shock value has worn off.

Good comedy of any kind is the most difficult genre to write. That’s a vast generalization, but I think it’s true. You apparently can’t force yourself to write it, but you can force yourself to write a novel or a poem. Leo Rosten has an insightful introduction to his second volume of the wonderfully comic Hyman Kaplan stories. He writes that one night when he was in despair, Hyman appeared to him. Rosten wrote the stories when he should have been doing something else. They were a great success, so of course people wanted more. But Hyman disappeared, not to re-surface until twenty-five years later when Rosten was again in despair.

One time long ago, when my husband was worried, he woke me up to read me his first Everett Coogler poem. My reaction was, Oh no, he’s gone round the bend. He wrote quite a few Coogler poems, enough for a slim chapbook, and they were wildly successful. When he performed them at readings, people would howl with laughter. Strangers wrote him fan letters. But alas, Everett disappeared.

I love the Christopher Fry essay, “Comedy”. “…there is an angle of experience where the dark is distilled into light: either here or hereafter, in or out of time: where tragic fate finds itself with perfect pitch, and goes straight to the key which creation was composed in. And comedy senses and reaches out to this experience. It says, in effect, that, groaning as we may be, we move in the figure of a dance, and, so moving, we trace the outline of the mystery.”

Occasionally when I am giving a reading from one of my novels, the audience will laugh. Then I fantasize that I too could write a comic novel. Or maybe a short story.

Filling

How can I fill my God Hole at this stage of my life? A good question. One of the reasons I began this blog was to find out just that. When I was young, the hole was filled by reading religious books and writing what I think of as religious novels. Church played a big part, not because I could sense God’s presence – that strangely was usually absent. However, it was, and is, good to be with people who also are seeking the Realm of God, The Community.

Recently I was given the task for a church brochure to ask some parishioners why they go to church – what do they get out of it. Almost everyone mentioned the community. Two mentioned religion, no one God, prayer, or Jesus.

Prayer is the usual way to fill the hole, isn’t it? “The value of persistent prayer is not that He will hear us…but that we will finally hear him.”(McGill) Lately, God has been absent. Perhaps that is because I have abandoned my strict regimen of going to my office and there reading, praying and writing. I don’t know. Is it something that happens to people as they get older?

A New Venture

About 10 years ago, I decided to write a novel that I myself would like to read, not having a possible audience in mind, but hoping that it would be acceptable to others. Alas, it didn’t work out. For one thing, it didn’t have enough narrative thrust – none actually – and when I tried to insert some, it sounded artificial to my ears. I have been tinkering with it for some time now. While I was away in Maine, I had a eureka moment: it might work as a blog. I had written it as journal being kept by a woman who had recently been ordained and, along with her new husband, given a charge, roughly set in a fictionalized Baccaro, Nova Scotia, a spot I dearly love. The title of the novel is A Meditation on Psalm 139. One of the inspirations for the novel was a service I attended in Baccaro, where the woman minister read the psalm. As I studied it, I thought that it could have been composed by a woman. Harold Bloom had suggested in The Book of J that some of the psalms might have been written by a woman, that there were educated women high up in the courts of Solomon and David.

God Hole Gene

My grandfather was an early Jehovah Witness, joining the sect about 1920. It was founded about 1916 by “Pastor Russell” as my grandfather called him and later was led by “Judge Rutherford.”

I am not sure which of my grandfather’s eccentricities were his alone and which were associated with his religion. He was a blacksmith by trade, but by the time I knew him well he must have been retired, because he spent his time walking long distances, going from house to house, spreading the word. He would visit my father’s sister, Tempie, and seeing an abundance of vegetables she had just harvested, he would request some to take on his journey. “Mrs. Bartlett could use these.” He also carried discarded clothing to the needy. If we saw him walking up the hill to our house, we would alert my mother, who would quickly hide her cigarettes and ashtray. He remonstrated with me about crossing my legs at the knees—this was bad for circulation. I still don’t cross my legs at the knees. He brought my brother and me treats from the health food store--this was back in the 1940’s--candy made from carrots, for example.

On one memorable afternoon he preached to me and my boyfriend for about an hour about God. I wish I could remember what he said. I was amazed at this memory – he quoted many passages of the Bible – he seemed to know the whole book by heart.
I suspect that what attracted him to the Jehovah Witness sect was its scholarly nature. After he died, my grandmother gave me his Bible. Half of the volume is the actual Bible, half study apparatus. She also gave me his interlinear translation of the New Testament.
His father was a shepherd who had emigrated from England. The story goes that he went to work in the wool mill and at one point had a conversation with the owner. When the owner discovered that he had been a shepherd and was working towards bringing his large family over and eventually having a sheep farm of his own, the owner offered to pay for this dream. I learned from family research done by a cousin that Tom Senior had given some of his land to the Plymouth Brethren to build a church. The church is still there although it has changed its stripes several times over the years.

Tom Senior was long gone when I arrived in this world. He died 6 months after my mother’s birth. My grandfather married late, in his forties. He was 20 years older than my grandmother.

My mother remembered the slight embarrassment of being called in from playing to evening prayers. “The other children knew why I was being called in.” My aunt doesn’t remember the embarrassment, but she does remember the evening prayers. “My father would kneel with me beside my bed.”

I think my brother and I have inherited our God holes from this grandfather. Alas, we didn’t inherit his amazing memory.

Still in this World

A combination of a lot of distracting talk around me, a lot of spam to clear away on my e-mail, and only 30 minutes on the library computer has spoiled my dream of posting while I am away. I shall return.

Challenge Met

Here I am posting to my blog in the library. I have only 30 minutes, so I won't be as long winded as I usually am. I have read The Red Tent, No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency, House Thinking, and a Carolyn Roe mystery, A Draught for a Deadman. The No. 1 Ladies is quite different from what I imagined -- I can see why my friend likes the series so well. The central character is indeed a lovable creature. The Roe mystery is like the Brother Cadfael series, in that you are treated to historical settings as well as to interesting characters and of course a mystery to be solved. The House Thinking is like some of this kind of book -- there is a premise which after a while seems to be labored. One of its most interesting themes is the desirability of having both refuge and prospect in a home -- vistas and coziness -- and that men like a ratio of more prospect than refuge and women vice-versa. The Red Tent is quite a tour de force -- very convincing.

I have been writing about my grandfather, my mother's father, and I will put some of that on this blog the next time.

Thanks to poor mad peter for his advice.