Our disappeared were everywhere, irresistible, in waking, in sleeping, a reason for violence, a reason for forgiveness, destroying the peace we tried to possess, creeping between us as we dreamed, leaving us haunted by the knowledge that history is not redeemed by either peace or war but only fingered to shreds and left to our children.
The Disappeared is my very favourite type of book: it introduced me to a new time and place (I learned something) using language that I found to be spare and beautiful (and consequently, I felt something). In addition, I love books that go from what is familiar to me (St. Joseph's Oratory in Montreal) to what is foreign (a marketplace in Phnom Pehn). Throw in big themes of love and death and memory, and what's not to like?
As the book opens, we learn that the narrator is recording the events of thirty years earlier, when as a girl of sixteen, she met Serey – the great love of her life – who was a Cambodian exile; sent abroad to study and now unable to return home during the murderous reign of Pol Pot. The narrative takes the form of a love letter (always referring to Serey as “you”) as Anne Greves remembers their early days together and the strain that it placed upon her relationship with her father; a distant man, an immigrant himself, who was forced to raise Anne alone when his wife died young.
A girl understands with her first lover that there is no daughter who does not betray the father, there are only great crashing waves of the woman to come, gathering and building and breaking and thrashing the shore. I watched my body's swelling and aching and flowing and shrinking as a sailor watches the changing surface of the waves. I let you do anything. I did anything I wanted and the dirty sheets of Bleury Street became my world.
Set against Anne's naive and urgent love is Serey's concern for his family. As a musician, he plays for her a two-stringed chapei, singing traditional folk songs and lullabies that recall the smokey blues they enjoy at Montreal clubs. Where Anne is open and effusive, Serey is reserved and respectful; his family never far from his thoughts; he having had no news of them for the four years of Pol Pot's Killing Fields.
I tried to telephone and the operator said there were no more lines to Cambodia. I went to the post office to send a wire. No lines. I gave the clerk a letter to mail and she said, I'm sorry. There is no more service. I dropped the letter in a mailbox outside anyway and four days later it came back to me with a stamp: undeliverable. Do you know what it means to send a letter to your family and read that it is undeliverable?
When Serey learns that the Vietnamese have invaded Cambodia and reopened its borders, he rushes back home to find news of his family, insisting that Anne wait for word from him. And word never comes. Eleven years later, Anne thinks she sees Serey at the edge of a crowd on TV, and finally, she goes in search of him. (This is not really a spoiler, as the opening paragraph sees Anne arriving in Phnom Pehn.)
Once she's on the ground, Anne finally faces the reality of a country that has lost a quarter of its population to genocide. As in Montreal, Anne discovers that love and death in Cambodia are never far apart from each other, and by introducing a fellow Montrealer whose job it is to exhume mass graves and count the victims, author Kim Echlin is able to organically pepper her story with the appalling facts of this atrocity.
Why do some people live a comfortable life and others live one that is horror-filled? What part of ourselves do we shave off so we can keep on eating while others starve? If women, children, and old people were being murdered a hundred miles from here, would we not run to help? Why do we stop this decision of the heart when the distance is three thousand miles instead of a hundred?
That's all the plot I'll record because much of the pleasure in reading this small book is derived from the discoveries along the way. There is also much pleasure to be found in the writing itself: consistently poetic and controlled. Her eyes held my grief, and her body gathered in my pain and knit it into herself as if she were an old marsh creature weaving baskets from rushes. I recognise that a sentence like that won't be to everyone's taste, but it satisfies mine. Reading a book like The Disappeared feels like a bit of a rebuke: Pol Pot was in power just forty years ago, and even today, Cambodia is ruled by a “superficial democracy” (Hun Sen has been Prime Minister since 1985); but who remembers the Killing Fields? Who gives a thought for Cambodia today – despite its dismal rankings on all international rankings – when the newscasts are filled with other, noisier tragedies? Not me. For many reasons I am pleased to have found this book and I enjoyed it thoroughly.
How merry was your bond? When you set the forfeit at an equal pound of Antonio's fair flesh, to be cut off and taken from whatever part of his body it pleased you, what intended you by it? What intended you by it in the spirit of jest – that's to say how far in earnest were you, and how far playing the devil they expected you to be? And what intended you in the matter of anatomy? Did you mean salaciously, flirtatiously even, to designate Antonio's penis as it pleased you to take? Was that the pound of his fair flesh – weighing hyperbolically – you originally had your sights set on, before all jests went out of the window with your daughter?
When I was in grade nine, The Merchant of Venice was the first Shakespeare that I studied. The casket plot, the rings plot, the cross-dressing court scene: there's something about your first Shakespeare that stays with you forever. And, of course, it was Shylock himself who left the greatest impression upon me: for four hundred years, the image of the money-hungry Jew who demands his pound of flesh has hunched over Western culture, and no matter how nuanced my English teacher's interpretation of Shylock was, I, too, believed Shylock was more villain than victim. Along comes Howard Jacobson, and as part of the Hogarth Shakespeare series, he has reinterpreted and updated The Merchant of Venice in Shylock Is My Name; and as one might imagine from such a prominent writer on modern Jewish themes, Jacobson doesn't merely acknowledge Shylock's looming presence; he invites the moneylender into the plot.
The book opens with Simon Strulovitch – a rich art dealer and nonobservant Jew – visiting his mother's grave to inspect her new headstone. He is aware of a fellow mourner – Of course Shylock is here, among the dead. When hasn't he been?– and when he leaves, Strulovitch proposes for Shylock to come along with him. The two men talk extensively about Jewish law and culture, comparing their different times; for though Shylock is presumably alive and well and real, he is indeed the Shylock of Shakespeare, with the events of the play always in his immediate past: Action had stopped arbitrarily for Shylock, but time hadn't. Time had embalmed him.
Strulovitch has a pressing reason for wanting Shylock's advice: just as Shylock' own daughter Jessica had run off with a Gentile, Strulovitch's daughter, Beatrice, has been tormenting her father with her love of non-Jews and is currently trying to get him to meet her new boyfriend: a semipro soccer player infamous for parodying the Nazi salute on the field. Although Strulovitch doesn't eat kosher or attend temple, at the moment of Beatrice's birth he felt the presence of God and the weight of His covenant with the Jewish people, and despite having once married a Gentile himself, Strulovitch can't bear the idea of his daughter leaving the clan. The new crowd of friends that Beatrice meets through the soccer player are parallels to characters from The Merchant of Venice and events are put into motion that force Strulovitch – the nonobservant Jew; the generous philanthropist and benefactor – into playing the stereotypical Shylock; into demanding his payment in flesh.
Howard Jacobson, as a British Jew, has something very particular to say about modern Jewish life. Strulovitch must watch as his offer to open a museum of Jewish art is refused as not in keeping with the local Manchester historical character (despite the artists themselves having been born in the area); he witnesses a group of protesters who want to stop a company from providing local trash collection because they also produce sewer systems for a disputed West Bank settlement; even the parody of a Nazi salute on a soccer field is based on actual events: while no one is literally spitting on Jews (as mentioned in Shylock's famous “If you cut us do we not bleed?” monologue), the modern Jew still suffers by association with a maligned past and with a lumping in with their larger community; and with the assumptions that others make about their motives and their desires; behind every Jewish businessman, the Gentile recognises the presence of Shylock fingering his ducats.
The two men, who would rather not, in any circumstances, wish to be exchanging glances, direct their gazes over each others' shoulder. If D'Anton were a pirate with a parrot, Strulovitch would be addressing that. D'Anton himself is looking even further to the rear of his guest, as though at Strulovitch's grandparents in their headscarves and skullcaps, falling under the hooves of Cossacks' horses, muttering to their mouldy god while their hovels go up in flames...But enough of that, D'Anton tells himself.
I find Jacobson to be a very funny writer, and there is much dark humour here. Purists might not like that this isn't a straightforward modernisation of The Merchant of Venice, but I liked the device of having Shylock serve as counsel and example as Strulovitch stumbles right into Shylock's own dilemma: the irony is rich as the art dealer has every opportunity to not sink to the expectations of others, but whether through spite or devilry, sink he does. If the central conflict in Merchant is Shylock's quest for justice counterpoised against Portia's call for mercy, it was a nice touch for Shylock here to lecture her modern equivalent on that theme:
It is wrong not to know where you got your sweet Christian sentiments from. It is morally and historically wrong not to know that Jesus was a Jewish thinker and that when you quote him against us you are talking vicious nonsense. Charity is a Jewish concept. So is mercy. You took them from us, that is all. You appropriated them. They were given freely, but still you had to steal them.
So does that demonstrate what Shylock had always believed, or is it the result of four hundred years of thinking? Four hundred years later, why couldn't a non-observant Jew like Strulovitch embrace mercy? Shylock Is My Name is an interesting, entertaining, and thought-provoking book.
Here's a passage I liked, between Strulovitch and his first (Gentile) wife:
"That psychological scarring we once discussed," she began.
"Whose?"
"Yours."
"What about it?"
"It's there every time you make one of your footling, thing-centered jokes."
"How could the trauma of mutilation have turned me into a footler? If I'm the trivial man you accuse me of being it must mean I wasn't mutilated enough."
"That's a naive understanding of cause and effect. You footle to disguise the pain. You cannot bear to accept that what was done to you was bestial in the extreme and so you try to joke it away -- the proof of that being that your joking is always phallocentric."
He felt suddenly very weary. Words ending in "centric" always had that effect on him. "You're right", he said. He couldn't tell her one more time that joking wasn't in his nature. Nor could he tell her he neither looked nor felt mutilated. That would sound like empty denial or brute insentience, and both only went to show how badly mutilated he was.
In a way, Shylock Is My Name is one big phallocentric joke, so here's another: We were out for dinner last week, and Mallory was talking about how useless it feels to be taking Religion, but since it's required for graduation, take it she must. (And I'll insert here that although I was a nonobservant Catholic when the girls were born, I understood what Strulovitch meant by recognising the weight of God's presence at their births; and wanting them to be admitted to a community of faith that goes back thousands of years; for the community if not the faith. And so I sent them to Catholic school where they could learn about and feel membership in that community; yet, Catholic marriage will not be required of them.) So, there's Mal griping about her Religion course but saying that at least it was better than the year before. In grade eleven, the course was called World Religions, and the students were taught about all the biggies (which can only be a good thing in the modern world, I do believe). As a part of that class, they visited a mosque, a Hindu temple, and a synagogue. The teacher (who is admittedly dumb) embarrassed the students when, in the synagogue, she asked the rabbi where the baptismal font was and he had to gently inform her that they did not do that sort of thing there. Dave laughed and put on a high-pitched ditzy voice, "Of course. Well, where do you perform the circumcisions?" Mallory lowered her voice and deadpanned, "Generally, on the penis area." And Dave laughed and laughed, and I pointed out to Mal that she had made her Dad really amused by that one (her jokes usually get a "Huh" or an eyeroll out of him). Proving, of course, that the twelve-year-old boy never dies in the man.
Like mothers all over Littleton, I had been praying for my son's safety. But when I heard the newscaster pronounce twenty-five people dead, my prayers changed. If Dylan was involved in hurting or killing other people, he had to be stopped. As a mother, this was the most difficult prayer I had ever spoken in the silence of my thoughts, but in that instant I knew the greatest mercy I could pray for was not my son's safety, but for his death.
After sixteen years of silence, Sue Klebold – mother of Columbine shooter Dylan Klebold – has written A Mother's Reckoning; a book that recounts her son's childhood, the details of the day of the shooting, and her family's journey in the aftermath of the tragedy. While it might come off as slightly defensive and self-serving at times (you only need to read the comments sections of newspaper reviews of this book to appreciate the level of hatred that this woman has had to bear; after all, you must be a monster to have raised a monster), but Klebold has a very important message that she's trying to share: having missed or misread the signs that her son was spiralling into depression, she had lost the opportunity to get him help, and perhaps, prevent the Columbine massacre. To the extent that this book might provide vital information to another parent – and because the author profits are being donated to suicide prevention and mental health charities – I think that it's an important read, despite its shortcomings.
One of the thousands of letters that the Klebolds received in the months following Columbine said: “HOW COULD YOU NOT KNOW??!” And that's probably the scariest part: They didn't know what their son was capable of, and with the information they had, they likely couldn't have known. Dylan was their “Golden Boy”, always bright and smiling, with a bunch of good friends and big plans for the future. The family ate dinner and watched old movies together; Dylan and his brother had been well-supervised (even in high school, Dylan wasn't allowed to hang out with new kids until the Klebolds had met them and their parents); the Klebolds were anti-gun and wouldn't allow them in the house; the boys had had strict limits on sugar cereals and television: this wasn't hands-off parenting. In the immediate aftermath of the shooting, Sue Klebold had been convinced that her son couldn't have been a willing participant: he must have been drugged or coerced or he had been present but not a shooter or it was all some prank gone horribly wrong.
Six months later, her denial was shattered: the police called the Klebolds in and shared what they had learned. Step-by-step, they were told which shooter killed or injured each victim, and when they were done, the investigator showed them the so-called “Basement Tapes”; in which Dylan and Eric had filmed themselves using horrible language and racial slurs, posturing with their weapons, and making clear their intentions to kill as many people as possible. Seeing her son's avid participation in these tapes was the first time that Sue Klebold truly understood that Dylan had been living a double life. It took another two years before the police shared with the Klebolds what they referred to as Dylan's journal (although it was just random pieces of writing assembled from various notebooks and loose sheets of paper found in Dylan's room and school), and it was only then that the family began to find some answers from Dylan's own hand:
Thinking of suicide gives me hope that i’ll be in my place wherever i go after this life – that ill finally not be at war w. myself, the world, the universe – my mind, body, everywhere, everything at PEACE – me – my soul (existence).
Most of Dylan's writing was despair over the unrequited love he felt for a girl – whom the Klebolds had never heard of – and his wish for suicide to make the pain of heartbreak go away. They eventually also saw Eric Harris' journal – in which he described fantasies of brutal rape and murder – and after sending all this writing off to various psychiatrists, the best diagnosis they could get was that Eric was likely a homicidal psychopath (so intent on killing others that he was indifferent to his own death in the act) and Dylan was a suicidal depressive (so intent on killing himself that he was indifferent to the deaths of others in the act). Ultimately, it took the two of these brain illnesses (to use Sue Klebold's preferred term), working together, to put each of their fantasies into action. But should the Klebolds have seen it coming?
Of course hindsight is 20/20, but the last year of Dylan's life sure sounds like a kid spinning out of control: two school suspensions, a felony arrest for theft, plummeting grades, disturbing writing flagged by his English teacher. On the other hand, he held down a part-time job, helped around the house, was accepted into his first choice college and went on an excited campus visit there, was released early from a program for young offenders, and rented a tux and attended his school prom three days before the tragedy: this doesn't sound like someone who was ready to die; who, with bombs that thankfully failed, had been plotting to kill hundreds of others along with himself. Because of the Columbine school shooting, there are now safe school initiatives that would hopefully put these red flags all together and prompt an intervention, but at the time, it's hard to accuse the Klebolds of willful ignorance.
The information that only Sue Klebold could share in this book was quite interesting, and I should note that she was mindful not to include anything graphic that might inspire the next school shooter (it is of everlasting sorrow to her that so many shooters since Columbine have claimed her son as a hero). It is also valuable in that Klebold includes much of the research she has gathered over the past sixteen years about suicide prevention and brain illness. On the other hand, A Mother's Reckoning isn't a perfect reading experience – much felt defensive or glossed over (there is an especial void in information about Dylan's co-shooter Eric, and Robyn; the girl who accompanied Dylan to prom and bought the guns for the pair). I couldn't help but wonder about this book's effect on the families of the shooters' victims: no matter how many times Sue repeated that not a day goes by without her thinking of and mourning those victims, that doesn't quite make me want to accept an equivalence between her loss and their's; no matter how uncompassionate that makes me: To the rest of the world, Dylan was a monster; but I had lost my child. But it's not quite the same, is it? I think maybe this book would have been better if Sue had put her story in the hands of a journalist: someone who could stand back and add some context where needed or make unbiased commentary where necessary. Overall, the faults don't diminish this book's important message and the four stars reflect this importance:
There is perhaps no harder truth for a parent to bear, but it is one that no parent on earth knows better than I do, and it is this: love is not enough. My love for Dylan, though infinite, did not keep Dylan safe, nor did it save the thirteen people killed at Columbine High School, or the many others injured and traumatized. I missed subtle signs of psychological deterioration that, had I noticed, might have made a difference for Dylan and his victims – all the difference in the world. By telling my story as faithfully as possible, even when it is unflattering to me, I hope to shine a light that will help other parents see past the faces their children present, so that they can get them help if it is needed.
For a couple of different perspectives, this is a very gentle treatment of Sue Kebold by Diane Sawyer on 20/20, and this is an excoriating review on Salon's website that sees racial bias in any attempt to redeem the memory of a white killer.
The spirit of the times is one of joyless urgency, many of us preparing ourselves and our children to be means to inscrutable ends that are utterly not our own. In such an environment the humanities do seem to have little place. They are poor preparation for economic servitude. This spirit is not the consequence but the cause of our present state of affairs.
I think that with this passage, Marilynne Robinson totally captures the spirit of the age: it seems to be a given that the legions of baristas with their humanities degrees are the epitome of waste; that they ought to have spent their education dollars on technical college or found themselves a viable trade. My facebook feed is equally divided between the people who uncritically quote the quasi-metaphysical Deepak Chopra and David Avocado Wolfe on the one hand and those who throw out the cold cynicism of Richard Dawkins and Ricky Gervais as “proof” against those who still believe in “fairytales about invisible sky gods”. People of faith are thought to be either fundamentalists who attempt to impose their beliefs on others or weak-minded dolts who say their prayers at night out of infantilism or nostalgia. In a world where God cannot be found on either radar or spectrogram – where absence of proof is assumed to be proof of absence – who has the courage to defend belief on purely intellectual terms? Marilynne Robinson does. And yet, as she made and defended her arguments in the seventeen essays in The Givenness of Things, quoting Erasmus and Calvin and Bonhoeffer, I so often couldn't quite follow along with her; and all because I have no proper rooting in the humanities – Bonhoeff-who?
I had an easier time of it when Robinson was talking science – as she often does, returning again and again to the unreality of quantum physics, gravity that's weaker than it ought to be, the unknowable nature of time; all topics which have long fascinated me – and I found myself in easy agreement with an argument like this one:
Neuroscientists seem predisposed to the conclusion that there is no “self”. This would account for the indifference to the modifying effects of individual history and experience, and to the quirks of the organism that arise from heredity, environment, interactions within the soma as a whole, and so on. What can the word “self” mean to those who wish to deny its reality? It can only signify an illusion we all participate in, as individuals, societies, and civilizations. So it must also be an important function of the brain, the brain aware of itself as it is modified by the infinite particulars of circumstance, that is, as it is not like others. But that would mean the self is not an illusion at all but a product of the mind at other work than the neuroscientists are inclined to acknowledge.
And if it's that easy to argue for the existence of “self”, is it really that large a leap to argue for the existence of other concepts (the soul or God) that we as humans can feel the reality of but cannot “prove” with current technology? (Perhaps I should note that I'm not personally religious – as I tend to think of religions as the imperfect constructions of imperfect humans – but that doesn't make me an atheist.)
I also connected to the bits about Shakespeare (on whom Robinson wrote her doctorate decades ago) and appreciated her argument in favour of seeing the Bard as a theologist; writing for a culture (including the so-called Groundlings) that understood the history of Western thought better than we do today. But again, my ignorance of the humanities/the classics didn't allow me to completely understand seeing the endings of the history plays as metaphors for grace; that Shakespeare told the story of Antony and Cleopatra, for example, in a way that would make his audience understand that the lovers had to die in order to see the rise of Augustus Caesar, which would then set the scene for the coming of Christ. I would never have made that connection and I am jealously resistant to the idea that the unwashed masses in Shakespeare's day would have known more than I do; and that's rather the point of this book.
As I was reading, I put multiple book darts in every essay, knowing I would want to come back and talk about all of them, but now that the book is done, I just want to restate what I found to be the main idea: In public conversations today (of which I find my facebook feed to be representative), it seems a given that people of faith are not too bright, but consider this: I've read that the cavemen who painted deer and bison on the walls at Lascaux, France some seventeen millenia ago had brains just like ours; we like to imagine them as dumb knuckle-draggers, but as their art proves, they were fully human. But if a modern rationalist were to speak to a cave-painter, demanding scientific proofs for the source of his artistic impetus, our caveman wouldn't have the language to defend his inspiration – and yet I'm sure he'd know that his being was more than a common piece of meat whose animating force was more than a random effect of evolution. In the past few millenia– even closer to modern day and even more analogous to our own brains – deep thinkers were able to meditate on and discover elegant proofs for the existence of the soul, of God(s). This history of thought – the humanities – has long been taught by intelligent people to intelligent people, and there was in Western culture a common language of belief. Yet in the past few hundred years, we have prioritised science (as though “science” and “faith” are mutually exclusive), and within the past generation, we have become utterly contemptuous of the humanities. Therefore, the modern person of faith has lost the language to defend his beliefs; he may as well be a caveman; he is certainly compared to one often enough.
In reading Marilynne Robinson's previous works – and especially Gilead and Lila – I often mentally checked out when characters would explain Calvinist ideas to one another; now I understand what the author was trying to achieve by this. Givenness is a rather dense work to get through – and most especially if, like me, you don't have the proper educational background with which to approach it – but I found it rewarding just the same; it was fascinating to read what has been the lifelong fascinations of an author I admire. And as I just recently read her first novel Housekeeping (which is commonly considered a work demonstrating the Transparent Eyeball metaphor of Emerson and Whitman) this passage felt especially meaningful to me right now:
I feel that I have been impoverished in the degree that I have allowed myself to be persuaded of the inevitability of a definition of the real that is so arbitrarily exclusive, leaving much of what I intuited and even what I knew in the limbo of the unarticulated and the unacknowledged. I wish I had experienced my earthly life more deeply. It is my fault that I didn’t. I could have been a better scholar of Walt Whitman.
If Robinson wishes she had experienced her “earthly life more deeply”, imagine how impoverished I feel right now. Yet, richer for having read this book.
They
put a parking lot on a piece of land Where
the supermarket used to stand. Before
that they put up a bowling alley On
the site that used to be the local palais. That's
where the big bands used to come and play. My
sister went there on a Saturday. Come
dancing, All her
boyfriends used to come and call. Why
not come dancing, it's only natural?
Another
Saturday, another date. She
would be ready but she'd always make him wait. In
the hallway, in anticipation, He
didn't know the night would end up in frustration. He'd
end up blowing all his wages for the week All
for a cuddle and a peck on the cheek. Come
dancing, That's how they
did it when I was just a kid, And
when they said come dancing, My
sister always did.
My
sister should have come in at midnight, And
my mum would always sit up and wait. It
always ended up in a big row When
my sister used to get her own way Out
of my window I could see them in the moonlight, Two
silhouettes saying goodnight by the garden gate.
The
day they knocked down the palais My
sister stood and cried. The
day they knocked down the palais Part
of my childhood died, just died.
Now
I'm grown up and playing in a band, And
there's a car park where the palais used to stand. My
sister's married and she lives on an estate. Her
daughters go out, now it's her turn to wait. She
knows they get away with things she never could, But
if I asked her I wonder if she would, Come
dancing, Come on sister,
have yourself a ball. Don't
be afraid to come dancing, It's
only natural.
Come
dancing, Just like the
palais on a Saturday. And
all her friends will come dancing Where
the big bands used to play.
Mum
and Dad's 50th Anniversary is tomorrow and we just got
back from celebrating it. I told my brothers last summer that I
thought we should plan to go to Nova Scotia for a weekend – our
parents would hate for us to rent the church basement and advertise
an Open House in the newspaper, and they wouldn't go on a cruise if
we paid for one – and at the time, we all agreed that a visit is
all they'd appreciate. Then, around Christmas, Kyler said there was
no way he was going to waste the time or money to go down in February
when they're lucky enough to see us every summer; lucky especially
when they don't always act happy to see us. Fair enough, I guess.
Then
in mid-January, I happened to look and there was a seat-sale: it was
almost too good to pass up. I emailed the prices to Ken, and when he
responded, he said that he had seen the same sale and was considering
going down with just him and his kids. I said that we'd go, too. He
said that he had talked to Kyler the night before and he was
definitely not going; Ken thought that either just he and his kids
could go or none of us; he didn't want to cause a rift between him
and Kyler if we all went without him. Ken then texted me and asked if
Dave would call Kyler: he's the only guy who could make sure Kye
wouldn't be mad if we all went without him. Dave called and Kyler
said that for sure he wasn't going and he didn't care
at all if we went without him. So, I opened up my laptop to reserve
seats and then Kyler was calling, asking for the flight info. Then he
was calling saying that he'd only go for the weekend. Then he was
calling to say that he had booked seats on the same flight as us. By
the time Ken got around to booking his own tickets, all the seats at
the sale price were gone and he had to pay full price. That's what
worrying about your little brother's feelings will get ya. Just as
well then that Ken had already decided to drive down to haul a motor for Dad, opting to
just buy one-way tickets for his two kids and drive them back home.
I
got Kennedy to call Mum that night to say that we were coming (and to
make sure that she wanted us to come), and Mum was really surprised
and delighted. I called the next morning to find out what they wanted
to do with us all there, and to my shock, Dad answered the phone. I
could count on one hand the number of times Dad has talked to me on
the phone, so I knew he was genuine when he told me how happy they
both were to hear we were coming down. I told him that I wanted to
know if there was a restaurant I should make a reservation at and he
said no way: especially in the off season, there's nowhere he'd rather eat than
right at home, and as soon as Mum came in the room he asked her
opinion, and she agreed. Well, that's easy, too. The takeaway from
that conversation was that booking the trip had been the exact right
idea.
I
sent an email to Ken and Kyler that night to tell them that we
weren't going to go to a restaurant and to describe Dad's tone: we
had done the right thing even if the parents don't deserve it. Ken
replied to the email the next day to say that he had talked to Mum
and Dad and that I had been right: they were nearly giddy with
appreciation; we were doing the right thing. Kyler waited another day
before replying: I hate you all. That evening I was telling Dave
about the email chain, and Ken was there, and after I got to the
punchline, Ken said, “You see, what Kyler meant by that was...”
And Dave cut him off, “I've known Kyler for nearly thirty years. I
know what he meant by that and it's hilarious.”
As
the trip was approaching, I was thinking that we had to give the
parents an actual physical gift, and since I had sent away for
letters of congratulations (from the Governor General, Prime
Minister, etc.), and I had bought them a share in a gold mine (and
had received a frameable stock certificate for that), I figured we
could assemble a scrap book (in a 10 page book, after the 7
certificates/letters, we were conveniently left with 3 blank pages
and 3 families to fill them). Each family put in a collage of photos
and signed our pages as though it was a card, and the whole thing
turned out really nice.
The
morning of our flight out, Kyler called Ken (who was already on the
road) to say that he hadn't realised it was a late night flight. He
and Chrissy decided to take a hotel room for the Friday and rent a
car to get out to Mum and Dad's on Saturday. After the blowout
Chrissy witnessed last summer – when Dad probably threw out Ethan's
phone – she had said she was never going down to Nova Scotia again,
so I was just happy that she had the grace and charity to join in at
all; them limiting their time was a-okay with me. When they met us at
the airport, Chrissy looked around and said, “Where's Laura?” I
guess no one had told her that Laura couldn't make the trip (which I
actually didn't really understand; with a late night Friday
flight out and an early morning Monday flight back, Laura would have
missed about two hours of work; but despite being a very
understanding in-law, Lolo also witnessed the blowout and she's
allowed to proceed any way she likes; it's all a-okay.) As
Dave explained that Lolo was probably laying out on her couch in her
skivvies just about then, Chrissy's face crumpled; she didn't realise
that not coming was an option.
So,
we made it out there, got a rental van to accommodate taking Ken's
kids along with us, and had an eventful late night drive. We were
motoring down the road and the car coming towards us seemed too fast
or too close and that's when we realised that it was driving on the
wrong side of the divided highway, zooming past us on our left. If
Dave the speed demon had actually been in the fast lane, we would
have had a head-on collision, probably killing all of us. Nice
anniversary gift, eh? I considered calling 911, but as there were
other cars on the road who could make that call – and as I was
hoping that one of them would have been a local who could explain
exactly where the car was – I left it to “others” (of course,
once I made that decision I felt responsible if anything happened to
anyone, but there was nothing on the news the next day about any
crashes, so I'll take the no news as good news). So, you'd think Dave
would go carefully after that. About a half hour later, getting
closer to the woods, the car coming towards us on the highway
suddenly threw on its police lights and Dave groaned and pulled over
to the side to wait for the officer to make his u-turn and come up
behind us. Dave was apparently going 140 km/hr in the 100 and the cop
who came to the window for Dave's license and rental agreement was
none too happy. After the officer went back to his squad car, we sat and sat on the side of the road, wondering
what was taking so long. The cop finally came back and said, “So you're
in from Ontario and just picked up the rental at the airport tonight?
Well this is your one freebie: my computer is crashed and I can't get
anything to come up. I have no way to ticket you. I'm going to let
you get on your way and I expect you to slow down.” Imagine that –
without his computer, it was impossible for him to ticket us;
I was happy for Dave but it doesn't make me feel safer overall. As
for the one freebie: that's what the cop in New Brunswick told Dave
last summer when he chose not to ticket us for speeding – I think
Ella is Dave's good luck charm. So, now it's after 2 in the morning,
we're almost to Mum and Dad's (because Dave has the cruise control
set to a buck-oh-five), and immediately after a car with one
headlight passed us (which was freaking us out because it looked like
a motorcycle that was hugging the center line), we came around a
corner and here was an accident in the middle of the road, with skid
marks down into the ditch, a police car with its lights flashing, and
a flatbed tow truck pulling up a destroyed little car. They were
taking up so much room that we couldn't pass on the right, and as we
sat and considered our options, a man started kicking and kicking at
the fender of the car; it was surrealistically violent. A man came
over and advised us to pass around to the left, and we crunched those
rental tires over broken glass and plastic, wondering what we might
have been tangled up in if we hadn't been held for so long at the
side of the road earlier. If a person believed in portents...Finally, we arrived at Mum and Dad's.
The
next day, the parents were delighted to see us all, with big hugs and
smiles. I know that Mum can become overwhelmed when anticipating
making a big dinner, so I let her know that I was there for her for
whatever she needed. Mum just kept saying that her back was hurting
her and that she couldn't sleep the night before and that if she only
had a nap...Dad warned her that she was going to have to “dig
deep”: neither of them would be having a nap because there was too
much to do and we were there for so short a time.
In
the end, we pulled off a big dinner: roast beef; roast chicken with
stuffing; mashed potatoes with gravy; carrots; asparagus; turnip;
baked beets; peas for Conor; coconut shrimp for Kennedy; frozen
lobster thawed out for everyone. Because their anniversary is also
Dad's birthday, he requested a special Hawaiian Surprise cake that
Mum used to make for him and she pulled that off too. They've lived
in that house for sixteen years, and this is the first time we ever
all sat together at their dining room table. When Ken was setting it,
he said that it would only seat 10 people comfortably and he offered
to sit at a separate table with one of his kids. I said no way –
the point of us all going down together was to have dinner together,
and I suggested putting a kid beside Mum and Dad at each end of the
table. In the end, it was wide enough and comfortable enough that Dad wondered why we don't
always eat like that. Why indeed.
While
we were having dinner, from the other end of the table Ken said,
“We've heard Mum's story a hundred times about how you two met. How
do you remember it Dad?”
Everyone
kept eating, quietly clinking forks and knives on our plates as Dad
began to speak:
“There
was a show on TV a long time ago called I Love Lucy that most
of you here wouldn't know or remember. It was about this
smart-talking, good-looking redhead from Brooklyn and the dim-witted,
Cuban bongo-player that she married. Like opposites attracting,
right? And Lucy and Desi were married in real life, too. After he
died, a reporter asked Lucy if it was love at first sight, and she
said, “No, it took about five days.”
(Here
Dad coughed into his napkin, and when I looked at him, I realised
that he was crying. As he began talking again, the eating stopped and
the room became completely quiet.)
“I'm
sorry, I didn't mean it to be like this, but you asked. That's the
way it was for me, too: it took about five days and I knew.
“When
I first got the job with the Bank of Commerce there in Charlottetown,
I'd have maybe ten dollars clear a week after paying for my room and
board. They paid so little that I honestly wonder if they were trying
to pressure us into stealing; just to see who they could trust,
right? Anyway, every Saturday night – it didn't cost much – me
and my roommate Laurie would go to the dance at the Roll-Away. And
that's where I first laid eyes on your mother. And yes, you better
believe I noticed her. She was very popular, always up and dancing,
and I was not; not popular. I don't know how exactly to describe
her.”
Ken
piped up with, “Hubba hubba?”
And
Dad continued: “No, no, not like that. She was...crisp. I don't
know how else to describe it. Like no one I had ever seen before.
“Well,
one day, you see, my roommate Laurie – there were ten of us at the
boardinghouse and they split us up into pairs and Laurie was a great
fella, from down around Blue Rocks and Lunenburg – Laurie worked at
the Bank of Montreal and he didn't get paid any better than I did,
but it didn't matter as much for him because his grandmother was rich
and she doted on him. In the time we lived together, she bought
Laurie two different cars. Anyway, this one day we were driving along
and we seen your mother and her cousin Karen walking along the side
of the road and we pulled over and asked them if they wanted a drive.
They got in and that's how it started.
“In
the end, we got married very young, but I knew that that would be
okay. Your mother had a good family and a good Catholic upbringing,
and the values she brought with her, well, they were exactly what a
dope like me with my bad behaviour needed at the time. And now it's
been fifty years, and there were good times and bad, but I can look
at your mother here tonight and say I'd do it all over again. Because
I would.
“And
I know I've been going on and on here but I want to say two more
things. When you have a family – you have kids and they bring
people in, and then they have kids – the love is unconditional. As
a parent, the love is unconditional for your family. But what's not
automatic is respect and admiration. And we respect and admire each
and every one of you. Our kids. Kennedy and Mallory; Nan and I are
amazed at everything you accomplish. And Laura, who's only here in
spirit, but she has our respect. Dave and of course Christine. With
the boys, Conor and Ethan, I know that things can get a little nutty,
but that's just my way with boys; it's never meant to be
disrespectful. Krista here. The first time I met each of you, you had
my love, but over time, each of you has earned my respect.
“And
the other thing: Down in the village, your mother and I are the envy
of everyone. People just can't believe that all of our kids and their
families want to come down and visit us every year. There's people
there whose kids moved away and have never been back, or people who
only get a visit once in a great while. They just can't believe that
you all get along with each other and that you want to be together
down here with us old people. It's no small thing and we do
appreciate it.”
And
with that, we raised our glasses for a toast to fifty years.
From
Mum's end of the table, she interjected: “I just want to add that I
had noticed your Dad at the Roll-Away, too. When me and Karen got in
that car that day – Karen in the front with Laurie and me in back
with Dad – I asked your father why he had never asked me to dance.
He said that since we didn't know each other, he was afraid I'd say
no. So I told him, 'If you ask me to dance, I won't say
no.' And I didn't.”
And
the glasses were raised once more.
Come
dancing, All her
boyfriends used to come and call. Why
not come dancing, it's only natural?
(This
took a long time to get to the reason for this week's song choice,
but isn't it perfect? Not only is it on theme, but it's from 1982 –
which is where I am in my life's overall story arc – and
it's by The Kinks; a band that might have been heard doing You
Really Got Me at the Rollaway when Mum and Dad first met. I
imagine them doing the watusi. The frugue.)
We
had cake and champagne and the glasses were raised for the last time
as Mum and Dad pored over the scrapbook (which was a big hit and all
the present they needed). It just all went very very well. After the
cleanup and a bit more visiting together, everyone went off to their
beds. Mum told us later that as Kyler went upstairs, he stopped and
leaned against the banister and said to her wistfully, “Who would
have ever thought that we would end up as a normal family?”
How extraordinary. How dangerously close to speaking truthfully about
this nutty group of people. Too close, actually, so we laughed it off
as quirky old Kyler and clung to the memory of Dad's teary speech and
his professed love and admiration for us all: that's who we want
to be.
The
next day, Dad got up early and took Conor and Ethan out for a 5 am
breakfast, and when they got back home, they all went back to sleep.
When Dad got up for the second time, we could see that it was going
to be a black day: Dad without enough sleep is a dangerous situation.
He knows that, too, and spent most of Sunday away from the rest of
us; puttering in his garage and throwing the ball for his dog.
Kennedy spent most of the day amusing the cousins – hanging out
with them down by the lake as they skipped stones across the skim of
ice; setting up the Risk board; playing Spoons and Old Maid – and
she texted me a few times to ask if Pop was mad at her. I kept
reassuring her that he was just tired, but she eventually texted back
to say that he apparently was mad at all of them: when Conor
asked if they were still going to go to Stewie's convenience store
for a treat, Dad said, “No, I already went by myself because youse
guys were throwing rocks in my lake”. Well, bah. I half understand
the rule against throwing rocks in the lake in the summertime
(because that's potentially unkind to submerged turtles?) but that's
a pretty weakass excuse for punishing a couple of little boys who were
trying to amuse themselves with sticks and stones and little else. We had only all been together for twenty-four hours at that point.
Dad
eventually went for a nap – during which time Chrissy and Kyler
went to Stewie's and bought treats for everyone – and since they
had done more than enough just by showing up for the weekend, they
decided to leave for the hotel in Halifax around 3 pm; have a dinner
out and maybe enjoy the hotel pool. Ethan went downstairs to let Pop
know they were leaving, but when he came back up nearly immediately,
Ethan said, “Pop told me to get the hell out and turn the damn
light off.” Ken came in shortly after that and I let him know what
had happened and he went down to wake the bear. Of course Dad did
want to say goodbye and he came up for hugs and thank yous, but
naturally, no apologies. Funny how a person's half-conscious actions
can cancel out the goodwill built from a teary and love-filled speech
from the night before.
We
stayed for dinner and then left for the hotel ourselves, getting lots
of hugs and thank yous; they were certainly sincere with their
appreciation and I'm just left thinking: going down was the right
thing to do, more than they deserved from us (I know I keep saying that, but it's so true), and I have no idea
where we go from here. I absolutely believe that Chrissy doesn't want
to go back down this summer; maybe she never will again. Maybe Lolo
was just taking the first step in not playing along anymore either;
not pretending we're “a normal family after all”. After not
feeling very welcome down there last year myself (at that time Dad
told me that everyone in the village laughs at him because he has
company – us – for weeks nonstop every summer), I was
flirting with the idea of having an actual summer vacation with my
own family this year; doing my part to stop Dad's nonstop nightmare.
But how to do that in the wake of Dad's speech? How does he say all
that for the first time and then we stop coming? Which are the real
Mum and Dad: the ones who spend all our time together ignoring or
growling at us, or the ones who hug us when we leave?
Fifty
years of that and they'd do it all over again. Huh. I don't know if I would want to grow up in that battlefield all over again; Lucy and Desi certainly knew when to call it quits.
In A Wild Swan : And Other Tales, Pulitzer Prize winning author Michael Cunningham re-imagines eight classic fairytales and The Monkey's Paw (all from a decidedly adult point of view), and opens and closes with some original writing. While the unique viewpoints were interesting, and while the writing itself was very good, I couldn't help but think, in the end, that this collection is a little pointless.
Some of the stories were funny modernisations – Jack (of beanstalk fame) is a lazy man-child who refuses to move out of his mother's basement, even after stealing the Giant's riches; the witch (of the gingerbread house) was a boozy cougar until “it seemed as if the dresses themselves held you upright on the barstools” – but I thought the title story was the most poignant. I wasn't familiar with the tale of the twelve brothers turned into swans by their evil stepmother, so it was fresh to me that their sister was able to nearly completely reverse the spell: nearly because one brother was left with one swan wing. While that might be acceptable in a fairytale world, it comes with complications in ours. In trying to work out his identity, the swan-man thinks:
He could see himself selling himself as a compelling mutation, a young god, proud to the point of sexy arrogance of his anatomical deviation: ninety percent thriving muscled man-flesh and ten percent glorious blindingly white angel wing.
Baby, these feathers are going to tickle you halfway to heaven, and this man-part is going to take you the rest of the way.
So that's the level of the funny, and I did laugh at it. And there were some interesting alternate viewpoints – what happens after Rapunzel loses her hair and her prince has been blinded? What was going on in Rumpelstiltskin's mind when he decided to help the miller's daughter? – and with an adult narrator, there are opportunities for perceptive commentary, as in this explanation for why the Giant's wife allowed Jack to run off with her husband's riches as he slept:
We all know couples like this. Couples who've been waging the battle for decades; who seem to believe if finally, someday, one of them can prove the other wrong – deeply wrong, soul-wrong – they'll be exonerated, and released. Amassing the evidence, working toward the proof, can swallow an entire life.
And like I said, there was some really fine writing here. I was struck by this description of the son having an industrial accident in A Monkey's Paw:
Their son has been snatched up by his machine, as if he were the raw material for some product made of manglement, of bone shards and snapped sinews, of blood-spray that turned quickly, before the eyes of the other workers, from red to black.
No review could be complete without mentioning the remarkable illustrations done by Yuko Shimizu – in every instance, these retro pen-and-inks were shocking and evocative; stories of their own. Poisoned was motoring along as this very interesting story about a couple negotiating the husband's fetish – Prince Charming is apparently turned on by putting Snow White back to sleep in the glass coffin and rescuing her afresh before getting down to business – and while Snow White seems willing to play her role for his pleasure, this illustration made me gasp:
And yet, like I started with, despite my basic enjoyment of these brief retellings, the collection did feel a little pointless in the end. A fine way to spend a couple of hours, but not the kind of book that I'd urge onto anyone.
I don't tend to reproduce illustrations, so I sincerely hope that I'm not contravening Yuko Shimizu's copyright here: all credit to this incredible artist, my intent is simply to share my love of her work
