Category Archives: Personal

Always Something to Miss

Posted on by
6

Feeling a little sad this morning, as it’s the last day of my month in Toronto. It’s been a wonderful month, so quickly — it seems — gone! When I came I raked leaves, which I enjoyed thoroughly, no longer in possession of a yard myself, and since then it’s cooled and even snowed (though the snow was rained away) and Christmas decorations now adorn the neighbourhood.

There have been special events (birthdays and the musical “Come from Away”) and ordinary ones, memorable day by day. Also, because this was a longer visit, I was able to get in a few meet-ups with other people: professor emeritus and writer Magdalene Redekop (Making Believe); friends from Winnipeg days, now in St. Catherines, the wise and wonderful Doug and Annie Schulz; avid reader (and supporter of writers via her blog “Pickle Me This” and 49th Shelf) and writer Kerry Clare. Nourishing conversations, all of them, of the kind that make one paradoxically hungry for more!IMG_5188

First on the agenda when I get home will be to put up the tree and festoon my own apartment with Christmasy matter, as well as re-connect with my Tsawwassen family (including attending a performance of Handel’s Messiah with oldest granddaughter) and my local friends. This is lovely anticipation. But I will miss my Toronto family a lot, and this place too.

“There is always something to miss,” says Sarah in Sarah, Plain and Tall, one of the books I read to the two youngest here, “no matter where you are.” Always, sadly and true, because “where you are” is one place at a time.

Where I Am Now

Posted on by
16

Since the basement suite at my Toronto son’s home is currently between renters, he and my daughter-in-law and I decided this would be a perfect time for me to come and stay longer than my usual visits. I left Vancouver yesterday morning and arrived in the evening to a warm welcome. I’ll be here a month.

IMG_5078

On the flight I watched a movie: Young Woman and the Sea, based on the true story of Trudy Ederle, the first woman to swim the English Channel. I found myself choking up at numerous points, which surprised me, because although it’s well done and inspiring, it’s also a fairly predictable triumph-over-adversity narrative. Why was my emotional skin so thin that every little thing in the movie threatened to puncture it?

I discerned that perhaps even more than I’d been aware of, I was discouraged by the recent U.S. election, especially in matters concerning women. It felt as if the formidable challenges Trudy Ederle faced as a female in sports in the 1920s were standing in for the resurgence of an ugly cultural misogyny.

Perhaps the anticipation of inhabiting the exact space Helmut and I did more than eight years ago was part of it too. After we packed our Winnipeg belongings into a storage pod, spring 2016, we came to Toronto for two-plus months, living in the basement. Helmut helped son Peter wall off the area for the current two-room apartment. My sister, whose husband died several years before mine, once observed, “You get used to it.” And it’s true, eventually you do. It would actually be awful if one didn’t get used to things. Nevertheless, anticipation of a return to the space we (and then I) had not been in again since 2016 (because it was renter-occupied) seemed to be triggering sad nostalgia.

IMG_5077

The Toronto house I’m in. (By Natalie Czerwinski.)

Once inside it, however, I was slightly disoriented and realized that the space had subtly altered in my memory. I have a strong sense of places I’ve lived, but obviously it’s far from infallible. As I settled into the specifics of the present — one twin bed in the room, not two squished together, and the addition of a desk and chair and some other furniture — the memories became clearer and re-arranged themselves, and I was happy about them and also ready to enjoy being here with the children and three granddaughters — semi-independent but connected — and to work on a couple of small writing projects as well as help along in whatever ways I can. My emotional skin feels thicker; there’s fresh courage in this space.

Friendship of a particular kind

Posted on by
8

I’m just home from a river cruise (Basel to Amsterdam, on the Rhine) with a friend, and while I’m thinking back at what we did and saw, I’m also thinking about friendship of a particular kind — not a long side-by-side as some are, but a then-and-now-again.

Miriam and I roomed together in a 2-room basement suite our first year of university in Calgary. When I do the improbable math I see that this was more than 50 years ago. I haven’t actually asked her how she found it, but I recall telling people she had been my “easiest” room-mate. I moved to Toronto the next year and she stayed in Calgary, where she would teach, but eventually she went to Europe, living in France, later Vienna, her base for work related to supporting the underground church in Iron Curtain countries like Romania. She also lived in Russia, where she did research for her PhD. She returned to North America after many years in Europe, leading and teaching in theological schools in Toronto, Chicago, and Calgary.

During the same years my life involved marriage and a family, study and writing, and living in Saskatchewan a spell, also Paraguay, but mostly Manitoba until Helmut and I re-located to B.C. Miriam and I kept in touch, but quite intermittently. I think there may have been a couple of short visits in all those years, one of them in the Winnipeg airport when she was between flights. Now and then we wrote letters.

In recent years, we’ve been in each other’s homes on occasion — mine in Tsawwassen, hers in Calgary — and somehow the idea of doing a “celebration trip” of our upcoming milestone birthdays developed, and so it was done.

I’m not sure where this rumination is taking me, except to register the marvel of a strong early connection in space and time, followed by a huge divergence in entirely separate geographies, and then an intensive mutual experience — a trip together — once again in shared space and time. The picture I have is of a rainbow, say, touching down on two ends and bridging a long stretch of earth between points. (The same thing happened when an even longer-time friend Eunice and I travelled together several years ago, after living in different provinces since childhood.)

Sometimes one meets someone from the past and the reunion is lovely but once the catch-up is done, there’s little to sustain it further; it’s simply a renewal of memory, a sweet brief gift. Other times, however, once-upon-a-time friendship can carry more.

At times, in our close ship cabin quarters on the cruise, it might have been yesterday and two girls getting ready for classes again, but next moment we might be leaning into the other’s “good ear” on account of diminished hearing in both of us, and there was no illusion about the passing of time. And when I observed her connecting with ship staff from Hungary, Romania, or Belarus with her “I was there” capacity, or me exchanging mutual experience with a widow, the awareness of differing life histories asserted itself. At any rate, we did this wonderful adventure together, strolling in a chain of cities on the Rhine, eating rather extravagantly, and looking at art, and it was a new fastening, a solid gift for which I’m grateful.