Author: carin

she washed; i dried

~ carin ~ 29 Comments

 

This month marks twenty-five years since my sister died of ALS.

Eleven years older than me, she had all the powers of an adult [or so I thought] but was more fun.

I inherited her green two-wheeler—too big for me to sit on and pedal at the same time but otherwise perfect—and a yellow cardigan that I wore with yellow stove-pipe jeans and white go-go boots. I was ten and the sweater came to my knees. It made me invincible.

She worked at Diana Sweets where she let me watch her copy menus on a Gestetner machine and later she worked at a greasy spoon near the canal where, when I’d run over to meet her after a shift, she’d pick me up and carry me back like a monkey.

She made the best toast I have ever tasted.

When she moved out I got her room. It was a nice room but I liked it better when she was in it.

For a while I phoned her every day to read her a joke from some book I got at the library.

Of all the people waving at the train station when I left for Edmonton, it was her that I was waving back at.

And when I returned, she was the first person I called.

On summer nights we’d sit in her yard, have a beer and talk about everything we hated and everything we loved.

When the disease got worse, I’d take her shopping in a wheelchair. I noticed the way people looked at her.

One time we drove to the beach and just sat in the car and she said she missed walking. I didn’t know what to say. I think on some level I was still pretending she could walk, that she just chose not to.

Eventually she couldn’t move. This is what ALS does, traps the person inside their own body while their mind continues to function perfectly well. Her only means of communication was very laboured, slurred words, hard to understand. And the effort exhausted her. So we organized conversations around questions she could answer by blinking once for yes, twice for no. Of course I couldn’t always tell if she was ‘talking’ or just blinking and sometimes the confusion made us laugh so hard we’d cry. I’d wipe her tears away first, then mine.

The last time I saw her she was a skeleton in the hospital, on serious morphine. I don’t know if she knew I was there or if she heard what I said to her; in fact I have no idea if I said anything at all…

**

A few million years ago, when we’d do the dishes together, she washed, I dried. Except for the big knife, which she washed and dried.

She liked roses, carnation, lily of the valley soap, and garage sales, and on rainy days, for fun, she’d pile her kids in the car and head to the countryside to look for deserted roads and puddles big enough to plough through at speeds that would render the windows thoroughly sploshed and the kids thoroughly thrilled.

She read cheesy books in the bathtub while eating chips and salami and had coffee with my mum every Tuesday.

She liked the sound of laughter in her house more than the sound of a compliment for décor or tidiness.

She was a master of chicken wings, potato salad, and lemon meringue pie.

And there was always room at her table for anyone who dropped by unannounced.

Her name was Mary.
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this is not a review: ‘to love what is’, by alix kates shulman

~ carin ~ 11 Comments

 

I received this book as a gift from someone who knows that I’ve been a fan of the author’s work since reading her memoir Drinking the Rain some many, many years ago. One of the few books I re-read on a regular (used to be annual) basis. Go ahead. Ask me anything…

To Love What Is is her latest gem, an account of what happened after Shulman’s husband suffered brain damage from a fall—it will appeal to anyone who enjoyed Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking.

Only this is better.

Much better.

Heresy, I know. But there you are.

What I felt about Didion’s book [just to clear this up] was that rather a lot was missing. Here is what happened, she tells us, here is how mad I was with it, and we empathize, we’re with her, but after a while I wanted not just to read lists and repetitions of her [understandable] mania but for her to offer something deeper, how she felt and how she was changed by this extraordinary period in her life.

I thought its honesty was bordering on superficial and maybe she held back because she simply wasn’t ready or able to give more. Her prerogative of course, but then why write a memoir? I actually read Year of Magical Thinking  twice because I couldn’t believe I was the only person on the planet who didn’t wholly embrace it. And then I stopped trying, and I began to wonder how it would rate or be discussed or ignored had it been written by an unknown. In other words, was the buzz created by the magic of Didion’s words… or was it our interest, and faith, in a beloved literary icon?

Shulman’s book, for whatever reason, didn’t elicit the same widespread reaction. At least I don’t recall it being discussed and applauded ‘everywhere’. Too bad. It’s an excellent piece of writing on a subject that has broad interest.9780374532055

As in Didion’s book, things begin with a moment between husband and wife… after which everything changes.

“On a moonless summer night my husband fell nine feet from a sleeping loft to the floor and did not die…. though X-rays taken several hours later showed that he had broken most of his ribs and both feet; punctured both lungs, causing perilous internal bleeding; and suffered so many blood clots in his brain that each CAT scan of that precious organ resembled an elaborate filigree.”

Shulman dips into the past only enough so that we understand who her husband was [a sculptor, among other things], what their marriage was made of and how his limited recovery affects every aspect of life.

“Never again will we be able to mull over a problem together, negotiate a decision, chew over the news, arrange to meet on a street corner, discuss the meaning of a remark, consult each other for advice, dispute the wisdom of an action, confide our secret anxieties, appreciate each other’s wit, plan a trip, weigh our options, fantasize about the future…”

In the course of years—from event to completion of the book—she meets with countless doctors, reads tons of material and manages to condense it in a way that we begin to understand the mechanics of brain function, the various effects of brain injury, impact on memory, and how her husband Scott, while able to recover to the degree that he resembles, outwardly at least, an intelligent, charming, normally functioning man of his age, no longer has any concept of how a coat is buttoned.

“How can you think or reason without remembering the facts to reflect upon? How do you know which way to turn when you’ve forgotten where you’re trying to go? With no recall of time passing or of what has transpired, you are bound to be in a state of perpetual confusion or apprehension. And along with confusion, agitation and upset. No matter how eagerly you may wish to cooperate, you can’t respond to others’ expectations if you can’t remember what they are. If a minute is the same as an hour, when your wife goes to the bathroom, how do you know she hasn’t ‘evaporated’—and, without her, how you will survive?”

She writes of the time it has taken to arrive at this point, the dedication on both their parts, but doesn’t play the victim card, not even once. Though she admits to exhaustion, frustration, fear, doubt, cowardice, she does all this without ‘drama’. Shulman doesn’t do drama.

“Facing squarely for the first time the bleak prospect of spending the rest of my days as caretaker of a well-meaning, loving, but helpless and clueless man, I find myself succumbing in odd moments to unexpected bouts of grief, as if a life as ended. Not his life, but mine.”

She tries to make things as normal as possible; she mounts a show of his work. He mingles, chats, appears almost himself… “But once the show has been taken down, he has no memory of it, not even that it occurred. None. And again I face the recurring question: was it—is it—worth the effort? If so, for whom? I had thought it was for him, but if he remembers nothing?”

Aside from all else, the book broadens our understanding of brain injury and aspects of memory loss.

“… since memories of different kinds of things (colors, numbers, music, places, faces, names, among many others) are ‘stored’ in different, specific areas of the brain and can be altered over time with subsequent recollections, the generalized concepts of long-term and short-term memory are no more than theoretical constructs…. Cognitive scientists disagree as to how many  kinds of memory systems there are, and they often divide memory into ever finer categories, including sensory memory (input from the senses), procedural memory (of skills and habits, such as tying your shoes or playing the violin), semantic memory (of the facts that make up or general knowledge of the world, as opposed to our personal experience of it…) episodic memory (of events that occurred to us…), associative memory (which can connect the taste of a madeleine, for example, with a flood of feelings from the past)…”

Initially devoted to ‘curing’ Scott, she finally accepts the reality of the situation and requires only “minimal conditions” to keep her spirit alive: “to be able to cook a meal without steady interference; to be free to read without constant interruption; to work on my writing every day.”

Shulman takes us to the brink of hard decision-making, not in a dithering way, but clearly thought out. She reads each passage of the book she’s writing [the one we’re reading] to Scott, and for as long as he can remember it, mere moments, he is able to comment honestly and intelligently. And this means everything to her.

They return to the Nubble, the cottage off the coast of Maine where the accident happened. This is also the setting for Drinking the Rain and a place on earth that is almost sacred to Shulman. She can’t bear the idea of giving it up. Or giving in.

“How little it takes to lift my spirits and restore my equanimity! Someone to spell me with Scott whom he accepts and I trust, a walk along the shore, a meal I can cook with imagination and freedom, and I am myself again.”

The title refers to many aspects of her situation, including the future, whatever it may bring—and I close the book hating the inevitability of what that future may hold for Shulman, but by then I’ve been assured, too, by her courage and straight up love of life, that whatever is thrown her way, she’ll manage to find the joy.

And all without a trace of saccharine.

Or self-indulgence.

And there it is, the challenge of memoir: how to write without myopia [or sticky sweetness in the case of love and loss… or to over-compensate and become one dimensional— self-protection disguised as aloofness, or vice versa]. Easy enough to circle the area but to venture anywhere close to that precarious edge without losing balance is the trick. And this, I suspect, has less to do with the brilliance of the writer than an ability to manoeuvre through the fearful territory of honesty without constantly looking in the mirror… or, worse, over one’s shoulder.

♦

To Love What Is, is available online at Blue Heron Books. Support indies!

the story of fred (a winter’s tale)

~ carin ~ 4 Comments

It begins, as most stories do, on a dark and stormy night in Edmonton. Nineteen eighty something. The storm was made of snow and arrived without warning at the end of the work day. Normally, this would have meant nothing more complicated than standing at the bus stop for a much longer than normal period in the whipping wind and infamous Edmonton but-it’s-a-dry-cold  minus forty temps. [They tell you that dry part as if it means your fingers won’t snap off as easily as if it were a wet cold.]

But all was not entirely normal… for that very day at lunch I had purchased a hamster cage.

Why? Because the sign said this: Buy A Cage and Get a Hamster FREE!!

Who could resist?

And so I had walked back to my office carrying, in one hand a hamster cage, cedar shavings and hamster food, and in the other a hamster in a cardboard box. Then I asked a guy at work to please transfer the furry little cherub from box to cage because a) I couldn’t imagine touching it myself, and b) the cherub was rapidly gnawing its way through the cardboard.

The guy’s name was Fred and now so was the hamster’s.

It might have been a reasonable enough series of events were it not for the storm. Suddenly the idea of standing in the but-it’s-a-dry-cold, waiting for a bus that might be hours away, wasn’t on… not with a hamster named Fred in an open-concept cage. I called for a taxi and was told the wait would be at least two hours. Undaunted, I did what anyone in this situation might do—I walked over to the Four Seasons Hotel [Fred’s cage wrapped inside my coat] with the genius plan of hopping into one of the many cabs queued up outside the front doors.

Except there was no queue.

Wait time: hours.

Well, the next logical step is obvious. I took solace in the hotel lounge… Fred on one chair, me on the other. A glass of wine between us. No need to panic. [Animals can sense fear.] We’d simply wait until a cab arrived. In the meantime I ordered something to eat, offered my companion some lettuce, and was grateful no one enforced the No Rodent Rule, [which I’m assuming is one of those things that gets waived during acts of god].

We eventually made it home and Fred seemed content enough with his new digs.

The story becomes considerably duller from here on out, mostly involving a wheel on which he ran several times the circumference of the earth.

I’ll spare you the scampering, squeaking, cedar scented details, other than to say I did, eventually, touch him but never loved the feel of his squirmy rodent-ness.

My tiny-toed flatmate lived to a respectable age and rests in a backyard on the south side.
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fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth, tenth, eleventh and twelfth gifts of the season

~ carin ~ 10 Comments

5.  Discovering that dinner at my nephew’s would not be a turducken as he’d threatened, but free-standing birds along with perogies, couscous and snuffing [stuffing to the rest of the world]. Preceded and followed by impromptu salsa dancing.

6.  The way Elizabeth Simcoe led me to the origins of the word spinster. 
A noble word!

7.  Learning that unicorns are real. [Seems they’ve been heard by certain people of short stature who know about these things. They sound like reindeer.]
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8.  Preparing the annual package of food and clothing that’s then left on a dark and deserted and slightly rundown street with a note reading Merry xmas to whoever finds this. The two best parts: picking out the stuff that goes into it, and wondering about the moment it’s found.

9.  The doves. They’d been gone from the backyard for several seasons but earlier this year, after our little tortoiseshell girl died, they returned the very next day and have stayed. And in the most wonderful way this doesn’t feel insignificant.

10. Lunch with a friend. Fries, calamari, kale salad, a glass of chilled Canadian riesling… but mostly the part that had nothing to do with food or wine.
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11. Home. Breath. Arms. Legs. The sound of a furball purring. You know, the good stuff.
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12. A walk to buy lemons and seeing that the hockey net from last year has returned. I don’t know who sets this up but, like a weird Inukshuk, it tells me whoever it is, is still about. I’m glad they’re well.
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***
The first four gifts are here.

impoverished spinsters may apply

~ carin ~ 5 Comments

“According to the usual pattern, she was educated at home with a series of governesses, and a weekly parade of drawing and dancing masters. Boarding schools, although increasingly popular as the century waned, were considered not quite good enough for gentry, since they were now infiltrated by rich merchants’ daughters in pursuit of the social graces of their superiors. It was much more genteel to be educated at home. The curriculum included English literature, a little geography, a very little arithmetic, and a smattering of languages, particularly French. At least half the time, however, was devoted to ‘accomplishments’, which included lessons in painting, music, embroidery and deportment. ‘Accomplishments’ were considered essential bait with which to trap a husband. Young ladies, after all, were educated for matrimony; there were no careers open to them, although it was considered respectable for gently born but impoverished spinsters to turn their hand to governessing, or to novel-writing.”

~ from The Embroidered Tent: Five Gentlewomen in Early Canada, by Marian Fowler (Anansi, 1982)

~

Am loving this book. Have read only the section on Elizabeth Simcoe so far, who I was prepared to label an entitled heiress [which of course she was] and dislike her for that reason. Turns out that despite her not so endearing trait of having zero compassion for underlings, or pretty much anyone of ‘lower class’, she was completely and utterly enchanted by the Canadian wilderness and heartbroken when her boring, whinging and militaristic husband John, decided to return to England. Her marriage was pretty loveless but for the [scads of] children [though children at that level of society were no trouble once ‘produced’ as they were farmed out to wet-nurses and nannies and had only a daily appointment with mother] and there’s a suggestion that she either had an affair, or thought about it a fair bit, with a much more upbeat and outdoorsy chap who lived on the shores of Lake Erie.

She was, it seems, a woman once the epitome of British upper class sensibility, raised to be ‘proper’, who discovered the joy of wading barefoot through a stream, who was never happier than when her husband went on extended sojourns, who learned to drive a wagon on her own over rough roads and who was only too happy to give up the daily round of social engagements and fancy dress balls she once enjoyed in order to watch eagles soar, seasons change, to paint fearlessly on the edge of Niagara Falls as her tight, precise watercolours changed to a wilder and freer style. She could have lived anywhere in Upper Canada but chose to build a home, ‘Castle Frank’, near the Don River, in a spot that, at the time, was no where near ‘civilization’. And then she obligingly gave it all up to return [at her husband’s insistence] to ‘society’ back in the U.K. where she ‘did her duty’ but apparently never completely embraced that world again…

Some of her paintings are in the British Museum, others, in the Province of Ontario Archives.
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♦

Read this for origins on the word spinster.