mothers and daughters and hoarders

The shock - that this person came out of my body! Today my daughter came over to help me organize my office, which is buried under snowdrifts, an avalanche of paper, especially now that I'm digging into my mother's bulging bags of letters. Help! I cried to Anna. For example, I said, showing her an adorable letter I wrote to my father when I was just six and my parents were separated, what should I do with this?
Throw it out, she said.
I recoiled as if she'd hit me. But it's adorable! I was 6! It's to my dad!
How many letters do you need to remind you that you loved your father and were a good writer at six? she answered calmly.
Every single one! I answered internally but not out loud.

But she's right. Because, as she so sweetly pointed out, if I don't throw it out, someone else will, and we both know who that person will be.

My mother was a hoarder - not pathological, just a "born poor lived through the war" hoarder. I had to get rid of her decades' worth of Bon Appetit magazines and her lifetime collection of knee-hi stockings among many other things, including a phenomenal pile of paper and plastic bags, and let's please not mention her freezer. She kept almost every letter ever written to her, especially from her lovers - the ones before Dad, then Dad, then the one in 1956 who wrote her nearly every day for years, it seems (care of a romantic family friend sympathetic to the cause), and the one in 1971, when I was 21 - they're all there. Mum knew who I am, a delver, an investigator, a family chronicler, and she knew I'd find them and read them, as I am in fact doing now. That eventually, perhaps, I'd tell the story.

But my own daughter is the opposite. She's busy living her busy life with no interest in delving into the past, in the mystery of who those people with her genes were back then. She honours family - she has read my Jewish Shakespeare book though not the others or the articles and certainly not this blog - but she's not interested in reams of old paper, in the letter I wrote to Dad when I was six, what that says about me, about him, about our life then.

So my job now is to deal with it all and then get rid of it so she doesn't have to.

She also enjoys mainstream films I wouldn't go near, like superhero movies, and TV shows too; she likes soft drinks and junk food and gooey desserts, and she is the most sensible, wise, grounded person I know. I turn to her often now for advice on simple matters. She listens, she advises - as I do, occasionally, for her. She never forgets that I'm her mother, as my own mother, anxious to tell me her secrets, did to me; there are no secrets here. And despite the fact that she wants me to throw out precious letters and sometimes drinks Coca-cola, I adore her.

She told me what's going on in her sons' school because of Ford's cuts to education - for example, there is now one educational assistant in a school of 700 children, many of them recent immigrants with poor or no English language skills. A nightmare which will only get worse. The strikes will start soon.

Annals of modern life department: at the playground on the weekend, as Eli played, I listened to a bunch of pre-adolescent girls who'd draped themselves over the climbing apparatus. And then one howled, "Olivia, PLEASE don't post that!" Olivia must have taken an unflattering photo. And I realized the horror for kids of this social media age - your friends are there with their phones ALL THE TIME, as are your enemies. They can photograph, even film you whenever they want and put it up for millions to see. Another kind of nightmare.

Advantages of being old department.

information on Beth's courses at U of T and Ryerson

Dear writers, how things change - last term I had very small classes at both U of T and Ryerson, to the point that I wondered if memoir was starting to fade as an interest among student writers.

This term, I'm happy to report, my class at U of T is completely full more than 3 weeks before term begins. The cutoff number at Ryerson is 4 or 5 more students per class than at U of T, but my class there, starting next Monday, is nearly full too.

I just watched a moving documentary about Warren Buffett. It was moving because at least partially a love story, a tribute to his wife Suzie who, he says, helped make him the humane man he is - a man who has given away many billions of dollars and taken great pleasure in doing so. In the film he speaks to a group of high school students and tells them, if they can find work they'd want to do even if they didn't need a job, they'll spend their lives skipping out of bed in the morning, as he does.

And I thought, lucky me, Warren, I'm one of those. I love the job I've been doing for 25 years at Ryerson and 12 years at U of T. Though I don't often skip out of bed, and it's likely I won't tomorrow morning - see today's post about body pain - still, I am energized and fed by love of my work.

As my dearest Wayson would say - Onward.

In which she comes in sixth and looks for cottages in Nova Scotia

Oh my, she said ruefully, I'm not the woman I once was. This weekend is the Cabbagetown Festival, the once-yearly event when my 'hood is taken over by garage sales, street food, arts and crafts, music - fun. This morning was the fundraising mini-marathon, a 2 k. fun run through the streets which I've done nearly every year since we moved in in 1986. At one point, when I moved into the Senior Women's category, I actually won. Twice. The first time I stopped to tie my shoelace and still won. But I'm years older now, and anyway, despite my classes at the Y, am simply not in shape any more.

Eli was here for a sleepover last night but did not want to run with me, so I left him briefly to the good graces of TVO and my tenants, and ran. I took it slowly, walked a few times, finished, and went home immediately, where the results were already posted online. It took me 11 1/2 minutes to finish  a 2 k. race, so managed the less-than-stellar pace of more than 5 minutes per k. And yet I came sixth in my category.

And have been in pain from neck to knees ever since. Poor Eli - I did manage to go around the 'hood with him on our bikes, and we bought little presents for his parents. Yesterday he bought himself a magnificent diamond necklace for $2 which he wore all weekend, and I got things for the kids - 2 MEC sleeping bags, a snow-racer. A whole weekend where your neighbour's crap is exchanged for yours, and vice versa.

Would have bought these but couldn't bring them home on the bike - giant charts for English composition teachers. Would have been fun for my gang.

Hand in the cookie bag and diamond bling around the neck.

God, my body hurts. At home, I offered Eli $2 if he'd do a puzzle, and then another $2 if he'd do it again. $3!, he replied, but he took my offer and I got to lie down for a bit. After his dad came to get him, I rode to Parliament Street to buy some pad thai and mango salad and came home to recuperate. Sorry for my aching body, but still - the sixth fastest old lady in C'town.

Have not mentioned last week's social events - the Word Sisters here for dinner on Tuesday, a gathering of fabulous women in the word business; the C'town Short Film Festival on Wednesday, a selection of films under 15 minutes from around the world, also fabulous; and the launch of term event at U of T on Thursday, good food and drink and meeting colleagues.

Usually I start teaching the Monday after Labour Day, but not this year, not for a whole other week. I'll do more transcribing of my parents' letters. In one letter, Dad mentioned our family vacations at Toney River; I remembered, vaguely, tiny cabins near a beach, and Googled. I'd proposed renting a cottage in Muskoka for my 70th next year, but my daughter had a better idea - a cottage in Nova Scotia for a family getaway. She went to StFX and loves everything Nova Scotian, as do I, plus I grew up in Halifax and still have friends around the province. It suddenly seemed a great idea. So I've been online for hours, checking cottages on the water - near Toney River.

Perhaps you CAN go home again.

People have been kindly asking about my son. He seems to be recovering from the hideous trauma inflicted on him. Thank you for caring.

my mother's lover

Some beauty for you - a fall bouquet picked for the dinner table tonight...

... and Macca, taken by his daughter Mary. He's 78. May we all look so good. He looks a bit like my mother, in fact. Yikes. Let's not go there!

Here is something my mother's lover wrote to her in September 1956. Dad had given Mum an ultimatum - he would not negotiate the future of our family with her lover, once my father's good friend, in the country (we were in England.) And so the man was forced to leave her side, temporarily, they both thought. Incidentally, he was married with two children, as was, of course, my mother. Mum and I were living with her parents in west London, and my dad and brother in north London.

I shall keep in touch with your mother, darling, until I leave; and after that I shall write to you through her. Please read my letters, love, although if you cannot bring yourself to do so, that too I shall understand. Please oh please write to me soon and tell me what is happening to you and the children, and how you are. And if and when you need me, darling, cable or telephone and I shall come—I shall come with all speed and with my heart so full of happiness that I shall burst. For with all this, my Sylvia, and whatever may come, I shall love you more and more each moment. And darling, if things become more desperate that your thoughts turn to suicide, then call me too, that I may die with you. If it should be that we cannot live together, then let us at least die in one another’s arms. This too I ask you to promise.

He had it bad! And he was a good writer, if a bit verbose - there are scores of letters, all as impassioned as this one. Odd, and sometimes shocking, to delve into these more than 60 years later - but what the hell, I'm a writer, that's what I do.

Today is the first day of the rest of our lives; even the air feels different, crisper, more businesslike. My young tenant went off with shining face to his new job this morning, and Ben went off to JK. A bit reluctant, but there were no tears.

The serious one in the middle in the hat.

May your hat and shoes be as splendid.

"MIracle of Miracles"

A beautiful holiday Monday, the city tranquil, the weather temperate; it's 7 p.m. and all's well.

Sunday was a productive day; I submitted two essays to different places for consideration and sent a query about another.  They were in my Documents files, things I'd written years ago and left to moulder. So, some editing and cutting and out they go.

The new tenant arrived, a very nice young man who'll be working at the symphony. So the house is full once more. And last night, three hours - three solid hours - of a remake of Little Women on PBS. It was too saccharine, and why, why, do they cast a beautiful actress as Jo and then have her sister say that Jo's only beauty is her hair? Do they think we don't have eyes? But still, I watched the whole thing, because - because it took me back to those heavenly hours sitting in my dad's big chair in the living room (that's in my living room today and not nearly as big somehow), reading and reading and weeping.

The actual copy, unfortunately without its bright yellow dustjacket.

Unlike it seems all other writer women of my age, I did not then identify with Jo. I was Beth, and not just because we share a name. I've never understood why until last night, because Beth is passive and shy and selflessly sweet, nothing like me. Last night I thought - I knew I wanted to write, but I wasn't remotely fiery and rebellious like Jo. I wanted to be loved. Beth was much, much loved. That's who I wanted to be.

It took a few years, but I got there. And I didn't have to die like she did, to boot.

Today's treat - meeting Ken to see Miracle of Miracles, a documentary about the making of Fiddler on the Roof. Sholem Aleichem, the writer of the stories on which the musical is based, was a contemporary and rival of my great-grandfather's, though it's not sure they ever met. It's my great sorrow that Jacob Gordin didn't write humorous warm tales about his people that would make such a great musical that it's still iconic more than 50 years after its opening.

The doc is fantastic, showing how such an unlikely piece came to be - a musical about shtetl Jews, oh sure, said one sceptical producer. What will you do for an audience when all the Hadassah ladies have seen it? They show some of the many productions from around the world, including Japan, Thailand, and one done by African-American teenagers. There's something universal in the story of poverty; the fight against and yet the need for the suffocating comfort of tradition; the disappointments and love of parents for their rebellious children; and finally, the victimization of helpless people. As Tevye and his neighbours are being exiled from their village, the film shows us heartbreaking footage of modern refugees from Syria, from Mexico and Central America. Ken cried.

And then dinner at the pub across the street, as usual. Ken has lost two dear friends recently and is, he says, sick of death. But we cheered each other up. I gave him a magnificent cucumber, one of three fresh picked today, that he found a way to transport home on his bike.

I feel I should be gearing up for work but have another almost two weeks to go, a great gift. Lots happening - tomorrow someone coming to begin transcribing my parents' letters and then 8 women in the publishing business are here for a potluck dinner; Wednesday the Cabbagetown Short Film Festival; Thursday the huge back-to-school gathering for the Continuing Studies profs at U of T, where I get to meet my colleagues amid food and drink; and then all weekend is the Cabbagetown Festival, where the 'hood goes nuts.

Summer's over. But still - good times.