On Reading

On many occasions as I sat reading a book by some author whom I love and admire, I have fantasized writing a story, as it were, within the fabric of their cloth. This happens especially when I read Elizabeth Strout. She has a way of telling her story as though she and I are having tea together and she is simply telling me about things that she had been thinking about, memories that had come to her, or something that had recently struck her imagination. The tone is so comfortable and true that I, the reader, feel drawn in and taken along, without excitement or stress, to an understanding of the woman herself and of those of whom she is speaking.

Her writing is always interesting and pertinent. It has an affect, on me at least, of opening me to my own thoughts and stories, things I think about, perhaps fear or hope for, people who have been parts of my life over these many decades, things that I have done, am happy about, or have regretted. Her non-judgemental, always interested way of being opens me to a quiet sense of peace within which I can share any story of my life without shame or undue pride.

My life has been long. I am now 84 years of age, in quite good health with the ususal limitations of energy and memory. I am married for the third, in a way I should say, the fourth time. I insert that caveat because while I was 44 to 49, the entire time that I was in graduate school, I lived with and loved Michael Bergot. It was a marriage, like each of the others, chosen for particular reasons, lived/enjoyed/endured for its time, and like the other two marriages that came to an end, did so in prolonged and painful circumstances.

A couple of years ago I invested in what is called an Oura ring. I wear its thick circumference on my index finger to prevent squezing it between any two fingers. It gives me on-going information about my activity levels, sleep, breathing, body temperature and so on. I see that I have long periods of REM sleep during the night, the periods in which we have dreams. And nightly I am aware of long and detailed dreams, colourful dreams, stories of which I capture only pieces, but stories of interest nonetheless. It seems to me that these are the nightime versions of the memories that come to me when I am awake, of the many decades, experiences, relationships of my life. These memories are sometimes of a visual or auditory nature, but also they can be simply a sense, a feeling, something ineffable.

When I began to think of all of the various places where I have lived or travelled in my lifetime, all of the different ‘careers’ or lines of work that I have taken on, of the

people I have known, people who have come in and out of my life as I have come in and out of theirs, I started to think of my grandmother, Gramma Craig, aka, Alberta Stewart Craig, ‘Mother’ to her children and husband, sometimes ‘Bertie’ when he was in a hurry to reach her.

Gramma lived a life of tremendous stability. She was born on the farm of her parents, married John Alexander Craig from the farm next along the road, had eight children and a bevvy of granchildren with him, cared for the home, the children, and early-on the workers for their lumber mill who camped across the road from the farmhouse. She was responsible for everything during the periods that my grandfather went to Ottawa by train for the sale of livestock, or later to Toronto from 1931-9 when he was the Lanark County member of Ontario’s governmemt. This she did with help from a local girl, later from one of her two older daughters after they had completed grade eight – the norm at the time. Together, they would cook three substantial meals a day, cleaning and washing everything by hand, in an area of Ontario that to the time she was 80 still had no electicity. Around then my granparents left the farm, moving to the close-by village of Calabogie. Her entire life was encompassed by that small area.

Yet of course she was so much more than that. She was known locally as Mrs. Craig, ‘a real lady,’ and I think of her in that way as well. I stayed at the farm alone from time time, though sometimes with my brother Craig, four years my junior. Gramma and I would go by car with my granfather – she never drove the car – to shop in Calabogie, or to visit with some of the neighbours along that road. Living then in Ottawa as an eight or nine year old, I would marvel at what I viewed as the shabby homes of the people whom they visited. I see now that they were the homesteads of people settled there over a hundred years earlier, made of unpainted wood, with small interiors and few rooms. It’s possible that their own original home was of similar construction. It burned to the ground in 1934.

The new home was larger with five smallish bedrooms upstairs; a large kichen dominated by an iron stove, fired by wood, with a pantry and a small room for washing up; a living room rarely used, a dining room used mainly on a Sunday when more of the family came for a weekend, or, on Sundays when after a church service held in the one-room school that had been the early seat of learning for all of my aunts, uncles, and my mother, Gramma would invite the minister to the farm for dinner, always served at noon. I remember going to that place for church with my grandparents and being present when the current preacher was invited. It was an encounter between a young gentleman who had come from one of the surrounding towns to give a service and and a sermon to people living in the countryside, and Mrs. Craig, a lady of substance and maturity inviting him into her home and family for a meal as a token of gratitude. They were clearly respectful of one another.

My parents had had a rarely occasioned mixed marriage in the late 1930s world of the Ottawa Valley where Scots Protestants and Irish Catholics founded homes, lives, and families, adhering in the main to their own kind, their own customs and religions. My mother had agreed as a condition for the celebration of their marriage in Ottawa, that the children would be brought up as Catholics. Though all of this had happened rather quickly, her parents did not object and were kindly and accepting of my father. After grade school, my mother had boarded at the Catholic high school in Calabogie. Though never pressured in any fashion by the religious Sisters who ran the school, her years there gave her a sense of Catholicism. After four years of marriage, instructions by a Monseignor in Belleville where we were living, brought my mother, Mary, into the Church, a move I suspect made in part because it simply made more sense to unite the family in their Sunday rituals. Another part might have been because of the admiration held by Mary and the middle-aged, interesting monseignor for one another. She had a lovely photograph of him riding a horse like a true equestrian, and, a small desk that he had given to her at one of their catechetical meetings. My mother was a beautiful and clever woman who would elicit admiration from many sources.

I mention this piece of family history to underline the particularity/peculularity for me as a young girl in attending Sunday services in the humble setting of the one-room school on the Lanark Road, and, of witnessing the engagement of the young minister by my grandmother for dinner afterwards. I had no adversity within towards this experience. Religion to me was probably like to any child of that age, simply the regular, accepted culture of the family and community. But the striking difference between the school house and the large, almost palatial (in comparison), gold and jewelry-decorated churches that we attended in Belleville and in Perth when visiting my father’s family, had an impact upon me, in some way revisited later as other incidents taught to me the distinctions, the relativity of what in one confession might be seen as the absolute, unquestionable Truth of it’s particular teaching. I have written about this before and may possibly return to it again.

I feel as I am writing about my grandmother the feelings that I must have had when I was that child who stayed with her from time to time. I feel her solidity, her quiet humour, her care and interest in me, though certainly there was never any direct comment or action demonstrating this. In those days and in those cultures people did not throw around the hugs and kisses, the ‘love you’ farewells with which we are so familiar today. Gramma would have me come to dry the dishes as she washed them in a large basin of terribly hot water set upon a table. She knew that I was addicted to sweets, giving me for my breakfast toasted thick slices of bread, hot from the large iron stove’s flame, slathered with butter and brown sugar and served with a mug of hot chocolate. When she baked cookies or cupcakes, she would try to hide them from me, knowing that I would indulge myself if she was having a nap or someplace else in the house. I would usually find them, however, but I think that this only amused her.

I am happy to recognize, to feel emotionally right now that I was loved by my grandmother and that I loved her as well, to feel in my body that sense of connection between us that as a child and for all these decades since, I had not an awareness.