Year End Message December 31, 2023 – Warning, This is a Very Long Essay

Two words:  humbling, sad. That is 2023 for me. This has to be the hardest year end message I’ve ever written.  I’ve been through a lot in my life but there’s nothing yet (and hopefully never again) that tops the horrible reality that was this year. 

It started off okay.  I had a couple of weeks vacation after an incredibly busy year of working long hours.

I remember I was watching tv on the night of Friday, January 13^th, and as I’m a night owl I was still up in the middle of early morning hours of the 14^th.  It was a typical Friday. I’d returned that week from my vacation and was relaxing after being busy catching up.  One thing about it that stands out clearly is that as I was loading the dishwasher, something about a sudden death came on the tv and it reminded me of Russell.  I thought to myself, “the worst thing is when you lose someone suddenly, it’s so hard”. It brought back memories about the time when my dear friend Russell died. That’s what you do when you lose somebody, the pain comes back to you at odd times. The reality is, you never do get over losing someone, you just learn to live with it. When I was done the dishwasher, I put those thoughts aside and continued on with the rest of my evening.

When I woke up, I was told that my son and his father had died in a house fire.  My daughter saw a news posting about a fire at her dad’s place. The police confirmed to her that her brother and father were gone when she called them. I am so very sorry she had to find this out first and call me. The police were on their way to tell me, so I ended the call and got dressed.  My mind was in a whirl, how was it possible?  It didn’t make sense.

The police were kind, we talked a bit about the situation and I got a card for victims’ services.But really, I was in so much shock at this point that I was both thinking clearly and not quite grasping that this had indeed happened.  I looked at the news clip that was shown about it that day, read and re-read the articles that came out in the following days. Cold hard facts with pictures and idiotic comments from strangers underneath.  There were nice things said too, but it’s hard not to focus on the things that hurt because you’re already hurting.  I wish that people nowadays still believed the adage that my mom used to say: “if you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all”. My generation didn’t always do that nor do the subsequent ones. I’m as guilty at that as anyone when somebody annoys me, though I wouldn’t say nasty things on a comment section when there’s been a tragedy.  I’m not sure what kind of person gets off on that, but I sure wouldn’t want to know them in real life.

So that has been my year.  I am in this liminal surreal place where I’m trying to understand how this could be and at the same time fully aware that it has indeed happened.  When you lose a loved one, especially suddenly and there is no time for emotional preparation, the whole of life becomes seemingly tenuous.  You feel fragile, like one more thing will be what totally breaks you. 

There is a physical component to it as well that’s hard to fathom. For two months every muscle in my body hurt; I had weird pains everywhere. It felt like for a while every brain cell had been blown out and I was functioning somewhat as an automaton.  My memory was gone – I had to write everything down; I’d read and it wouldn’t sink in. Waves of grief would hit me (still does occasionally) when something triggers it and all I wanted to do was curl up in bed and cry myself to sleep.  Then I’d have nightmares of the fire, so that was a not very restful thing to do. Accidental death is a tragedy and for me it felt like a bomb blew up my world, the very fabric of the space-time continuum had been rendered. I wished I could turn back time so I could warn them. 

I can honestly say that the first few weeks are a blur of things we had to do; phone calls and paperwork, while holding closely to those who were with me on this dreadful journey. The fact that we are still dealing with the administrative side of things prolongs the healing, I think.  At nearly the one year mark, it’s not done yet.

I was off work for two months, until I felt I could sort of function and was able to say a few sentences without choking up. My kind and generous coworkers sent me a card and a gift. My kitchen table was full of beautiful flowers.

I had a number of nice messages from people.  It was so difficult telling those who knew them about it before we published the obituaries. We tried not to blindside those who were close to them if they were to see it. I made sure a notice was posted in the Ottawa Citizen and the Toronto Star so that people there would know about it if they read the obits regularly. The people we knew from those days other than those we told, I don’t know if they are aware or not; at least I tried.

I found it a little strange having to say, “I’m sorry to tell you this but…”, when asked how my son was doing not too long ago. I have a feeling that will happen a few more times, and in an odd way I kind of hope it does.  I want people to remember him, to know that he was the kind of person people would ask about if they hadn’t talked to one of us in a while. Sames goes for his father. He was two thirds of my life, a close friend and he blessed me with my children. There were people who didn’t understand our relationship, tried to turn into some adversarial thing that it never was; it doesn’t matter, we understood and that’s all that matters.

I want to know that there are people who think to ask after them.  I do. The saying that you exist so long as people remember you haunts me a little. That’s sort of why I’m so curious about genealogy – these people are the reason I exist, I should know them, warts and all.

It’s strange how death is one of those things that either brings people closer or pushes them away.  I’ve never quite figured that out.  There are times that I’ve felt that my contacting people after something difficult happened to them would be one more thing for them to have to deal with, so I’ll send a message or a card instead.  This definitely is the type of thing that is hard for everyone to talk about. Anyway, that’s the people who know me.

So many kind words were posted at the funeral home site. I really appreciate that.  I spent hours trolling my son’s social media, reading all the things I stayed away from out of respect for his autonomy.  I wish I had known just how good a programmer he was and how involved he was in raku open source developing. He told me a few times about it but I had sort of let go of my computer programming when I moved to New Brunswick. I just didn’t have the time or money to continue with my studies which is something I regret now; I would have liked to have finished that computer science degree. 

Regardless, I will look into raku to see all that he was involved in, and find out what exactly the raku program is for.  It must be worthwhile if he was so interested in it.  He always made me proud that he borrowed my computer science books to teach himself programming, though I could have done without the time he turned all my system fonts into wing dings right before a deadline I had on one of my courses – I couldn’t read my screen and had to figure out how to turn it all back into regular system fonts again.  Still, I was glad he did that rather than having to spend hours at 5 a.m. in a cold rink like many mothers do; I don’t think that would have been fun, I’m a night owl. So was he.

While it seemed to me at first like I’d never be able to work again, I did go back. It was important to me to take time to focus on something else every day. I am doing okay but I am nowhere near whole and may never be again.  I put one foot in front of the other and hope. As time goes by, the good minutes have turned into good hours.  I’m still waiting for entirely good days.  I expect that will happen eventually.

My thick skin is a lot thinner though and people don’t realize that things they say or do can set me back because, why should they? It can happen when I get a redirected piece of mail for my son.  It can be when I have to fill out a form about him or explain.  One person who was frustrated with how long something was taking said to me, “But you were gone for two months!”  I truly hope they didn’t know why I was gone, but regardless, I was in tears for the rest of the afternoon and evening. It will be a while I think before I can just wince and carry on when there’s something said or done that opens this up unexpectedly.

Occasionally I feel like the elephant in the room when I try to mention that I don’t quite have the stamina I did before then the subject gets changed quickly, or oddly, like when I first went back to work – some people wouldn’t look me in the eye. That’s how it is. Healing takes time and treating yourself gently. Until then, it’s still a little raw.

My thought in all of this is if you can’t say something nice or be kind, please just stay away. Being asked about it sometimes feels a bit like entertainment or curiosity instead of concern if I get prodded too much for details that I can’t even comfortably say out loud yet. Or conversely, I’ll overshare stuff that really, who cares but me and I’d rather not make people uncomfortable. Nobody needs to hear me bloviating about stuff when I should be talking about impersonal matters which is something that times of high emotion causes, so I gauge my going places carefully.

What’s happening now though is that new people are entering my sphere who know nothing about this which brings its own set of challenges.  How do I answer how many children I have when my youngest has passed? I say I have two, because he’ll never not be my son, no matter what plane of existence he happens to be on. I will always be his mother.

The business of death is remarkably heartless. It’s expensive and what I really didn’t like was having to talk to people, fill in forms and drive in snow storms on dangerous highways to meet officials like the lawyer, the funeral director, and the police. One place we had to go to days after the fire was across the street from the house, which was still standing with police tape around it because it was considered a crime scene until that was ruled out.

I felt awful for my daughter who had way too much on her hands for the business of her father; as next of kin for my son we were able to split much of this but an adult with bills and accounts is much harder to deal with than a young man just beginning to start his lifepath. I gave her whatever information I could and she shared information she’d learned from friends who’d recently dealt with a loss.  You know you’ve grown up when this kind of paperwork falls on your shoulders.

I don’t know how many times I’ve had to say, “I can’t get that information/give you that/go through their papers, because everything burned in the fire.” I’m glad I wasn’t on the receiving end of a statement like that, but I hate that I had to say it even once. Because really, this isn’t how it’s supposed to be, right? Things like this happen in the news. You never believe that it’ll be you and yours who are the news.  You just don’t.

I’ve learned a lot about grief over the years but this really is the advanced course. I know I need to speak to a therapist someday because when someone close to you dies there is always residual stuff that will remain unresolved.  You have to learn to come to peace with all those memories, and if you’re anything like me you endlessly flog yourself mentally over stupid things said or done that maybe they wouldn’t have remembered anyway, but regardless, there is no resolution ever.  When the day comes that I can actually talk about this without choking up, that is the day I make the appointment.   

This summer we decided to rent a couple of cottages, one on the lake where the kids spent their summers growing up and one by the ocean. We went the week we chose to do the internment of the ashes.  It was a vacation of happy memories, tears and spending time in water which I think cleanses the soul. 

The internment was a very small, private event. We learned that if there’s no service many people won’t go, which is fine, I can see why it would be uncomfortable without one. Neither of them was religious at all and we were doing what was right for them. Something this painful was better off small, we didn’t want strangers, curiosity seekers or people who might say something unkind; it simply wasn’t the time or the place for such things. Our send off was the best we could do under the circumstances and I think it was perfect. All the right people were there.

We decided on a gravestone that suited them. I went to go see it and lay a wreath recently after it was installed.  It looks nice. The house is torn down and we put flowers there a couple of times.  The land will be sold. Three generations lived there, but now it’s time for this one to put down roots where ever it feels right to do so, even if that place is the whole wide world.  As for me, I’m just trying to figure out what the point is of staying in a place with so many sad memories, but we’ll see where I am when it all settles.  My family is so small I could go anywhere really. What does that look like? Who knows. Probably right where I am for now, it’s expensive moving anywhere these days.

Other than that, in December I just had a day and half of no power after heavy rain and high winds knocked it out.  As I started to write this some places in this province still didn’t have it back (it took 6 days to get them all). I was thankful for my woodstove, and the load of wood we got this fall.  I lost most of the food in the fridge but not all – the turkey roll was still frozen solid and the fresh vegetables were fine when the power came back on.  We did have a Christmas dinner, and I lived to tell about it.

This year I’m reminded of two things:  no one is immune to loss, and while I thought such an accident is rare, I see now that it isn’t.  Tragedy is a part of living, the part where hopefully you escape it touching your life; we live with wishful thinking where everyone passes peacefully in their sleep of old age.

Fire it seems is such a part of the zeitgeist that nearly every movie and television program has reference to a house burning if they don’t actually show it. I remember watching one show thinking, oh I should share it, it’s so good, then there’s a scene where people are trying to crawl out of a burning house. So I didn’t. I haven’t stopped watching tv but I remind myself that fiction is fiction and watch those things cautiously. I’m not watching the news as much; I need to focus on more positive things.  I read about the current events in online newspapers instead to keep up to date.

I’m a creative person and while I’ve written a number of poems and a couple of essays about this, I have ideas I can’t do yet.  It still hurts too much.  I’ll know I’m well on my way to being more myself again when I can tackle them.  One thing I did try was Nanowrimo, my annual foray into writing 50,000 words of a work in progress or new.  I was proud of myself for starting something but no, I didn’t finish.  Once again, I chose a subject that was just hard to put to paper, like the fictional work I’ve been writing about a son who discovers his mother has dementia on an annual visit home. 

I started that one before my mom had dementia and then the whole thing became painfully more real because while I’ve been close to a few people with dementia, it’s a different thing when it’s your parent. It’s still not done but it nearly is, so someday soon, I hope.  This year’s attempt is a creative non-fiction book about grief. The different faces of it, my perspective because I’d never want to speak for anyone else in this regard.  I do think that writing about this, like any of the other tough subjects I’ve tackled previously is worth saying. I am not alone in this as much as it feels that way sometimes. We all work through things differently but if I can show people that you know what, other people think these things, or do these things, or react this way, maybe it’s a comfort, you know?

I talk a lot about projects that seem to never get finished but that’s not true, it just takes me longer than some people because I’ve got a lot on my plate still. I truly only get the time and the clear enough head to really make progress when I’m not working so that’s weekends and holidays if I don’t have a million chores already planned. I did submit a chapbook of some of my short stories for consideration, and I still intend to finish putting together that second poetry book, the short story and the essay books.  I have more than enough material for these.

But enough of this navel gazing.  So much went on in the world this year. When the earthquake happened on February 6 in Turkey and Syria where entire families died, I thought: who am I to feel sad when half a world a way entire blocks of apartment buildings became rubble and generations of families were lost? Who am I to feel so hurt when the horror of war is happening all day every day in several places around the world? It’s silly, I know. 

So much happened this year around the world between weather events, wars, and politics gone crazy. There’s way too much division and “us and them” mentality, and I am deeply disturbed at human rights being rolled back because of people putting their own beliefs ahead of the welfare of others. People who look at trying to revive the good old days are forgetting an awful lot that was not so good about society in the past and so much has changed over time it’s simply not possible to go back. 

Denying, hiding or erasing history won’t change the fact that certain events did happen. Avoiding tough subjects for fear of upsetting people is forgetting that life itself is hard, bad things happen, people fall ill and die. Sometimes people are homeless because there are no homes they can afford to live in, not because they’re lazy. Just because someone’s opinions or beliefs aren’t yours don’t make them wrong. Making mundane things political is dangerous and divisive.  We need to support decisions with facts that are based on vetted research, recognizing that an opinion loudly spoken doesn’t make it fact. It just doesn’t.

I still have hope. We just need a little less extremism, a little more compassion.  While history may be ugly, there’s lessons that need to be remembered so that we don’t repeat it. When we swing back from the extremes and settle in the middle, things will calm down.  So please, let’s start the process now.  Let’s make decisions from fact not emotion or rhetoric, take the time to research from places other than social media where algorithms are a feedback loop that highlights the negative. Being on the defensive is exhausting, how about us approaching people with neutrality instead? 

Most people just want to live their lives in peace.  To do so means we need to be peaceful.  Let’s aim for that.  All it takes is a little compassion and a touch of empathy.  Forgiveness helps too.  That last part I admit I’m working on, starting with myself. I also want to remind people that whatever moral compass you live by, whatever religion you follow (or don’t) doesn’t mean that you must force others to live that way too. Let’s try appreciating all the differences in people, the things that make society as a whole richer. 

Remember, while spirituality is an important part of what it means to be human, religions were created by men.  Literally.  That makes any religion fallible and open to interpretation.  It’s a good idea to examine the reasons why religions were created; there is an element of control and cultural mores that, while it was a consistent way of keeping people faithful to church and state, looking at how it fits into your life in this era is wise.  If it dictates that there is an element of keeping secrets, is causing you to turn away from family or shun them because they don’t follow the rules, maybe it’s not that good for you. 

There is no one “right way”, and if you are being told that this way is the only way, perhaps you should follow your heart and your own inner wisdom.  Ask yourself why they would be telling you this. So much atrocity over the centuries has come from tying religion into political aims when the two shouldn’t be combined.  It simply isn’t the right thing to do to force people to follow what you believe simply because you have the power to do so. If it encourages hate, how is that spiritual enlightenment? Let’s listen to our intuition on this. A little bit of critical thinking if someone is encouraging blind faith couldn’t hurt too.

I worry too when people take it so seriously that they are literally biding their time waiting for the reward when they pass on.  That’s not living, it’s existing, and I don’t think we were put on this earth to bide our time waiting for what happens when you die. Life is meant for living.  We should do that as well and as much as we can, whatever form that takes.

My mother to me was the perfect example of spirituality. She was the kindest person I’ve ever known.  She loved her religion (Anglican), and loved to study religion itself and took religious classes at night at a local college when she retired. Her two degrees were for her career, these studies were her heart. She went to Chautauqua every year, and belonged to the King’s Daughters.

My dad was Catholic and, in her words, they were a mixed marriage. That is what it was considered back in the 1950s.  She remained faithful to her religion while she was married, steadfastly not converting then and didn’t for a very long while after they split up though she did eventually. But then she was flexible in her approach to spirituality.

I went to public school, Catholic school, private school, finished grade 13 in night school and correspondence. Whatever worked best for the time was how it was. We sometimes went to Catholic church, mostly Anglican because she was in the choir and it’s where she was most at home. She learned that while Sunday school wasn’t really my cup of tea, singing was.  We were in the choir together for years.  We also shared an interest in Edgar Cayce.  She was very understanding and lived her truth her way, never once trying to force me be anything other than open minded and I am very glad of that.  While I may have turned away from formal religion, mainly because of the hypocrisy that I’ve never been able to reconcile, she always approached it from the spirituality of it, less so the rules. I wish that was how it was taught to everyone.  I really do.

To me, some solutions to the current problems are simple. Don’t like the idea of trans people reading story books?  Don’t go.  If you think abortions or same sex marriage or compassionate death is wrong, then don’t do it. You think a book or a movie or some music or game is horrible and possibly evil and corrupting?  Don’t read, watch, listen or play it. You know what’s right for you. However, if you want to try being inclusive and standing up for others, great. We need more people like that.  What we don’t need is more banning or overturning hard won freedoms because others just don’t agree with it.

The saying that you can’t put the genie back in the bottle is true – we need to be very careful how decisions are made that affect people personally. It’s offensive to think that politics can take precedence over a medical decision between a person and their physician or specialist. It can start there, but where does it end?  Think about that, and if you agree, for the love of all that’s worthwhile – vote! 

I say this because extremists are always in line to vote and that’s how we wind up with parties and leaders who don’t really reflect society as a whole – it’s because the whole of society isn’t showing up. It is so very important now that all people express themselves in the way that is constitutionally given to them.  Being able to vote it a gift.  One that as a woman, I always keep in mind that it wasn’t all that long ago that women weren’t able to. My mother started her career at a time when married women weren’t allowed to stay in their job after they got married.  She didn’t get married until she was 40. By that time, it wasn’t common, but at least she could have a career and be a Mrs. Her older sister got a PhD and became university professor but she remained single.  

I remember when I got married in 1988, we went to set up a joint bank account. This was in Mississauga. The officer insisted that my husband had to sign whenever I wrote a cheque and I was furious. I told them no, I’ve been working for 10 years, I’m the one who’ll be writing most of the cheques and if this really is the rule, take my effing name off the account. I’ll keep using the account that I have.  It took escalating it and husband’s okay to allow me to sign cheques by myself.  Think about that for a minute.  It was because I was a woman.  No other reason.  This kind of thing is what some people are trying to do to women again.  Don’t think it could happen?  Look at Afghanistan. It can and it does if people let it.

Most societal changes don’t happen all at once but in tiny increments, like taking away the power of women and their doctors for her to make her own decisions about her medical care. I personally wouldn’t want some person with no medical training to decide for me, would you? Well, it’s happening in the US right now, a bastion of freedom.  No one is immune.

If you’ve gotten this far in my message, thank you. I appreciate it.  And now I think I will let my missive end here.  I wish you all the best for 2024.

This year please be kind to one another, have respect, and remember the Golden Rule:  do unto others as you would have done unto you.

À la prochaine, Cathi

© Catherine M. Harris, 2023

I Didn’t Want to Say Goodbye

January 14th, April 5th and 9th, June 29^th, October 16th, November 17^th.  These are dates that give me pause; one of them is also the June 29^th person’s birthday.  I don’t hate them, they are only calendar days after all, it’s what those dates represent. I didn’t want to have to say goodbye to those people.  These are now negative days, ones that I will inevitably find myself just thinking about how much I miss the person or people who died on that day, and right now none more so than January 14^th.

That date was this year, 2023.  When I went to bed in the early morning hours of a Friday night, I had no way of knowing that 100 kilometers away two large pieces of my soul had just died.  I would find out later that day: Saturday January 14^th we learned that the house those souls lived in burned down overnight.  Two bodies were found.  It was in the news.

There was the horrible task of calling me after confirming with the police that this indeed was our family that had died, telling me what happened and letting me know that police were on their way to talk to me. They arrived not too long after, but long enough for me to start wondering why, how did this possibly happen?  How come they didn’t get out?  I’m still wondering that because at the time the fire probably started, they would both likely have still been awake.  The policemen were kind and explained as much they could and left me a card with a number to call if I need victim services.  The reality of it all hadn’t sunk in yet so I did speak to them clearly.

Then I thought about work – I’d have to be off, how long is a question but definitely for the allowed week.  I notified my boss and the person who would have to fill in for me and I put my out of office on.  By this time reality was starting to hit, so the phone number I gave them was gibberish but at least the information in the email wasn’t.

Nobody wants to receive an email like that and my boss called me to let me know they got the message.  It isn’t easy getting news like this and it is difficult certainly for anybody who knows you well but isn’t in your personal sphere; how much do you ask and how much should a person tell?  Anyway, that was work and one thing I knew for sure was that there would be no one week off and trying hard to muddle through after that. This time these losses would blow up my world in ways that would go on forever. One of the two bodies was my former husband who I had been close to for 40 years and who was the father of my two children, the other was my youngest child, my baby. My son.

When something like this happens, time passes in unusual ways and at first you’re sort of lucid as the shock keeps the hurt from sinking in too deeply.  It’s that initial period when between the tears you phone or meet with people to make arrangements and the like. My daughter, son-in-law, spouse and I spent the next week dealing with the various people we needed to immediately, such as the funeral director and notifying whatever we could figure out since we didn’t have the usual paperwork to go on with the fire destroying everything. We divided the tasks of father and son between us; they were living a simple life with little to speak of and so it was figuring out what to do exactly and then doing that which is what we were doing (and still are, two months later).

That’s the administrative end of things.  By far the harder part is the mental and emotional toll that a sudden passing causes.  I won’t speak for my daughter as she has her own story to tell if she wants to.  Mine though, is my own and it is very complicated indeed. 

There are two things that I do want to share:  one is that while my husband and I didn’t work as a couple, we started off as, and always were, friends.

My son and I had been very close until he became upset with me about some things he heard. He didn’t like my explanation and decided to stop talking to me a few short years ago. I kept the door to communication open and was waiting for the day when we could clear the air. All I ever did – as his mother – was with his best interests in mind, even if on the surface it might not have seemed that way. It’s the underlying reasons why I did things the way I did was what he was missing.

However, because I was dealing with adult decisions that as my child he didn’t need to worry about, that bothers me. Probably we would have worked it out in time. The thing is, I’ll never know. That hurts me so much right now, this unfinished business. If there is karma, I hope whoever told that stuff to him is held in some way accountable for the harm those words caused us, and that they learn the power of forgiveness.

Relationships are messy.  They can be glorious, wonderful exaltations of joy, comfortable spaces of love and quiet understanding, whirlwinds of activity, times of despair and even loneliness, compassionate acceptance, places for growth and sometimes, darkness and resignation.  The main element underlying all of that is love.  Whatever else and regardless of how things were in whatever moment there was that.  I will always be grateful that for all of my life, there have always been people who cared and for whom I could care even if that circle of caring was small as it is now, or big as it has been.

Death is unfortunately something I am well acquainted with.  My mother was in her 40s when she had me so from a very young age I was going to funerals for great-aunts and other people, sometimes friends of my mother’s, sometimes relatives I didn’t know I had.  I grew up with tales of people long gone. I thought I had no grandparents until my paternal grandfather was dying and I was introduced to him. 

I learned then of what I think of as our family curse, people getting cut out of the circle.  I’ll never know what the issue was between my dad and his father since they are both gone now. I’m left with one memory of my granddad: he and I sitting at his kitchen table talking.  I don’t remember what we talked about but I do remember that he looked like a smaller version of my dad with a larger nose.  I don’t think that’s how he would have liked to be remembered by his granddaughter. 

The sad thing is the same thing happened with my father and my immediate family.  There were good reasons for my parents to separate – this was a regular event in my life, his moving in and out.  When I was 15 it was the final event, and he was effectively cut off from one side of the family. I listened to him, set some boundaries and told him to treat me like a friend because laying down the law on a 15-year-old me just wasn’t going to cut it.  He agreed and we were very close for the next two decades, with me acting as a kind of middle person between the warring sides. I didn’t like it but it meant something to me that people weren’t told that he was dead when he wasn’t.  Some went so far as to only refer to him as “him,” said in a venom-dripping tone – something I really disliked. 

My mother was a kind soul who never spoke about him like that, thankfully. She was always sad that it finally ended because she was faithful and truly believed her High Anglican teachings that marriage was for life. It was other people who did that. At the time it felt mean to me and the people doing that lost 20 years of his life. There were family members he only met when he was dying and the swords were laid down.  A very familiar modus operandi for us it seems.

I will accept a lot of things. Being mean, rude or disrespectful aren’t included in that acceptance. That’s where I draw the line.

I do believe in looking at as many sides of an issue as you can, in seeing how a difficult person can fit in my life and if it’s too disruptive, how to comfortably deal with that and not cause harm to my immediate family.  I will never avoid someone because of their marital status, legal sexual proclivities (it’s none of my business), sexual orientation, their opinion about abortion access, contraception use and when it’s allowed, beliefs about sex before marriage, race, politics, religion, age, mental state, physical state, drug usage, their fondness for alcohol, gambling habits, spending habits, the list goes on. 

I may not like what someone is doing, it may not be anything I would do myself, but I will never hold it against them unless they are harming people.  But if they ask, and I can help with getting help, I will. It hurts me to think there are people who just can’t be in my life because they are nasty to me or mine.  It also makes me sad that people can be mean to those they should be compassionate to but there’s nothing I can do to change peoples’ opinions of me or any one else.  It has to be them opening their hearts to learn to accept differences in others. If there’s anything that bothers me the most in this life, it’s that. 

I’d rather be alone than tolerate verbal abuse and meanness.  I’ve left jobs and relationships because of that crossed line but all things considered, that’s a pretty low bar.  If I have a wish it’s that people remove societal, religious or personal glasses and look at people for who they are. I like to think they’d be surprised and maybe learn to love someone they didn’t think they could before. 

For me it’s these differences that makes relationships so interesting and broadens my perspective.  That’s a good thing I believe.  Being open to questioning rules and convention is how growth happens.  Rules and convention are meant to fit a certain time and place and it is only right that as changes happen those rules be revised or even tossed out if they are no longer necessary.  It’s for this reason that while I am spiritual, I walked away from organized religion.  Until it shows the compassion that is preached and the followers have empathy for everyone, I consider it to be too hypocritical for my taste.  But that’s me.  Feel free to follow whatever religion (or none) if you choose to, even if it’s the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster.  Just don’t force me to follow your rules.  My missing two lived every inch of their lives being themselves no matter what.  I am proud of them for that.

My son and his father didn’t have a religious bone in their bodies.  And that’s fine.  We respect that and we will arrange a celebration of life when the snow has melted and the summer sun has warmed the earth, flowers and trees in full bloom, when life is present. The earth and water won’t take their ashes right now so we heal ourselves and wait.

There’s a lot of waiting right now.  For documents sent to the no longer existing address that’s been forwarded to me or my daughter, depending who the mail is addressed to.  For answers to questions we can’t easily solve.  There’s a lot of cold fact stuff, applications, dealing with banks and various accounts, CRA.  So far the bank has been the worst.  Important information like what the email address associated with the account was so that I’d know which of the several email accounts that I know of for my son was his main one weren’t allowed to be given to me.  I asked for a one-year statement.  No dice.  Privacy act.  Even repeatedly saying, he’s dead and everything went in the fire didn’t phase them. CRA isn’t much better, I wasn’t able to answer the qualifying questions because again, the fire burned everything so I filled in a form, made myself a representative (but can’t link his account yet) and I have no idea what is in his My Account.  So yeah. 

How do you explain to people that this name or number was my son, the child I gave birth to and held in my arms and helped him grow up?  That there is no way possible to say how it feels to lose a child, when he was just starting his adult life, still discovering who he is? You can’t.  But this unknowable feeling is what I am going through right now and it is my life sentence.

For now though my main thing has been processing all of the memories – both good and bad – that suddenly rise up in my mind.  Lovely mommy things, sweet moments of a friendship and a marriage when things were still good, and the flip side, when things didn’t go so well with both them.  Maddening things.  Things that can never be resolved. 

When I go to sleep and if I wake in the middle of the night, I think about the fire, the two of them, what might have happened, how could it be they didn’t just open that big window in my son’s room and jump out….circular thoughts that lead to remembering more moments that were buried and some of the more unpleasant things in our relationships.  I have 9 hour sleeping times when it’s particularly bad, 7 if I’m able to brush it aside and go back to sleep.  Yes, there’s nightmares too.  I have PTSD, have had from before this and here it is, showing itself in all it’s glory. Someday soon I will talk to a professional again to help me deal with it. But for now, I have been spending my time doing whatever it takes to be functional in the world again, to hold conversations without crying, to laugh and make jokes more often.  Slowly the sharpness of the pain is fading and this past week I felt almost normal.

More normal means facing the world again, going back to work, dealing with difficult people, not taking sharp words as daggers but more like annoying pin pricks.  Nothing personal, just business.  Soon.

While I will always have unfinished business with my son, my own I will try to continue.  Paintings, five books, two or three illustrated videos of my work that I’ve been planning, the rest of my life.  One moment at a time, one breath at a time, stretching I hope into happy years.  Hope. 

Hope for myself, hope for my family still here, hope that light will eventually break through the darkness.  My quiet days of coming to grips with the loss and turning into acceptance.  I will never forget, as much as I have never forgotten those gone before.  You never do “get over” such a loss.  It just gets less difficult, and that happens more quickly when the stress isn’t too much.  For me, that’s usually people. I can’t ask people to change, but I can try to be understanding.  I wish the same for you, and –

That if you can’t be loving, at least be kind.

Love is always patient and kind; love is never jealous; love is not boastful or conceited, it is never rude and never seeks its own advantage, it does not take offence or store up grievances.  Love does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but finds its joy in the truth.  It is always ready to make allowances, to trust, to hope and to endure whatever comes.  Love never comes to an end. 1^st Corinthians 13: 4-8

© Catherine M. Harris, March 5, 2023

Our Wedding and Other Miracles

Here it is, a creative non-fiction piece I wrote in 1988 after my wedding, go figure. The whole situation was so ridiculous I couldn’t not write this. Anyway the reason I’m posting it here is because it’s a reminder I need to finish my essays book and publish it, and also because I submitted this as a first paragraph to a radio contest just for fun. My disclaimer is: yes, I’m crazy, this really happened and all the people involved in it are real with names changed to protect the guilty. What can I say but I told you so?

————–

The matron-of-honour was keening rapturous wails while clutching my shoulder for balance. The Groom was quivering gently beside me that fine snowy day in mid-April. The Minister stood bedecked in his finery intoning those last fatal words:

Those Whom God Hath
Put Asunder
Let No Man
Join Together…

Wisely I heeded sundry prophets of doom and married a little later than average. That I am now married at all is still a bit of a surprise to me; however, I did live to call myself a Missus. So, at the expense of persuading a few singles to forgo their own nuptials, I tell you my tale.

It started so innocently with my boyfriend of five years pronouncing that he was being transferred to Mississauga in a little under six weeks. During a fit of nostalgia at our favourite tavern, perhaps egged on by the mention that my mother had several prospective husbands lined up, with a delicately trembling hand, he took mine in his and gasped, “Wanna get married?” With tomblike gravity, my response was a quick and decisive utter silence. “Take your time.” he told me, so I did.

After half an hour of maniacal giggling and catatonic wall-staring, my dearly beloved announced, “I have to go to the can.”

Five minutes later, I brushed off the cobwebs, sipped some tepid wine and followed him to the bowels of the restaurant. As I descended, there in the shadows at the foot of the stairs emerged my intended.

In a wave of impetuous affirmation, I fell into his arms and whispered a firm, “Uh huhn.”

I’d like to say that at this treasured moment a choir of angels sang and flowers rained down from above. But the angels were singing for some other lovers and all that rained down on our blissful kissing was projectile vomit that flew past our heads from a woman who lurched down the stairs.

Now lesser souls might have taken that as an omen of what was to come, but not us. Instead we began our plan of attack. First there was the sticky problem of telling everyone that no, we are not crazy, and yes, we really intend to do this. My father was of some concern to me since he held the firm belief that if I really wanted to I should have children but, “for God’s sake don’t get married!” As for the others there was the inevitable “you pregnant?” which we expected after the length of time we adamantly refused to get married or even live together.

There was also two apartments, two cats, a piano I’d had mouldering in storage for four years and of course, the delightful chore of telling my wholly disliked employers that they could stick it. Also there was the matter of finding an apartment in an area where only dead relatives and lottery winnings will ensure you a place to live. And last but not least was the question of where and by whom we’d get married.

Telling people was the easiest part. Everybody loves to see others get themselves into the same mess they’ve been in and so they were delighted. Friends and relatives from near and far were happy to come to the wedding to see this for themselves. A Minister was found in the form of my brother-in-law’s brother and the church where I had once sung in the choir provided the place.

Now came the dirty work. While my fiancé was apartment-hunting I had one week to pack up five year’s accumulated detritus from my apartment. We decided that it would be better for me to move to his place before the wedding which left me cheerfully attending to a myriad of details, lunches and meetings at work, things to buy and movers to coordinate.

Our local charity organization would pick up the furniture, and yes, it was all in good condition, sort of. They came the day before the movers and after an opera of expletives about the front stairway, they decided there was no room for the couch. Instead, one particularly avaricious helper was entranced by a waterbed I was planning to throw out. Sure he could take it; of course it was in mint condition. Except for the two supports I forgot to tell him didn’t exist any more. Just slipped my *%&! mind. Honest.

The boxes came forty-eight hours before the move, and at midnight the day after, I ran out. In desperation I crammed all my left-overs into garbage bags; with a living room that resembled your basic town dump, I finished my packing at dawn. My movers were friendly, efficient and late; they worked wonders but not miracles. They didn’t have room for the couch. Mario, if you read this, sorry about the poor lonely behemoth I left in your living room…

Suffice to say that the apartment-hunting trip is a story in itself, best left for my husband to tell. After one false start and two and a half month’s rent deposit, we weren’t going to have to live in the parking lot of Pearson International after all. Mildly exasperated, he returned home triumphant only to find that the woman he left just barely resembled the simpering wraith that awaited him. You see there was a wee problem with the church…

I will confess here and now that neither my intended nor I were avid church-goers in the past; in fact, I never quite got around to getting confirmed. My taller half had never been baptised and was raised in a different church. No matter, we were both Christians. We just didn’t have thirty days to post the banns. Barring a marriage in the middle of Bank Street by a justice of the peace, we decided to go for a dispensation from the Bishop.

As Norman Mailer could tell you, waiting for a dispensation from the Bishop is much akin to waiting for the Governor’s word on the eve of the dawn of your execution. With promises of hurried marriage preparation meetings, post-marriage courses and assurances there was absolutely no way we would get married two weeks after we moved (what? you want us to live in sin for a month? Shame on you!) we were finally, two weeks before D-Day, given dispensation.

Our meetings with the Minister were delightful except that I would burst into laughter every time the word troth was uttered. You see, my first reaction to hearing “I give you my troth” was where can I get one? With visions of little hairy fang toothed troths dancing in my head, any mention of a troth was enough to get the giggles started.

Complimentary banns were read the Sunday before the wedding at the request of my mother. Naturally we attended one of these services. After vowing – and yes, believing – that any offspring to this union should partake in religious training, this was a good refresher course in church activities for both of us, and a source of considerable admiration by all. And the bets were heating up nicely on whether I’d break out laughing at “I give you my troth” during the service.

The week before was a joy of coordination. The Matron-of-Honour, living in Philadelphia, came to Ottawa the day after being a Matron-of-Honour at another wedding. Now this was also the city where she had lived with her late husband shortly before he died; she hadn’t been back since, but for the delight of seeing us married (and as for the wager on that, Russell, wherever you are, you won) twenty-two teams of wild horses would not have stopped her coming. Those same horses would not have stopped my fiancé’s mother and grandmother either; they had long since given up on his ever getting married. But I digress.

The cats were getting along fine, all and sundry were in various stages of ecstasy, the gynaecologist had his grope and our Matron-of-Honour was stepping off the plane. The wedding rings were bought, thankfully, by a generous donation from my aunt.

Four days before the wedding, my dress (yes, the real thing) was bought on sale in one hour. The next day was shopping with my Matron for everything else and getting into arguments with salesclerks and waiters. My intended meanwhile was arranging for a loan with the bank to help pay for the move. Despondent, he returned with the verdict that without collateral no one can get a loan and without a loan no one can get collateral. The employee counsellor at his work put it most wisely; moving and changing jobs is right up there with getting married in terms of stress. His face said it all when my working half told him he was also getting married. He knew whereof he spoke. Wait, it gets better.

In our last week of frantic activity, grandmother, mother, aunts, uncles, sister and brother-in-law complete with nephews began arriving. Ma Bell is still enjoying this and I’m sure Blue Line Taxi is still thanking its blessings. You see, our not having a car meant that it was also necessary to arrange our transportation to and from the church, something that occurred to us the day before the wedding.

The last two days were the greeting of relations, the packing of bags, the long nights of heartfelt discussion with anyone but my almost-husband. I had not gotten to the stage where I was wondering “who is this person?”, but getting awfully close to “what the hell am I doing?” Everyone involved naturally had their own ideas of what should be done and everyone contradicted the other. Small things like what brand of champagne to buy suddenly became issues of monumental proportions; for example the realization that one magnum of champagne couldn’t possibly serve 32 people for a toast, which occurred to us the night before. This critical situation was nicely solved by the intervention of our “missing link.”

The whole procedure being such a hurried affair, it came right down to the wire when we realized we still had NO BEST MAN. Attempts had been made, sure, but travelling persons and unanswered phone messages do not a best man create. Finally, two days before Ground Zero he was found in the personage of a long time good friend. In the amount of time given, we can only say that he did his job admirably. This man deserves an award.

Day One was a delight and everyone was up for it. The phone was surgically removed from my ear in time for the rehearsal and all parties concerned were at the church before it was unlocked. The torrential downpour was really refreshing.

Once inside the church, all of us giddy from too little time and not enough sleep, the jokes came fast and furious. The Minister, meanwhile, tried desperately to keep things in some semblance of propriety. The Matron-of-Honour remarked that the Mets were playing the next day, so we concurred that the wedding should be postponed on account of the Mets. By this time our Minister could only shake his head and regard us with baleful eyes. At the trading of the troths the proceedings ground to a halt with everyone, including our poor beleaguered pastor, laughing so hard we were crying.

Wine on top of the lack of sleep and high emotions made for a very interesting post-rehearsal dinner-and-meeting-of-the-grandmother. We tried, really tried, to behave ourselves but things did get a little out of hand. One such moment begs to be repeated: the tradition of not seeing the bride before the wedding flew out the window with our sanity. When grandmother remarked that we shouldn’t see each other, our Matron quipped, “Why not? They’ve been sleeping together for the last two weeks.” Needless to say, Grandma nearly fell off her chair with that one. Our idiocy was reaching gargantuan proportions.

Dinner over, the rehearsal group retired to our apartment for toasts to tomorrow. Of course it was tomorrow by the time the toasts were finished. Living on adrenaline and hysteria we went to bed just in time to get up.

The alarm clock rang with the subtlety of an air raid siren. Time for Armageddon. After five cups of coffee and countless cigarettes, I went to get my hair done. Apres french braids, the flowers arrived and then came the dressing. Our Matron was quietly lurking around taking X-rated pictures to kill time. We weren’t nervous at all, just shell-shocked.

At last the cars arrived and amid a slight blizzard we were off to the church. The groom was ushered there by a psychiatrist; meanwhile Matron and father were plotting possible escape routes and getting pretty emotional, complete with lectures on sex from the bride.

At the church our psychiatrist (every wedding should have one – I highly recommend it) quietly passed around prescriptions of Doctor’s Own – little sample bottles of Cutty Sark. Pockets bulging, we retreated to the church library to await the arrival of the groom to the altar.

One o’clock came. No sign of the groom at the altar. One ten arrived. Groom, but no bride. One fifteen: bride, father and Matron-of-Honour are running down the aisle with the song “Can you hear that funky dixie land? Pretty Mamma’s gonna take you by the hand. By the hand! Hand! Take you by the hand!” playing in our heads.

The service began beautifully and everything was going as planned. Soon I could hear heaving sobs to the left of me. A hand began massaging my left shoulder. Looking over, my Matron was standing in a torrent of tears. The groom glanced over, smiled, and we waited for the troths. No laughter here. Fine.
The licences were signed, the end was nigh. A sombre Minister intoned, “Those whom God hath put asunder, let no man join together.” This is a moment of comic relief truly meant to be savoured.

The service over, we forgot to kiss, raced down the aisle, down the stairs that eventually led up to the church annex where the reception was being held. From the depths of the church came a thundering “YEE HAH!!!” compliments of our Matron-of-Honour. The celebrations began.

Our reception was short and sweet, much enjoyed by all. We hitched a ride to the train station in a taxi and soon were off to four days of feverent honeymooning.

Now most people would think that our honeymoon went well, replete with joy every living moment. Well, it certainly was memorable. Stay tuned for the sequel, “Robert Bourassa, the night the lights went out in Montreal and the Honeymooner’s Guide to Pharmacopoeia in Quebec.”
—30—

Names of the living have been omitted to protect the guilty. Any resemblance to actual events is purely intentional…

The photo was taken the night before the wedding.

Cathi’s Comments Dec. 31, 2021

I’ve been trying to find a word that would best describe 2021 for me and I think equilibrium just about covers it.  It’s been a time of finishing off or starting to finish off things that have dogged me for years.  There’s been some form of resolution – whether actual or my acceptance of what is.  I’m in a much better place mentally and emotionally than I have been in what? 5 years?  So it’s been healing.  There’s a lot of areas I was trying to heal, and it’s kind of ironic that in year two of a pandemic my own personal healing has accelerated. 

You see for me, coming into this pandemic my life was a shambles and I was trying to pick up the shards of irretrievably lost (or so it seems) things:  relationships, status, my heart – I lost so many people and pets over those 5 years leading up to 2021.

My career had been on a downhill slide for quite a while and at times it felt like I was subtly being nudged towards a retirement I couldn’t afford. Doors start closing when you hit 50, I have learned. Hasn’t stopped me from trying and applying for jobs though.

My life situation was confusing and strange with people who chose to make up their own minds about how my life is without asking me (hint:  they’re wrong).  But unread letters won’t provide answers and me railing about being called my former no-longer-legal married name from 20 years ago doesn’t help anything.  I will defend the provenance of my legal name, my relationship status, and my history if need be, but I’m not worrying about this anymore.  Life is for the here and now, not old angry memories.

If you’re wondering, I’m not concerned that writing comments like this could deepen the rifts because I’m not naming names and they won’t read this anyway.  If they did maybe it would open a respectful dialogue; reality is, they aren’t interested. And I’m okay with that.  This is just me echoing off a canyon in my soul.

One revelation I came to this year and I feel good about is that in the end, this is my life.  Mine.  So I get to tell it the way that I’ve lived it, other peoples’ opinions be damned.  I think I’ve spent way too much time trying to please other people, which is fine unless it becomes you trying to live your life that way.  It’s inauthentic:  you can’t please everyone and in doing so you can lose who you really are.

I’m a writer, painter, singer/songwriter (though sadly quite rusty in this department right now).  That’s who I am.  Everything else I do is purpose driven or emotion driven. 

There are two creative things in my life that for emotional reasons I just couldn’t finish.  One is a painting of a photograph I took of a little boy in a raincoat splashing in puddles after a heavy rainfall.  I loved that photo – it spoke of a special time in my life.  I had started painting it thinking maybe it was one I could sell or maybe I should keep.  But a life event made continuing with it too painful.  I put it away out of sight for a couple of years because it hurt just to see it. 

This year though I felt it was holding me back – there are several other paintings and illustrations I want to do and this unfinished business was crippling my ability to do that.  No more, I decided.  Come hell or high water, I was going to finish it.  And you know what?  I did.  It hangs on my wall because I have a right to enjoy the memory of that moment in my life.  I’m happy it’s there.  I am also planning other paintings now, time permitting.

The other thing that is kind of holding me back is a book I started before my mother was diagnosed with dementia but it took on a whole new aspect when she was.  The book is about a man who visits his mother for Thanksgiving one year and realizes she has dementia and shouldn’t be on her own – how to cope with that, which for him was a couple of weeks that turns into years and what it does to his life and his view of himself.  I had to stop writing it – it was too painful, and after my mom passed I couldn’t read any of it, it hit too close to home. 

Last year I tried, got a little further in writing, then got to a point that had me in tears.  This year though, I tackled it differently.  I decided I should edit what I’ve already written which made me question the format of the timing and noticing several detail mistakes in characters that need fixing so there’s that.  But in reading it now I think I can finish this once I’m comfortable with the major edits that need doing first. 

But before I came to these conclusions about my in-progress work, I had a crisis this year where I felt there was no way I could continue with any of my creative endeavors.  I didn’t have time to finish or start anything and here it was, my entire life going nowhere with these things even though I’ve been published and won awards.  Awards don’t mean anything though, not really.  Selling and eyeballs on your work, that does.  I was thinking that if nobody gives a damn about it, why should I? 

I started to rewrite my website to be a one-page farewell.  I took all my paintings off the walls, stopped short of throwing them and my supplies out (I almost did – they went in bags), instead choosing to put them out of sight.  I decided that if nobody cared then neither did I, but maybe I could give them to someone. 

The blank walls felt empty.  I thought, why take down my history which is what my website is, why not just leave it? If nobody is interested, well, I am.  Slowly I reminded myself – I don’t do these things for other people.  I do them for the love of doing them and shutting that door, however softly, hurt a lot.  I came to an understanding that this is another area in my life I have to say:  who cares?  I do, and that’s what matters.

That was the nudge I needed to finish the painting that now hangs on my wall with the rest of them, restored to their places.  My website?  It still needs a major revamp but it’s not been taken down, not yet anyway.   Like so many things web programming is something I haven’t had time to do.  Someday.

The downward slide in my career stopped this year with an appointment from a pool I was in that ended my many years of assignments between 3 different employers at that level and giving some stability in my finances, which was a huge relief.  Having fewer expenses with working from home also has helped with my tackling bills that went back years; I even paid off two major ones that had haunted me.  Doing that also means the others are disappearing.  I still need a new vehicle (ours runs but is 12 years old and is on borrowed time I think).  I also still have one major thing to pay off.  But the end is sight and the relief of that is enormous.  Jim got his US pension finally and as a thank you, he bought me the heat pump I’d been dreaming of installing.  So, yay on these fantastic developments too.

I end this year on these high notes, fully vaccinated and boosted, going with the flow of the waves of the pandemic and regardless of what’s happening outside, moving forward here.  With writing I finally got the I Ching Jukebox paperback out, and now have to see why Off-Air isn’t showing on Amazon (it should be – it is available on Lulu).  I didn’t submit much this year because I did so much last year however, I do want to finish the novel I’ve nearly done, finish my book of essays, and my short story book.  That’s my challenge for 2022. 

I also want to do at least one or two paintings and make headway with my children’s book The Troll of Barondale as an illustrated book and hopefully animated one if I can find the right inexpensive program to create it in.  But that’s getting back to my computer programming which I’ve sadly let slide since moving to New Brunswick.  We’ll see.  

Other things I hope is to end is this now 9-month plateau of weight loss – I hate to think that 1200 calories a day has become my maintenance number, but I am exercising daily as much as I have time to do (1/2 hour to an hour a day).  Not sure what else to try but at least I reached the weight I was before the 5 years when my life went to hell and I gained 20 pounds.   Now I’m trying to get back to normal weight then the weight I’ve been most of my adult life.  Fingers crossed I find that answer this year – if you’re wondering I’m following Noom which is a good, healthy program – I’m not a fan of omission or single element focused diets, it’s not sustainable.  The plateau is something I’m doing or not doing; I just haven’t figured out what.

Looking at the bigger picture, there are lessons in the pandemic that I hope people will learn.  While it is forcing society to look at some things that had lurked under the surface such as long-term care homes and how they are managed, the cost of working versus not, job stability, financial social safety nets, the supply chain and where our food and goods come from, it’s also at a deeper level in that it’s forcing us to re-evaluate our lives and the people in them, the jobs we do, what we truly want in life.  It’s hard, but these are good things to look at and hopefully improve. 

What has gotten worse though is division between people because of ideology and the politicization of things that really shouldn’t be politicized.  Skepticism of facts based on data versus ideology became dangerous on Jan 6^th in the US and I don’t know how we, the society of the world, can reign in this culture of non-acceptance of data in favour of belief that is happening everywhere.  Science shouldn’t be a belief, neither should numbers. 

How do you convince people to listen when they don’t trust the sources?  There’s a lot of clean up needed in media and reporting but I don’t know how that can happen and still allow opinion – like this piece, for instance.  Maybe by focusing on hate speech and removing that?  The odd thing is that while one side of this bellows opinion being the right of everybody, real human rights are eroding dangerously. Take for instance Texas and the anti-abortion laws they’ve enacted.  There are legitimate health reasons for allowing abortion regardless of the human rights angle but when those hard-won rights are taken away, they are so much harder to get back.  We should be guarding those rights, no matter what our personal beliefs are.  For those of us outside this area, keep a close eye.  This could be the bellwether for what’s to come.  Remember that.

That’s the thing – you are free to believe whatever you want, but when it encroaches on and possibly endangers others’ rights, that’s where I draw the line.  In the bigger picture, and in my own life.

So now we’ve gone full circle.  My final thoughts for this year are:  as always, have compassion and show it.  I don’t mean by saying I love you to everything in your vicinity – that’s not compassion, that’s words.  What I mean is by being a caring person, accepting peoples’ differences and their beliefs and life choices even if you don’t like them.  Listen.  And maybe, just maybe take a few minutes to find out the facts on matters that have empirical evidence.  Lastly, please don’t turn personal opinions into hard core rules for everybody.  Everyone is entitled to their opinion but nobody should have to live by someone else’s opinions.  Take the time to form your own, and stand up for what’s right, even if it means going against the grain.  Be authentic.  The world needs a whole lot more honesty and empathy right now.  Let it start with you.

À la prochaîne, and here’s to a better 2022.

Cathi

20 Years On

It’s Sept. 11, 2021. This week I watched an excellent documentary on 9/11 and I’ve listened to various pundits discussing the events of New York in 2001. It’s triggered a lot of memories for me, and as much as I hate to say this, the horrible day for the US that changed everything was a pivotal moment for me as well. It may seem odd that as a Canadian I say this but I am. I remember that day very well indeed.

The events of that particular day actually started for me a few months earlier with a dream that I shared on an online fellow webmaster/writer’s blog. It was a weird one but I thought he’d appreciate it for its detail. One thing that spoke to me was a fence. At the time I dreamt it I understood it as an allegory of what was happening in my life.

So first, the dream: I was walking down a street that was mostly fields on both sides. I saw plane flying so close I could see the pilot’s face and I thought that was weird and then it dove to the ground and crashed. I ran to the crash site, hoping I could help the pilot but I couldn’t get to him because it was behind a fence. I tried to find a way around it or over it but I just couldn’t it was too tall and I decided to run back to where there were buildings to get help and as I ran back I saw another plane crashing and then I was terrified and ran into a building that had (oddly) a Chinese restaurant where I went in with other people and we all hid under the tables.

I woke up wondering what the significance of all of this was except that I was in the very last days of my marriage at the time so for me it was maybe a symbol of the two of us going down in flames. I couldn’t save it, it was not possible. Just like those burning planes beyond the fence to me salvation was unreachable. To this day I have no clue what the Chinese restaurant meant. It doesn’t matter though – it was so vivid I had to share it and see if somebody else on the blog could figure it out. So my Connecticut friend let me post it.

That summer was strange and I was exiled to the couch while waiting for my rental townhouse and it was spent in sad stony silence in between decisions about furniture and the basics of unravelling the tangled mess life had become at the point. I was trying to smile for small children and stay professional at work while inside walking on emotional thumbtacks. That was a dark time indeed. Necessary, but oh so difficult. I try not to think of it. There are some points in a person’s life it’s better to not dwell on – just mentally close the door. By the end of summer that’s what I did physically.

In 2001 I was in the Toronto area working in an aviation environment where I was dealing with things at the international airport and other airports across Ontario. My online friend was involved with a non-profit radio station in Connecticut. We shared writing we were working on, helped each other with web programming problems and enjoyed being part of a group of like-minded creative folks who would have group MSN Messenger chats where we talked about life and all that was.

That group was in fact where we met in 1999 and I am pleased to say I still am in communication with several of those folks. I was focussed mostly on being a mother, trying to learn web programming on my own and fitting in my hobbies while working full-time at an office where it felt like I drove halfway around the world to get to. Most of the time it was an hour and half drive each way. Looking back I have no clue how I did everything I did in a day except that I do know I rarely got more than five hours sleep, and never without interruption. Which is how that dream was even more remarkable in that I even had one long enough to remember. Everything I did back then – dreams included – was in snippets and usually simultaneously.

At the beginning of September 2001 I was in a rental townhouse with brand new furniture (ask me how fun it was to build a bunkbed almost all by myself – thank you Andrew for saving the day when I simply couldn’t finish by myself), and trying to figure out the next minute in life. Until then, my Messenger friends were a lifeline when in the deep of the night I needed a listening eyeball to chat with – no one knew what I was going through because I just didn’t want to share that except to real life people.

It gets exhausting going over the tough stuff all the time, so those chats were also me listening to their lives and talking about creative things so it was refreshing. However, at the advice of my lawyer, communications with friends of any type that could be used against me in any way had to go. Since pages of fiction shared between us could be misconstrued I told the world the truth, that I had to delete any drafts of anything or shared worries about life and that included my Connecticut friend’s stuff. Of all the people I chatted with at the time, he was the one who was mostly likely to be on when I couldn’t sleep and I had to tell him also to please keep anything important, I have to delete it all. I was going to be offline the few days in early September and it was at that time I explained why.

I came back on line a day or so before my friend’s birthday on September 9th. We were both working the morning of September 11th. I got email notices of news bulletins and there was just the weirdest one about a plane crashing into the World Trade Center. Our Director had a tv in his office that got turned on. Then there was people exclaiming and the emails were coming one after the other. I phoned the children’s father and asked him if he was watching CNN. He was. Daughter was in school, son at the babysitter.

My office crowded in front of the t.v., dumbfounded, not sure what we were seeing. A couple were crying – they had relatives there. Others were worried about friends or family who happened to be travelling in the States. Our building was on lockdown for the forseeable future – there had been threats against it so nobody was going anywhere except for a few who had to leave. The day went in a blur of worried voices, stunned silence and the occasional stress-induced dark humour jokes. Sometimes you gotta just laugh instead of cry.

There were employees who deal with emergency situations – I was one of them in an administrative sort of way. It was a very long day with not much I could do except pretty much okay whatever the folks at the airport needed; there were hundreds of international flights over North American that were landing in Canada because the airspace over the US was closed. We were the next best thing. There’s a wonderful play that explains that very situation that happened in Gander – the airport that by far had the most planes landed. My concern was not the planes but more providing what area staff needed and we’ll leave it at that. What was worrying to me was that the local news was going on about what was happening at our airport, mentioning on occasion the place I worked and I wasn’t back several hours after school being let out because we were still in lock down.

My little girl was going to her dad’s after school and was going to be hearing about that on the news after not being told by the school what was happening. I know because I was told she first found out it from the tv and was a little bit worried hearing about the airport and the name of where I worked being said in the same time as some huge event of buildings falling. To this day I wish the schools had told the children about it. I mean, we were told the tough stuff. Regardless, it was late when I got home and I had many many longs days and nights of work ahead of me.

Late that evening I was on the computer trying not to look at the tv anymore, too wired to think about going to bed. My Connecticut friend was online – and more wired than I was. He was at the radio station that day, 50 miles from New York City, and talking all day to people who knew somebody, people who spoke to people who said goodbye from the planes and people who knew people in the Towers. For him this was real.

So we listened to each other that long night after that shocking day. I was glad he was alive across that now closed border. The next few weeks for both of us were mind-boggingly long and scary and strange. In my place people were threatening Muslims and I worried for the many neighbours we had that suddenly had become targets. I swore I would take in whoever would need to hide if it ever came to that and I hated that for even a minute we considered that was even a possibility. And my friend’s blog? The servers hosting it were in the basement of the World Trade Towers and so were lost.

When the border opened again and after a war was started, there came a time of fierce nationalism to the south of us which, while understandable got a bit ugly after Canada didn’t join that war. There were tales of people with Canadian license plates being turned away from gas stations and hotels when going across the border. I thought how strange after helping in the best ways we could we became one of the countries like the French (remember Freedom Fries?) .

So after the coming together and being there for one another, the anger crept in which was sad because there’s also a kindness that was lost after 9/11. I don’t know what can bring that back. What really hurts is that the anger festered and it’s boiled into a binary way of looking at things, of divided politics and a me-first thinking that is now literally killing people in this pandemic where it really will take unity or a whole lot of time for this to be over.

I get ahead of myself here though, because I found something that many other people did at that time. I found my soul. I realized then just how important it was to follow your heart because tomorrow everything can be taken away.

My online friend became my phone friend and we talked for hours. Some months later when there was time to breathe, we got an opportunity to meet in person for a coffee at least. One year later we were choosing to spend our lives together as a couple. For us, 9/11 was where several hours commiserating turned into a connection that would be strong enough to stand the test of time. We took a chance on a relationship that was unthinkable just a few months before. That’s something that this event did for a lot of people – it shook our lives so profoundly we took a chance on us. I’m glad we did.

So at the 20 year mark, I’m pleased the Afghan war is over and I hope that if there is a lesson learned here, it’s that we need each other. As we go through the second year of a pandemic one thing I’d like people to do who were around in 2001 is to remember how it felt, how no matter where we were, people wanted to help. They did what they could however they could even if there was a border between us. My allegorical fence has been almost a real one twice now – once with sick actions of terrorists and now with a terrible illness. I wonder what it will take for us to realize that if we had compassion for one another we can overcome anything?

I’m beginning to think I won’t be here if or when the world ever figures that one out. So I think I’ll just say that in my little world I did let compassion in, and I was fortunate enough to take the time to talk to someone who just needed to be listened to 20 years ago, as did I. Good things happen when you let love in your heart and truly listen.

So maybe with today’s challenges can I just ask one thing from people? Can I ask that maybe we think of other people during this pandemic and maybe try to care for one another without the divisions, recognizing that at the end of the day we’re all just people? Can we do that please?

–30–

Catherine M. Harris (c) 11.09.2021. All rights reserved

April 9, 2020

I’m writing this today from my locked down silent life that I and pretty much everyone else in the world is doing right now.  It’s the Easter long weekend starting tomorrow and I am fortunate enough to have a turkey breast roll in the freezer and all the food we need for the time being.  I work from my kitchen table and while there are some limitations in the bandwidth on the VPN, so far my colleagues and I are getting by.  I am one of the fortunate ones – I know this, though if things take a turn for the worse here in Canada I am also very much aware that I could just as easily join the many thousands no longer working.  I’m needed for now but not essential.

I’ve resisted the temptation to post a tribute to my parents today. The first anniversary of my mom’s passing was on the 5th and the twenty-fifth of my dad’s is today.  I have several essays on both of them here so I thought that I’ll  do quiet appreciation for them in my own way tonight.

It’s been a while since I last posted anything and that’s okay.  I’ve been working in the shadows on an essay that I sent in for the CBC Creative Non-Fiction contest, on myself and am trying to heal after what has been a brutal 2019.  A huge part of me wished I could just go away for a while so that I could heal my broken heart and soul and find myself again.  Fate has taken an ironic turn though, and I actually have gotten what I thought I needed all this last year: the time to reflect and to step back a bit from life to do that.

We are living in dangerous times and for many it is really hard to understand what the big deal is.  What the point is.  “Aren’t we overreacting?” They say.  It’s going to be somebody else.  It’s not fair.  It doesn’t make sense.  It’s half a world away.  It’s just a cold.  It’s only the flu.  It’s …[place your favourite saying here]… It can’t happen to my family.  The thing is, it can happen.

My mom was born in 1919.  She came into the world on heels of the end of the Great War, the War to End All Wars that didn’t.  The Spanish flu had claimed thousands of young peoples’ lives among others, this at a time when so many Canadians had died fighting for King and Country.  She was born at a time of ice boxes and model Ts and crystal radio sets.  She was a child in the roaring twenties and then the stock market crashed and the Great Depression set in.  As a young woman she saw many friends and relatives go off to war in WWII and some never came back.  She was around for the inventions of penicillin, insulin, vaccines, plastic, television, talking movies and technicolor, ball point pens, computers, cell phones, travel to outer space…the list goes on.

My mom always was concerned with the fragility of life.  It seemed a little silly to me but as someone who has had relatives die and lie in state in her drawing room, who had a childhood friend die of blood poisoning from an infected cut (“never wear red!”, she warned me – she thought the red dye in her friend’s clothes had poisoned her), who lived through so much on a grand scale that I did listen to her. I was always quick to point out how much things had changed but the reality is people die in unexpected ways no matter how advanced the world is.

I thought for the longest time that the evolution of society had fixed so many things and she – rightly so it turns out – was always just a little skeptical. She appreciated these advances even if some of them like computers and VCRs scared her just a bit.  To be honest I think what scared her most was the change in society’s mores and our lifting of the veil on so many hush-hush topics.  That subject is for another essay though.

Today I’m focused on how much we’ve taken for granted.  This is a lesson that was hammered home to me in 2019 when I realized that you can’t count on people to put aside their differences in hard times and that the senior officer position I tried so long and so hard for that I finally got in 2006 would get taken away with the stroke of a pen 13 years and 1000 kilometres later.  I was faced with the certainty that nothing is forever and that there may not be that open door waiting for me when a door closes.  I’ve always liked to think there was one.  What I did learn is you can’t hope that people will be kind or considerate when you think they will be and that makes me terribly sad.  I’ve always liked to believe in that there is a better day coming, and deep down inside everyone has a heart.  Maybe not.

With 2020 there is the knowing that sometimes you need to look at the past for lessons and use those lessons to look ahead.  What’s happening now in peoples’ attitudes is a little like Y2K when there was the big “oh my God everything’s going to fail” worry and the relief of the “I told you so”s when the world didn’t end.

The thing is,  I worked in assets in the late 90’s and we spent a good couple of years identifying all the possible equipment big and small that had software that potentially could crash and either had the software upgraded or replaced them.  It was an exercise carried out worldwide and of course the critical equipment was upgraded first.  That’s why the Y2K crisis wasn’t:  not that it didn’t exist, just that you couldn’t see it.  Most of it was fixed before it became a problem.  Which is what should have happened here but it’s a bit trickier with viruses.

I was in the Toronto area in the SARs era and it was kind of scary.  Driving by the hospital you could smell the hand sanitizer from the street.  On the doors there was a sign saying “If you are sick don’t enter” which I though was particularly funny given that this was a hospital.  But I knew what it meant, which was sick visitors.  Still it gave me a laugh every time.  SARs didn’t become the big deal that it could have but what we are dealing with now is a cousin and it is a big deal.

I grew up very much aware of the 1918 pandemic thanks to my mom and her family.  They had stories of people who suffered and died.  Their reality has shades of what could happen now.  And that’s the thing:  it hasn’t become that – YET – but it could if we don’t take the lessons learned from that and other pandemics.  Even the black death and the doctors who wore those crazy bird noses realized distance and a mask can help, even though that was caused by poor sanitation and rats.  Keeping people inside isn’t new, they knew even then that keeping people apart from one another helped.  In the early part of the 20th century there was a typhoid epidemic that killed hundreds and it, like the recurring yellow fever epidemics from the previous centuries were eventually stopped by better sanitation and vaccines.  And so it will be now if we make the effort not to spread it.

I’ll stop proselytizing now.  I’m beyond up to the eyeballs with corona virus information.  I’ve taken to not watching television news much and just catching the headlines, watching when there’s something important I want to see about.

Some things that I am appreciating is that like it or not, things are changing.  Right now, the Earth is taking a deep breath.  The skies are clearing, water is going from dirty to clean, people are having this time with their families and getting back to basics.  We’ve proven that teleworking is a functional way to work and save time and money. Children are being home schooled, people are taking up or getting back to hobbies they may have put aside years ago, instead of shopping we’re baking and cooking from scratch and contemplating victory gardens.  Dogs are getting walked and for pets, this is the greatest time ever! Time alone means time to think.  Time to read, to catch up on things you’ve put aside, to step out of the rat race for a while.  I wonder whether we will be as anxious to be living non-stop lives again when the world reboots itself, and it’s important to remember that it will.  After the black death that killed half of Europe’s population there came the Renaissance, a flourishing of art and culture and learning.  I wonder what kind of renaissance – and I hope there is one – will we see?  I just wish that people actually start to show compassion for one another, that’s my dream.

What do you want to see at the end of this?  How do you think we will grow?

 

Welcome Back, Mississauga

This was my 2019 entry to CBC creative non-fiction contest, which as you may gather since it’s published here, did not make the long list. That’s fine, it will be in my book of essays I intend to publish in the not-to-distant future. This was an essay that took me a mere 15 years to write. Enjoy 🙂
———
With the power back on and the house officially mine, I could finally get the trailer of furniture delivered. This was a good thing because at the moment we only had a kitchen full of tropical plants plus a cage of renegade birds that had been exiled from the hotel we were staying in. We killed the time between closing on the house and the arrival of the furniture by painting the living room walls three different shades of blue.

The deadline for delivery was extremely tight – the movers had to drop off everything at which point we needed to jump in the car and drive back to Mississauga to make it for the appointment I learned was scheduled for the day after. When I was told of the appointment the date and time seemed reasonable if quite annoying but here we were. It was August of 2003 and my big move back to the Ottawa area was quite literally darkened by the great power outage of eastern Canada and the US.

That I was coming back was a bit of a marvel in itself. I had relocated to Mississauga in 1988 and 15 years later it seemed to me that coming home would be a bit of an impossibility. When I moved there it was after the discovery of my boyfriend being transferred to Toronto in six weeks who promptly proposed. Then it was a very quick wedding, a house hunting trip I didn’t go on, a pack and move of 2 apartments and 2 cats, a honeymoon in Montreal with its own power outage that lasted nearly a day and a bad case of the flu for the both of us.

This time it was two children, one ex and a new common-law spouse later. I was living in a townhouse in a co-operative that had the world’s best babysitter-slash-surrogate grandma on one side. On the other, a strange woman with 2 children who didn’t speak to me but took a shine to my fellow and had him building furniture and mowing the lawn for her. She wasn’t too fond of me though. That she would shovel one half of the single sidewalk paver width entryway and took offense if anybody stepped a toe on her lawn didn’t help me warm to her either.

It had been a long 15 years for me. My dreams of leaving my hometown and the civil service to go to university in Toronto didn’t quite pan out. We discovered a couple of days after arriving exactly how expensive this area was; looking at our combined single person credit debt foolishness we realized that even though this new job brought a better salary, his wouldn’t be enough. Full-time university got put on the shelf for me for what seemed like – and so far is – forever.

I swore I wouldn’t go back to work for the government again, that is until my dad told his boss I’d moved to Mississauga. They knew me from my previous job so no sooner had he mentioned that I was there, she said, “We need someone who knows how to run a warehouse! What’s her number?”

Well, there were thousands of hours spent staring at taillights on the 401 in the end. But I knew six months in that this wouldn’t be my forever place. Thirty-one years and two cities later I have come to ask myself: will I ever find a spot that truly feels like home, someplace I never want to leave? Something tells me such a place just doesn’t exist and that’s fine with me. I was born with wandering feet, though my feet are slower than some peoples’ are.

At this time and place though, it was a case of me saying I wanted to go back to Ottawa, and Ottawa needing my skills perhaps more than where I was. This was confirmed by means of a phone call while my partner and I were enjoying a bite at a restaurant. I hung up and I’m told all the blood had drained from my face. “We’re moving to Ottawa,” I announced. My dream had come true.

Be careful what you wish for, they say. In the end it was the right thing to do but my complicated life became considerably more so in the coming days. I had to tell people. That was one thing, but when you have children there’s the added element of schools and babysitters and friends. One of those children was on the verge of becoming a teen, the other still small and needing of a babysitter with patience for my little spitfire.

With the childrens’ father remaining in Mississauga there was the daunting thought that oh no, what about the weekends? Just the idea of driving that distance two ways twice a month freaked me out but it was something that was going to need to be done. One thing that would be helpful was that the kids spent their summers in the Maritimes so much of this would happen while they were away. That was a bonus.

It took what felt like forever to get the go ahead which meant a whirlwind house hunting trip and then an equally frantic packing and cleaning session. Before that I had to let my current employers know that not only was I serious that I wanted to go home but now I was actually doing it. That also meant a great deal of clearing up work things and explaining everything I knew about my field to someone quickly chosen to fill in and hand off things left in midstream.

Days before I was set to leave I get a phone call from the City of Toronto. Somebody had given them my name and they said, hey, would you like to try for a job? It was in my field and paid $30,000 more. I sighed and explained I was moving in two weeks and asked: where were you three months ago?

House hunting was fun; I fell in love with a place half an hour out of town that sadly turned out to require a complete electrical upgrade from spool and wire; another was very much like walking into a museum. The voices we heard talking in an empty upstairs room were a little disconcerting. One townhouse was close to my family but had no backyard, was expensive with condo fees; then lastly on the final hour of an open house we walked into a cottage style 80 year old house in Arnprior.

It felt like home, had a big back yard and a two-story garage – we were hooked. That it had character and was detached with more than a Brazilian landing strip of grass sold me. No more neighbours calling the police for young child temper tantrums at midnight for us!

The quiet lifestyle and relaxing fields of cows on the way into town were added bonuses. Not minding the dire warnings from my family of having to drive forever each way, I signed on the dotted line. Thing is, until you’ve been eight months pregnant in summer in a car with no air conditioning on the 401 after a truck has rolled over trapping you there for three hours until you reach your off-ramp you can’t understand how 45 minutes of cows with 15 of those being city highway traffic seems easy. It’s not for nothing that people in Toronto drive with empty bottles under their seats just in case.

Anyway I soon discovered that my delightful co-op gleefully rubbed their hands at my relocation. This would mean an inspection and that townhouse better be spic and span with not a hint of dirt or damage or there’d be hell to pay. Or maybe just the first and last month rent deposit.

I painted, I cleaned, I shampooed the carpets. They did an inspection the day before the move that had me painting the hallway again. The inspection days after I moved was the hell that cost me the deposit in order to replace a damaged carpet that I found out later was never removed.

My last day of work was both touching and silly with the gift a gigantic bouquet of flowers which, had I not been moving 500 km away would have made me so happy. At this point all I could think of was how the heck am I going to bring this with me? My two vehicles were already packed to the brim but after 15 years working there those flowers were coming with me. I put them in the back, hoping my allergy medicine would hold out for the whole trip.

Moving day came with movers who needed to put stuff on the lawn while loading the truck. Lady next door comes flying out complaining. Something was on her grass! This went on several times until late afternoon when a bicycle and a few choice words were tossed and she marched off to the manager’s office. One of the last things left in the house was the phone which I promptly unplugged when it started ringing a few minutes after she left. With hugs and a few tears we said goodbye to our special friends on the other side and we were off!

One quick night in a hotel and the next morning we headed out. Nothing could stop us now! Except for the rain that is. I got a little worried when it got hard to see, partner following behind me got worried when I’d slowed down enough that I should have had my blinkers on, and on top of it all my phone kept ringing.

Just outside of Kingston I answered what turned out to be my doctor’s office. The results of my mammogram meant I needed to have an ultrasound in a week. Damn. Now add me shaking from that on top of the shaking I was already doing from the heavy downpour. Nevertheless we made it in time to check into the hotel mid-afternoon.

Our birds were settled on the dresser beside my bouquet of flowers in this animal-friendly room. We ate, had a nap and were watching t.v. when … nothing. The power was out. Our battery radio told us that the hydro was down all over the east.

The next morning we knew two things: that we couldn’t close on the house, and that the only place we could find to eat that cooked with gas was a pizza place downtown. So pizza followed by a bicycle ice-cream vendor cone was our treat for that day.

We were able to close the day after the power came on but not before the movers had had to put the trailerful of stuff into storage until they could retrieve it. By this time a visiting baseball team at the hotel had complained about us. It seems our chirping was more disturbing than their yelling up and down the hallways and the birds were asked to leave. Fortunately we weren’t asked to leave with them so they graced the kitchen in the new house while we got rid of all of that pink paint which is not one of my favorite colours from the living room walls.

As the sun started to set on our moving truck a few days later we hopped into the van and back we went, me worried about getting to the appointment on time. That we couldn’t get the doctor’s note when we got there because the office was closed was nicely solved by my near tears and shakingly told tale of the move.

In the end I was fine. I’d escaped the family cancer scourge this time thankfully and headed back to continue our latest adventure.

Home again. For now.

Catherine M. Harris
2019

Memorial for Mom

Freda B. Harris 13-May-1919 to 5-Apr-2019. Mom.

Mom, what a long and wonderful life she lived.  99 years, nearly 100.  Can you imagine?  She was a fair bit older than her contemporaries when she got married and had children and while it was challenging she did the best she could and I am so grateful for that.  We were unconventional but I wouldn’t trade that for anything because what I learned from this was priceless.  I had the great good fortune to be raised with two very strong and accomplished women in my life:  my mother and my aunt Lorna.  Both of them challenged what society’s determination of what a woman should be and did so with grace. 

My mother was born in 1919, just after World War I ended and during the time of the Great Flu pandemic – she was one of the few people alive who probably had immunity to that.  She told me stories of the time when telephones were party lines, the milk came by horse wagon in glass bottles with cream on the top, of ice boxes cooled by blocks of ice cut from the Ottawa River, of the Great Depression and the weird symbols that vagrants carved on their fence posts letting others know they had a pot of soup on the stove to share.  Listening to her gave me a fondness of the past and of learning about genealogy I carry to this day.  Life was precarious growing up in the time before penicillin and vaccinations and she came of age sandwiched between two world wars.  To grow up in that time was an era of loss and life and death was much more a reality for them than it is today.  She remembered family members lying in state in the living room of their house. 

When WWII started my uncle went to war and my aunt joined the WRENS while my mom stayed home and worked for the Bank of Canada while getting her BA.  She later got a Master’s in Library Science from the University of Toronto. 

When the war ended this was my mom’s time to see the world so she joined External Affairs and was posted to Dublin.  One of mom’s memories was watching Queen Elizabeth’s coronation on t.v. which was one of the first big events that was televised.  She was posted to Rome where she met my dad. 

My mom was a career woman.  She was the main breadwinner and she had a solid career which was remarkable for that time – I honestly can say she must have faced huge hurdles – it’s still a difficult slog for a woman in the civil service and I can’t imagine how it would have been for her when discrimination was allowed to be blatant as it was in the 60s and 70s.  Add to that that most women weren’t career women with families and she had the challenge of child care in a much less friendly environment. 

When she was the Chief Librarian for the Department of the Solicitor General I would do my homework in the library; because she travelled a lot she would often take one of us with her.  She went to many conferences which is when we usually went but she also inspected libraries in the Federal Penitentiaries across Canada.  One of her favorite stories (and mine) was the time she got snowed in at Dorchester Penitentiary – a men’s maximum security prison. 

For me, growing up with these trips and with all my parents’ friends visiting who were still in External Affairs made me think for the longest time that what you did when you grew up was get a job where you travel and live in exotic places.  I haven’t had the pleasure of that but I am lucky enough to have had a couple of jobs where I got to see Canada.  I think this travel bug is genetic; my daughter so far is busy visiting amazing places with her husband, and who knows what my son decides to come up with.

So you see, my mom essentially packed two lives into one; a full career as a single woman then the married career mother.  She was inclusive and she would do things with my sister and I that suited each of us and for me that meant swimming and being in the choir which was the only way she could get me to go to church – we both loved music and singing so there we had it.

One of the reasons my mom was so determined to make us a part of what she did was because her own mother had died at age 60 and our other grandmother at age 50.  That she was 42 when she had me, she wasn’t sure that she would live to see us grow up.  This weighed on her mind.  Every day beyond that accomplishment was icing on the cake for her and she was thrilled to become a grandmother – not just once but 6 times and to live long enough to see them grow up. 

My mom was a sweet, kind, considerate and thoughtful person who loved people unconditionally and who always tried to see people in their best light.  On the surface she portrayed herself as a gentle soul but inside she did have a band of steel to be able to live her life according to her truth which in many senses was very contrary to the way of life in her time.  She didn’t kowtow to convention, she did what was right for her. She was understanding that people need to follow their own hearts even if it isn’t what is expected of them.  I really appreciated that consideration. 

When I moved out on my own we would visit each other; she loved going to lunch with me when were both working downtown; we would spend evenings chatting and later when I moved to Mississauga we would spend hours on the phone chatting, something that we continued to do right up until 4 years ago.  I loved our long conversations – it was our safe space to talk about life.  When I learned that I could no longer call her, to me that was the first of the long heartbreaking goodbye. 

I will never forget the relationship we had and I am very grateful that I had a mother I knew loved me whether or not she agreed with my decisions.  She was the truest example of unconditional love and I am a stronger person because of that.

I learned a lot from my parents.  They were both good at relating to people and not being overly judgmental.  My mom was a wonderful force with the most beautiful light and I am so blessed to be able to say I am her daughter.  I couldn’t have asked for a better mom.

Cathi.

My Life in Paintings

Here’s my 2018 CBC contest non-fiction entry – didn’t make the cut but here it is for you to read and decide for yourself whether it’s a worthy essay.  Enjoy 🙂

---

MY LIFE IN PAINTINGS

There’s a painting on an easel in my living room right now.  It’s half finished.  A little boy is splashing a skipping rope in puddles in our driveway and the splashes are flying up into the air.  I love the photo it comes from, and that young fellow is my son fifteen years ago.  I started the painting last fall for a contest then life got in the way.  It hurts to continue right now and that’s why the brush got put down.  My son is grown and living elsewhere.  I will finish it though, regardless of whether he’s around or not.  I am his mother after all, and nothing can diminish or erase the fact that I have a son I love beyond measure because I am his mother, no matter how old or distant he is.

 

I have a painting in my spare room that is leaning on the wall, sitting on a shelf.  It’s big – 18×24 – and it’s a portrait of my mother.  It’s pretty much finished but it hasn’t got a frame.  Someday soon I plan to put a frame on it; it’s expensive so that purchase has fallen to the bottom of the list for years.  This painting I made for my mom at her request – she liked a photo that was taken of her while she was visiting a cousin in B.C.

 

 

 

 

 

My mom loves to travel.  I was going to say loved but I won’t because she’s still with us.  She’s almost 99 and is in a nursing home, a small shadow of herself brightened by occasional glimmers of memory.  This painting though, she liked it except for one thing:  her chin is too long.  So here it is in my house, many years after she asked and long since forgotten.  She was right. Her chin is a little too long so I will fix that and frame it and put it on my wall.  It kind of makes me sad to work on it at the moment so I haven’t yet.  But I will.  I promise.  It’s also the last portrait I completed, mainly because I haven’t been asked again but also because I discovered it’s hard to make a portrait perfect enough to suit other people.

 

 

 

 

I say this because when I was single I used to visit my young nephews (I had two then) fairly frequently and I took a lot of pictures at that time.  One photo I really liked was my sister in a chair with the baby in her arms and the oldest at her feet reaching up.  Kind of Madonna and Child if you will.  So I did an acrylic painting of that photo.  It took me a few months and then I had it framed in glass and wood.  At the time I thought I’d done a good job and gave it to her for Christmas.  She didn’t like how I made her legs look so that was that.  I have no idea what happened to it.  The thing is that’s probably the best portrait I’ve done and you know, it was a sweet moment in time.  I hope someday she comes across it and realizes that – if she still has it after several moves and all this time.

In my basement I have a painting that I call 26.  It is the only self-portrait I’ve done and I was newly married when I did that.  It’s me in a summer dress with a pattern I loved, sitting in a hanging swing in the gazebo of my ex-husband’s mother’s cottage in New Brunswick.  What’s not in the picture is the guitar on the floor – I had gone there for a bit of space and to play my guitar which I did a lot in those days.  I used to write songs and work out the chords for favourite tunes then I’d record them and give copies to people who wanted one which at the time was pretty much only my dad.

I appreciated the colour of the trees and the wood and my dress so for fun I put my 35mm camera on a beam and took a few timed exposures.  One photo stood out so I painted it.  This one I put on show in Mississauga once.  The only comment I got was “Why is this called 26?”

It lives in my basement because it’s big and it’s me and maybe if I had a larger house I’d find a wall to put it on but for right now it feels a little self-aggrandizing to hang it somewhere prominent.  Regardless, I like it.  I think I looked my best around that age.  It’s a nice reminder.

I had one painting come back to me.  This one doesn’t have people in it but it does have trees.  It’s quite large and it is of an entrance way to Apfeldoorn Het Loo castle at the end of a long archway of trees – the play of shadow and light and the arching branches were striking, and this is one photo I have from the time when my aunt took me on a National Art Centre trip to Holland and Belgium.  Auntie traveled often and this was the only time she took me on one of her trips.  She usually took my mother but for this one she knew I’d appreciate the outstanding artwork in the Netherlands. Van Gogh is one of my favorite artists. I was in my early 20’s and I had had a horrible year.

A dear friend died suddenly and a few months later I came down with walking pneumonia so between the two I was emotionally and physically knocked flat.  Auntie thought this would make me happy and she was also pleased that I was old enough to travel with her.  I gladly went and the trip was just what I needed; it was wonderful to spend all this time with her getting to know her in an environment experiencing something we both had in common:  a love of art.

When we came home I made her a photo album of our trip and for Christmas I gave her the framed painting of Apfeldoorn.  She proudly hung it over her bed – she collected original artwork and displayed it all over her apartment so for me that meant a lot that she liked it that much.  That painting stayed there for a few years but it was also at this time her health started declining and she only went on a few trips after the one with me.

She died in 2000, and sometime after that I was given back the photo album and the painting with the mat still there but oddly, the outer frame is missing.  That’s okay, it still looks good.  It spent 10 years over the top of a stairway in my house in Arnprior, and now faces a door in my little bungalow in Fredericton.  It reminds me of a person who was important to me, and of a time of my life just before I got married.

Just as important though are the sketches of paintings not yet done.  One is a sketch I did of my daughter as a baby and I have to laugh because its very existence is much like an essay I started writing back then about life as a new mother: it ends mid-sentence after about three paragraphs.  I haven’t tried to finish it because you know what?  That’s what being a new mother is all about, this not enough time to do anything.

I also have a sketch of Grammie-great.  I promised to paint it for my daughter someday because Grammie-great (her great-grandmother on her father’s side) simply adored her.   She died when my daughter was four and I think she’s her guardian angel. I will do this one soon, now that she is grown.

I’ve fallen behind in my paintings of people: my dad, my daughter, my spouse.  I’m just looking for the right moment in time and the right inspiration to come.  I may be old and white-haired by that time but hey, that’s what retirement is for isn’t it?  I think George Bush Senior would agree.

My latest printed photo album ends in 2004.  With the advent of digital cameras I now literally have nearly a decade and a half of thousands of images that if I don’t print them or something they will be lost in time.  I’m not alone in this certainly.  A painting can last forever though.  Why not put the really special moments on canvas in a way that maybe will long outlast me?  They might wind up in a dump somewhere, sure, but I hope when the day comes and I’m not here, that for at least one or two somebody will say: “Hey, I like this.  Let’s put it up on the wall.  Who did it?”

“Oh, it was Great-great-grandma.  Cool, eh?”

(c) Catherine M. Harris, 2018.  All rights reserved.

1967

Well, I didn’t make the long list again for the CBC Creative Non-Fiction contest, but that’s okay, that means you get to read this now.  Here’s my essay on some of my memories of 1967.  It was an incredible time to be 5 in the capital of Canada.

---

1967

My dreams twirled in front of me dancing like the minnows I caught on the end of my fishing line the year I was five.  I’d spend my days in tomboy glory, my little blonde beagle Cookie that my dad bought me running by my side.  My bicycle was my trusty steed riding me to adventures unknown, or maybe to freezies at the corner store.  I was a bit of a free-range child I will admit.  We lived in a two bedroom apartment on the ground floor of a building very close to the shores of the Rideau River on what is now called old Ottawa South.

In the morning after breakfast of the typical 1960s sugary cereal the dog and I would climb out the window and meet up with our friends in the grounds at the back.  My friends were mostly boys because boys did fun things like fishing and climbing trees.  If a stranger asked me if I was a boy or a girl, I’d say boy.  My long hair had been cut short by this time and I did look like one.  It was a fun change from the frilly dress gloved and hatted girl I would be on Sunday when attending church with my family.  Tea parties weren’t for me; I melted my Barbies on the radiator just to see what would happen and while my dad insisted I wear the pretty dresses he bought for me when he visited, my mom let me be who I wanted to be, which in that year was Stefan.  We lived just us three, my mother, sister and I in the apartment.  My dad lived in an apartment near Rideau Street.  Cookie was a birthday present from him.

On the weekend when he would take my sister and me out we often wound up at the Mayflower Restaurant on Elgin; it had undergone a renovation and I remember it had a colourful maple leaf in tile on the front of the counter where there were stools.  It was put there in honour of the 1967 centennial in Ottawa.

The centennial was a really big deal for Canada, and certainly for Ottawa.  It was an exciting time to be a child, there were numerous parties and celebrations and in addition to that, there was Expo 67.  So many things happened that year for me that I can truly say that this was the first mostly full year I can remember.  A lot of it is in glimpses:  playing on my aunt’s piano in her living room in her apartment upstairs in the same building we lived in.  Standing in line at Dairy Queen on Bank Street near the Mayfair theatre.  Being lectured by a policeman after my friends and me, playing with a Coke bottle accidently threw it through a store window.  Oops.

Some of these are funny:  there was a grassy area on Elgin Street close to where the National Arts Centre was being built.  Ottawa, tourist mecca that it is, was teeming and I was totally enthralled with the colorful fun clothing people wore at that time.  Walking past there one sunny summer day, I saw a guy dozing on the lawn, his curly long red hair flowing behind him.

When I think back I remember a lot of music. I was frequently at my aunt’s where she played the piano often and very well; she had been a concert pianist and played for the precursor of CBC radio during a mine disaster up in Northern Ontario all night one time I was told.  I loved it when she played her version of Onward Christian Soldiers, full of fierce chords and trills, it always made me laugh.  The Beatles were huge at that time and I remember sitting with a baby sitter in a cafeteria somewhere – they had the radio playing the Beatles and they were excitedly talking; one weird thought I had was seeing one of the girls’ hair – it was blonde at the bottom with a couple of inches of dark at the roots and I wondered if that’s what my mom meant when she said blonde hair goes dark over time.  I was a strange child.

My mom had friends who lived in Montreal and had a cottage in the Laurentians.  I remember her excitement at us being invited to their place for a week or two so that we could go to Expo 67 and then to the cottage.  I loved riding the train so not knowing what an Expo was I still loved the idea of travelling by train to Montreal and being able to swim in a lake maybe, now that I could swim.

Being able to swim was actually a fairly recent development for me at the time; my mother loved to swim and grew up spending summers on the Rideau River at the cottage her father owned.  In memory of his youth in PEI he hand built a lighthouse for the kids to play in and change their clothes.  So when we moved to the apartment building we spent many an hour at the indoor pool my sister and me splashing around, my mom doing the breast stroke and encouraging us.  My sister tended to be a bit of a bully sometimes like older siblings can be; one day while swimming she pushed me under and held me there.  I fought and managed to kick myself away from her grasp; then I realized: hey, I’m swimming!  I was underwater and knew just what to do.  Mean as it was, that action was just what a four year old me needed for it all to click.  To this day I love swimming underwater; I even dream of it.  It’s so peaceful there.

Expo 67 wasn’t my strongest impression of that trip to Montreal.  Oh I do remember it; the Habitat Pavilion intrigued me and I was totally amazed by just how many people were there.  I hadn’t been anywhere with that many people before.  There was an electric sense of something incredible, something important going on.  There was music, lots of music, and food of all kinds to try.  It was fun.

What I remember most of that vacation was the cottage in the Laurentians.  I wish I could remember the name of that man and his wife, they were very kind and the man walked around the grounds with me talking and showing me stuff.  We had this conversation about his toenail and how they froze it and pulled it out.  I was fascinated.  I thought he meant they held ice cubes on his toe and I didn’t have the nerve to ask him why.  I just was intrigued by the fact that nails could come off.  One thing that really stood out for me was their old hand crank party line telephone.  It was the real thing – you held the ear trumpet in one hand and spoke into the mouth piece on the phone body, and you cranked a handle to get the operator.  You knew who the call was for by the number of rings.  Ring ring pause ring ring – well, that was two rings and it wasn’t theirs so you didn’t answer it.  Except, with a sly smile, our host showed me that if you quietly took the ear piece off the hook and held your hand over the mouth piece, you could listen in on somebody else’s conversation!  It was our little secret, this conspiratorial thing between us because we knew if anyone else had caught us listening in we’d be in trouble.  It saddens me to think that if he’s still alive, he’d be well into his 90s.

I could ask my mother, she is still with us.  However going on 98 her mind is lost in a world of its own; she spends her days in bed mostly, sometimes lucid more often not.  Now is not the time for questions.  Perhaps I don’t want to know the answer anyway.

As we settle into the year that Canada celebrates its 150th anniversary I won’t be at Parliament Hill on July 1^st.  I’m not in Ottawa anymore. For 1967 I was in that crowd on that hot summer day. It was my dad’s 36^th birthday and I sat on his shoulders as we listened to the Queen and later watched fireworks.  My mom and sister were there too of course.

My dad and my mom did get back together shortly after the apartment got flooded and after I lost my fishing pole forever as punishment for biking downtown by myself.  But like many families, in the 1970s ours didn’t last and that was the right thing to do for us.

My dad, like so many in my half century on Earth is no longer here.  So for now I think I’ll be that small girl on his shoulders on a historical day in a wonderful place for just few minutes more in my mind.

Happy sesquicentennial, Canada.