Lonesome Dove and the Old West

I am steadily making my way through the 945 pages of Larry McMurtry’s Pulitzer Prize winning Lonesome Dove in preparation for our book club meeting in ten days. This is not a chore. While in Puerto Vallarta in the winter I read two of McMurtry’s sequels to this tome, The Streets of Laredo and Dead Man’s Walk. Chronologically, these books were prequels, going back to the earlier lives and exploits of Captains Call and McCrae of the Texas Rangers. I would have read Lonesome Dove during that period as well, so taken was I with the vast sweep of early southwestern American history that McMurtry captured. However, I was unable to find a copy at the local library or in one of the used book stores. I have been reading Lonesome Dove with my Rand McNally atlas close to hand, following the movement of the men and women of this tale from the Rio Grande border with Mexico, through all of Texas, into present-day Oklahoma, Kansas, and to date in my reading, Nebraska. Other important people in the book begin their journeys in Arkansas, going either south into Texas or north, following the Arkansas River and cattle trails into Kansas. The contrast between the conditions of life in this mid- 19^th century south-western setting and the way that we live now could hardly be more stark. The geography, weather, and the almost total lack of settlements throughout these areas, imposed a way of being on travellers not just difficult for people of our time to imagine, but most likely, to survive. Besides these elemental forces, without the rule of law other human beings in the territories could without warning create situations of peril. Residual bands of natives not yet under the iron control of the American government, rough groups of buffalo hunters, horse thieves, gamblers and drunks found in the smallest of settlements could threaten the movement of families seeking homesteads, or even in unlucky circumstances, the considerably well organized cattle-drive groups like those of Call and McCrae.

The story focuses rightly on the men of the old west as it was men who primarily fought for this area, ultimately allowing the settlement of families and a space for women. Most of these men live rough lives with one another, experiencing little if any connection with women other than the “whores” to be found in small towns. McMurtry paints their interactions with one another and their varying roughness, discomfort with, and longing for the company of women, with a deft hand. Three women play important roles in his narrative: Clara, Gus McCrae’s old love who married a farmer and moved to Nebraska; Elmira, the wife of a sheriff in Arkansas, a former “sporting girl” who had passed herself off as a widow when she came to his town; and Lorena, the beautiful “sporting girl” of the Lonesome Dove (a tiny south Texas town) saloon who longed to make her way to San Francisco.

Other than in developing her own strong drive and energy, Clara’s earlier life in her parents’ general store further east did not prepare her for the rigour of farming life in Nebraska. She raised her five children in a sod house, burying her three sons within a few years, and seeing her husband slowly die after being kicked in the head by a mare he was attempting to tame.  Elmira’s desire to marry stemmed from terror engendered by her near-death treatment at the hands of some buffalo hunters. Regretting her decision after several months of quiet “respectability,” she abandoned her husband while he was away on a search for a killer, heading north and west looking for Deet, an earlier lover. The troubles that she then fell into were more terrible than her previous experiences had been. Lorena, who joined the Call/McCrae cattle drive heading north and west for Montana, was captured en route by a notorious native renegade and sold to a group of natives who cruelly raped and tortured her, leaving her profoundly traumatized long after her rescue by Gus McCrae. All three of these women are drawn, not as stereotypes, but as living personalities, each exemplifying in some fashion aspects of the roles and perils available to women in that location and time.

My husband, Mark, who was born, raised, and educated in Michigan, and who has lived in New York City, Rhode Island, Alaska, Boston, and Los Angeles, has long been interested in the native peoples of North America, especially in the American southwest. Over our time together I have gradually understood some of the reason. Though we Canadians are similar to Americans in so very many ways, our own history and geography have brought us up to different attitudes and values. I have often reflected on the importance of slavery, the civil war, and their aftermaths, as major factors in the differences between us. But the taking and settling of the southern and western portions of the current USA have had perhaps an equally important role in the inherent collective national narrative. Larry McMurtry quotes at the opening of his novel a passage from T K Whipples’s Study Out The Land, which I shall replicate here:

“All America lies at the end of the wilderness road, and our past is not a dead past, but still lives in us. Our forefathers had civilization inside themselves, the wild outside. We live in the civilization they created, but within us the wilderness still lingers. What they dreamed, we live, and what they lived, we dream.”

Our own early Canadian history contains some of the elements to be found in McMurtry’s narrative but the differences are substantial. Other than the native peoples found throughout North America when Europeans came and began to explore, conquer, and colonize, the founders of both Canada and the USA were of the same ilk. We are like children of the same parents, alike in some basic fashion, but demonstrating our profound differences in both genetic materials and time and place of nurture: siblings who by no means always “get” each other.

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Where Memory Takes Us

The summer I turned 14 our family moved from Brockville, returning to Ottawa from which we had decamped four years earlier. I went to visit my aunt Alma at her cottage near Renfrew while the move was happening. On my return to the family I was picked up at the Ottawa train station by my father and was driven to our new home on Tilbury Ave, an inauspicious duplex on a newly developing street. When I saw these new digs my heart fell. Our funny little house in Brockville was set on a half-acre lot, surrounded by climbing trees, a side lawn bordered by flowers, a back yard where we played baseball, and great spots for secreting oneself when at dusk we would play hide and seek. I could tell that my father wanted me to be happy with this place that they had found, so I kept my feelings to myself. In some way the setting of the new house, not necessarily the house itself, so bereft of sidewalks, trees, and greenery, is for me a kind of metaphor for this new phase of life that we entered into by leaving Brockville.

Now that my sister, Valerie, was old enough to start school, my mother decided to get a job. I doubt that this would have happened in Brockville where the peer pressure of their more well-to-do friends and the zeitgeist of the 1950s would have pronounced such a move shameful, not for her, but for any man unable to support unaided his wife and children. My mother told all who enquired that her decision was simply based on her desire to have a job. Decades later the narrative changed to one of economic necessity. So we entered not just a new town and a distinctly different neighbourhood, but a greatly altered domestic scene. In Brockville my parents had enjoyed a rich social life, filled with late afternoon cocktail parties, evening gatherings, formal affairs, and sun-filled days spent at friends’ cottages along the bordering St Lawrence.

In retrospect I can see the many advantages that this life gave to us, their children. Because she was not working outside our home, my mother was able to support all of this extra-familial activity very well. Domesticity was not her strong suit but she could handle the tasks demanded of her at home as well as be up for all that their social calendar demanded. And she loved it. She was happy and as far as we could tell my parents got along very well and enjoyed their lives together. This in itself is great for kids. But there were other advantages. They often had people in “for drinks,” giving us the experience of other adults who would sometimes talk with us in an interested and interesting manner: lessons in how to be sociable. Even more: lessons in how to tidy up quickly because people were coming over; how to set up a table for company; how to hang out in the kitchen sampling the extra desserts and listening in on the adults’ conversations and jokes. Linda and I got asked to babysit for their friends’ younger children, a great source of revenue for a kid like me always hankering after cash for candy and comics. Sometimes we were asked along for the cottage visits, making friends with same-age kids of my parents’ buddies. Then, of course, there were the many occasions that my parents were simply out having fun, allowing the mice at home to play. It definitely gave us greater latitude in doing as we pleased about staying outside on summer evenings and in going to bed late.

The move back to Ottawa closed that entire chapter. My mother soon got a job in the credit department of Simpsons-Sears at a shopping mall west along Carling Ave. Within a few years she was the assistant manager, a position she obtained no doubt because of her smarts and her efficiency on the job. Linda became more and more her domestic stand-in, taking responsibility for getting suppers started and probably, though I have little memory about this, picking up Valerie after school. Without their extended group of pals in Brockville my parents’ social life was considerable constricted. Besides, the sheer intensity of her five day a week job took up much of my mother’s energy and focus. When she was around, she was more tired and increasingly more irritable.

In Brockville our little house had four bedrooms allowing all six of us to cluster on its second floor. The Ottawa house had three upstairs and a windowless room carved out of the mostly unfinished basement. Craig, not quite ten, was elected to sleep there. But he was unhappy being downstairs alone, so Valerie was given my bed in the room I shared with Linda, he took Valerie’s room, and I moved to the basement. I lived there for the two years that we stayed on Tilbury. As I recall it was not a very pleasant space. I had a large old bed and a dresser set on a linoleum floor. The lighting was poor, probably from an overhead fixture. No one, including myself, gave any particular thought to decor or comfort in my new dwelling place. It was just to be a place to sleep, though in many ways it became my home for those two years. My companions were books. I discovered down there a box or two of novels that my mother had read in her earlier, more leisurely days, and I hoovered through them all. Mainly I loved historical fiction. I read all of the stories by Thomas B Costain and then went looking for other authors who could take me into the heart of adventure and romance in other eras. In my basement nest I could set my own, unexamined sleeping times. Often I would read well into the night, enduring exhaustion and, of course, the consequent inattention at school the following day. I fervently wished that I could travel in time to those earlier periods to see for myself what life was like there. Were those people like us or were they substantially different? I puzzled over this question in some fashion for decades. Reading Sam Pepys diaries many years later confirmed for me that human beings have been essentially the same creatures for millennia.

The prompt for this little jog along one memory track came this morning as I thought over this past week. Some things have held my attention and concern: the daily dance with encroaching carpenter ants (hopefully arrested yesterday by a visitation from the fumigators), and, some unpleasantness with our landlords  – not yet settled to anyone’s satisfaction. Then the more happy and interesting things: reading Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove for our up-coming book club meeting; seeing a documentary (112 Marriages) at the Bloor with Mark – we agreed afterward that we would do the marriage thing all over again; having lunch with Max Dublin, a neighbour from our Walmer Rd days, and with my good buddy Roz, of whom I am more fond all the time; seeing Elizabeth for supper and Billie after her hip-hop class on Wednesday; starting with a couple of new clients; spending time with my brother Craig and his lady, Dale last Sunday; walking out along Bloor both east and west, taking in the spring air and sometimes sprinkles; being ridiculously happy about the Blue Jays’ new spot at the top of the AL East; and etc., and etc.

Thinking of all these things and of all of the vastly important events going on in the world right now, I remembered a program that Craig and I used to watch on the first TV set purchased by my parents in 1955 while we were still on Tilbury. Colour television had yet to come; there was only black and white. Moreover, in Ottawa there was but one channel: the CBC. Programming began at 4 PM and finished around midnight. Some programs were in English and some in French. We could never have imagined then the array of media now available to us. The particular show that I thought of was hosted by Walter Cronkite. It was kind of cheesy as I recall, but we liked it. Each week an historical event was dramatized and commented upon by Cronkite. Its title was You Are There. At the beginning and end of each program Cronkite would intone solemnly, “It was a day like all days, filled with those events that alter and illuminate our lives, and,  ---- You Are There.” It was impressive and it was also funny. Craig and I would from time to time over the years recall that summation of the nature of “all days” to one another in imitation of Cronkite’s baritone. So there I was this morning, musing over the ways that the various events of this week, personal and global, have altered and illuminated my life. Off I went into that place on Tilbury where Craig and I would listen to Cronkite and where we found ourselves living a life so very altered to that which we had experienced in Brockville.

And so it goes. Be well.

About Shunryu Suzuki and Movies

A few years ago while I was writing my blog on Therafields a friend recommended a book entitled Shoes Outside the Door by Michael Downing. It recounts in sympathetic detail the events leading to a crisis in leadership at the San Francisco Zen Centre a few years after the death of its founder, Shunryu Suzuki. There were some parallels between the difficulties experienced there and the events leading to the demise of the Therafields community, problems afflicting many human institutions that achieve a concentration of power over others. From that aspect it was certainly an interesting read. Even more important to me personally though, was that it introduced me to Suzuki, reflected in the work through Downing’s interviews with current and past members of the community. Intrigued, I purchased David Chadwick’s bio of Suzuki entitled Crooked Cucumber, a seemingly strange title for a biography of a loved spiritual leader. It was a name laid upon him by his own Zen master and mentor when he was a young acolyte, denoting affectionately some of his idiosyncratic qualities.

Reading of Suzuki and then reading the collections of his talks to his students in San Francisco, I was seriously smitten by his intelligence, humanity, sense of humour, and his commitment to the young people who gravitated toward him in the Bay area in the 1960s. For the next two years I followed practices of meditation as he taught them. I found them to be not significantly different from the kind of meditation that I had found myself practicing while I was a member of a religious community during that same era. I had never been able to “meditate” upon a text or idea of any kind. Gradually my practice had become simply to be present in my body and to focus on my breathing. In the space that this provided I experienced some of the deepest inner, I would say, spiritual connections of my life. After this two year period I decided for reasons I will not belabour here to discontinue the formal daily practice of meditation. But Suzuki remains with me, a loved and appreciated mentor, a man from whom I have learned much that has helped and continues to help me in my daily life and work.

One practice that I have retained is to eat my breakfast without reading. This may seem a trifling matter to most of you, but it is a serious deviation from my regular activities. From my earliest days I have sprung from the bed to the written word! Meals are almost always an occasion for reading. Refraining from that accompaniment requires for me a repeated and deliberate decision. What it gives to me is the following: a space uncluttered by the quick-to-crowd-in events and challenges of the day, a space wherein I catch up with myself and the ideas, interests, or concerns that rattle around at a deeper, not always addressed level. It becomes an entry to writing as this is invariably the time of day that I begin to render my thoughts into sentences and paragraphs to send out into the great ether beyond.

The above is an example of what I am describing. I had no intention of writing about Suzuki this morning. Rather I planned to detail some of the interesting films that Mark and I have seen over the past ten days or so. Sitting here with my cereal and coffee, I mused about this early morning period of quiet and in short order found myself telling you about it, its origin, and significance. So briefly, the movies: last night we attended Russell Field’s yearly Canadian Sports Film Festival, this year held at the TIFF, a serious jump in scale from its earlier incarnation at the Revue Cinema on Roncesvalles Ave. Russell teaches sports history at the U of Manitoba in Winnipeg. Each May he and a crowd of volunteers present films from all over the world that focus on sports and their transformative functions in the lives of many people. The film that we saw, Next Goal Wins, tells of the efforts of the soccer team of American Samoa, a small, gorgeous Pacific island, to overcome the infamy of a 31-0 FIFA loss to Australia over a decade earlier. Aside from the fun of watching the practices and games as well as the beauty of the island settings, the film showcased the spirit and intense dedication of this group of young men (and one transgendered man/woman) to their sport, their country, and each other. A FIFA coach, present at the screening and for a Q & A afterward, had been parachuted in to upgrade the team’s skills and mental approach. Being there, working with these lovely, hard working amateur players was as personally transforming for him as it was for the team. In the qualifying round for FIFA play the American Samoans won one game, tied one, and lost a third. They did not qualify for the next round but they had accomplished a marked up-tick in their collective abilities, achieving a never before attained mark of scoring goals in FIFA competition. It was a quintessentially human film about struggle, winning and losing, and the power of sport to potentially bring out the best in people. The connection with war and battle, earlier ways of dealing with inter-tribal/national competitions was clearly shown in the rallying mantras the team used to psychic itself up pre-practice and game. Sport is a clear winner over war when it comes to dealing with rivalry!!

Another documentary film that we saw at the Jewish Film Festival recently held at the Bloor Cinema deserves at least a brief mention. It is called Shekinah: The Intimate Life of Hasidic Women. Chanie Carlebach is the wife of the rabbi at a Hassidic synagogue in St Agathe, PQ, and the mother of 13 children. (Her 13^th was born just after the film was completed; she says she isn’t finished having children.) She also is the founder of a seminary for Hassidic young women, aged about 18-20, who come from afar to stay with her for two years as they prepare for their roles as wives, mothers, and community teachers. Far from being dour and repressed, Chanie and her students are beautiful and lively creatures, speaking openly about their beliefs and presenting an argument for the entire absence of physical connection with their spouses until after marriage, that surprises and yet intrigues the high school students with whom they dialogue in St Agathe. The film is opening this week, I believe, at the Carleton theatre.

Well, enough for today. There is no end to the great things to attend and experience here in my lovely Annex. Today we will visit with my little (?) brother Craig and his lively partner, Dale, showing off our new place and walking with them through nearby Kensington market to find some lunch. Adieu, kind friends, adieu.

The Church in the Modern World

Before we moved to Major St my “library” underwent a massive restructuring. Literally dozens of LCBO cartons filled with books were sent to my grandson’s school library, to a used book store in Orillia, to the Sally Ann, and to respondents for free books on Kijijji. The seriously pared-down remainder sits with me in our new and lovely digs, all in one accessible living room area. Since, I have quite rigorously adhered to my self-imposed admonition to refrain from purchasing more books. One site of temptation manages to slip under that determination, however. Along the strip of Bloor running west from Major to Christie where my feet often take me, there lie three used book stores, two of which position bins of remaindered books for $1 each outside their doors. What is a woman to do in the face of such easily attained riches? And so I succumb.

Recently I have brought home my copy of Mary McCarthy’s memoir of her Catholic girlhood of which I recently wrote. As well I have purchased a very good Thesaurus – always fun to flip through; a book about the Arabs in history for Mark who has long been interested in the Shiite/Sunni split; a copy of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, a story in poetic form that intrigues me even though I am unlikely ever to see it all the way through; a brief history of Canada since 1867, a handy and quick reference; a book of cartoons for Billie; and, a book about which I would like to say a few words, entitled The Trial Of Pope Benedict by Daniel Gawthrop.

I was reflecting recently about how over many decades I have experienced an instinctive dislike and distrust of particular political or religious figures. Granted these folks (as the Americans are fond of saying) lie mainly on the conservative side of the political spectrum. But, it has not been simply a matter of their political ideology or actions. When I have watched and listened to these people on television, I have found it painfully difficult to put together their words and something else that I sensed about them that was at odds with their presented personas. Nixon, Reagan, and Mulroney come to mind. As later facts about their secret dealings have come to light, I have felt some justification of my original evaluations of their characters. I didn’t feel this way about Margaret Thatcher. I didn’t like some of her actions and attitudes but I didn’t sense duplicity in her essential being.

Joseph Ratzinger, the former Pope Benedict, is another person whom I more or less instinctively did not like. John Paul II before him had been profoundly conservative with respect to the Church’s teachings on faith and morals as well. But, because of his encouragement of the Polish Solidarity movement and its subsequent successful confrontation with the communist regime, I cut him a fair amount of slack as a human being. However, when Ratzinger was elevated to the papacy, his decades-old role of controlling the public face of the Church became known to more than just Vatican watchers. His repression of theologians espousing practices and ideas contrary to his own more rigidly formulated thoughts and the systematic hiding and denial of the sexual abuse of children by members of the clergy became open knowledge. I and many others could in no fashion accept him as a “man of God.”

Gawthrop’s book is a revealing narrative of Joseph Ratzinger’s influence as head of the powerful Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, and the role that he played over decades of reversing and repressing many of the most important components of the opening of the Church to the modern world put in place by Pope John XXIII through Vatican II. Because I gradually walked away from any connection with the Church in the mid-1960s and the 1970s, I followed few of the events that he documents. Nonetheless, I was aware that the sense of the Church and its directions conveyed to me during my most intense period of Catholicism, immediately before, during, and after my four years in a religious order, were being greatly altered. In the early sixties I knew and was influenced by some wonderful Catholic men and women who in themselves were intelligently devout and thoroughly humane. I think, for example, of Sister Mary Coderre and of Father Hendricks, the idiosyncratic pastor of Wolff Island parish. I had also the opportunity to read works like Hans Kung’s The Church in the Modern World. These pointed me toward an ecumenical future, consistent with the mixed religious culture in which I had grown up, one which embraced all peoples in a spirit of understanding and tolerance.

In the period of the mid-60s after I had left the convent life my connections with the Church were loosened but not left behind. At St Mike’s in Toronto where I completed my BA degree and in the Therafields community of which I became a member in 1966, I continued to meet, like, and respect nuns and priests (actual and former) who embodied all that was best in the spirit exemplified by John XXIII. Gradually, however, I became aware that the Church’s hierarchy was taking a substantial turn toward conservatism, actively repressing the significant openness and toleration that had been the hallmarks of Vatican II. I didn’t like it and I didn’t like the people who were clearly enacting the repressions that followed. This period marked my true walking away from the Church. It had briefly appeared a place of inclusion and of caring for issues of social justice. That promise seemed to die the death of a thousand repressions.

Gawthrop’s research outlines the processes that over several decades tightened the control of the Vatican over “dissidents” like Hans Kung and others who attempted to keep the spirit of John XXIII alive within the Church. Theologians who disagreed with Ratzinger’s hierarchical, magisterial version of the Church were silenced, their publications disallowed. Rather than entering into a meaningful dialogue with the modern world and its laity, the Church became ever more reactionary and insular, leading to the explosive confrontations of recent years as issues of sexual abuse and financial fraud in the Vatican bank have been pushed to the fore of public awareness. Whatever the cause of Ratzinger/Benedict’s resignation as pope, many former Catholics, like myself, are taking note of the changed atmosphere currently emanating from Rome and are interested to see in what it might eventuate.

A Saturday With Billie

The past few days: I realize that so many things happen each week, I don’t get around to thinking about or writing about many of them. Here are some from the past few days. On Friday Maurice brought Billie from Barrie to spend the weekend with us. That girlie is a great weekend morning lounger. She decided to sleep in the living room instead of my office because she finds our couches more comfy than the little IKEA set up that we put in place especially for her visits. I eat my breakfast (in fact most meals) in the living room but my early AM eating, writing, and reading newspapers on an adjacent couch disturbed her rest very little. Even when she finally pulls herself into a semblance of consciousness, Billie enjoys a continuation of her own inner world by settling into a book or a game on her ubiquitous tablet. Much time passes before she emerges into a fully sentient being, keen to eat and to explore a larger world. Makes sense to me and it works for both of us as I continue with my own Saturday AM slothful habits.

Late in the morning Mark, Billie and I boarded a Spadina streetcar, travelling its now truncated route (due to construction) down to King St. From there we walked along that really interesting thoroughfare – a more up-scale and shi-shi area than my own native Annex locale – that I enjoy but do not prefer. I tried to take some photos of Billie riding the backs of some large cow sculptures in the park that commemorates its former life as a market, but the sun shone so brightly on my cell phone/camera that I ended by taking several snippets of videos instead. Pretty cute though.  Passing through the BCE place we decided to have some lunch at the Marche. Billie was uninterested as she had had breakfast just before we left home, but, seeing the amazing set up of individual kiosks distributing made-on-the-spot pizzas, salads, rotis, full dinners of chicken or beef with various vegetables, crepes – sweet or savoury, gelato, deserts of every description, and etc, her eyes grew larger and larger. She walked about for some time trying to balance her fairly full constitution with the smorgasbord of delights before her. She settled finally on a dish of French vanilla gelato, and later, a brownie. She is now keen to bring her mother down to sample this marvellous gastronomic spread.

From the Marche Mark, the tour guide, took us to see the first Toronto Post Office  on Adelaide St. The front entrance was shut due to some repair work but we accessed the rear and walked about the restored ground floor. Antique tables, quill pens with paper and ink ready for use by any interested visitor, and a host of other original artefacts, photographs, and explanatory notes gave a good sense of the working of the postal business of the day. I was particularly struck by a board which detailed the historical uses and abuses of the building itself after it ceased to be a post office, and the work done to restore it to its present state. We are so lucky to have had (and to still have) people in this city sufficiently interested in and concerned about our history that they would expend lots of energy and money to preserve it.

By this time Billie and I were feeling the effects of the warm day on our too heavily shod feet and were attempting to influence the guide to head for home. But, we had one more important stop to make: the St Lawrence Market, in full swing for its Saturday morning incarnation. We passed up going through the hall itself, though we did walk through the farmer’s market across the street. In the StL Market we headed upstairs to the gallery to view Nir Bareket’s photographic exhibit, My Eyes Have Seen. The exhibit consists of photos taken over many years by Nir; most are part of the collection of the City of Toronto. They showcase several sites or themes on which Nir has focussed, for example, his haunting photos of the Don Jail, and, a series of pictures showing the plight of Toronto’s homeless population. Each section of the exhibit is introduced by someone connected to that particular area or theme. For example, the pictures of the Don jail are introduced by John Sewell, of former mayoral fame. (Remember when we had mayors with serious concerns?) He writes of the effect that Nir’s photos had in convincing people of the importance of saving that site of historical suffering, lest we forget from whence we have come.

The section that was most affecting for me personally contained photos from the March of the Living, a pilgrimage taken by Toronto students (and youth of other countries) some years ago, to sites of the Holocaust in Poland. At Auschwitz the entire group of young people walked together the few kilometres from Auschwitz 1, the original camp, to the later constructed Birkenau, Auschwitz 2, a main site of extermination of the Jews transported there from across Europe. Nir accompanied the Toronto contingent to Poland and to Israel which they visited later. Throughout he documented their physical and emotional journeys to these sites of powerful historical import. For many, as he has said, the journey was life changing. Nir’s exhibit will remain at the gallery of the St Lawrence market until July 19/14, if you are interested in seeing it. Definitely worth the visit with or without overly heated feet!

The remainder of our day was fairly anti-climactic: we returned home to Major St in time to watch the Blue Jays go down to a second defeat at the hands of the visiting LA Angels. Emily came over to play with her cousin in my office. We enjoyed supper cooked by Mark, the chef, and watched one segment of a TV series called My Inner Fish. This particular piece focussed on our inner monkeys – the development of colour sight and of the oppositional thumb/index finger in that branch of our ancestry, the how and the why of these developments and what they allow for us primate humans. Really engrossing stuff! Afterward I took Emily back to her dad’s place and the rest of us retired with our books to our beds.

Starting to write this post, I intended to survey many of the events of the past several days, but as you can observe, I have gotten no further than our Saturday spent with Billie. But that is plenty. A good spring day with an interesting and funny girlie:  fully enjoyed by all.

Reflections on a Mother's Day

Tomorrow is Mother’s Day. So here’s my Mother’s Day present: the kids are coming for supper. Or, I should say, four of the five of them are coming. Theo has gone for a long-promised weekend to his buddy’s cottage (Sorry, Nana, he said to me on the phone). But it’s OK. I love him and know that he loves me back. That is really what all this is about. It’s about love. Since we have returned to Toronto in early May we have yet to have all five progeny together here as both of my daughters now live out of Toronto. Catherine with Theo and Emily had Sunday lunch once on our off-the-kitchen deck on a singularly lovely day last month. Elizabeth is here weekly to see clients; she and I regularly have Wednesday night supper and a talk at one of our many local eateries while Billie attends her hip-hop class. Billie is staying with us for the weekend as Elizabeth takes off for parts unknown with her coterie of mother pals – a yearly festival of celebration and reprieve. But she will return tomorrow evening to join Catherine, Emily, Billie, Mark and myself to collectively bask in the glory and rewards of motherhood. More generally, of course, these are the rewards of family, by no means easily come by.

My own family has not been close. An astute observer said as much to my sister on the occasion of my mother’s 90^th birthday party, held at Linda and Darcy’s home in Etobicoke. As adults the four of us basically went along our own paths, connecting at prescribed events held at my parent’s place – perhaps once or twice a year. Valerie lived in Ottawa raising her daughter Tracey away from the mother with whom she chronically feuded. Craig had an involvement with Linda’s family, sometimes going to her place for dinner and amusing her four kids with his dry wit. He and I would go for a walk once in a while and talk about our past and our parents, sharing a perspective not understood by Linda, long our mother’s ally and our dad’s clear favourite. The things that I did, the way that I lived my life, and the choices that I made were at such angles to my mother’s views of a proper way of being that I was generally considered “weird” not just by her but by Linda’s kids as well. My discomfort in the bosom of the family was such that for many years I maintained the absolute minimum of contact, and at no time encouraged an involvement of my daughters with their grandparents.

None of the above is happy stuff. We have all suffered from the connections that we missed among ourselves. In the past several years as my mother’s health failed, Linda, Craig, and I met periodically and talked more openly about family dynamics. “Where was I?” Linda said on several occasions as Craig and I recounted some of our ancient stories. Her experiences with our parents was so vastly different from our own that we might have lived in different families. It was a great shock to her when our mother turned against her in the last few years of her life, berating her undeservedly. Craig and I openly expressed our satisfaction to Linda that she was experiencing the venom that we had described but which had never before come her way. At last she got it! But again, I have to underscore that all this is unhappy stuff. My poor old mother had to have good guys and bad guys within the orbit of her day-to-day existence, people she could smile upon and expect the best from and others upon whom she could frown and find fault. Her children and even her grandchildren found themselves divided by these “fault” lines and suffered the undeserved consequences accordingly.

As individuals we, Mary’s children, have found our own ways in the world. Valerie prospered in her own interesting and idiosyncratic manner in Ottawa, raising her daughter (whom we know and love), but succumbing to cancer some years ago. Craig is shortly to retire from teaching humanities at a community college, looking forward to spending more time with his terrific companion, Dale. Linda has woven a close and loving family within the context of Darcy’s circle of siblings and of their many friends and connections. The miracle of the love among my kids and theirs and Mark and me is the absolute greatest, most valued component of my long life. So many challenges, so many difficult times to struggle through and to understand, so very much under that proverbial bridge, but here we are, really happy to be so solidly in one another’s lives. My girls have their own challenges as do their neophyte children but I see how well placed all of them are to move ahead, secure in the knowledge that they are loved, accepted, and supported. What greater joy, what greater gift can there be for a grandmother on Mother’s Day?

            

A Protestant-Catholic Cultural Duality

In my last post I wrote about my early Catholic experiences up to the time I entered high school. That was not the end of the story, however. Most of you know that some time later I embarked upon an intense period of Catholicism, spending four years in the order of the Religious Hospitalliers of St Joseph, or, the Hotel Dieu nuns as they were colloquially known. In the intervening six years I dwelled in what I would characterize as a mainly secular culture, one impacted by both Catholic and Protestant influences. 

Though my mother had become a Catholic four or five years after my parents’ marriage, she at no time displayed the often fervent attributes of the newly converted. Her experience of boarding with religious sisters during her high school years gave her some knowledge and sympathy toward Catholicism. I suspect that having us children attend church with our father alone would not have sat well with her; she most likely came along. She then agreed to become a Catholic if she could study it and accept it in her own mind. This conversion was facilitated by a relatively young and interesting monsignor, resident in our Belleville parish. My mother was never one to suffer fools with any gladness whatsoever. She would not have welcomed a romanticized or devotional Catholicism. The good monsignor must have been intelligent and wise enough to pitch his teaching at a level that my mother could accept. I think that they liked each other very much. In fact, my mother kept a photograph of him, on horseback, for many years. So in this fashion we were transformed from a mixed-marriage family to a fully Catholic one. But! You can take the girl out of the Protestant faith but you can’t take the Protestant faith (read, culture) out of the girl.

I think of our dual-culture family’s philosophical approaches as something like this: the Catholic side – Don’t worry, be happy – look at the lilies of the field – i.e., God provides; if you transgress in some fashion, you can go to confession and you will be forgiven. The Protestant side – work hard, don’t lie, don’t cheat; God helps those who help themselves; if there are transgressions, keep them to yourself, certainly let no one know outside the family: what would the neighbours think?!!! These values or approaches only revealed themselves obliquely, to be sure. They were never debated and rarely enunciated, certainly not by my dad, though periodically by my mother. She would often comment, “My father could never abide a liar.” This was an impressive statement if a rather unforgiving one. It imparted to us the idea that certain sins, ones to which children were particularly liable, were egregiously reprehensible.

Our family devotions consisted entirely in attendance at Mass on Sundays and on Holy Days of Obligation, a degree of fasting and abstinence during Lent, and the de rigueur fish on Fridays. We did not partake in other devotions such as evening Benediction or Stations of the Cross, nor did we pray together as a family. On Ash Wednesday we received the penitential ashes to the forehead and on Good Friday we participated in the three hour liturgy commemorating the agony and death of Jesus. I have no memory of these observances being meaningful to me in themselves. They were simply what we did. We went to church; we went to confession and to communion, simply because my parents took us there. It was an unreflected upon part of our existence in that time and place, without inner awareness of its historical or religious significance. As I advanced in my teen years I grew less rather than more interested in being made captive for these exercises. My greatest complaint (kept to myself as I recall) related to the sermons given each Sunday during Mass. I have no idea what was said that offended or perturbed me. I only remember that I developed an uncanny ability to entirely tune out as soon as the priest began to speak. I would waft away on my own thoughts, returning to the present only as he left the pulpit. The rest of the service moved along and we were released.

In my last couple of years in Ottawa a new parish was established by the Basilian Fathers. They opened a high school, starting with a grade nine class and advancing each succeeding year until the school had a full five year program. While the church was under construction, Mass was held in the auditorium of my own school, Nepean High. In our last year there we attended the new church. Years later I learned that Maurice, my first husband and the father of our beautiful daughters, was also in attendance. At the time he was a Basilian scholastic, sent before his ordination as a priest to teach a semester at the new high school. We did not have the pleasure of meeting one another until a further eight years had elapsed, and then not under the auspices of the Church, but of that other community influential in our lives, Therafields. But that is another story. In those intervening years there were other phases relative to my engagement with Catholicism to which you, my intrepid readers, will no doubt be made privy.

            

My Catholic Girlhood

           Unable to sleep a few early mornings ago, I arose to eat and to read. Lately I have begun a few books but been unable to peruse them beyond the first hundred pages or so. I am interested in their contents but they do not seem to have a kind of pull upon some inner place that clearly looks these days for satisfaction. Holroyd’s book about his family that I wrote about in my last post, exercised that pull. One that I began the other morning is having a similar effect. This is Memories of a Catholic Girlhood by Mary McCarthy. I found this slim volume a few days ago while walking out on Bloor St. BMV Books keeps several bins of used stock at its curb, each book modestly priced to entice bibliophile passers-by. On my way to the fruit market I paused to look over the current batch and found myself drawn to McCarthy’s book. I too had a Catholic girlhood, one that ended fairly abruptly (not that this was realized by anyone at the time) when I graduated from St Francis Xavier grade school and began my high school career at Brockville Collegiate Institute and Vocational School as it was then known.

                It must be the period of my life that I find myself in, perhaps also the fact that my mother died last year, that is moving me inexorably toward an inner storehouse of memories. The brush of Holroyd or McCarthy’s recollections upon my own, sets up an inner vibration that leads me toward a space in which experiences are more of the senses than of the mind. I am again that little girl in my coat and hat that match those of my big sister, standing with my parents in an enormous public space filled with people, with music, with incense, with a sense of mystery and occasion that command my attention. There is shuffling in the seats as some move into the aisles and toward the front to take part in an inner observance from which I am as yet excluded. I long to be a part of that circle.

                My father came from an uninterrupted line of Irish Catholics, fervent and unquestioning in their faith. His marriage to a woman steeped in the Protestant conservatism of her own people neutralized some aspects of his devotion over time, though by no means destroyed it. Ironically both of my parents received their high school education in settings that diluted the full impact of their backgrounds, making possible their unusual for that time and place, inter-faith marriage. Mom was sent to board with religious sisters at a Catholic girls’ school in Calabogie for the five years of her post-grade school education. Dad was boarded in Ottawa at the university’s high school, his mother hoping that he would discover a vocation to the priesthood. These hopes crashed and burned, however, when scarce weeks after being left in Ottawa, he climbed the wall and found his way back to Perth by train. Entering the local school, he left behind the intense Catholic culture of his grade school and home.

                The Catholic school that Linda and I attended in Ottawa had few religious sisters as teachers. I remember none (other than the principal who reddened my palm with her strap on one painful occasion). When we moved to Brockville in 1950, however, it was a different situation. For both grades seven and eight my teachers were religious, part of the order of Notre Dame. I have no distinct recollection of the sister who taught me in grade seven. She seemed to me to be an older woman, rather heavy, not particularly attractive physically or personally. I suspect that she was nearing the end of her career and experienced the energies of her students as burdensome. This is pure speculation, of course. She may simply have been a woman troubled by her own inner trials, unable to put them aside to be more present to the children in her care. My lay (i.e., not religious) teachers in Ottawa had been more involved with us and with the materials that they imparted.

                I loved my teacher in grade eight. She was a young religious, healthy, attractive, and bright. She did wonderful things, like writing the lyrics of traditional songs on the side blackboard and then singing them with us. I sensed that she saw me, probably all of us, as individuals and dealt with us accordingly. We would be given poems to learn by heart. When finished we could approach her at her desk and give our recitation. I would do this as quickly as possible in order to get back to reading whatever book I had in hand at the time. If I hadn’t a book she would let me leave the classroom and find something in the small library on the upper floor of the school. I knew that she sympathized with my desire to read.

                It was during those years at St Francis Xavier that I experienced most fully being a Catholic in the manner of people whom I have known since. We studied, in fact memorized, the catechism, the booklet which through a series of questions and answers teaches one the core tenets of the Catholic faith. These tenets were not discussed; they were simply learned as truth with a capital T. I digested them as such and had no questions. Regularly a priest from the parish next door to the school would come to give a talk to the students. Then we could ask questions if we wished but there was never a real challenge to his teaching. As part of our regular school life we would say rosaries, make novenas, go over to the church to make confession, walk together in processions to honour the Virgin Mary on one of her feast days, learn about and raise money for the missions in foreign lands, hear stories of young women who died preserving their virginity (an idea I only vaguely understood at the time), and went in buses to Kingston, the seat of the archdiocese, for immense day-long rallies. I enjoyed it all. At Mass I would go upstairs to the choir loft and sing (as I had begun doing while we were still in Ottawa). This was an especially joyful way of entering into the liturgy, none of which I understood or appreciated as anything more that an expressive and colourful drama in which I had my own part.

                In our home there were no overt expressions of Catholicism. We went to church on Sundays and we all received the sacraments. We continued to say the little bedtime prayers that we had been taught but there were never any rosaries or novenas, and certainly no devotion to Mary. A lovely statue of her circulated the homes of the students, staying for a week at each, giving families an opportunity to say their evening rosaries in front of this blessed icon. My mother declined the privilege when I said that it was our turn. In that incident, if not others, I was aware that her (and thus our) location was at some odds with that of the school and my teachers. I also caught the whiff of distain that she nurtured for such devotions.

                Grade nine came and I left behind that Catholic Petri dish and with it my Catholic girlhood. Without any realization of this transformation, I slid into the space inhabited by my parents who had compromised their own traditions in order to be together. The memorized catechism stayed with me in some unconscious manner, reappearing many years later when I struggled with questions of faith. The veiled references to sexual sin worked upon me in ways that ultimately created terrible inner stresses in my early womanhood. I in no way regret this period, however, as I do not regret other experiences that have formed various elements in the mosaic of a fortunately long life. So much to recall and to re-experience, to re-visit, to savour, to compassionately understand.