Bereavement

(Note:  This is a subject I decided to write on by myself, not one of the subjects drawn at random.)

My mother died almost two years ago, after falling downstairs.  She was in a hospital ICU for a week and seemed to be recovering, but she suddenly took a turn for the worse, then was gone.  She was almost 94.

If I could send her one message now, I think I'd thank her for teaching me, by her example, to take a sympathetic view of people. (She even felt sorry for Nixon!) If I'm a good person, it's in her image; if I'm not a good person, it isn't her fault.  And that's probably the most important thing anyone has done for me.

Yet I didn't cry over her death.  Not until last Sunday.  I'd been laid up with a severe cold for almost a week--I had to miss several performances by the Toronto City Opera, in which I'm a chorus member--and was looking at some old comic books from my childhood.  They were French-language comics about Petzi, a little bear cub who sails around the world in his little boat with his friends, a penguin, a pelican and a seal. (The original version was Danish, and he was called Rasmus Klump.) These comics are aimed at really little kids, at about the level of Barney the Dinosaur.  Back at the time, I read them to try to learn French, since the language was pretty simple.

In some stories, Petzi returns to home port and comes home to his mother.  In one I was rereading yesterday, just after an adventure in the Land of Sleep, he has what with a grownup would be called an anxiety attack:  he sits sobbing on the deck of his boat, explaining, "I want to see my mother again!" (He's usually a dauntless adventurer, not the sensitive type like I was.) Fortunately, just then they come in view of home and return, and he has a reunion with his mother, who hugs him and feeds him a huge stack of pancakes.

After seeing this little bear lose it on his boat because he missed his mother, I ended up losing it too.  I shed tears for a couple of hours and went through four handkerchiefs. (My cold didn't help.) So now I've cried over losing my mother.

A sense of home

Twenty years ago I spent eight months in London, England, researching my Ph.D. thesis.  I stayed at Goodenough College in Bloomsbury. (I was lucky my sister had just stayed there and put in a good word for me.) It was the best eight months of my life.  I not only did a great deal of research but went to ten plays and visited a lot of museums. (I even went on a protest march down Park Lane.)

There was one moment I especially remember.  I think I was walking on the University of London campus on a Sunday afternoon in October, and really felt at home!  But now that I think about it, this probably wasn't a single moment but a composite of several moments.  Memory can work in funny ways.

There's a Woody Guthrie song I like that goes, "The gambling man is rich and the working man is poor and I ain't got no home in this world any more."

Favourite swimming hole

When I was young, we owned a cottage near Northumberland Strait, near the eastern end of the New Brunswick-Nova Scotia border.  We often swam there.  I dream about it quite a bit.  For some reason, it bothers me when I dream about places from the past that I'll never see again, yet I'm not completely free from.  I also dream about our Sackville home and feel like I'm intruding on the new owners!

On the subject of swimming, at the age of twelve I failed a junior-level swimming course. I have a feeling that they looked at me in the first class and said, "He's going to fail!" The only reason I hadn't quit already was that I didn't want to be a quitter. (In hindsight, I should have just quit.) On the day that I failed it, we bought a new electric typewriter, so I've always associated that typewriter with my failure.  Some years earlier my four older siblings had all taken a swimming course together, but three of them failed.  Al least they failed together, while I felt alone.  They encouoraged me to take the course again, but I was too proud.  It's our failures that define us more than our successes.

Fruit preserves

My mother used to make strawberry jam when strawberries were in season. (She used the artificial pectin that came in envelopes of Certo.) And in September she'd make chow chow from fresh tomatoes, a smell I always liked.

After we got a freezer, we'd freeze fresh strawberries and raspberries.  It always bugs me when they're frozen with too little sugar:  it just doesn't taste as good.  There are some people who'll make a recipe the way it says, but reduce the amount of sugar or butter by a half or two thirds.  When the recipe is ruined, they don't care.  It'll just have to do. (A few years ago my brother made us a rhubarb pie with hardly any sugar.)

Which reminds me of Jello.  I learned to make Jello when I was young.  You mix the powder in a cup of boiling water, add another cup of cold water, then let it cool in the refrigerator.  I especially liked the "skin," the tough part that develops on the bottom of the bowl where extra powder settles.  For variety, you can put it in the freezer and it'll get icy.  Or you can mix flavors.  I have a feeling that when I'm approaching the end of my life, I'll wish I'd eaten more Jello. (Remember that TV commercial where the farmer said "Hey, you kids get out of that Jello tree!"?)

Books I didn't finish

I usually make a point of finishing every book I start.  I can only think of a few exceptions.

Some thirty years ago I started reading the Gary Jennings historical novel Aztec, set in Mexico just before the Spanish conquest, with Montezuma as a bad guy.  It wasn't a bad book; on the contrary, it was pretty entertaining in a somewhat lurid way. (I remember one part where he was travelling in the northern deserts, through the land of the dog people, then the land of the wild dog people, then the land of the rabid wild dog people.) But around the midpoint I just felt sated.  Yet I did read about 600 pages of it.

When I was young I read several of L.M. Montgomery's books about Anne of Green Gables.  But I lost interest in Anne's House of Dreams. (Maybe it felt a bit too adult for me.) I should try it again sometime.

I have this book about recollections of Groucho Marx by his longtime girlfriend Charlotte Chandler, titled Hello, I Must Be Going.  I've tried to read it twice, but couldn't get into it.  Better to watch his movies.

I'm in several book clubs.  In one we did Reading Lolita in Tehran, but I only read a bit of it.  It was something of a girl's book. (I only got through half a dozen pages before deciding the same about Alice Walker's The Color Purple.) And I only read a few pages of Jonathan Livingston Seagull before throwing it across the room.