It is now finally summer. At least, the calendar tells us so. The weather this spring has been frightful—cold and dull and stingy of heat. But now that the sun has decided to shine, my thoughts turn to camping—that great summer pastime we indulged in with our friends and our kids.
When you have four kids, camping is pretty much the only family holiday you can afford. That was certainly the case for us, and for most of our friends in Herbert. We were all young parents with small children. No one had disposable funds. For most of us, there were more days at the end of the month than money. Fortunately, Jack and I had a supportive bank manager and a line of credit. We got by.
But when summer would finally show up in Saskatchewan, thoughts turned to “the lake”. In Saskatchewan, holidays were taken at “the lake”. There are thousands and thousands of them in Saskatchewan, but they are known collectively as “the lake”. Sometimes, if you were flush, it was “the cabin at the lake”. For the rest of us, it was simply “the lake” and we would camp.
Our first tent was a smelly old canvas job Jack’s parents gave us. One season of its musty walls and space-intruding centre pole convinced us that we needed to get a better tent. And so, we invested in a gigantic dome tent that you could easily park a Hummer in (although I don’t know why you’d want to—Hummers pretty much defeat the purpose of tents).
We loved that tent—it was a bugger to put up but you could stand in it to get dressed. For those who’ve struggled to zip up jeans while kneeling with heads brushing a tent roof, you will know what a luxury this was. It comfortably housed the six of us—but when four of the persons are under four feet high, there is space left over for essentials such as books, board games, pillows, the dog, etc.
We often went camping with Dee and Rollie and their kids. Sometimes Duane and Natalie and their gang would come as well. On one memorable weekend, Herbertians pretty much took over the campground at Anglin Lake. The Little Moron Club terrorized the campsites, the adults sat in front of fires and drank coffee. I recall Claire’s husband Hank consulting his bug book so he could tell us what kind of critter was biting, stinging or crawling on us at any particular time.
We would take the kids to the beach—a miniscule sandy cut in a grassy bank—where they would splash like maniacs and try to drown one another. We’d sit in the sun (no worries about skin cancer then—we were working on our tans), peer over sunglasses from time to time to yell at some over-rambunctious kid, and wade in when we got too hot. Whenever one of us would lumber into the water, the kids would shriek with delight. They would leap like porpoises, sending silver arcs of water at whatever hapless adult whale was wallowing in the shallows. Then one of the kids would invariably step on a sharp rock, or get an elbow in the eye, and crying would ensue. Things would calm down for a few moments and then ramp up again. It was fun times.
One year Jack bought a canoe. It was a beautiful old Chestnut Prospector canvas-and-cedar job. We have it yet—it sits perched high in the eaves of our woodshed, missing its canvas and gunwales, waiting for a chance to hit the water again. For us, camping was never the same. The canoe meant we could skim out over the water. We could go fishing. We could explore little bays and streams and channels. The lake was ours.
It also functioned quite well as a car-top carrier. It held an amazing amount of stuffables—sleeping bags, packs, life-jackets—anything that could be jammed, squeezed, wedged or wadded was bungeed securely in the upside-down canoe. That left more room for the boys to fight over on the trip up.
Sometimes Jack and I would wake up before the kids. We’d dress in silence and steal away for an early morning paddle, pinning a note to the tent door for whatever other adults were camping nearby. We’d sneak down to water, where the upturned canoe was waiting.
Those early morning paddles, sans kids, were bliss. The lake was usually like glass—the wind would come up later in the day, but early mornings were invariably calm. The sun would already be high in the sky—summer days on the northern parkland are long. We would watch the pelicans take off—like leftover pterodactyls, they would bounce on big feet before taking flight, their impossibly long wings whooshing the air above our heads. Nearby loons dove for fish, coming up far away from where they’d slipping under the pewter-coloured water. Sometimes a bear would lumber down to the water from the surrounding bush. In a silent canoe, you are one with the lake and all the creatures who call it home.
One morning, as we were heading back from a paddle, we noticed a motorboat (the bane of our canoeing existence) circling something in the water. The boat’s motor roared as it leaned into its own wake, chopping the water into spume and wave.
Jack, impatient with motorboaters at the best of times, uttered some words that I won’t repeat here. “Let’s go see what they’re doing,” he said. “Okay!” I said, following orders. As we paddled their way, we could see a small black head in the middle of the boat’s wave-wake. “Those bastards!” said Jack. “They’ve got a loon.”
For some reason, when some people get out into nature with an internal combustion engine at their disposal, they like to run over animals. Cars, trucks, ATV’s, snowmobiles, boats—it doesn’t matter. Any motorized chassis will do the job, as will any critter unfortunate enough to be in the way. These morons were running down a loon. The bird, frantic to fly away, couldn’t get off the water. So it had to keep diving for cover. And wherever it came up, the boat was waiting for it.
“Paddle harder!” Jack hollered. Usually I would bristle at such bluster, but this time I just dug in and pulled. We made that canoe hum over the water. The boat’s driver saw us coming and hit the throttle, pulling out of the choppy trough he’d been ploughing up in his efforts to run down the loon.
“They’re making a run for it,” shouted Jack, paddling like a madman. “Head them off!”
“What?” I said, turning to look at him. “Are you nuts? He’s got a big motor! We’re in a canoe, in case you haven’t noticed. We’re supposed to outrun a motorboat?”
“PADDLE!” Jack hollered again. “If you’d just shut up and paddle, we can catch them.”
Now I was miffed—an early morning paddle had resulted in me being hollered at, something I didn’t appreciate. However, I decided to take the moral high road, so I paddled. If Jack was bonkers enough to think we could outrun a motorboat, I wasn’t going to be the one to screw it up.
But Jack’s blood was up—he was a paddling machine. “Harder!” he kept yelling. “Harder! Paddle harder!”
I thought about shrieking that I was paddling as hard as I could and he could shove it if that wasn’t good enough, but thought I’d save my breath. So I paddled. And darned if we didn’t get to the dock at the same time the motorboat did.
As I grabbed the rubber fender and halted what was a pretty fast landing after all that paddling, Jack leaped out of the canoe and stood on the dock, brandishing his paddle, and dressing down the boat crew of four guys old enough to know better. They replied with some rude words of their own, but you could tell their hearts weren’t in it. Obviously they were ashamed and embarrassed to be caught in such an act, AND outrun by a canoe.
After a few more salty exchanges, Jack shook his head in disgust. By this time, I’d crawled out of the canoe. My arms were like lead. Jack threw the paddles and extra life-jacket onto the dock and heaved the canoe out of the water onto his shoulders. He marched the canoe all the way to the campsite, where the boys were just waking up and Rollie and Dee were pouring coffee. Rollie went with Jack to the general store to report the boaters. I had to hold my coffee cup with both hands, so tired were my arms.
The rest of the day wasn’t nearly as eventful.
Fishing was another activity we enjoyed while camping. The boys insisted on giving the fish we caught names (the name Frank was always awarded to the first fish caught). But that didn't stop them from crowding around Jack as he cleaned them, fighting over who got the heads, upon which they would enact all kinds of unspeakable things.
Cooking with fire was also fun. Even though we had Jack’s parents’ ancient Coleman camp-stove (still functioning, by the way), we preferred to fry bacon and eggs, boil coffee, and sear wieners over open flames. The soot and black bits added to the flavour. And we could sit around the flames as darkness fell, poking them to see sparks rise in the night air. Marshmallows were torched. The hard black crust would be allowed to cool. Then you’d slip it off, revealing the sweet goo beneath, which would be thrust in the flames again to repeat the process. A good roaster could get three or four searings out of a single marshmallow. However, after an unfortunate incident involving a burning marshmallow and human hair (I won't say whose), no one was allowed to cool the little fireballs off by waving sticks in the air any more.
What I remember about camping are the smells. Wood-smoke, pine resin, that lakey-water smell, spicy poplars, wet dogs, coffee boiling on the fire—these are the Proustian aroma-memories of summer at the lake. To this day, a whiff of poplar will blast me back to “the lake”—the summer lake of memory—long days, sun, water, forest, earth, sky.
Interestingly enough, there is a growing body of evidence that shows how “forest therapy” helps calm us down, improve our concentration, and generally tune us up. A couple of websites you might be interested in: http://www.sunchlorella.com/whats-new/health-news/237.html and http://adifferentkindofdoctor.blogspot.com/2010/10/forest-therapy.html
For me, the smells, sounds and colours of the lake and its forest have always done their magic. Our boys tell us that they cherish the memories of family camping in all its various guises (car-camping and later, when they got older, wilderness canoe camping). They learned about nature, but more importantly, they learned about themselves, and developed some invaluable skills in the process. To this day, Primero can start a fire in a hurricane. Segundo’s surgeon skills were honed at an early age on de-boning jackfish. Tercero can whittle anything out of wood with a Swiss Army Knife—need a small nuclear reactor? No problem. Cuarto can climb any vertical surface—tree, cliff, wall, apartment building—you name it, he will climb it.
I know I’ve said it before, but it bears repeating. And given what they are discovering about the necessity of our urban brains to commune with nature for periodic refreshers, the message takes on importance and urgency. Parents—take your kids camping. Let them see trees and water and creatures. Let them poke sticks in fires and cook things over flames. Let them climb trees and hills and get wet in non-chlorinated water. Let them get dirty and sandy and smeared with pine-sap. Let them experience true dark, actual silence, sunrise and sunset on a natural horizon.
For too many of us now, we do not go into nature and live with it for any length of time. Electronics have become our primary relationships—we experience the world screened by gorilla glass. Everything is virtual. We do not feel, taste, smell, touch, hear the real thing anymore.
Last week Jack and I went camping. Since moving to Vancouver Island, we’ve hardly accessed its wild places at all. Living in the midst of such extravagant beauty has made us complaisant, I guess. Back in Saskatchewan, we had to drive three hours through miles of cultivated and empty fields to get to trees and water. But here, trees and water are everywhere, and we’ve been taking them for granted.
We went to Pacific Rim National Park with Jack’s sister Chloe and her husband Duncan. Jack and Duncan finally got themselves motorcycles a couple of years ago. After decades of Jack mooning after his youthful riding days, I finally gave in and told him to just do it and shut up. After all, the kids are grown up and on their own—those responsibilities are over. Jack also took great pains to research and show me that most motorcycle accidents involve young guys hotdogging it. When I asked him about older guys hotdogging it, he primly replied, “We older guys don't hotdog.” We shall see--for sure, one older guys will not be hotdogging it with me on the back (the bitch seat, as Cuarto's wife Annie calls it--I don't mind--it's not like I've never embodied the behavior at times). And, as Duncan has repeatedly pointed out, “If I go, I’d rather go having fun on a motorcycle.”
So our first real camping trip in years was not in a car, or a VW Westfalia, or with canoes, or kayaks. Or with kids, for that matter. We packed stove, food, tents, sleeping bags, clothes and other sundries for four people on two motorcycles and headed across the Island to the west coast.
It seemed strange, at first, to not have kids in the campsite. It was so quiet. (I think of all those old westerns where the cavalry officer, leading his troop into Indian Country, says “Mighty quiet out there…”, to which some horse-soldier would invariably reply, after squinting and spitting into the mesquite, “Too quiet.”) But there were families with small children in the campground, so we enjoyed shrieks and chattering second hand.
But the smells were there—woodsmoke, pine-sap, poplar spice. And instead of that lakey-water smell, we had the ocean’s underlying tang. And at night, the boom of the waves rumbled beneath the darkness and our dreams. In the morning, we scrambled down the steps to the beach—rolling breakers as far as the eye could see—coming in all the way from Japan, hurling themselves to spume and foam on the buff-coloured sand.
We’ve decided to embrace the adventure of motorcycle travel—it combines camping with road trips—I have always loved road trips, even as a young child. What I like about it is that we’ve never done it before. It is new, and therefore, it is future-oriented. For while writing this blog, and remembering the stories about herding boys through childhood has been a delight for me, sometimes the weight of the past becomes heavy. For those of us firmly in the latter part of our lives, the past is like the submerged part of the ice-berg—bigger than what pokes up over the surface of things. And that weight can, sometimes, immobilize us, or at least restrict our movements.
So, while I plan to continue the “Herding Boys” blog (more stories to share—and each Thanksgiving dinner reveals even more--the familial statute of limitations always relases a few choice ones each year), I am also thinking of starting a new blog for new adventures.
As the four of us sat around the campfire last week, we joked about our geriatric little motorcycle gang—we are greyer, older, less limber, not as fit as we once were. But the spirit is still there. We were willing to sleep on the ground, cook on a stove the size of a tea-cup, walk for hours on sand, sit on stumps, crouch over fires, and forgo showers for a couple of days. We were on a mission to combine something old with something new—communing with nature from the back of motorcycles.
What we realized we’d been missing in our late-middle-aged lives was adventure, the sense of possibility, and future-time. So we are setting out on adventures. Our steeds are bikes. Plus, motorcycle gear is cool.
Stay tuned.
Saturday, July 2, 2011
Thursday, June 9, 2011
All Creatures Dead and Small
Last week I went on a pilgrimage to Herbert—I hadn’t been back for some years. I phoned Allie, who is still in Herbert (as is Joe) and went for a visit. We picked up our conversation as if we’d seen each other the week before. We also went for a walk around the not-so-mean streets of Herbert that figure so largely in my memories.
The day was sunny but windy—welcome to Saskatchewan, I thought. Most days are windy—the air assumes real velocity when there is nothing to impede it for a thousand kilometers. As the clouds piled up on the horizon (always visible, no matter where you are in Herbert, or Saskatchewan for that matter), we wandered past houses I remember so well and in which I spent so much time.
Our old backyard is transformed—the garden vegetable beds are no more, nor is the little greenhouse where we babied tender plants. The apple trees we planted are also gone, although the firs and the birches are huge. I am gobsmacked by their size until I realize it’s been almost thirty years since we planted them. Then I am gobsmacked by the fact that almost thirty years have gone by. Time’s passage is now too heavy for comfort.
I see the streets and the houses through a scrim of present superimposed on the past. Wallace Stegner, in his excellent memoir Wolf Willow, talks about returning to the town of East End, seeing his childhood places with adult eyes and the vertigo that this double-visioning produces. It’s not until he smells the evocative scent of wolf willow that his double-vision clears—the spicy aroma brings him singularity.
I have no such olfactory epiphany on the streets of Herbert. I just see everyone’s houses and register the changes—some good, some bad. The Legion Hut (the Herbert branch of the Canadian Legion was never rich enough for an actual hall—the best they could manage was a one-room hut with a kitchen of sorts stuck on the back) is now a private residence). For the life of me, I cannot imagine anyone wanting to take on the project of making the Hut livable. However, we had many events in the Hut—Kaiser tournaments, games nights, various parties. I remember one memorable Halloween party where Duane was a sartorially splendid fellow with little beeswax knobs stuck to his head for horns. He never alluded to the identity of his character, but would whistle The Stones’ “Sympathy for the Devil” when asked who the heck he was supposed to be. Rollie’s brother Steve sported a latex skull-cap with a strange occipital lump that made him look like a mutant nuclear holocaust survivor. Good times, as my boys would say.
As we returned to Allie and Joe’s place, we were greeted by their two dogs. One is new, but I remember Bell from previous visits. Bell, a male dashchund/terrier cross, is a fat little sausage of a dog—he is old now, and sports various fatty lumps on his body, although it’s difficult to tell which lumps are growths and which are just Bell. Allie told me they lost Smoky the cat the year before. I cannot believe that Smoky lasted as long as he did—I remember them getting Smoky from Ellen and Hal, who moved into Herbert with their two boys Darryl and Robert a few years after we arrived. Smoky, we figured, was brain-damaged at birth because Ellen’s chihuahua used to haul him around by the head. Smoky was prone to visions—he’d stare at a bare spot on the wall for hours and then attack it in a sudden frenzy. A steel grey feline juggernaut, he was constantly hurling himself at walls.
Which brings me to the subject at hand—pets. As I walked out on the streets of Laredo—I mean Herbert—that day, I couldn’t help but think of all the critters who used to live in the houses we frequented, and many of whom are buried in the backyards.
Before Smoky, Allie and Joe had a cat called Tiger. Tiger broke a leg and was treated at the University of Saskatchewan’s Veterinary College, where he became a bit of an experimental cause celebre. Tiger’s leg had more metal pins in it than Robocop, and the vet bill he piled up was almost as impressive as his bionic limb. Tiger also had strange habits (Allie and Joe attract eccentric cats). One was his propensity to crap on our roof. We lived in fear that he’d be hit by lightning and we’d have to haul his crisped and costly carcass across the street to Allie. He also liked to sleep behind our car’s rear wheel. Jack usually checked before leaving for work in the morning, but was worried he’d forget one day. Then we’d have to haul Tiger’s squashed carcass across the street.
Rollie and Dee also had a cat—Ernesto the Besto. Nesto was the laziest cat in the world. He would park himself on the fence and gaze up at whatever birds swayed on branches above. He’d wave his front paws halfheartedly in their general direction, likely hoping that one would fall. We’d watch his desultory hunting attempts from the kitchen window. Dee swore the birds were laughing at him.
We, too, had a cat—Gozer, named for the Gozer the Gozerian, the Destructor, and Lord of the Sebouillian from Ghostbusters. Gozer had a small frame and a fat body. She was almost completely spheroid, and rolled when she moved. She was terrified of magpies, who quickly picked up on this and would chase her down the street, hopping and cawing as she scrambled just barely ahead of them. They also took great delight in dive-bombing her as she cowered on our backyard picnic table, too fat to dive for cover.
Natalie inherited her granny’s dog Lucky. Lucky was elderly when they got him. He had snaggle teeth that gave him a ferocious grin—Joe was terrified of Lucky and refused to come into the yard unless someone was home to protect him. Lucky, however, was fairly harmless. He just looked frightening. He also had spectacularly bad breath—we used to kid that this was the scariest thing about him. Lucky spent most of his time in the backyard dog-house Duane built for him. When you would enter the yard, he’d come out, snorting and wiggling, baring fangs that went every which way. It was a bit disconcerting for anyone who didn’t know that Lucky was not dangerous, and for Joe, who didn’t believe it.
We ourselves went through a couple of dogs. If Joe and Allie attracted weird cats, we had bad luck with dogs. Our first attempt was an Airedale-Collie cross called Rufus. Rufus turned out to be the world’s dumbest dog. He refused to obey the simplest command. He also was addicted to garbage. Because Herbert had burning barrels, we would pile our bagged garbage in the back porch until burning day to keep the critters from getting into it. One day as we returned from the city, we opened the back door to a scene from some third-world urban dump. Rufus had eaten his way through a solid wood door to get at the garbage. After he ate the door and whatever garbage he didn’t strew around, he went to work on my leather shoes. He also used to cruise the town’s burning barrels for poopy pampers, which he’d bring home to munch on at his leisure. After one too many garbage episodes, we decided to give him away. We put an ad in the newspaper and a family responded, came out and fell in love with him—he was a nice-looking dog, and we didn’t want to prejudice any potential owners by divulging his unfortunate habits. They took him away with them, and Jack and I heaved a sigh of relief.
The next day, I got a phone call from the man who’d taken Rufus. It seems he’d run away the evening before, and they were concerned that he might head back to Herbert. After assuring the man that we’d watch for him, I hung up. Swell, I fumed, the stupidest dog in the world is now going to pull an Incredible Journey on us. Thankfully, the man phoned a few hours later—they’d found Rufous several streets away, playing in a park with a bunch of kids. We breathed again.
Our next dog was a Keeshond called Rocky. Rocky was very protective of the boys. In fact, he was a bit too protective and went after a neighbour kid one day. Trying to be good citizens, we felt that he would have to go back to the breeder. We found out later that the kid was a bully who picked on our boys and jabbed sticks at Rocky when he was tied up. On the day that Jack and Primero came back from returning Rocky, Gus the guinea pig died in his cage. Segundo solemnly announced to Primero that Gus was all stiff, and proceeded to poke him with a pencil. Primero, already emotionally raw at losing his dog, burst into tears and decked Segundo. After both boys recovered, they buried Gus in the back yard, under the lilac bush. For the next couple of days, Segundo would wonder about Gus’s physical state. Finally, on the third day, they dug him up. Disappointed that not much had changed, they reburied him. They would then scoop him up every few days to check on his rate of decay. Gus must’ve finally rotted to the desired consistency, because they eventually quit disinterring him.
Terry and Dave had a cockapoo called Buffy. Buffy was a gender-bender. She would hump your leg and lift her leg to pee. Other than that, she was fairly normal. Terry also had various cats and rabbits over the years. She adopted our angora rabbit Bugs, when it became apparent that Bugs and Gozer were never going to get along. Various members of The Little Moron Club got rich looking after Terry’s critters when she and Dave and the kids went on holidays.
Dee and Rollie had a Chow cross called Siku, who went with them when they moved to Fort McMurray, where their Italian neighbor fed leftover pasta to Siku, who ballooned to an enormous size. Rollie and Dee, mystified by the dog’s weight gain (they’d reduced her food, bought diet kibble, stepped up her walks—all to no avail) staked out the yard one evening and discovered the source of Siku’s clandestine carbo-loading. The neighbor, not realizing that pasta was bad for dogs, agreed to stop. However, Rollie suspected that every once in a while, she’d sneak some lasagna or rigatoni to Siku, who was known to vomit in front of guests—she’d zero in on the person least comfortable with dogs and hurl at their feet. Rollie blamed the pasta.
Then there were the numerous fish, birds, rodents and amphibians that lived fleetingly,were buried ceremoniously, mourned briefly, and quickly forgotten. Backyards were bone-yards. Cats, hamsters, goldfish (those that weren’t flushed), budgies, mice—all nourished backyard gardens and childhood curiosity about death.
And then there was the road-kill. In the summertime, the paved streets were perfect for preserving flattened frogs and toads who hadn’t made it across the road. The Little Moron Club was forever poking at these with sticks, flinging them at each other, trying to dismember them even further. It was a gigantic outdoor biology lab.
Boys have a fascination for dead things—large, small, in various states of decay (in fact, the gooshier the better)—it is all grist for their little morbid mills, so to speak. And who knows where such interest will lead? Segundo, for example, always wanted to dissect the fish we caught on camping trips. Jack would gut them and Segundo would check to see what their last meal was. He would then gouge out their eyes and examine the little round buttons of tissue. Segundo is now an ophthalmologist. Go figure.
Not having ever been a boy, I confess to some discomfort with the boys’ childhood absorption in critter death and decay. Since then, I have relaxed my view somewhat. After all, they weren’t offing living creatures. They cherished those—they looked after them, pet them, fed them, walked them, played with them. No, it was the dead critters that enthralled them. I tell myself that perhaps it was the great mystery of death, writ small. After all, the death of a hamster, while a tragedy, is not in the same league as a human death. And in the lives of fortunate families, the death of a pet will likely come before the death of a family member. With a pet, a child can get up close and personal with the enigma that is physical death. There is grief for the guinea pig, but there is also curiosity about how the body disappears into the earth.
Having experience with physical death clears a space for dealing with the big questions—the ones about where we go when we die. Do we get buried in the backyard with the budgies? Do dogs go to heaven? Will Bowser be there to greet us? Do cats have souls? Do we?
As humans, it appears we are hard-wired to believe in an afterlife. Traces of flower pollen and red ocher buried with ancient remains seem to point to this. We look up at the night sky and imagine that is where we go when we die. After all, there is a lot going on in up there--stars, planets, a moon that sometimes eclipses, northern lights....For the Inuit, the aurora borealis are the spirits of the ancestors dancing in the sky. To the Cree, they are the “Dance of the Spirits”. In the Middle Ages, Europeans thought they were a sign from God. These are all far more evocative than ionized nitrogen atoms excited by solar wind particles, and who is to say less true?
The great mystery is, of course, death. It has kept poets and playwrights and artists and thinkers and prophets busy for millennia. Hamlet’s soliloquy is a rap on death and what comes after (short version--no one knows!). We seem to instinctively sense that something is out there in the great beyond, something to do with the spirit, or the soul, or the incorporeal reality that makes us human. And pets do not seem to have this special something, no matter how beloved they were. Which is why boys dig up pets. They know this difference very early on.
The world’s religions all promise a life after death. The exact nature of this life is, to all intents and purposes, unknown. It seems to be connected to how we live our lives in this world. The artists of the Renaissance made great creations out of the places we go when we die, and scared the crap out of us at the same time.
And we've remained scared of death. We don't like to think about it or deal with it. Our technological society has managed to distance physical death—outsourced it, so to speak. Family members no longer prepare bodies for burial. They are handed over to professionals, and we simply show up at the event. We then go home and grieve. Maybe we've lost a connection by handing over our loved ones to strangers.
What has this to do with pets and Herbert, you ask? I think of all the pet semataries in the backyards, of all the creatures who were beloved by the various kids who lived in those yards, who buried their animals in the warm earth, cried, said their words, and went away, and sometimes were pulled back by curiosity about what changes in Fluffy the earth wrought. Being kids, operating for the most part under adult radar, they had no compunction about having a peek. And, with no adult around to freak out, they calmly went about examining the evidence.
We are told that pets are a good way to teach kids various things--compassion, empathy, responsibility, among other things. And because pets generally do not last long(unless you're a parrot or an elephant), they teach kids about death.
If death is a part of life, as the poets and prophets tell us, then perhaps childish attempts to explore pet death is a good thing. Maybe it's not morbid to dig up the family gerbil, but healthy (as long as they wash their hands before dinner, that is). So if your little boy wants to dig up the gerbil, or hamster, or Siamese fighting fish after a few days, don’t worry. He’s not an incipient serial killer. He’s learning about life. Or maybe he just likes gross stuff. In any case, make sure he re-buries Fluffy and washes his hands. Tell him to use soap this time.
The day was sunny but windy—welcome to Saskatchewan, I thought. Most days are windy—the air assumes real velocity when there is nothing to impede it for a thousand kilometers. As the clouds piled up on the horizon (always visible, no matter where you are in Herbert, or Saskatchewan for that matter), we wandered past houses I remember so well and in which I spent so much time.
Our old backyard is transformed—the garden vegetable beds are no more, nor is the little greenhouse where we babied tender plants. The apple trees we planted are also gone, although the firs and the birches are huge. I am gobsmacked by their size until I realize it’s been almost thirty years since we planted them. Then I am gobsmacked by the fact that almost thirty years have gone by. Time’s passage is now too heavy for comfort.
I see the streets and the houses through a scrim of present superimposed on the past. Wallace Stegner, in his excellent memoir Wolf Willow, talks about returning to the town of East End, seeing his childhood places with adult eyes and the vertigo that this double-visioning produces. It’s not until he smells the evocative scent of wolf willow that his double-vision clears—the spicy aroma brings him singularity.
I have no such olfactory epiphany on the streets of Herbert. I just see everyone’s houses and register the changes—some good, some bad. The Legion Hut (the Herbert branch of the Canadian Legion was never rich enough for an actual hall—the best they could manage was a one-room hut with a kitchen of sorts stuck on the back) is now a private residence). For the life of me, I cannot imagine anyone wanting to take on the project of making the Hut livable. However, we had many events in the Hut—Kaiser tournaments, games nights, various parties. I remember one memorable Halloween party where Duane was a sartorially splendid fellow with little beeswax knobs stuck to his head for horns. He never alluded to the identity of his character, but would whistle The Stones’ “Sympathy for the Devil” when asked who the heck he was supposed to be. Rollie’s brother Steve sported a latex skull-cap with a strange occipital lump that made him look like a mutant nuclear holocaust survivor. Good times, as my boys would say.
As we returned to Allie and Joe’s place, we were greeted by their two dogs. One is new, but I remember Bell from previous visits. Bell, a male dashchund/terrier cross, is a fat little sausage of a dog—he is old now, and sports various fatty lumps on his body, although it’s difficult to tell which lumps are growths and which are just Bell. Allie told me they lost Smoky the cat the year before. I cannot believe that Smoky lasted as long as he did—I remember them getting Smoky from Ellen and Hal, who moved into Herbert with their two boys Darryl and Robert a few years after we arrived. Smoky, we figured, was brain-damaged at birth because Ellen’s chihuahua used to haul him around by the head. Smoky was prone to visions—he’d stare at a bare spot on the wall for hours and then attack it in a sudden frenzy. A steel grey feline juggernaut, he was constantly hurling himself at walls.
Which brings me to the subject at hand—pets. As I walked out on the streets of Laredo—I mean Herbert—that day, I couldn’t help but think of all the critters who used to live in the houses we frequented, and many of whom are buried in the backyards.
Before Smoky, Allie and Joe had a cat called Tiger. Tiger broke a leg and was treated at the University of Saskatchewan’s Veterinary College, where he became a bit of an experimental cause celebre. Tiger’s leg had more metal pins in it than Robocop, and the vet bill he piled up was almost as impressive as his bionic limb. Tiger also had strange habits (Allie and Joe attract eccentric cats). One was his propensity to crap on our roof. We lived in fear that he’d be hit by lightning and we’d have to haul his crisped and costly carcass across the street to Allie. He also liked to sleep behind our car’s rear wheel. Jack usually checked before leaving for work in the morning, but was worried he’d forget one day. Then we’d have to haul Tiger’s squashed carcass across the street.
Rollie and Dee also had a cat—Ernesto the Besto. Nesto was the laziest cat in the world. He would park himself on the fence and gaze up at whatever birds swayed on branches above. He’d wave his front paws halfheartedly in their general direction, likely hoping that one would fall. We’d watch his desultory hunting attempts from the kitchen window. Dee swore the birds were laughing at him.
We, too, had a cat—Gozer, named for the Gozer the Gozerian, the Destructor, and Lord of the Sebouillian from Ghostbusters. Gozer had a small frame and a fat body. She was almost completely spheroid, and rolled when she moved. She was terrified of magpies, who quickly picked up on this and would chase her down the street, hopping and cawing as she scrambled just barely ahead of them. They also took great delight in dive-bombing her as she cowered on our backyard picnic table, too fat to dive for cover.
Natalie inherited her granny’s dog Lucky. Lucky was elderly when they got him. He had snaggle teeth that gave him a ferocious grin—Joe was terrified of Lucky and refused to come into the yard unless someone was home to protect him. Lucky, however, was fairly harmless. He just looked frightening. He also had spectacularly bad breath—we used to kid that this was the scariest thing about him. Lucky spent most of his time in the backyard dog-house Duane built for him. When you would enter the yard, he’d come out, snorting and wiggling, baring fangs that went every which way. It was a bit disconcerting for anyone who didn’t know that Lucky was not dangerous, and for Joe, who didn’t believe it.
We ourselves went through a couple of dogs. If Joe and Allie attracted weird cats, we had bad luck with dogs. Our first attempt was an Airedale-Collie cross called Rufus. Rufus turned out to be the world’s dumbest dog. He refused to obey the simplest command. He also was addicted to garbage. Because Herbert had burning barrels, we would pile our bagged garbage in the back porch until burning day to keep the critters from getting into it. One day as we returned from the city, we opened the back door to a scene from some third-world urban dump. Rufus had eaten his way through a solid wood door to get at the garbage. After he ate the door and whatever garbage he didn’t strew around, he went to work on my leather shoes. He also used to cruise the town’s burning barrels for poopy pampers, which he’d bring home to munch on at his leisure. After one too many garbage episodes, we decided to give him away. We put an ad in the newspaper and a family responded, came out and fell in love with him—he was a nice-looking dog, and we didn’t want to prejudice any potential owners by divulging his unfortunate habits. They took him away with them, and Jack and I heaved a sigh of relief.
The next day, I got a phone call from the man who’d taken Rufus. It seems he’d run away the evening before, and they were concerned that he might head back to Herbert. After assuring the man that we’d watch for him, I hung up. Swell, I fumed, the stupidest dog in the world is now going to pull an Incredible Journey on us. Thankfully, the man phoned a few hours later—they’d found Rufous several streets away, playing in a park with a bunch of kids. We breathed again.
Our next dog was a Keeshond called Rocky. Rocky was very protective of the boys. In fact, he was a bit too protective and went after a neighbour kid one day. Trying to be good citizens, we felt that he would have to go back to the breeder. We found out later that the kid was a bully who picked on our boys and jabbed sticks at Rocky when he was tied up. On the day that Jack and Primero came back from returning Rocky, Gus the guinea pig died in his cage. Segundo solemnly announced to Primero that Gus was all stiff, and proceeded to poke him with a pencil. Primero, already emotionally raw at losing his dog, burst into tears and decked Segundo. After both boys recovered, they buried Gus in the back yard, under the lilac bush. For the next couple of days, Segundo would wonder about Gus’s physical state. Finally, on the third day, they dug him up. Disappointed that not much had changed, they reburied him. They would then scoop him up every few days to check on his rate of decay. Gus must’ve finally rotted to the desired consistency, because they eventually quit disinterring him.
Terry and Dave had a cockapoo called Buffy. Buffy was a gender-bender. She would hump your leg and lift her leg to pee. Other than that, she was fairly normal. Terry also had various cats and rabbits over the years. She adopted our angora rabbit Bugs, when it became apparent that Bugs and Gozer were never going to get along. Various members of The Little Moron Club got rich looking after Terry’s critters when she and Dave and the kids went on holidays.
Dee and Rollie had a Chow cross called Siku, who went with them when they moved to Fort McMurray, where their Italian neighbor fed leftover pasta to Siku, who ballooned to an enormous size. Rollie and Dee, mystified by the dog’s weight gain (they’d reduced her food, bought diet kibble, stepped up her walks—all to no avail) staked out the yard one evening and discovered the source of Siku’s clandestine carbo-loading. The neighbor, not realizing that pasta was bad for dogs, agreed to stop. However, Rollie suspected that every once in a while, she’d sneak some lasagna or rigatoni to Siku, who was known to vomit in front of guests—she’d zero in on the person least comfortable with dogs and hurl at their feet. Rollie blamed the pasta.
Then there were the numerous fish, birds, rodents and amphibians that lived fleetingly,were buried ceremoniously, mourned briefly, and quickly forgotten. Backyards were bone-yards. Cats, hamsters, goldfish (those that weren’t flushed), budgies, mice—all nourished backyard gardens and childhood curiosity about death.
And then there was the road-kill. In the summertime, the paved streets were perfect for preserving flattened frogs and toads who hadn’t made it across the road. The Little Moron Club was forever poking at these with sticks, flinging them at each other, trying to dismember them even further. It was a gigantic outdoor biology lab.
Boys have a fascination for dead things—large, small, in various states of decay (in fact, the gooshier the better)—it is all grist for their little morbid mills, so to speak. And who knows where such interest will lead? Segundo, for example, always wanted to dissect the fish we caught on camping trips. Jack would gut them and Segundo would check to see what their last meal was. He would then gouge out their eyes and examine the little round buttons of tissue. Segundo is now an ophthalmologist. Go figure.
Not having ever been a boy, I confess to some discomfort with the boys’ childhood absorption in critter death and decay. Since then, I have relaxed my view somewhat. After all, they weren’t offing living creatures. They cherished those—they looked after them, pet them, fed them, walked them, played with them. No, it was the dead critters that enthralled them. I tell myself that perhaps it was the great mystery of death, writ small. After all, the death of a hamster, while a tragedy, is not in the same league as a human death. And in the lives of fortunate families, the death of a pet will likely come before the death of a family member. With a pet, a child can get up close and personal with the enigma that is physical death. There is grief for the guinea pig, but there is also curiosity about how the body disappears into the earth.
Having experience with physical death clears a space for dealing with the big questions—the ones about where we go when we die. Do we get buried in the backyard with the budgies? Do dogs go to heaven? Will Bowser be there to greet us? Do cats have souls? Do we?
As humans, it appears we are hard-wired to believe in an afterlife. Traces of flower pollen and red ocher buried with ancient remains seem to point to this. We look up at the night sky and imagine that is where we go when we die. After all, there is a lot going on in up there--stars, planets, a moon that sometimes eclipses, northern lights....For the Inuit, the aurora borealis are the spirits of the ancestors dancing in the sky. To the Cree, they are the “Dance of the Spirits”. In the Middle Ages, Europeans thought they were a sign from God. These are all far more evocative than ionized nitrogen atoms excited by solar wind particles, and who is to say less true?
The great mystery is, of course, death. It has kept poets and playwrights and artists and thinkers and prophets busy for millennia. Hamlet’s soliloquy is a rap on death and what comes after (short version--no one knows!). We seem to instinctively sense that something is out there in the great beyond, something to do with the spirit, or the soul, or the incorporeal reality that makes us human. And pets do not seem to have this special something, no matter how beloved they were. Which is why boys dig up pets. They know this difference very early on.
The world’s religions all promise a life after death. The exact nature of this life is, to all intents and purposes, unknown. It seems to be connected to how we live our lives in this world. The artists of the Renaissance made great creations out of the places we go when we die, and scared the crap out of us at the same time.
And we've remained scared of death. We don't like to think about it or deal with it. Our technological society has managed to distance physical death—outsourced it, so to speak. Family members no longer prepare bodies for burial. They are handed over to professionals, and we simply show up at the event. We then go home and grieve. Maybe we've lost a connection by handing over our loved ones to strangers.
What has this to do with pets and Herbert, you ask? I think of all the pet semataries in the backyards, of all the creatures who were beloved by the various kids who lived in those yards, who buried their animals in the warm earth, cried, said their words, and went away, and sometimes were pulled back by curiosity about what changes in Fluffy the earth wrought. Being kids, operating for the most part under adult radar, they had no compunction about having a peek. And, with no adult around to freak out, they calmly went about examining the evidence.
We are told that pets are a good way to teach kids various things--compassion, empathy, responsibility, among other things. And because pets generally do not last long(unless you're a parrot or an elephant), they teach kids about death.
If death is a part of life, as the poets and prophets tell us, then perhaps childish attempts to explore pet death is a good thing. Maybe it's not morbid to dig up the family gerbil, but healthy (as long as they wash their hands before dinner, that is). So if your little boy wants to dig up the gerbil, or hamster, or Siamese fighting fish after a few days, don’t worry. He’s not an incipient serial killer. He’s learning about life. Or maybe he just likes gross stuff. In any case, make sure he re-buries Fluffy and washes his hands. Tell him to use soap this time.
Thursday, May 12, 2011
A Dangerous Business
Raising boys is a dangerous business. It's mentally dangerous for the parents, but it's physically dangerous for the boys, if our many trips to the ER are any indication. Emergency--a strange word, when you consider the root is "emerge" (which is what the ER has been shorted to--as in, "Didn't I see you in Emerge last night?"). A quick google of the word turns up several synonyms, among which are "flow, gush, spurt"--I assume this is the connection. After all, we made many trips to the ER with boys gushing and spurting blood all over the back seat.
We learned things along the way. For instance, never wash the blood off--it gets you past the desk in record time. If you need to, slather on some ketchup. Also, be prepared to endure some hard looks and questions when you drag a toddler with facial lacerations into the ER at 2am. Apparently falling face-first from the top bunk into a pile of lego sounds dodgy at that hour. Don't take it personally--the tired staff are merely doing their job. Another good idea is to send chocolates to the nurses on their birthdays--remember, it's all about building relationships.
Our ER champ is Primero. He and Cuarto were neck-and-neck there for a while during childhood, but Primero's adult stint as a chef put him ahead--apparently sharp knives, a hurried atmosphere and improperly-grounded appliances make for perilous working conditions. He pulled ahead of Cuarto and has retained the top position since. Tercero is a distant third—most of his trips to the ER were garnered in his teenage years, doing things that are best left unsaid. Segundo, always the most watchful of the four, never went to Emerge, although he did snap a finger tendon once poking a brother (I forget which one—these sorts of incidents were too numerous to keep track) in the ribs.
It was Primero who introduced us to the world of emerge/ncy. By the time he was five, he was a seasoned veteran. His first visit was when he smashed his face against the bathtub, opening up an impressively spurting gash that refused to stop bleeding. We bundled him up (he was our only child at that point) and hauled him into the hospital--Jack repeated his personal best of 20 minutes from our house to the ER doors, first accomplished when I was in labour with Primero. Luckily, it was a slow night, and the ER doctor stitched up the wound in record time. I was impressed with his sewing skills--he was good. Primero didn't even have time to shriek.
The second time was the infamous Skil saw incident. Jack was building the first of many additions to our house (see blog post “The House that Jack Built”) and had left his Skil saw up on the top of a framed wall, its cord dangling down. Three-year-old Primero, wandering around chomping on a carrot, found the end of the cord and yanked. The saw fell smack on his upturned face.
I was in the house, changing Segundo’s diaper, when Jack ran in, white-faced, clutching Primero to his blood-soaked shirt.
“What happened?” I yelled. Jack lay Primero down on the floor and began digging in his mouth. There was blood everywhere. “What happened?” I yelled again. Jack shook his head and just kept digging.
Jack pulled something small and bloody from Primero’s mouth. “Oh my God, he’s bitten OFF HIS TONGUE!” I shrieked. Jack looked at me as if I’d lost my mind. “It’s a carrot!” he said. “I didn’t want him to choke! Geez, what’s the matter with you?” He threw the bloody chunk (in my defense, I maintain that the carrot was the size of a three-year-old’s tongue, it was lacerated and bloody—any jury would agree with my initial reaction) into the toilet and scooped up Primero, who by now was screaming bloody (pun completely intended) murder.
“Grab the baby—we need to get this kid to emergency!” We threw baby Segundo into his car seat and strapped Primero into the back. This was before children required car seats until they graduated from high school. As Jack hurtled down the highway (we did a lot of that back then), I sat sideways in my seat, patting Primero’s arm, trying to see if he was going into shock. Jack, hunched over the wheel in his blood-drenched shirt, zoomed past cars as if they were standing still.
We reached the ER in new record time. Jack easily broke his In-Labour-With-Primero record that day. In fact, the Primero/Skil saw trip record would stand unbroken for the remainder of our time in Herbert—for all I know, it’s unbroken to this day.
The ER nurses, seeing the blood, hollered “This way!” and scurried ahead, showing us to an empty cubicle. In no time, a doctor was there, peeling away the towels we’d wrapped Primero’s bleeding face in. The sight made me clutch Segundo even harder than I was. He squawked in protest. As the doctor began washing away the blood while listening to Jack’s narrative, Primero’s little face became visible. “Oh my God!” I said.
“Believe it or not,” the doctor said, “there’s very little real damage. I think the carrot absorbed most of the impact.” Jack looked at me. “It looked like a tongue.” I muttered. He kept washing away more blood. And more. And more. “Head and face wounds always bleed the most,” he said cheerfully. “We’ve got a small puncture in the lip—likely from the tooth behind. Also, the tooth is a little loose, but it looks alright for now. We’ll stitch up the puncture, and he should be okay.” As he began sewing, I recognized his technique—it was the same doctor we’d had on Primero’s first visit. The guy was good.
Primero would go on to have more trips to Emerge, but none would be as dramatic (thank God!). Segundo, thankfully, was a different kid altogether. As a child, he always assessed situations before he acted—it saved him a lot of blood over the years. While Primero would always be a leaper instead of a looker, Segundo never leaped until he’d looked very carefully indeed.
As a child, Tercero was too smart to get hurt. He only started injuring himself when he became a teenager, which is when kids undergo a kind of brain-death anyway, so it was understandable. Cuarto, on the other hand, was a lot like Primero, but without the same opportunities for injury. By the time Cuarto came along, the house was no longer a major construction zone, although the finishing would not be done until it was time to move (a pattern that we have since followed slavishly). Cuarto’s trips to Emerge were less dramatic.
His first was when he shoved a piece of hard rubber ball (they were called “Teeny-bouncers” for those who remember) his brothers had left lying on the floor after they’d shattered it with a hammer. He shoved it in so far we couldn’t get it out, even with tweezers. So, off to the ER we went, although no speed records were broken that day. As the doctor blew up the balloon catheter (the only thing that would pull out the fragment), Cuarto’s eyes bulged along with his nose. All I could think of was the scene from Total Recall, where Arnold Schwartzenegger digs up his nose and yanks out some kind of tracking device. “How much do you want to bet he never does THIS again?” the doctor said, as he carefully pulled out the piece of Teeny-bouncer. He was right.
Cuarto would visit the ER several times—falling on Lego in the middle of the night (“Where did you land?” asks concerned parent, wanting to know what anatomical part was hurt. “ON THE FLOOR!” wails injured and literal-minded child); punching a hole in his middle finger (the bird-flipping digit) while slamming a pocket door; chipping a tooth shovelling snow while holding the handle in his mouth; almost losing his boys while straddling the picket fence and its opening gate—he has an interesting scar to this day because of that one; and other more minor injuries. As you can see, Cuarto’s childhood ER adventures trumped Primero’s, although none would come quite as close to panic and sheer terror as Primero’s adventure with the saw.
Of course, all the boys had their scrapes and scabs, sprains and minor lacerations. Every fall, when I would take them to Doctor Heather for their pre-school check-up, she’d check their shins for bruises and abrasions. “If I don’t find these, I get worried.” She said. “That means the kid isn’t active enough.” Doctor Heather never had to worry about the boys. She’d send me home with some worming medicine (“Worm pets and kids in the fall!” she’d chirp), and that was that until next year.
I often think of Doctor Heather looking for signs of life in kids. I know some parents today (and there were those back then, too) who freak out if their kid trips and falls. I admire those parents who react with equanimity to the many trips and falls their children take, and who so teach their kids that life has its ups and downs. I think of all the injuries The Little Moron Club endured—falling out of trees, off roofs (wait a minute—that was Joe, come to think of it), off their bikes; smashing their fingers with hammers , rocks and bricks; tripping over their own feet; getting pierced by fish-hooks; slicing open thumbs with new Swiss Army knives—the list goes on and on, injuries too numerous to recount.
They all made it to adulthood fairly intact (well, physically, anyway). And no doubt they learned about the physics of the world—gravity is a law, sharp things cut, bones break, skin is soft, heads are not as hard as bricks, etc.
This is not to say that the world can’t be an extremely dangerous place for children, or that we should be cavalier about their safety. We learned to child-proof (as much as possible) a home construction site. We also learned that giving the boys their own little tools and showing them how they work went a long way toward keeping them away from the adult tools. I still have a mental picture of a diapered Segundo sitting on the plywood subfloor of some addition (there were so many), doggedly pounding in nails with a ball-peen hammer, so many that the floor shimmered like chain-mail once he was done.
And I also think that each child has a platoon of guardian angels assigned to him or her—some kids’ platoons may be larger than others—but they all have one. I imagine these angels, punching in and out of their celestial time-clock (like those sheepdogs Sam and George in the Looney Tunes cartoons), making sure that their charges survive until lunchtime, when they’re off the clock. It’s the only thing that can explain the more hair-raising close calls.
The world is a dangerous place. And, as insurance underwriters tell us, most accidents happen in the home. So home AND the world are dangerous places. The trick is to empower our kids to navigate the two. And since they learn this in that menacing, hazardous and jeopardous place called home (“There’s no place like home!” insists Dorothy, desperate to get out of Oz—wait, didn’t a tornado just HIT home?). So again, parents must perform a balancing act—on the one hand, being vigilant about danger, anticipating it and rescuing children from its clutches while on the other allowing their kids the scrapes, lacerations, bruises and sprains that come with activity. Parents, working with the guardian angel platoons, do this balancing act daily—only getting respite when their kids are safely in bed (unless they fall onto a pile of Lego, that is).
So yes , raising boys is a dangerous business. Indeed, raising children in general is not for the faint of heart. It’s the most important job out there, and often there is little support for it: emotional, economic, social. If it really is as important as everyone seems to think, then it stands to reason that there should be some serious pay-rate increases, for the parents AND for all those guardian angels (although I’m not sure what they would get paid in). Maybe parents need to start a union. The International Brother and Sisterhood of Parental Units Everywhere—IBSPUE! Parents of the world, unite! You have only your guilt to lose! Strike for higher wages! DANGER pay! Oh, yes indeed.
Wouldn’t it be nice…
We learned things along the way. For instance, never wash the blood off--it gets you past the desk in record time. If you need to, slather on some ketchup. Also, be prepared to endure some hard looks and questions when you drag a toddler with facial lacerations into the ER at 2am. Apparently falling face-first from the top bunk into a pile of lego sounds dodgy at that hour. Don't take it personally--the tired staff are merely doing their job. Another good idea is to send chocolates to the nurses on their birthdays--remember, it's all about building relationships.
Our ER champ is Primero. He and Cuarto were neck-and-neck there for a while during childhood, but Primero's adult stint as a chef put him ahead--apparently sharp knives, a hurried atmosphere and improperly-grounded appliances make for perilous working conditions. He pulled ahead of Cuarto and has retained the top position since. Tercero is a distant third—most of his trips to the ER were garnered in his teenage years, doing things that are best left unsaid. Segundo, always the most watchful of the four, never went to Emerge, although he did snap a finger tendon once poking a brother (I forget which one—these sorts of incidents were too numerous to keep track) in the ribs.
It was Primero who introduced us to the world of emerge/ncy. By the time he was five, he was a seasoned veteran. His first visit was when he smashed his face against the bathtub, opening up an impressively spurting gash that refused to stop bleeding. We bundled him up (he was our only child at that point) and hauled him into the hospital--Jack repeated his personal best of 20 minutes from our house to the ER doors, first accomplished when I was in labour with Primero. Luckily, it was a slow night, and the ER doctor stitched up the wound in record time. I was impressed with his sewing skills--he was good. Primero didn't even have time to shriek.
The second time was the infamous Skil saw incident. Jack was building the first of many additions to our house (see blog post “The House that Jack Built”) and had left his Skil saw up on the top of a framed wall, its cord dangling down. Three-year-old Primero, wandering around chomping on a carrot, found the end of the cord and yanked. The saw fell smack on his upturned face.
I was in the house, changing Segundo’s diaper, when Jack ran in, white-faced, clutching Primero to his blood-soaked shirt.
“What happened?” I yelled. Jack lay Primero down on the floor and began digging in his mouth. There was blood everywhere. “What happened?” I yelled again. Jack shook his head and just kept digging.
Jack pulled something small and bloody from Primero’s mouth. “Oh my God, he’s bitten OFF HIS TONGUE!” I shrieked. Jack looked at me as if I’d lost my mind. “It’s a carrot!” he said. “I didn’t want him to choke! Geez, what’s the matter with you?” He threw the bloody chunk (in my defense, I maintain that the carrot was the size of a three-year-old’s tongue, it was lacerated and bloody—any jury would agree with my initial reaction) into the toilet and scooped up Primero, who by now was screaming bloody (pun completely intended) murder.
“Grab the baby—we need to get this kid to emergency!” We threw baby Segundo into his car seat and strapped Primero into the back. This was before children required car seats until they graduated from high school. As Jack hurtled down the highway (we did a lot of that back then), I sat sideways in my seat, patting Primero’s arm, trying to see if he was going into shock. Jack, hunched over the wheel in his blood-drenched shirt, zoomed past cars as if they were standing still.
We reached the ER in new record time. Jack easily broke his In-Labour-With-Primero record that day. In fact, the Primero/Skil saw trip record would stand unbroken for the remainder of our time in Herbert—for all I know, it’s unbroken to this day.
The ER nurses, seeing the blood, hollered “This way!” and scurried ahead, showing us to an empty cubicle. In no time, a doctor was there, peeling away the towels we’d wrapped Primero’s bleeding face in. The sight made me clutch Segundo even harder than I was. He squawked in protest. As the doctor began washing away the blood while listening to Jack’s narrative, Primero’s little face became visible. “Oh my God!” I said.
“Believe it or not,” the doctor said, “there’s very little real damage. I think the carrot absorbed most of the impact.” Jack looked at me. “It looked like a tongue.” I muttered. He kept washing away more blood. And more. And more. “Head and face wounds always bleed the most,” he said cheerfully. “We’ve got a small puncture in the lip—likely from the tooth behind. Also, the tooth is a little loose, but it looks alright for now. We’ll stitch up the puncture, and he should be okay.” As he began sewing, I recognized his technique—it was the same doctor we’d had on Primero’s first visit. The guy was good.
Primero would go on to have more trips to Emerge, but none would be as dramatic (thank God!). Segundo, thankfully, was a different kid altogether. As a child, he always assessed situations before he acted—it saved him a lot of blood over the years. While Primero would always be a leaper instead of a looker, Segundo never leaped until he’d looked very carefully indeed.
As a child, Tercero was too smart to get hurt. He only started injuring himself when he became a teenager, which is when kids undergo a kind of brain-death anyway, so it was understandable. Cuarto, on the other hand, was a lot like Primero, but without the same opportunities for injury. By the time Cuarto came along, the house was no longer a major construction zone, although the finishing would not be done until it was time to move (a pattern that we have since followed slavishly). Cuarto’s trips to Emerge were less dramatic.
His first was when he shoved a piece of hard rubber ball (they were called “Teeny-bouncers” for those who remember) his brothers had left lying on the floor after they’d shattered it with a hammer. He shoved it in so far we couldn’t get it out, even with tweezers. So, off to the ER we went, although no speed records were broken that day. As the doctor blew up the balloon catheter (the only thing that would pull out the fragment), Cuarto’s eyes bulged along with his nose. All I could think of was the scene from Total Recall, where Arnold Schwartzenegger digs up his nose and yanks out some kind of tracking device. “How much do you want to bet he never does THIS again?” the doctor said, as he carefully pulled out the piece of Teeny-bouncer. He was right.
Cuarto would visit the ER several times—falling on Lego in the middle of the night (“Where did you land?” asks concerned parent, wanting to know what anatomical part was hurt. “ON THE FLOOR!” wails injured and literal-minded child); punching a hole in his middle finger (the bird-flipping digit) while slamming a pocket door; chipping a tooth shovelling snow while holding the handle in his mouth; almost losing his boys while straddling the picket fence and its opening gate—he has an interesting scar to this day because of that one; and other more minor injuries. As you can see, Cuarto’s childhood ER adventures trumped Primero’s, although none would come quite as close to panic and sheer terror as Primero’s adventure with the saw.
Of course, all the boys had their scrapes and scabs, sprains and minor lacerations. Every fall, when I would take them to Doctor Heather for their pre-school check-up, she’d check their shins for bruises and abrasions. “If I don’t find these, I get worried.” She said. “That means the kid isn’t active enough.” Doctor Heather never had to worry about the boys. She’d send me home with some worming medicine (“Worm pets and kids in the fall!” she’d chirp), and that was that until next year.
I often think of Doctor Heather looking for signs of life in kids. I know some parents today (and there were those back then, too) who freak out if their kid trips and falls. I admire those parents who react with equanimity to the many trips and falls their children take, and who so teach their kids that life has its ups and downs. I think of all the injuries The Little Moron Club endured—falling out of trees, off roofs (wait a minute—that was Joe, come to think of it), off their bikes; smashing their fingers with hammers , rocks and bricks; tripping over their own feet; getting pierced by fish-hooks; slicing open thumbs with new Swiss Army knives—the list goes on and on, injuries too numerous to recount.
They all made it to adulthood fairly intact (well, physically, anyway). And no doubt they learned about the physics of the world—gravity is a law, sharp things cut, bones break, skin is soft, heads are not as hard as bricks, etc.
This is not to say that the world can’t be an extremely dangerous place for children, or that we should be cavalier about their safety. We learned to child-proof (as much as possible) a home construction site. We also learned that giving the boys their own little tools and showing them how they work went a long way toward keeping them away from the adult tools. I still have a mental picture of a diapered Segundo sitting on the plywood subfloor of some addition (there were so many), doggedly pounding in nails with a ball-peen hammer, so many that the floor shimmered like chain-mail once he was done.
And I also think that each child has a platoon of guardian angels assigned to him or her—some kids’ platoons may be larger than others—but they all have one. I imagine these angels, punching in and out of their celestial time-clock (like those sheepdogs Sam and George in the Looney Tunes cartoons), making sure that their charges survive until lunchtime, when they’re off the clock. It’s the only thing that can explain the more hair-raising close calls.
The world is a dangerous place. And, as insurance underwriters tell us, most accidents happen in the home. So home AND the world are dangerous places. The trick is to empower our kids to navigate the two. And since they learn this in that menacing, hazardous and jeopardous place called home (“There’s no place like home!” insists Dorothy, desperate to get out of Oz—wait, didn’t a tornado just HIT home?). So again, parents must perform a balancing act—on the one hand, being vigilant about danger, anticipating it and rescuing children from its clutches while on the other allowing their kids the scrapes, lacerations, bruises and sprains that come with activity. Parents, working with the guardian angel platoons, do this balancing act daily—only getting respite when their kids are safely in bed (unless they fall onto a pile of Lego, that is).
So yes , raising boys is a dangerous business. Indeed, raising children in general is not for the faint of heart. It’s the most important job out there, and often there is little support for it: emotional, economic, social. If it really is as important as everyone seems to think, then it stands to reason that there should be some serious pay-rate increases, for the parents AND for all those guardian angels (although I’m not sure what they would get paid in). Maybe parents need to start a union. The International Brother and Sisterhood of Parental Units Everywhere—IBSPUE! Parents of the world, unite! You have only your guilt to lose! Strike for higher wages! DANGER pay! Oh, yes indeed.
Wouldn’t it be nice…
Wednesday, May 4, 2011
Brain Sex
With my last post and Cuarto's arrival, our little family was complete (other than various pets added and subtracted over the years, many of which were interred in the pet sematary behind the house). Nowadays, four kids is considered a large family--well, I guess it was back then, as well. Big enough, at any rate, although there were several of us Herbertians who had four kid families. But we were the only ones with four boys.
One thing the four boy family gave us was a certain comfort level with noise and confusion. And I do believe that boy noise is different than girl noise--a few years of chaperoning girls on school trips has convinced me of that. Girls shriek and boys holler--the difference is huge. Shrieking enters your head like a sharpened vampire stake, while hollering just makes your holler back. And girls will shriek for anything--they're happy, they're mad, they've dropped their Barbie, they've seen a bug, they want the world to know they're there.
Boys, on the other hand, holler for emergencies (or what they consider to be emergencies)--they've fallen out of a twenty-foot tree, they're stuck on the railroad tracks, they've just dodged an exploding burning barrel and now they're trying to dodge YOU, etc. etc.
Jack and I firmly believed that we could raise kids who were gender neutral. By that, I do not mean we were bent on producing hermaphrodites. I mean we felt gender was pretty much a product of environment--there was no such thing as "brain sex", as the socio-biologists insisted upon. No, that smacked far too much of determinism for us, and we would have none of it. We were going to raise sensitive new age guys who would understand where women were coming from, who would "get" what Mr. Freud so famously asked: "What do women want?", who would assume their role in an equitable world where gender roles were the same.
We have since seen the error of our ways.
It started with a toy car. We watched, in fascination, as each of our boys would first discover the car, pick it up, spin its wheels on the floor, and say "Vroom!" Our nieces and the little girls of our friends did not do this. We would also watch in horror as each boy first encountered the dolls we insisted on buying them (well, okay, it was I who insisted--Jack was ready to draw the line on this one). They would dismember the dolls, pull their heads off, and then put them back together in various distorted ways. Again, our nieces didn't do this, although I can't attest to that as we didn't live with them. For all I know, some of them might have engaged in serial mutilation.
From the cars and dolls, it went on to guns. Of course, Jack and I forbade all forms of guns as toys, lest we feed into the military-industrial complex's all pervasive culture of death. Again, the boys defied our preconceptions. They simply made guns out of whatever was handy--sticks, carrots, wooden spoons, mailing tubes, Lego. We finally gave up and allowed water pistols--this escalated when Uncle Walt brought super soakers to a family barbeque one year. It was as if he'd armed the mujahadeen with AK-47's--our world was never the same again.
Increasingly, despite our efforts at raising boys with some consciousness of gender equality, it became obvious that little boys were different than little girls despite all our enculturating efforts. Little boys just thought differently than little girls. I'd always known that big boys thought differently, but I'd chalked it up to the oppression of patriarchy. Now, I had to re-think things. Maybe there was something to this notion of "brain sex"--maybe there was a biological difference in how boys and girls thought and learned. Maybe, just maybe, difference didn't automatically mean "bad" but just "different". Maybe I had to adjust my thinking about the whole notion of "difference" (I was likely studying Derrida and the Deconstructionists at the time--for a real mind-bender, google Derrida's term "Differance")--it's all in the final "a".
I also had to reconsider my reaction to some of Jack's behaviours. For years, I'd been asking him what he was thinking at any given time. More times than not, he'd say "Nothing." I refused to believe it--my mind NEVER was thinking nothing. Something was always percolating--there was no such thing as NOTHING. I would prod and poke: "C'mon, you have to be thinking about SOMETHING." I would fret--obviously he didn't want to tell me what he was thinking about, which meant he was thinking about me and it was something BAD and what a jerk he was being and how dare he not tell me what I wanted to know and I think our marriage is over.
Now, after years of insight into boys' developing thought systems, I realized that what Jack had been telling me all these years was true. Sometimes (well, okay, a LOT of the time) the male thought balloon is empty. True, ladies, as strange as it may seem--there's really nothing there (nothing conscious, that is). The brain is in idle, chugging along at its default position, waiting to be put into gear at a moment's notice (say, when a particularly delectable motorcycle or girl goes by, or any such other shiny object).
Raising boys has helped me understand the male mind, or as much as anyone who isn't male can do so. I watched our boys handle conflict within the family--they would bug each other until one broke and would start beating on the other. After the dust-up, everyone was friends again, until the next time. Grudges were not harboured. That would require remembering what led to the conflict in the first place, which would remove the enjoyment of executing the conflict over and over again. Primero ALWAYS succumbed to Tercero's needling, Segundo ALWAYS tried to (unsuccessfully) hide his Halloween candy, Cuarto ALWAYS fell for the various ways his brothers abased him, and all of them ALWAYS left the toilet seat up and incurred maternal wrath.
It has been my (limited as it is, admittedly) experience with girls that they are far more canny about these things. Girls, like elephants, never forget. (I remember this--I was once a girl). They can harbour slights and take them out to caress like Gollum with his precioussss. They use words, not actions, to wound. If all this points to girls being smarter than boys (this used to be my position--I mean, it seemed so obvious), I'm not sure anymore that this is the case. Again, we are falling into the pit of difference being necessarily bad--that one thing is better than its other. Derrida and the deconstruction gang had much to say about this.
Over the last several years, there have been many fascinating studies done on the brain, and on how female and male brains are different, starting in infancy. It appears, from the studies, that girls are better than boys at identifying the emotional content of speech. This is not particularly earth-shattering to any woman who's ever asked her husband if those jeans make her look fat and the poor sap who actually ANSWERS. He obviously has not identified the emotional content of that loaded question--but now, he can relax, knowing that he's been hard-wired from babyhood to miss the boat.
Another study shows that girls 2-4 days old spend twice as much time maintaining eye contact with a silent adult and when the adult is talking. The boys' attention span was the same (shorter) whether the adult was talking or silent. Again, any woman in a relationship can verify this male bias towards what guys see, rather than what they hear. This may account for the male ability to watch fifteen television shows simultaneously while tuning out their partner's demand to hand over the remote before she has a seizure.
Studies also show that baby girls like to gurgle at humans, while boys are equally happy jabbering away at toys or abstract geometric designs than at people. This could explain why men holler at televised sporting events or argue with Don Cherry between periods. (When you think of it, those jackets of his stand in admirably for the abstract geometric designs that babies jabber at).
Apparently, at four months, baby girls can distinguish photographs of people they know from photographs of strangers, while baby boys cannot. This may be why husbands do not notice if their wives have new haircuts, new outfits, or new bones through their noses.
So now, these (to women) annoying traits can now be explained by brain sex. And the bitch of it is, women always suspected this is so. Even the most hard-core, radical, card-carrying feminist has conjected, deep down in her heart of hearts, that there is something going on in the male brain that is not going on in the female brain, regardless of the toxic environment patriarchy has erected over the generations.
However, lest people think that this lets men off the hook for being doofuses ("Hey, what can we do? We're born that way!"), we again must re-visit our notion of difference and the role of environment on the brain. For many recent studies have ALSO shown how environment can affect the brain's wiring, especially in infancy and childhood. AND, increasingly, studies are showing that older brains can be re-wired (unlike that toaster you've been waiting to have fixed by you-know-who).
So, it comes back to how we want to raise our boys (and girls), and how we feel about difference. For difference does not have to privilege one term over the other in Derrida's binary oppositional "violent hierarchy" where "one of the two terms governs the other"--in other words, no one gets to be the boss of the other.
What we've learned, since our boys have grown up and most of them found terrific women, is that despite the difference of brain sex, our efforts at providing an environment where boys were encouraged to play with dolls, have tea parties (we bought Primero a tea set--he loved it, but it got smashed to bits over the years--this wasn't a comment on the tea set--the boys were remarkably even-handed about what they destroyed) and only play with water-pistols did bear some fruit, or so their partners assure us.
Perhaps brain sex can change over time. As the outer world becomes more celebratory of gender difference (and, indeed, of all the many differences that make the world an interesting place), as little girls play with lego and little boys with dolls (NOT action figures), as parents demand and assume that the outer horizons for sll children are equally limitless and their inner horizons are cherished, then the inner world of the brain may change, and when that happens, the outer world will change even more, which will, in turn, act on the brain again, on and on, in a dizzying whirl of nature/nurture.
I was at a conference years ago when a researcher who'd studied supportive communities and their effects on children stated that the old opposition of nature/nurture no longer applied. The relationship between the two was more like an intricate dance, she said, where one partner might lead for a time, and then the other would take over in a constantly complex do-si-do.
Our own little family laboratory seems to show this--nature and nurture work together. Each generation learns a bit more than the one before, and in so doing, BECOMES different. And the older generation must honour that learning, for after all, it had a part in the process. And while we didn't raise boys who thought just like girls, we managed to raise boys who are respectful of difference and give it room to play. And who are smart enough to ask the women in their lives the answer to Dr. Freud's question of what women want (something that Sigmund apparently never thought of). Of course, like all women everywhere, their brain sex determines the answer--"Women want men to do what we say..."
No, if nothing else, raising four boys has taught me the meaning of difference, and that is a good thing. As the French would say, "Vive la difference!" As Mr. Derrida (wherever he may be--in whatever endless world of play inside the celestial text) would say, "Vive la differance!"
One thing the four boy family gave us was a certain comfort level with noise and confusion. And I do believe that boy noise is different than girl noise--a few years of chaperoning girls on school trips has convinced me of that. Girls shriek and boys holler--the difference is huge. Shrieking enters your head like a sharpened vampire stake, while hollering just makes your holler back. And girls will shriek for anything--they're happy, they're mad, they've dropped their Barbie, they've seen a bug, they want the world to know they're there.
Boys, on the other hand, holler for emergencies (or what they consider to be emergencies)--they've fallen out of a twenty-foot tree, they're stuck on the railroad tracks, they've just dodged an exploding burning barrel and now they're trying to dodge YOU, etc. etc.
Jack and I firmly believed that we could raise kids who were gender neutral. By that, I do not mean we were bent on producing hermaphrodites. I mean we felt gender was pretty much a product of environment--there was no such thing as "brain sex", as the socio-biologists insisted upon. No, that smacked far too much of determinism for us, and we would have none of it. We were going to raise sensitive new age guys who would understand where women were coming from, who would "get" what Mr. Freud so famously asked: "What do women want?", who would assume their role in an equitable world where gender roles were the same.
We have since seen the error of our ways.
It started with a toy car. We watched, in fascination, as each of our boys would first discover the car, pick it up, spin its wheels on the floor, and say "Vroom!" Our nieces and the little girls of our friends did not do this. We would also watch in horror as each boy first encountered the dolls we insisted on buying them (well, okay, it was I who insisted--Jack was ready to draw the line on this one). They would dismember the dolls, pull their heads off, and then put them back together in various distorted ways. Again, our nieces didn't do this, although I can't attest to that as we didn't live with them. For all I know, some of them might have engaged in serial mutilation.
From the cars and dolls, it went on to guns. Of course, Jack and I forbade all forms of guns as toys, lest we feed into the military-industrial complex's all pervasive culture of death. Again, the boys defied our preconceptions. They simply made guns out of whatever was handy--sticks, carrots, wooden spoons, mailing tubes, Lego. We finally gave up and allowed water pistols--this escalated when Uncle Walt brought super soakers to a family barbeque one year. It was as if he'd armed the mujahadeen with AK-47's--our world was never the same again.
Increasingly, despite our efforts at raising boys with some consciousness of gender equality, it became obvious that little boys were different than little girls despite all our enculturating efforts. Little boys just thought differently than little girls. I'd always known that big boys thought differently, but I'd chalked it up to the oppression of patriarchy. Now, I had to re-think things. Maybe there was something to this notion of "brain sex"--maybe there was a biological difference in how boys and girls thought and learned. Maybe, just maybe, difference didn't automatically mean "bad" but just "different". Maybe I had to adjust my thinking about the whole notion of "difference" (I was likely studying Derrida and the Deconstructionists at the time--for a real mind-bender, google Derrida's term "Differance")--it's all in the final "a".
I also had to reconsider my reaction to some of Jack's behaviours. For years, I'd been asking him what he was thinking at any given time. More times than not, he'd say "Nothing." I refused to believe it--my mind NEVER was thinking nothing. Something was always percolating--there was no such thing as NOTHING. I would prod and poke: "C'mon, you have to be thinking about SOMETHING." I would fret--obviously he didn't want to tell me what he was thinking about, which meant he was thinking about me and it was something BAD and what a jerk he was being and how dare he not tell me what I wanted to know and I think our marriage is over.
Now, after years of insight into boys' developing thought systems, I realized that what Jack had been telling me all these years was true. Sometimes (well, okay, a LOT of the time) the male thought balloon is empty. True, ladies, as strange as it may seem--there's really nothing there (nothing conscious, that is). The brain is in idle, chugging along at its default position, waiting to be put into gear at a moment's notice (say, when a particularly delectable motorcycle or girl goes by, or any such other shiny object).
Raising boys has helped me understand the male mind, or as much as anyone who isn't male can do so. I watched our boys handle conflict within the family--they would bug each other until one broke and would start beating on the other. After the dust-up, everyone was friends again, until the next time. Grudges were not harboured. That would require remembering what led to the conflict in the first place, which would remove the enjoyment of executing the conflict over and over again. Primero ALWAYS succumbed to Tercero's needling, Segundo ALWAYS tried to (unsuccessfully) hide his Halloween candy, Cuarto ALWAYS fell for the various ways his brothers abased him, and all of them ALWAYS left the toilet seat up and incurred maternal wrath.
It has been my (limited as it is, admittedly) experience with girls that they are far more canny about these things. Girls, like elephants, never forget. (I remember this--I was once a girl). They can harbour slights and take them out to caress like Gollum with his precioussss. They use words, not actions, to wound. If all this points to girls being smarter than boys (this used to be my position--I mean, it seemed so obvious), I'm not sure anymore that this is the case. Again, we are falling into the pit of difference being necessarily bad--that one thing is better than its other. Derrida and the deconstruction gang had much to say about this.
Over the last several years, there have been many fascinating studies done on the brain, and on how female and male brains are different, starting in infancy. It appears, from the studies, that girls are better than boys at identifying the emotional content of speech. This is not particularly earth-shattering to any woman who's ever asked her husband if those jeans make her look fat and the poor sap who actually ANSWERS. He obviously has not identified the emotional content of that loaded question--but now, he can relax, knowing that he's been hard-wired from babyhood to miss the boat.
Another study shows that girls 2-4 days old spend twice as much time maintaining eye contact with a silent adult and when the adult is talking. The boys' attention span was the same (shorter) whether the adult was talking or silent. Again, any woman in a relationship can verify this male bias towards what guys see, rather than what they hear. This may account for the male ability to watch fifteen television shows simultaneously while tuning out their partner's demand to hand over the remote before she has a seizure.
Studies also show that baby girls like to gurgle at humans, while boys are equally happy jabbering away at toys or abstract geometric designs than at people. This could explain why men holler at televised sporting events or argue with Don Cherry between periods. (When you think of it, those jackets of his stand in admirably for the abstract geometric designs that babies jabber at).
Apparently, at four months, baby girls can distinguish photographs of people they know from photographs of strangers, while baby boys cannot. This may be why husbands do not notice if their wives have new haircuts, new outfits, or new bones through their noses.
So now, these (to women) annoying traits can now be explained by brain sex. And the bitch of it is, women always suspected this is so. Even the most hard-core, radical, card-carrying feminist has conjected, deep down in her heart of hearts, that there is something going on in the male brain that is not going on in the female brain, regardless of the toxic environment patriarchy has erected over the generations.
However, lest people think that this lets men off the hook for being doofuses ("Hey, what can we do? We're born that way!"), we again must re-visit our notion of difference and the role of environment on the brain. For many recent studies have ALSO shown how environment can affect the brain's wiring, especially in infancy and childhood. AND, increasingly, studies are showing that older brains can be re-wired (unlike that toaster you've been waiting to have fixed by you-know-who).
So, it comes back to how we want to raise our boys (and girls), and how we feel about difference. For difference does not have to privilege one term over the other in Derrida's binary oppositional "violent hierarchy" where "one of the two terms governs the other"--in other words, no one gets to be the boss of the other.
What we've learned, since our boys have grown up and most of them found terrific women, is that despite the difference of brain sex, our efforts at providing an environment where boys were encouraged to play with dolls, have tea parties (we bought Primero a tea set--he loved it, but it got smashed to bits over the years--this wasn't a comment on the tea set--the boys were remarkably even-handed about what they destroyed) and only play with water-pistols did bear some fruit, or so their partners assure us.
Perhaps brain sex can change over time. As the outer world becomes more celebratory of gender difference (and, indeed, of all the many differences that make the world an interesting place), as little girls play with lego and little boys with dolls (NOT action figures), as parents demand and assume that the outer horizons for sll children are equally limitless and their inner horizons are cherished, then the inner world of the brain may change, and when that happens, the outer world will change even more, which will, in turn, act on the brain again, on and on, in a dizzying whirl of nature/nurture.
I was at a conference years ago when a researcher who'd studied supportive communities and their effects on children stated that the old opposition of nature/nurture no longer applied. The relationship between the two was more like an intricate dance, she said, where one partner might lead for a time, and then the other would take over in a constantly complex do-si-do.
Our own little family laboratory seems to show this--nature and nurture work together. Each generation learns a bit more than the one before, and in so doing, BECOMES different. And the older generation must honour that learning, for after all, it had a part in the process. And while we didn't raise boys who thought just like girls, we managed to raise boys who are respectful of difference and give it room to play. And who are smart enough to ask the women in their lives the answer to Dr. Freud's question of what women want (something that Sigmund apparently never thought of). Of course, like all women everywhere, their brain sex determines the answer--"Women want men to do what we say..."
No, if nothing else, raising four boys has taught me the meaning of difference, and that is a good thing. As the French would say, "Vive la difference!" As Mr. Derrida (wherever he may be--in whatever endless world of play inside the celestial text) would say, "Vive la differance!"
Friday, April 29, 2011
Cuarto
You may have noticed it's been a while since I've posted regular blogs. Also, I haven't yet written about the coming of Cuarto (number four) into our ranks. This is entirely in keeping with Cuarto's usual treatment as the last (and, to be frank, uninvited) member of the boy herd.
A quick glance at the baby book reveals pages of entries for Primero (hospital ID bracelet, lock of hair from first haircut, congratulation cards from family and friends, and a particularly memorable montage of jolly-jumper photos), Segundo (same as above, sans the jolly jumper shots--Segundo never took to bouncing--he'd hang in the traces like the world's smallest paratrooper shot down over France), and Tercero (same as above only fewer in all categories). However, there are no pages for Cuarto. Recently I found his hospital ID bracelet stuffed into the bottom of an old jewelry box.
This omission of his birth relics gave rise and credence to the rumour (perpetrated primarily by Tercero) that Cuarto was adopted. Actually, the story (as embroidered by Tercero) was that Jack and I found Cuarto in a dumpster in New York City in 1992. The fact that Cuarto was born in 1987 apparently didn't twig the kid into dismissing the tale as bogus--toddlers are not good at math. It didn't help when Cuarto would come crying to us, upset at Tercero's latest version of the adoption tale. No matter how many times we assured him of his genetics, Tercero would say, Don't believe them--they HAVE to say you're not adopted!" And when we pointed out his uncanny resemblance to Jack, Tercero was there ahead of us: "For crying out loud--they just kept looking until they found somebody who looked like dad and who had a kid they didn't want--they're not STUPID!"
No, there are few birth relics for Cuarto. By then, I had little time for memorializing his entry into the world. I was back at university, commuting from Herbert to Saskatoon for night classes, determined to get my brain into some kind of working order. The only class I missed that term was my Monday night Medieval Literature class--I was in labour that evening and had the baby the next morning. I was back, however, the following week, determined to get my money's worth. I was PAYING for these classes, after all. And with more than money.
Let me backtrack a little. You all likely know the statistics on the reliability of birth control devices. Cuarto is a living reminder that nothing is perfect. By the time the doctor confirmed my condition ("I'm WHAT? AGAIN?"), I'd pretty much known it was true, but was in denial.
It was summer, and I was taking an intersession course in Western History. As the hormone fairy came to visit (thank you Robin Williams for that vivid and apt metaphor), I'd sit on the window sill of U. of S.'s Arts Building and sob uncontrollably, moaning that my life was over. I couldn't fathom how we'd handle yet another kid. Why, we'd have to buy a different car--our Fiat had room for only three in the back seat. And where would we sit in fast food restaurants? Tables could accommodate two, at the most three kids and two adults. The modern world was not designed for the four-kid family. Even fairy tales went in threes--there were no "Four Billy Goats Gruff", or "Four Blind Mice". Goldilocks didn't have to deal with four bears. Also, whoever heard of the FOUR Stooges? AND, Moe only ever Nyuck! Nyuck! Nyuck'ed three times!
No, the world follows the Rule of Three (it's an actual rule--it's got a Wikipedia entry). So here we were, a fourth coming along to bust up the gang of three (I googled gang of three but actually found an entry for "Gang of Four"--the repressive regime led by Chairman Mao's wife that was responsible for the "worst excesses" of China's Cultural Revolution in the 1960's--good thing there was no Google in 1986--this wouldn't have boded well).
To make matters worse, we'd just gotten rid of the last of the baby stuff--crib, stroller, high chair, play-pen, etc. Now we'd have to replace them. Things were not looking good. Number four was already incurring a lot of expense and angst, and he wasn't even born yet.
My state of denial lasted as long as the summer class. That fall, I was faced with deciding to continue school, or take a break while growing a baby. By then, I'd gotten a taste for intellectual stimulation (always a short supply when surrounded by toddlers who argued whether people's brains were made out of popcorn or jello) and decided I'd go for broke and continue my higher education. By dint of night classes, I was able to continue with my program of studies.
As February rolled around (and I grew exponentially--47 pounds--8 was baby and the rest Liberte Mediterranean Yoghurt), it became increasingly difficult to wedge myself into those ping-pong-paddle desks. I was sure my fellow students were making book on whether I'd extricate myself at the end of class, or have to wear it home.
By then, we'd purchased all new big baby items (including a Chrysler K-Car station wagon to replace our beloved Fiat) and loaded up on the small ones. We'd fielded all the inane comments about the baby's gender ("But what if it's another BOY?" "You're not buying anything PINK, are you?" "Maybe you could exchange him for a girl--hah! hah! hah!"). Jack and I had known from the beginning that it would be a boy. The ultrasounds of those days didn't usually reveal the sex. The images were not nearly as clear as they are today (Lab tech says to onlooking parents--"there's the head!" Onlooking parents, seeing fuzzy blob, look at one another and say "uh...sure...whatever you say...").
By the time contractions started again (for the skinny on contractions, see "Primero" blog entry), I was prepared. Having discovered the wonders of epidurals with Tercero (for the wonders of epidurals, see "Tercero" entry), I'd already put in my order with Doctor Heather. And I'd packed enough stuff in my overnight bag to last a week--I wasn't in any hurry to leave the hospital. After all, this was to be my holiday away from kids, and I was going to milk it.
Jack drove me to the hospital at a considerably slower speed than he had with Primero. By now, we were old hands. I knew my labours didn't progress rapidly, so there was no hurry. We dropped off two kids at one set of grandparents, and one at another--we'd learned it was best to split them up if we ever wanted babysitters again.
We proceeded leisurely to the hospital, swanned our way through registration and up to the maternity ward, only to be told the labour-and-delivery rooms were all booked, as there was a mini-baby-boom currently happening. I'd have to be content with a regular labour-and-delivery cubicle. "Whatever," I said airily. I was having an epidural anyway. No sweat--it wouldn't take long, and I'd be back in my room in no time. As long as they didn't put me in the hallway (which was the case for the late-comers that week!)
By this time, hospitals had done away with the more barbaric aspects of "prep" (see "Primero" blog entry). I settled into the bed and was once more hooked up to the monitor. Jack greeted the contraption like an old friend, readying himself to tell me how intense the contractions were.
Cuarto didn't take long to enter the world--the delivery was routine. Obviously practice made perfect--by the fourth time, we'd pretty much gotten it down pat. Doctor Heather announced "Another boy!" Jack and I both said "We know..." When Cuarto was put into my arms, we realized that all the angst and doom-crying about a fourth was so much air. Another baby! (Nature makes them cute for a reason). A sibling for the three amigos to fraternize. AND hand-me-downs were a go!
When the boys came to the hospital, they were fascinated with their infant brother, and wanted to take him home right away, all except Tercero, who kept ordering us to "Leave him here!" But then, that's what his brothers said about HIM when he was born--ah, brotherly love--it starts early.
There is a quaint hospital custom, perpetrated by maternity nurses, called "rooming in". This is where the nurses wheel the baby (snugged in a transparent plastic bassinet) into your room so you can feed, bathe, change, groom and entertain said baby while the nurses have coffee or something. When I had Primero, this custom struck me as a lovely way to bond with the baby. By the time Cuarto came along, I realized that the nurses were using me as unpaid labour, and I went on strike.
Every time the bassinet was wheeled in, I'd wheel it right back to the nursery. There were a few half-hearted attempts at returning it to my room, but by the fifth or sixth trip, the nurses gave up. I settled into my hospital vacation, which was enjoyable indeed. Every morning, when the nurse would come into my room carrying the bundled Cuarto (by then they'd quit rolling in the bassinet--apparently the wheels were giving out), she'd chirp "And are we going home today?" I'd chirp back, "We are not!"
But of course, all good things must come to an end, and by the sixth day, I was ready to go home. After all, I had a class to attend. Which I did, the very next day (or evening, to be exact).
It was an interesting experience, taking classes while looking after an infant and three small children. Luckily, Cuarto turned out to be the easiest baby of the bunch--he was good natured, slept when he was supposed to, didn't display any alarming eccentricities, and did everything on schedule. I would joggle him with my foot in his little plastic rocker as I studied for exams, or nurse him as I slogged my way through Chaucer's Middle English ("Whan that Aprill, with his shoures soote / The droghte of March hath perced to the roote..."). I don't know if he was the ideal baby or just bored with the Middle Ages--whatever the reason, he turned out to be an extremely easy kid to look after. It was as if his arrival was the ultimate cosmic joke: (God--"I've got good news and bad news...the bad news is--YOU'RE PREGNANT AGAIN! The good news is, he'll be the easiest of the bunch.)
Which is what Cuarto has been from the beginning--our easygoing, cheerful, most sunny-dispositioned of them all. To this day, he refuses to worry, fret, get upset or dismayed by much of anything. His aplomb is legendary. He takes whatever life throws and works with it sans fuss or muss. Of course, his brothers like to take credit for his equanimity--"It's a harsh world out there--we're just toughening him up!" was their usual answer whenever Cuarto suffered something particularly nasty at their hands. Primero was particularly dedicated to accustoming Cuarto to the world's vicissitudes, perhaps because his position as "the baby" had been usurped.
Now we cannot imagine our lives without Cuarto. He has always been a delight, as have they all, but he was the icing on a considerably enjoyable cake. And while I would never advise anyone to have four kids today (remember the rule about never being outnumbered!), I would also not trade an instant of the adventure we had riding herd on those four boys. Yee-haw! Let the adventure continue!
A quick glance at the baby book reveals pages of entries for Primero (hospital ID bracelet, lock of hair from first haircut, congratulation cards from family and friends, and a particularly memorable montage of jolly-jumper photos), Segundo (same as above, sans the jolly jumper shots--Segundo never took to bouncing--he'd hang in the traces like the world's smallest paratrooper shot down over France), and Tercero (same as above only fewer in all categories). However, there are no pages for Cuarto. Recently I found his hospital ID bracelet stuffed into the bottom of an old jewelry box.
This omission of his birth relics gave rise and credence to the rumour (perpetrated primarily by Tercero) that Cuarto was adopted. Actually, the story (as embroidered by Tercero) was that Jack and I found Cuarto in a dumpster in New York City in 1992. The fact that Cuarto was born in 1987 apparently didn't twig the kid into dismissing the tale as bogus--toddlers are not good at math. It didn't help when Cuarto would come crying to us, upset at Tercero's latest version of the adoption tale. No matter how many times we assured him of his genetics, Tercero would say, Don't believe them--they HAVE to say you're not adopted!" And when we pointed out his uncanny resemblance to Jack, Tercero was there ahead of us: "For crying out loud--they just kept looking until they found somebody who looked like dad and who had a kid they didn't want--they're not STUPID!"
No, there are few birth relics for Cuarto. By then, I had little time for memorializing his entry into the world. I was back at university, commuting from Herbert to Saskatoon for night classes, determined to get my brain into some kind of working order. The only class I missed that term was my Monday night Medieval Literature class--I was in labour that evening and had the baby the next morning. I was back, however, the following week, determined to get my money's worth. I was PAYING for these classes, after all. And with more than money.
Let me backtrack a little. You all likely know the statistics on the reliability of birth control devices. Cuarto is a living reminder that nothing is perfect. By the time the doctor confirmed my condition ("I'm WHAT? AGAIN?"), I'd pretty much known it was true, but was in denial.
It was summer, and I was taking an intersession course in Western History. As the hormone fairy came to visit (thank you Robin Williams for that vivid and apt metaphor), I'd sit on the window sill of U. of S.'s Arts Building and sob uncontrollably, moaning that my life was over. I couldn't fathom how we'd handle yet another kid. Why, we'd have to buy a different car--our Fiat had room for only three in the back seat. And where would we sit in fast food restaurants? Tables could accommodate two, at the most three kids and two adults. The modern world was not designed for the four-kid family. Even fairy tales went in threes--there were no "Four Billy Goats Gruff", or "Four Blind Mice". Goldilocks didn't have to deal with four bears. Also, whoever heard of the FOUR Stooges? AND, Moe only ever Nyuck! Nyuck! Nyuck'ed three times!
No, the world follows the Rule of Three (it's an actual rule--it's got a Wikipedia entry). So here we were, a fourth coming along to bust up the gang of three (I googled gang of three but actually found an entry for "Gang of Four"--the repressive regime led by Chairman Mao's wife that was responsible for the "worst excesses" of China's Cultural Revolution in the 1960's--good thing there was no Google in 1986--this wouldn't have boded well).
To make matters worse, we'd just gotten rid of the last of the baby stuff--crib, stroller, high chair, play-pen, etc. Now we'd have to replace them. Things were not looking good. Number four was already incurring a lot of expense and angst, and he wasn't even born yet.
My state of denial lasted as long as the summer class. That fall, I was faced with deciding to continue school, or take a break while growing a baby. By then, I'd gotten a taste for intellectual stimulation (always a short supply when surrounded by toddlers who argued whether people's brains were made out of popcorn or jello) and decided I'd go for broke and continue my higher education. By dint of night classes, I was able to continue with my program of studies.
As February rolled around (and I grew exponentially--47 pounds--8 was baby and the rest Liberte Mediterranean Yoghurt), it became increasingly difficult to wedge myself into those ping-pong-paddle desks. I was sure my fellow students were making book on whether I'd extricate myself at the end of class, or have to wear it home.
By then, we'd purchased all new big baby items (including a Chrysler K-Car station wagon to replace our beloved Fiat) and loaded up on the small ones. We'd fielded all the inane comments about the baby's gender ("But what if it's another BOY?" "You're not buying anything PINK, are you?" "Maybe you could exchange him for a girl--hah! hah! hah!"). Jack and I had known from the beginning that it would be a boy. The ultrasounds of those days didn't usually reveal the sex. The images were not nearly as clear as they are today (Lab tech says to onlooking parents--"there's the head!" Onlooking parents, seeing fuzzy blob, look at one another and say "uh...sure...whatever you say...").
By the time contractions started again (for the skinny on contractions, see "Primero" blog entry), I was prepared. Having discovered the wonders of epidurals with Tercero (for the wonders of epidurals, see "Tercero" entry), I'd already put in my order with Doctor Heather. And I'd packed enough stuff in my overnight bag to last a week--I wasn't in any hurry to leave the hospital. After all, this was to be my holiday away from kids, and I was going to milk it.
Jack drove me to the hospital at a considerably slower speed than he had with Primero. By now, we were old hands. I knew my labours didn't progress rapidly, so there was no hurry. We dropped off two kids at one set of grandparents, and one at another--we'd learned it was best to split them up if we ever wanted babysitters again.
We proceeded leisurely to the hospital, swanned our way through registration and up to the maternity ward, only to be told the labour-and-delivery rooms were all booked, as there was a mini-baby-boom currently happening. I'd have to be content with a regular labour-and-delivery cubicle. "Whatever," I said airily. I was having an epidural anyway. No sweat--it wouldn't take long, and I'd be back in my room in no time. As long as they didn't put me in the hallway (which was the case for the late-comers that week!)
By this time, hospitals had done away with the more barbaric aspects of "prep" (see "Primero" blog entry). I settled into the bed and was once more hooked up to the monitor. Jack greeted the contraption like an old friend, readying himself to tell me how intense the contractions were.
Cuarto didn't take long to enter the world--the delivery was routine. Obviously practice made perfect--by the fourth time, we'd pretty much gotten it down pat. Doctor Heather announced "Another boy!" Jack and I both said "We know..." When Cuarto was put into my arms, we realized that all the angst and doom-crying about a fourth was so much air. Another baby! (Nature makes them cute for a reason). A sibling for the three amigos to fraternize. AND hand-me-downs were a go!
When the boys came to the hospital, they were fascinated with their infant brother, and wanted to take him home right away, all except Tercero, who kept ordering us to "Leave him here!" But then, that's what his brothers said about HIM when he was born--ah, brotherly love--it starts early.
There is a quaint hospital custom, perpetrated by maternity nurses, called "rooming in". This is where the nurses wheel the baby (snugged in a transparent plastic bassinet) into your room so you can feed, bathe, change, groom and entertain said baby while the nurses have coffee or something. When I had Primero, this custom struck me as a lovely way to bond with the baby. By the time Cuarto came along, I realized that the nurses were using me as unpaid labour, and I went on strike.
Every time the bassinet was wheeled in, I'd wheel it right back to the nursery. There were a few half-hearted attempts at returning it to my room, but by the fifth or sixth trip, the nurses gave up. I settled into my hospital vacation, which was enjoyable indeed. Every morning, when the nurse would come into my room carrying the bundled Cuarto (by then they'd quit rolling in the bassinet--apparently the wheels were giving out), she'd chirp "And are we going home today?" I'd chirp back, "We are not!"
But of course, all good things must come to an end, and by the sixth day, I was ready to go home. After all, I had a class to attend. Which I did, the very next day (or evening, to be exact).
It was an interesting experience, taking classes while looking after an infant and three small children. Luckily, Cuarto turned out to be the easiest baby of the bunch--he was good natured, slept when he was supposed to, didn't display any alarming eccentricities, and did everything on schedule. I would joggle him with my foot in his little plastic rocker as I studied for exams, or nurse him as I slogged my way through Chaucer's Middle English ("Whan that Aprill, with his shoures soote / The droghte of March hath perced to the roote..."). I don't know if he was the ideal baby or just bored with the Middle Ages--whatever the reason, he turned out to be an extremely easy kid to look after. It was as if his arrival was the ultimate cosmic joke: (God--"I've got good news and bad news...the bad news is--YOU'RE PREGNANT AGAIN! The good news is, he'll be the easiest of the bunch.)
Which is what Cuarto has been from the beginning--our easygoing, cheerful, most sunny-dispositioned of them all. To this day, he refuses to worry, fret, get upset or dismayed by much of anything. His aplomb is legendary. He takes whatever life throws and works with it sans fuss or muss. Of course, his brothers like to take credit for his equanimity--"It's a harsh world out there--we're just toughening him up!" was their usual answer whenever Cuarto suffered something particularly nasty at their hands. Primero was particularly dedicated to accustoming Cuarto to the world's vicissitudes, perhaps because his position as "the baby" had been usurped.
Now we cannot imagine our lives without Cuarto. He has always been a delight, as have they all, but he was the icing on a considerably enjoyable cake. And while I would never advise anyone to have four kids today (remember the rule about never being outnumbered!), I would also not trade an instant of the adventure we had riding herd on those four boys. Yee-haw! Let the adventure continue!
Wednesday, March 23, 2011
Memory Alley
I've been extremely delinquent in posting segments on this blog lately (by lately, I mean the last ten months or so). A strange malaise has taken me over, much like the cabbages that attached themselves to the Starship Enterprise crewmembers' necks during Star Trek's first iteration (the really old one that spawned the cultural phenomenon known as "the Shat").
Not that I've stopped the various trips down memory lane that my brain keeps taking me on--it's just that I've lost interest in recording these trips. No one, including me, is very interested. After all, I haven't lived an exciting life--no journeys to exotic locales, no Nobel prizes won for anything, no 15 minutes (or even seconds) of Warholesque fame.
I feel as though these last months have been spent struggling with my shadow self, a Jungian concept that is helpful in understanding the importance of becoming aware of what it is that holds us back, keeps us down, stops us from doing. We battle with our shadow-self, and hopefully we win so we can take up our lives again. Like Persephone returning from the underworld, we emerge from our shadow-worlds and look back, still shaky from the encounter, thinking, "Boy, what was THAT? Whew, am I glad that's over, I think..."
That's pretty much where I am right now--shaky, but hopeful. I seem to be ready for action again. And, of course, for purposes of this blog, action summons up its own trajectory--also one of memory. Increasingly, I think, as we boomers become grandparents, moving up on the life-ladder rungs once occupied by our parents, we look back with misty-eyed fondness on those years spent in child-rearing.
We look at those children now--adults, some with children of their own, careers, partners, autonomous lives--and we think, How did we get here? WE weren't going to be grandparents like our parents were. We are the boomers, after all, and are going to re-make grandparenting into something cool. We will take our grandkids white-water rafting. We will harrass whalers on a Greenpeace boat, or protest transnational corporations at a world summit somewhere (although this might not be a good idea--remember Toronto). We will be the ultimate hip grandparents (and try not to break any hips in the process).
Jack and I are now grandparents--we are Grampy and Grammy (although "grampie" usually comes out sounding more like "grumpie"--fairly appropos, to my thinking). We've taken on the job our parents did in their last significant roles of our lives. It's a role that feels strange, like a really great pair of shoes that aren't broken in yet. We're not quite sure what our job is, other than spoiling the wee ones and being their buddies (something you couldn't do with your own kids, but apparently is okay with the grands).
I am approaching the end of the original blog, which was to be the story of four boys during their early years, the years spent in Herbert, Saskatchewan. I've dealt with Primero, Segundo and Tercero's early days, and am honing in on Quarto's arrival. This blog has been anything but linear--it's dipsy-doodled around contemporary musings on gender, recreational activities, cooking bacon for crowds, shifting socio-cultural constructs, renovation nightmares as well as various boy-and-hair-raising adventures. But then, after all, I am female, and therefore I write in Écriture féminine, that cyclical, non-linear manner so beloved of French feminists such as Julia Kristeva and Helen Cixous. (Finally, I get to actually use my Literary Criticism class). And, as I believe I pointed out way last year, that's how memory works. It dipsy-doodles around, refuses to walk on a leash, pops up at inopportune times, and also deserts us (like Homer Simpson's brain--"D'oh, I'm out of here") when we need it most--needing to remember where we left our glasses, car-keys, the car, etc.
Perhaps the last several months of shadow-boxing was really a preparation for shifting gears, away from the memories of being a parent to small children, and into the realities of grandparenting small children. It's a different role for a very different world. We are now realizing how foolish those parental curses were ("May you have a child just like you..."), especially if they've come true. After all, do we want to deal with this shit yet again, albeit one generation removed?
No, we wish for smooth sailing for those grandkids, and for living long enough to imprint something of ourselves on their memories. It's uncharted territory for us, this grandparenting. And while our own parents were pretty swell grandparents in their own rite, we know we will have to do things our way, whatever that may be.
Thank God Barb and Eldon are still around, and live just up the road (a little further than across the street, as in Herbert, but pretty close, nonetheless). They've been doing this for years now, and have been pretty cool grandparents. We can, as usual, learn a lot from them.
And so, the next couple of blog posts will wrap up the child-rearing journey. I have no desire to delve into the teenage years--they're still pretty raw in our memories, and had challenges that are repercussing (is that a word?) yet. No, I will draw the curtain of silence over those years and move into the present, into grandparenting. It has the shiny promise of being new and uncharted, of a future that is still to be shaped, of experiences yet to be lived. After all, why did I battle that old shadow, anyway, if not for the right to emerge into the world, where life is to be lived, full speed ahead and damn the torpedos (life always sends torpedos, it seems).
So I end this post on a brink, a cusp, a liminal space. I will finish the old, and work my way into the new.
Stay tuned.
Not that I've stopped the various trips down memory lane that my brain keeps taking me on--it's just that I've lost interest in recording these trips. No one, including me, is very interested. After all, I haven't lived an exciting life--no journeys to exotic locales, no Nobel prizes won for anything, no 15 minutes (or even seconds) of Warholesque fame.
I feel as though these last months have been spent struggling with my shadow self, a Jungian concept that is helpful in understanding the importance of becoming aware of what it is that holds us back, keeps us down, stops us from doing. We battle with our shadow-self, and hopefully we win so we can take up our lives again. Like Persephone returning from the underworld, we emerge from our shadow-worlds and look back, still shaky from the encounter, thinking, "Boy, what was THAT? Whew, am I glad that's over, I think..."
That's pretty much where I am right now--shaky, but hopeful. I seem to be ready for action again. And, of course, for purposes of this blog, action summons up its own trajectory--also one of memory. Increasingly, I think, as we boomers become grandparents, moving up on the life-ladder rungs once occupied by our parents, we look back with misty-eyed fondness on those years spent in child-rearing.
We look at those children now--adults, some with children of their own, careers, partners, autonomous lives--and we think, How did we get here? WE weren't going to be grandparents like our parents were. We are the boomers, after all, and are going to re-make grandparenting into something cool. We will take our grandkids white-water rafting. We will harrass whalers on a Greenpeace boat, or protest transnational corporations at a world summit somewhere (although this might not be a good idea--remember Toronto). We will be the ultimate hip grandparents (and try not to break any hips in the process).
Jack and I are now grandparents--we are Grampy and Grammy (although "grampie" usually comes out sounding more like "grumpie"--fairly appropos, to my thinking). We've taken on the job our parents did in their last significant roles of our lives. It's a role that feels strange, like a really great pair of shoes that aren't broken in yet. We're not quite sure what our job is, other than spoiling the wee ones and being their buddies (something you couldn't do with your own kids, but apparently is okay with the grands).
I am approaching the end of the original blog, which was to be the story of four boys during their early years, the years spent in Herbert, Saskatchewan. I've dealt with Primero, Segundo and Tercero's early days, and am honing in on Quarto's arrival. This blog has been anything but linear--it's dipsy-doodled around contemporary musings on gender, recreational activities, cooking bacon for crowds, shifting socio-cultural constructs, renovation nightmares as well as various boy-and-hair-raising adventures. But then, after all, I am female, and therefore I write in Écriture féminine, that cyclical, non-linear manner so beloved of French feminists such as Julia Kristeva and Helen Cixous. (Finally, I get to actually use my Literary Criticism class). And, as I believe I pointed out way last year, that's how memory works. It dipsy-doodles around, refuses to walk on a leash, pops up at inopportune times, and also deserts us (like Homer Simpson's brain--"D'oh, I'm out of here") when we need it most--needing to remember where we left our glasses, car-keys, the car, etc.
Perhaps the last several months of shadow-boxing was really a preparation for shifting gears, away from the memories of being a parent to small children, and into the realities of grandparenting small children. It's a different role for a very different world. We are now realizing how foolish those parental curses were ("May you have a child just like you..."), especially if they've come true. After all, do we want to deal with this shit yet again, albeit one generation removed?
No, we wish for smooth sailing for those grandkids, and for living long enough to imprint something of ourselves on their memories. It's uncharted territory for us, this grandparenting. And while our own parents were pretty swell grandparents in their own rite, we know we will have to do things our way, whatever that may be.
Thank God Barb and Eldon are still around, and live just up the road (a little further than across the street, as in Herbert, but pretty close, nonetheless). They've been doing this for years now, and have been pretty cool grandparents. We can, as usual, learn a lot from them.
And so, the next couple of blog posts will wrap up the child-rearing journey. I have no desire to delve into the teenage years--they're still pretty raw in our memories, and had challenges that are repercussing (is that a word?) yet. No, I will draw the curtain of silence over those years and move into the present, into grandparenting. It has the shiny promise of being new and uncharted, of a future that is still to be shaped, of experiences yet to be lived. After all, why did I battle that old shadow, anyway, if not for the right to emerge into the world, where life is to be lived, full speed ahead and damn the torpedos (life always sends torpedos, it seems).
So I end this post on a brink, a cusp, a liminal space. I will finish the old, and work my way into the new.
Stay tuned.
Tuesday, January 4, 2011
Back in the saddle again (for Delores)
It's been a while since my last posting. I can offer the excuse of a busy fall teaching term--4 classes, commuting 3 hours a day 5 days a week--but that is only part of the picture. This writing project (and the remembering that goes along with it) demands energy and discipline that I find hard to maintain. I'm getting to an age where if I don't HAVE to do something, I sometimes don't do it. After years of doing things because they need doing, this is revolutionary. I'm increasingly taking as my mantra Danny Glover's statement to a pre-melt-downed Mel Gibson in the Lethal Weapon movies: "I'm getting too old for this sh@%t!"
But this writing project has gotten under my skin, wiggling away like a worm (icky metaphor, but apt). While I spent my Christmas break recovering from a crazy schedule, making baby quilts (2 new grandkids on the horizon) and watching too much television (I've become addicted to Modern Family), I kept eyeballing the computer, purposely refusing to visit my bookmarked blogger site. While I merrily emailed, checked Facebook, prepped for January's classes, surfed the net for important information (was the guy who played Dan-o on Hawaii Five Oh still alive?), the niggling, wiggling writing worm was doing its sub-epidermis boogie.
So here I am, back in the saddle again (to continue the over-arching cowboy-herding boys metaphor), a little creaky from lack of practice, but here, nevertheless.
Of course, I had to read over all the previous blogs to see where I left off. Despite wincing at my usual writing infractions (too many adjectives, too many annoying intrusions tucked between brackets), I felt okay about what I'd written thus far. It didn't completely suck. As my own literary critic, this was more than I'd hoped for.
One thing that I did accomplish over the break was re-connect with many of the people in this blog--Herbertians past, present and honorary. The older I get, the more precious these relationships become. Distance has made them tenuous, and I realized they needed tending. So I had a lot of long-distance conversations--how lovely to pick up the phone and dive into a conversation with people you share stories and histories with.
Which brings me to Barb and Eldon Derkson. Barb and Eldon lived across the street from us in Herbert. You may remember Barb's famous statement from a previous blog entry--she encouraged me to enjoy the kids when they were little, because the older they got, the bigger the problems became. You will also recall that I thought she was nuts, but have since re-considered, and realized that Barb was right, as she is about everything.
Barb and Eldon now live not far from us in a small town up-island (I've become a real Vancouver Islander--don'tcha know--anything north of Victoria is "up-island"). Barb is battling illness, and she is doing it in her usual gallant, funny and fierce way. Eldon is her stalwart caretaker. It's a job he is superb at.
While Barb has grown physically smaller (she jokes about being able to finally wear skinny jeans, but her toe ring has become too large), she has become awesomely great in all ways. Her great heart, always large and loving and funny, has taken the illness, swallowed it whole, and used it as fuel. I don't know how she does this, but it is an act of supreme heroism and love--love of life, all who live it, her family and friends, and the world. I am gob-smacked by her.
Jack and I are going to visit her tomorrow. I am feeling many emotions about seeing Barb and Eldon. I want to tell Barb many things. I want to tell her how much she has meant to me over the years, especially those early years of struggling to not kill the kids. She would phone and invite us over for coffee, sending over their youngest son (the only one left at home) to baby-sit. We'd go over, drink coffee and laugh at her stories of raising their five kids in Herbert. She seemed to have a sixth sense for how close to the edge I was--I'd be careening up to it, and she'd phone with an invitation, or she'd pop over for a visit, or she'd have some scheme for fun.
My mental photograph album is full of Barb's fun schemes. She was an avid Dallas fan, that eighties prime-time soap opera. When Miss Elly got married, she invited us over to watch with her. She decked herself out in a big floppy hat and a flowing thrift-shop formal. The effect was marred somewhat by the gigantic cast she had on her arm, as she'd broken her wrist a few days before. But that didn't stop Barb from celebrating Miss Elly's wedding in high style.
She was famous for her Hallowe'en costumes. She would make herself completely unrecognizable, and hit Herbert's streets (all eight) with the kid-hordes. Because Barb was usually the only adult trick or treating, you had a pretty good idea who the tallest kid was standing on the doorstep. But she was so good at entering whatever bizarre character she'd invented, you were never sure, and so you just handed over the candy and marvelled at her moxy.
Last night I was on the phone with Dee and Rollie. We'd not spoken in some time, and had a long and wonderful conversation. When I mentioned Barb and her struggle, Rollie recalled the cross-country skiing episode. We roared with laughter--we all have told it so many times to so many people, it has assumed mythical status.
It started, of course, as one of Barb's fun schemes. She organized a cross-country ski trip. In Saskatchewan, cross-country skiing was the only kind possible, given the lack of vertical slopes. Barb and Eldon always skied the pristine pasture of their friends, the Blacks. There was a small trailer tucked away in a clearing, with a fire-pit. The trailer had blankets, a kettle, and tea-bags. Everything else was packed in.
I can't remember who baby-sat for us--likely Barb's boy, Will. Thrilled with any activity that didn't involve hauling around toddlers and a baby, we packed our skis, wax, poles, mitts and tooks and away we went. Dee and Rollie, Jack and I, Duane and Natalie, Ramin and his recently-arrived sister Noushi (Ramin and Noushi were Iranian refugees who'd sought asylum in Canada after the revolution and had become part of the Herbert family) caravanned out into the countryside, parking on the snowy grid-road flanking Black's pasture.
We parked in single file, cars leaning into the shallow ditch. Eldon parked behind this line, having lead the caravan safely to our destination. Car doors slamming, skis and poles stuck into the snow like giant toothpicks, we donned boots, hats, mitts, and broke out the wax. This was before waxless skis--so we had flat plastic tins with little cylinders called "farts" (to the delight of the boys).
Barb had marched around to the back of their station wagon. Leaning on its rear bumper, she balanced on one leg while jamming her other foot into her boot. Suddenly, the car lurched backwards and knocked her on her ass into the snowy ditch. Sputtering expletives and brushing off snow, she climbed out of the ditch and grabbed the boot she'd been trying to get on her foot. Balanced like an angry flamingo on one leg, still swearing at Eldon, Barb was jerking at her boot laces when the car gave another backwards lurch and bounced her back into the ditch. As she hauled herself to her feet yet again, she turned the air blue with invective, all of which she hurled at Eldon.
Eldon, in the meantime, rolled the window down, leaned out and, oblivious to the carnage he'd just caused, chirped, "Everything clear back there?"
Barb called Eldon names I'd never heard before. It was impressive.
Rollie said after that he thought it must have been some shtick that Barb and Eldon pulled regularly, because who would back into his wife twice and THEN ask if everything was clear? To this day, we're not sure, but it was entertaining, to say the least.
Waxed up, be-tooked and be-mittened, we set off into the snowy pasture, cutting trail in the new snow. The sky was white, I remember, and the skinny aspen bluffs were silent--no birds sang and all the little critters were bedded down for the winter under their blanket of snow. Except us. We sang, hollered, bantered, puffed and generally had a great time sliding over the snow.
Rollie, Jack, Eldon and Duane took turns breaking trail. Ramin, whose entire skiing experience was one two-hour trek around Herbert's grid roads the previous week, was coaching Noushi in the finer points of Nordic skiing. "Isn't this great?" he kept yawping, swinging his poles alarmingly. Noushi had arrived from the balmy Phillipines, where she'd been going to school, two days previously. Swathed head to toe in borrowed winter gear, her lovely face pale as the snow surrounding her, her eyes glazed in what we later understood to be terror, Noushi simply nodded and shivered, nodded and shivered. (Nushi told us recently that she had nightmares about that ski trip for years--some welcome to Saskatchewan!)
We finally arrived at the trailer in the clearing. A tiny, round-shouldered coffin with a window and a door, it promised hot drinks, blankets and a fire. Someone had left wood in the fire-pit, and we soon had a fire. Eldon pulled out blankets and we hunkered into these as we watched the flames. Barb filled the kettle with snow and laid it on the fire--yellow flames turned to red coals slashed with grey-white cinders. Bits of ash floated up into the still, white air, like topsy-turvy snow. During conversation lulls, we noticed the silence, and sat on the logs around the fire, leaning into each other for warmth.
Eldon went to the trailer for another blanket. As he pulled it out and flapped it open, a tiny field-mouse popped out and onto the ground. It appeared asleep.
"Would you look at that?" someone said, I can't remember who--someone who had a poetic and sweet view of nature, apparently. "Mother Nature looks after her own--this little guy is sleeping until spring."
Jack nudged the mouse with his booted toe. "It's dead." he announced. "Frozen." and gave it a kick. It bounced off the trailer, hit a tree and careened off into the snow like a ping-pong ball. It seemed to bounce forever, that frozen little mouse-orb. We hear it yet--ka-ching, ka-ching, ka-ching!
Chastened by our lesson about nature's red tooth and claw, we turned back to the kettle, waiting for the water to boil. By now, the temperature was dropping, and we were getting cold. We needed some hot tea in our bellies before the return trip.
It takes a long time for water to boil in a metal kettle on a small, aspen-twig fire in sub-sub-zero weather. Cold was creeping into our toes and fingers. We pulled the blankets tighter, on the lookout for frozen rodents in the folds.
Finally, Barb said "To hell with this--it's close enough" and dumped several assorted tea-bags into the barely-bubbling water. She jammed a spoon into it and furiously mashed the tea-bags. "It's ready," she announced. "Who's got the cups?"
The great silence of the northern plains in winter continued. Cups? Weren't those in the trailer? Because no one had brought any. Apparently cups weren't in the trailer. No cups--nothing to hold the hot liquid.
Those who say necessity is the mother of invention are right, although sometimes the inventions are lame. Functional, but lame. Duane, inspired by invention's mom, suggested we use the wax tins. So we did--we opened them up, hoicked out the wax tubes and carefully poured in the tea. Waxy globules bloomed on its surface. We were cold--we didn't care.
Because we had more people than tins, we had to pass them around. For those of you who remember those farts tins, you will recall their shallowness--an inch deep on either side. While this facilitated rapid cooling so we didn't burn our lips, it also set off tiny tea tidal waves that splashed us as we moved them around.
Warmed by the tea and our success at roughing it in the bush, we tucked away the blankets (Rollie wanted to find the mouse and put him back, but Dee called him an idiot, which dampened his enthusiasm) and the kettle and geared up for the return trip. By this time, Noushi was almost comatose with cold, but valiantly set off, propelled by visions of a warm car and an end to the madness.
We hadn't really figured on the temperature. It was December, and Saskatchewan. A deceptively mild morning had lulled us into a false sense of complacency. While we'd huddled around the fire, kicking frozen mice and drinking waxy tea, the cold crept in. The short day darkened the white sky to a dull grey. The air bit at our nostrils, and the snow squeaked under our skis. The return seemed longer and harder, the twin grooves in the snow from our trip standing in purple shadow.
We didn't holler or talk or sing on the way back. We simply skied, heads down, arms swinging, trying to outrun the cold. This was the part that Noushi night-mared about for years. She said in her dreams, the purple snow-tracks went on forever, as did she, until the inching cold froze her stiffly upright in her skis. That was the point where she always woke up, thankful that she never had to ski in Saskatchewan again.
We did fine until the last gully before the barb-wire fence skirting the grid-road and the cars. On the way out, the gully had been no more than a fun slide down and up shallow banks. Returning, tired and cold, we approached its now steep cliffs with dismay.
We all managed to get down without falling and scrambled back up without incident, if not without grace. Form was forgotten. Even Ramin had stopped giving pointers and was simply moving one foot diggedly in front of the other. We all managed, that is, except Barb. She fell spectacularly on the way down, poles and skis pinwheeling. Rollie, directly behind her in the ski-line, helped her up. Cursing, Barb looked at the looming embankment, turned to Rollie and said, "You'll have to push me."
"What?" Rollie asked, the cold appearing to have slowed his thought processes. "You'll have to PUSH me!" Barb said again, setting her skis in the tracks, grabbing her poles, and yanking at her scarf. Rollie, shifting from boot to boot, didn't quite know what to do. He tugged at his took, took off his gloves, put them back on again, adjusted his poles, and finally said, "Uh, what? Uh, push? Uh, how?"
"Put your hand on my ass and PUSH!" announced Barb. Rollie blushed and adjusted his gloves again. "Uh, gosh, Barb, I don't think I really know you well enough to..."
"PUSH!" hollered Barb. "It's goddamn cold and I want to get the hell out of her so PUSH, for Chrissakes!"
Flustered, Rollie brought his hands up to Barb's butt--not quite sure where exactly to place them, his hands moulding the air like a Balinese dancer's. "PUSH!" she yelled again. Rollie bit the bullet and, laying his hands on Barb's rear end, shoved her up the bank.
The rest of us, waiting safely on the up-side of the embankment, chanted "Push! Push! Push!" in a kind of fascinated rhythm. You'd think Rollie was helping Barb birth a baby to hear us.
Finally, Rollie got Barb up and over the embankment's far side. Barb adjusted her scarf again and ski-marched the last quarter-mile to the fence. Oh, the blessed fence, which meant the blessed cars and a blessed end to skiing.
Fortunately, no one backed into anyone as we clambered, frozen stiff, into the cold cars. Thankfully they all started, for the temperature had plummeted to battery-freezing levels. We all survived, and Noushi reports that she no longer has nightmares (although it took a long time).
This is our favourite Barb story--the mythical December-in-Saskatchewan cross-country ski trip. I see her yet, Rollie shoving her up the bank, the rest of us chanting like some insane Greek Chorus. I see her yet, skis flying, catapulting into the snowy ditch, and Eldon, smiling, asking if it was all clear. And Barb, cursing him out like a sailor. I learned some new words that day.
I learned much more from Barb--who has the equivalent of a PhD in parenting and grand-parenting, and who has been amazingly generous with her time, her affection, her humour and her energy. Barb's family has all re-located to Vancouver Island. Indeed, when all our kids wound up on the island, we claimed to have "pulled a Barb-and-Eldon." But of course, her family is much larger than her children and grand-children.
Barb and Eldon adopt willy-nilly. We've all become her family. Barb and Eldon, Saskatchewan gardeners extraordinaire, have adopted us all, have loved and cherished us all, have shared their considerable wisdom and experience with us all. And oh, those fun schemes!
Time and energy may be winding down, but her affection and her humour seem to grow exponentially. She has a heart as great as the white skies and endless snowy plains we skied through all those years ago. Barb's great heart has given so many of us so much. Her fun schemes have supplied laughter and stories.
She is simply the best. I love her.
But this writing project has gotten under my skin, wiggling away like a worm (icky metaphor, but apt). While I spent my Christmas break recovering from a crazy schedule, making baby quilts (2 new grandkids on the horizon) and watching too much television (I've become addicted to Modern Family), I kept eyeballing the computer, purposely refusing to visit my bookmarked blogger site. While I merrily emailed, checked Facebook, prepped for January's classes, surfed the net for important information (was the guy who played Dan-o on Hawaii Five Oh still alive?), the niggling, wiggling writing worm was doing its sub-epidermis boogie.
So here I am, back in the saddle again (to continue the over-arching cowboy-herding boys metaphor), a little creaky from lack of practice, but here, nevertheless.
Of course, I had to read over all the previous blogs to see where I left off. Despite wincing at my usual writing infractions (too many adjectives, too many annoying intrusions tucked between brackets), I felt okay about what I'd written thus far. It didn't completely suck. As my own literary critic, this was more than I'd hoped for.
One thing that I did accomplish over the break was re-connect with many of the people in this blog--Herbertians past, present and honorary. The older I get, the more precious these relationships become. Distance has made them tenuous, and I realized they needed tending. So I had a lot of long-distance conversations--how lovely to pick up the phone and dive into a conversation with people you share stories and histories with.
Which brings me to Barb and Eldon Derkson. Barb and Eldon lived across the street from us in Herbert. You may remember Barb's famous statement from a previous blog entry--she encouraged me to enjoy the kids when they were little, because the older they got, the bigger the problems became. You will also recall that I thought she was nuts, but have since re-considered, and realized that Barb was right, as she is about everything.
Barb and Eldon now live not far from us in a small town up-island (I've become a real Vancouver Islander--don'tcha know--anything north of Victoria is "up-island"). Barb is battling illness, and she is doing it in her usual gallant, funny and fierce way. Eldon is her stalwart caretaker. It's a job he is superb at.
While Barb has grown physically smaller (she jokes about being able to finally wear skinny jeans, but her toe ring has become too large), she has become awesomely great in all ways. Her great heart, always large and loving and funny, has taken the illness, swallowed it whole, and used it as fuel. I don't know how she does this, but it is an act of supreme heroism and love--love of life, all who live it, her family and friends, and the world. I am gob-smacked by her.
Jack and I are going to visit her tomorrow. I am feeling many emotions about seeing Barb and Eldon. I want to tell Barb many things. I want to tell her how much she has meant to me over the years, especially those early years of struggling to not kill the kids. She would phone and invite us over for coffee, sending over their youngest son (the only one left at home) to baby-sit. We'd go over, drink coffee and laugh at her stories of raising their five kids in Herbert. She seemed to have a sixth sense for how close to the edge I was--I'd be careening up to it, and she'd phone with an invitation, or she'd pop over for a visit, or she'd have some scheme for fun.
My mental photograph album is full of Barb's fun schemes. She was an avid Dallas fan, that eighties prime-time soap opera. When Miss Elly got married, she invited us over to watch with her. She decked herself out in a big floppy hat and a flowing thrift-shop formal. The effect was marred somewhat by the gigantic cast she had on her arm, as she'd broken her wrist a few days before. But that didn't stop Barb from celebrating Miss Elly's wedding in high style.
She was famous for her Hallowe'en costumes. She would make herself completely unrecognizable, and hit Herbert's streets (all eight) with the kid-hordes. Because Barb was usually the only adult trick or treating, you had a pretty good idea who the tallest kid was standing on the doorstep. But she was so good at entering whatever bizarre character she'd invented, you were never sure, and so you just handed over the candy and marvelled at her moxy.
Last night I was on the phone with Dee and Rollie. We'd not spoken in some time, and had a long and wonderful conversation. When I mentioned Barb and her struggle, Rollie recalled the cross-country skiing episode. We roared with laughter--we all have told it so many times to so many people, it has assumed mythical status.
It started, of course, as one of Barb's fun schemes. She organized a cross-country ski trip. In Saskatchewan, cross-country skiing was the only kind possible, given the lack of vertical slopes. Barb and Eldon always skied the pristine pasture of their friends, the Blacks. There was a small trailer tucked away in a clearing, with a fire-pit. The trailer had blankets, a kettle, and tea-bags. Everything else was packed in.
I can't remember who baby-sat for us--likely Barb's boy, Will. Thrilled with any activity that didn't involve hauling around toddlers and a baby, we packed our skis, wax, poles, mitts and tooks and away we went. Dee and Rollie, Jack and I, Duane and Natalie, Ramin and his recently-arrived sister Noushi (Ramin and Noushi were Iranian refugees who'd sought asylum in Canada after the revolution and had become part of the Herbert family) caravanned out into the countryside, parking on the snowy grid-road flanking Black's pasture.
We parked in single file, cars leaning into the shallow ditch. Eldon parked behind this line, having lead the caravan safely to our destination. Car doors slamming, skis and poles stuck into the snow like giant toothpicks, we donned boots, hats, mitts, and broke out the wax. This was before waxless skis--so we had flat plastic tins with little cylinders called "farts" (to the delight of the boys).
Barb had marched around to the back of their station wagon. Leaning on its rear bumper, she balanced on one leg while jamming her other foot into her boot. Suddenly, the car lurched backwards and knocked her on her ass into the snowy ditch. Sputtering expletives and brushing off snow, she climbed out of the ditch and grabbed the boot she'd been trying to get on her foot. Balanced like an angry flamingo on one leg, still swearing at Eldon, Barb was jerking at her boot laces when the car gave another backwards lurch and bounced her back into the ditch. As she hauled herself to her feet yet again, she turned the air blue with invective, all of which she hurled at Eldon.
Eldon, in the meantime, rolled the window down, leaned out and, oblivious to the carnage he'd just caused, chirped, "Everything clear back there?"
Barb called Eldon names I'd never heard before. It was impressive.
Rollie said after that he thought it must have been some shtick that Barb and Eldon pulled regularly, because who would back into his wife twice and THEN ask if everything was clear? To this day, we're not sure, but it was entertaining, to say the least.
Waxed up, be-tooked and be-mittened, we set off into the snowy pasture, cutting trail in the new snow. The sky was white, I remember, and the skinny aspen bluffs were silent--no birds sang and all the little critters were bedded down for the winter under their blanket of snow. Except us. We sang, hollered, bantered, puffed and generally had a great time sliding over the snow.
Rollie, Jack, Eldon and Duane took turns breaking trail. Ramin, whose entire skiing experience was one two-hour trek around Herbert's grid roads the previous week, was coaching Noushi in the finer points of Nordic skiing. "Isn't this great?" he kept yawping, swinging his poles alarmingly. Noushi had arrived from the balmy Phillipines, where she'd been going to school, two days previously. Swathed head to toe in borrowed winter gear, her lovely face pale as the snow surrounding her, her eyes glazed in what we later understood to be terror, Noushi simply nodded and shivered, nodded and shivered. (Nushi told us recently that she had nightmares about that ski trip for years--some welcome to Saskatchewan!)
We finally arrived at the trailer in the clearing. A tiny, round-shouldered coffin with a window and a door, it promised hot drinks, blankets and a fire. Someone had left wood in the fire-pit, and we soon had a fire. Eldon pulled out blankets and we hunkered into these as we watched the flames. Barb filled the kettle with snow and laid it on the fire--yellow flames turned to red coals slashed with grey-white cinders. Bits of ash floated up into the still, white air, like topsy-turvy snow. During conversation lulls, we noticed the silence, and sat on the logs around the fire, leaning into each other for warmth.
Eldon went to the trailer for another blanket. As he pulled it out and flapped it open, a tiny field-mouse popped out and onto the ground. It appeared asleep.
"Would you look at that?" someone said, I can't remember who--someone who had a poetic and sweet view of nature, apparently. "Mother Nature looks after her own--this little guy is sleeping until spring."
Jack nudged the mouse with his booted toe. "It's dead." he announced. "Frozen." and gave it a kick. It bounced off the trailer, hit a tree and careened off into the snow like a ping-pong ball. It seemed to bounce forever, that frozen little mouse-orb. We hear it yet--ka-ching, ka-ching, ka-ching!
Chastened by our lesson about nature's red tooth and claw, we turned back to the kettle, waiting for the water to boil. By now, the temperature was dropping, and we were getting cold. We needed some hot tea in our bellies before the return trip.
It takes a long time for water to boil in a metal kettle on a small, aspen-twig fire in sub-sub-zero weather. Cold was creeping into our toes and fingers. We pulled the blankets tighter, on the lookout for frozen rodents in the folds.
Finally, Barb said "To hell with this--it's close enough" and dumped several assorted tea-bags into the barely-bubbling water. She jammed a spoon into it and furiously mashed the tea-bags. "It's ready," she announced. "Who's got the cups?"
The great silence of the northern plains in winter continued. Cups? Weren't those in the trailer? Because no one had brought any. Apparently cups weren't in the trailer. No cups--nothing to hold the hot liquid.
Those who say necessity is the mother of invention are right, although sometimes the inventions are lame. Functional, but lame. Duane, inspired by invention's mom, suggested we use the wax tins. So we did--we opened them up, hoicked out the wax tubes and carefully poured in the tea. Waxy globules bloomed on its surface. We were cold--we didn't care.
Because we had more people than tins, we had to pass them around. For those of you who remember those farts tins, you will recall their shallowness--an inch deep on either side. While this facilitated rapid cooling so we didn't burn our lips, it also set off tiny tea tidal waves that splashed us as we moved them around.
Warmed by the tea and our success at roughing it in the bush, we tucked away the blankets (Rollie wanted to find the mouse and put him back, but Dee called him an idiot, which dampened his enthusiasm) and the kettle and geared up for the return trip. By this time, Noushi was almost comatose with cold, but valiantly set off, propelled by visions of a warm car and an end to the madness.
We hadn't really figured on the temperature. It was December, and Saskatchewan. A deceptively mild morning had lulled us into a false sense of complacency. While we'd huddled around the fire, kicking frozen mice and drinking waxy tea, the cold crept in. The short day darkened the white sky to a dull grey. The air bit at our nostrils, and the snow squeaked under our skis. The return seemed longer and harder, the twin grooves in the snow from our trip standing in purple shadow.
We didn't holler or talk or sing on the way back. We simply skied, heads down, arms swinging, trying to outrun the cold. This was the part that Noushi night-mared about for years. She said in her dreams, the purple snow-tracks went on forever, as did she, until the inching cold froze her stiffly upright in her skis. That was the point where she always woke up, thankful that she never had to ski in Saskatchewan again.
We did fine until the last gully before the barb-wire fence skirting the grid-road and the cars. On the way out, the gully had been no more than a fun slide down and up shallow banks. Returning, tired and cold, we approached its now steep cliffs with dismay.
We all managed to get down without falling and scrambled back up without incident, if not without grace. Form was forgotten. Even Ramin had stopped giving pointers and was simply moving one foot diggedly in front of the other. We all managed, that is, except Barb. She fell spectacularly on the way down, poles and skis pinwheeling. Rollie, directly behind her in the ski-line, helped her up. Cursing, Barb looked at the looming embankment, turned to Rollie and said, "You'll have to push me."
"What?" Rollie asked, the cold appearing to have slowed his thought processes. "You'll have to PUSH me!" Barb said again, setting her skis in the tracks, grabbing her poles, and yanking at her scarf. Rollie, shifting from boot to boot, didn't quite know what to do. He tugged at his took, took off his gloves, put them back on again, adjusted his poles, and finally said, "Uh, what? Uh, push? Uh, how?"
"Put your hand on my ass and PUSH!" announced Barb. Rollie blushed and adjusted his gloves again. "Uh, gosh, Barb, I don't think I really know you well enough to..."
"PUSH!" hollered Barb. "It's goddamn cold and I want to get the hell out of her so PUSH, for Chrissakes!"
Flustered, Rollie brought his hands up to Barb's butt--not quite sure where exactly to place them, his hands moulding the air like a Balinese dancer's. "PUSH!" she yelled again. Rollie bit the bullet and, laying his hands on Barb's rear end, shoved her up the bank.
The rest of us, waiting safely on the up-side of the embankment, chanted "Push! Push! Push!" in a kind of fascinated rhythm. You'd think Rollie was helping Barb birth a baby to hear us.
Finally, Rollie got Barb up and over the embankment's far side. Barb adjusted her scarf again and ski-marched the last quarter-mile to the fence. Oh, the blessed fence, which meant the blessed cars and a blessed end to skiing.
Fortunately, no one backed into anyone as we clambered, frozen stiff, into the cold cars. Thankfully they all started, for the temperature had plummeted to battery-freezing levels. We all survived, and Noushi reports that she no longer has nightmares (although it took a long time).
This is our favourite Barb story--the mythical December-in-Saskatchewan cross-country ski trip. I see her yet, Rollie shoving her up the bank, the rest of us chanting like some insane Greek Chorus. I see her yet, skis flying, catapulting into the snowy ditch, and Eldon, smiling, asking if it was all clear. And Barb, cursing him out like a sailor. I learned some new words that day.
I learned much more from Barb--who has the equivalent of a PhD in parenting and grand-parenting, and who has been amazingly generous with her time, her affection, her humour and her energy. Barb's family has all re-located to Vancouver Island. Indeed, when all our kids wound up on the island, we claimed to have "pulled a Barb-and-Eldon." But of course, her family is much larger than her children and grand-children.
Barb and Eldon adopt willy-nilly. We've all become her family. Barb and Eldon, Saskatchewan gardeners extraordinaire, have adopted us all, have loved and cherished us all, have shared their considerable wisdom and experience with us all. And oh, those fun schemes!
Time and energy may be winding down, but her affection and her humour seem to grow exponentially. She has a heart as great as the white skies and endless snowy plains we skied through all those years ago. Barb's great heart has given so many of us so much. Her fun schemes have supplied laughter and stories.
She is simply the best. I love her.
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