Trudy J. Morgan-Cole's Blog, page 52

Shelf Esteem: The First Rule of Book Club

Vlogging Again

Can’t stay away from dat YouTube, it seems.

Best Books of 2014

This a cross-post from Compulsive Overreader, my book-review blog. If you want all my reviews, follow that blog!

Some years I do something fancy like make a year-end book review video or do some kind of quiz where you can win free books if you guess my top ten book list.Last year I did both. This year … meh, I’m not so creative. It’s been a good year for reading, though. My top ten list was hard to construct, because there were eight books that were definite, gotta-make-the-list favourites, and then another six or so, any of which could have taken those last two Top Ten spots. As always, the ordering is a bit arbitrary, though I do feel pretty solid about the #1 book.

I read and reviewed 77 books this year, which is a little on the low side for me. I put this down to the fact that I actually read more than 77 — I was a judge for a local literary contest which involved reading every work of fiction published in Newfoundland in 2012 and 2013, and out of those, I mostly only posted reviews of the ones I really loved. I figured trashing the ones I didn’t like as much would be an abuse of my judgely position, and in some cases, once I got halfway through a book and knew it wasn’t going onto my shortlist, I skimmed the last half.

Interestingly, even though I really loved some of the books I read for that contest, none of them made my Top Ten of the Year list, though one book by a local author (published later than the cutoff for this contest) is definitely on there.

My 77 books broke down to 57 fiction and 20 non-fiction. 54 books were written by women and 23 by men. Those proportions are a little more skewed than usual; I usually read a little more non-fiction and a few more books by men than I did this year.

My Top Ten list contains three books by Canadian writers, two by British writers, and five by American writers. I suspect if I went back and checked, that would be representative of the books I read as a whole, if you discount the skew caused by contest judging.

I didn’t do a specific count on e-books versus paper but I do know that the VAST majority — probably about 60 of the 77 books? — were e-books as opposed to traditional paper books.

And now, without further ado … the list!

10. Between Gods, by Alison Pick. As I said, there were a lot of good books that could have gone in this slot, but I picked this one because I usually read a lot of great memoirs, and this year, this was the one memoir that really stood out and lingered with me long after I read it. Read my full review here.

9. Wolf in White Van, by John Darnielle. Out of the many excellent novels that could have grabbed the ninth-place spot, I picked this one because I’ve been thinking about it ever since I read it. A very thought-provoking read from a writer who, until now, has mainly penned unforgettable song lyrics. Read my full review here.

8. The Ocean at the End of the Lane, by Neil Gaiman. I’ve loved Neil Gaiman as a cultural icon for years but this is the first book of his that I can honestly say I was entranced by. A fairytale about childhood, for grownups. Read my full review here.

7. Fangirl, by Rainbow Rowell. For me, Fangirl was this year’s The Fault in Our Stars: a smart, funny, articulate, insightful young-adult romance. But with less cancer and more fanfiction. Read my full review here.

6. The Paying Guests, by Sarah Waters. Simply fabulous, evocative, powerful historical fiction set in post-WWI London. Read my full review here.

5. We Were Liars, by E. Lockhart. A great, gripping, twisty, gut-wrenching young adult novel. If you start to feel like the narrator might be a little unreliable, remember, you’re the one who opened a book clearly titled We Were Liars. Read my full review here.

4. Fool’s Assassin, by Robin Hobb. Wonderful start to a new trilogy by one of my favourite fantasy authors. Would I rather have beloved characters from the previous trilogies left to grow old in peace, or see them immersed in scary new adventures? Read my full review here.

3. Lila, by Marilynne Robison. Once again, Robinson takes us back to the small-town world she explored so deeply in Gilead and Home, now seen through the eyes of a different character. Wonderfully written and deeply thought-provoking. Read my full review here.

2. Sweetland, by Michael Crummey. Absorbing, powerful, breathtaking — there aren’t enough adjectives to praise Crummey’s masterful epic about the last man on a Newfoundland island abandoned by the modern world. Read my full review here.

1. Frog Music, by Emma Donoghue. I always love Donoghue, but not since Slammerkin has she produced a masterpiece like this madcap journey through the underside of late nineteenth-century San Francisco. This novel, based on accounts of a real-life crime, is the kind of historical fiction that’s as close as you’ll ever get to time travel. Read my full review here.

I would love to know what your favourite books of 2014 were. Share some in the comments!!

Let It Be

Last year was a tough Christmas. It was our first Christmas without my mom, and everything we did, every ritual and family gathering, was touched (for me, at least) with a constant awareness of that loss. Her absence was a presence.

I got through last Christmas by telling myself that the first Christmas after you lose someone dear doesn’t have to be perfect, or even merry, or cheery, or any particular thing. After you’ve lost a loved one, you get a free pass on happiness for the first Christmas because you get gold stars just for getting through it. Survival is the new baseline. And with the bar set that low, last Christmas was sad, but not at all unbearable, and had a few moments of laughter and joy.

Now we’ve come through another Christmas season. My mom’s absence is still much on my mind, of course, but the pain is not as keen as it was last year, because we’ve done all these things once already without her. That loss has become a part of the landscape of our lives now — which is not to say that it doesn’t still hurt, but that I’ve got used to the way it hurts.

This year, as you blog readers know, my Aunt Gertie died in November. This was a different kind of loss from my mother’s — it was expected, and gentle, and we’d had some time to get used to it. When a person dies at age 100 in a nursing home, the losses are gradual — we had already, some years ago, lost the tradition of decorating her tree for her at her house, and the tradition of bringing her up to my parents’ house for Christmas dinner. To be completely honest (which always feels a bit weird when talking about family and Christmas), my main feeling about Aunt Gertie this Christmas was relief — that we didn’t have to carry out the awkward ritual we’d done for the last three years, of bringing her turkey dinner and presents and a semblance of good cheer to the nursing home on Christmas afternoon. It was an event that always felt sad, and while I think she enjoyed it, she also seemed to find it overwhelming and a bit confusing, too.

This year, I remembered Aunt Gertie most keenly a few days after Christmas, when I made a pot of turkey soup out of the leftovers. This was something she used to make, and when she was no longer able to, I got her excellent recipe and began making it. I remember keenly how pleased she was the first time she had a bowl of my turkey soup and exclaimed, “It’s just like I used to make it myself!” Since she moved into the nursing home, I brought soup to her after every turkey dinner we had at home.

It’s OK. Let the memories come when and how they come.

In fact, this is my big mid-life realization about Christmas, and I guess about life in general (I’ve already written a bit about it in the context of grief and loss). It is what it is. Let it be what it is.

We all know that so much of the stress around Christmas comes from people’s expectations — that it should be perfect, and magical, and everyone should get along. I am trying to let go of my own expectations, to accept that every holiday season is a little different. The shape of the family changes — not only because the older members die, but the younger ones grow up. Christmas with teenagers is different from Christmas with small children, and some parents can’t let go of missing the pitter patter of little feet and the eager excitement of small hands tearing into packages. Me, I’ve decided to be grateful that we can sleep a little later on Christmas morning. This year, Chris’s out-of-town girlfriend came in to stay with us for a few days, then he went out to her place over New Year’s. I loved having an extra teenager in the house and missed them both when they were gone.

We no longer have the traditional Christmas dinner at my parents’ place. This year, my dad came here to have brunch and open presents with us, then we all hung around and talked and read and played with new gadgets and watched Christmas movies while Jason cooked a turkey for supper. It was a different way to celebrate, but it was good.

For many years, Jason and I used to throw a big party sometime between Christmas and New Year’s. The last two years, we didn’t do that. For a minute I felt like I should and then I thought, “What is should? It is what it is.” We invited a much smaller group of friends over for a games night. We thought the teenagers (Emma, Chris and his girlfriend, and our friend’s daughter) might want to go off and do their own things, but they all stuck around and played games with us, and we had a lovely evening.

It’s not a bad way to approach the whole year, never mind Christmas. I hope never to give up on having goals, plans, aspirations and dreams, but I’d be glad to let go of expectations. Of hanging onto what’s passed or wishing things were different from what they are. I don’t want to be dreaming of a white Christmas while we’re having our usually soggy green townie Christmas. I don’t want to feel that I “should” leave my tree up till Old Christmas Day (I normally take it down the Sunday before school starts, but feel guilty if that falls before January 6) and I want to learn to stop judging the people who tear down the tree and all the decorations on Boxing Day. It is what it is. My Christmas, and yours. My life, and yours. The sooner I accept things as they are, the happier I’ll be.

Let it be, let it be, let it be.

Time Lord of Gallifrey, Now in Flesh Appearing … (a Christmas post)

If you’ve never watched Doctor Who, this blog post may seem a little obscure, but stay with me, because there’s a serious point in here somewhere about the Incarnation.

Every Christmas along with wrapping gifts, I try to wrap my mind around the mystery of the Incarnation — this thing we Christians are actually celebrating at this season.  The idea of Jesus coming to earth and becoming a human being, expressing God’s love for us by being one of us. And sometimes I think when I watch Doctor Who, I get sort of close.

If you’re not familiar with this BBC sci-fi series that’s been running off and on for over 50 years, The Doctor is a time-travelling alien from a planet called Gallifrey. He looks exactly like a human being (since he has to be played by a human actor) and he spends a lot of time among humans — in fact, he seems to have a special fondness for human beings and their planet, often choosing close human friends and companions and intervening to save Earth from destruction, often at great risk to himself.

He looks human, but he isn’t exactly one of us. He has powers that the average human doesn’t have. He’s lived so long he might as well be immortal. He can die, but he can also regenerate into a new body (a clever trick the BBC came up with to allow the  series to run for decades with a series of different actors playing the Doctor, but also, of course, a kind of resurrection). 

Sometimes it seems to me that a character like the Doctor (or any one of many apparently human superheroes, like Superman) is the closest we can come to understanding the Incarnation of the second Person of the Godhead in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. He looked like us, He lived among us, to all appearances He was one of us — but He wasn’t really one of us. He had powers we don’t have access to — healing the sick, calming the storm, walking on water. And he didn’t share our ultimate human vulnerability — He defeated death. He loved us and cared about us, but He wasn’t really one of us.

As a child I used to sit in church and hear an older man in the congregation whose showcase piece to sing for special music was “Ten Thousand Angels.”

Heeeeee could have caaallllled

Ten thousand aaaaaaangels

To destroy the world

And set Him freeeeee …

Heeeeee could have caaallllled

Ten thousand aaaaaaangels

But He died aloooooone

For you and meeeeee!!!

That was the Jesus I grew up learning about — a Jesus very much like the Doctor, a Jesus who looked and acted human but wasn’t really, who had ten thousand angels at His control but refrained from calling on them so as not to blow his human cover.

But that’s not a real incarnation, is it? That’s a god trying on human form, like the pagan gods sometimes did — not actually becoming human.  

At the opposite end of the spectrum you have the many people — some agnostics, some atheists, some followers of non-Christian religions and even some very liberal Christians — who admire Jesus, but only as a great man. People I personally respect who are diverse as Gandhi (“I like your Christ. I do not like your Christians”) and Hank Green (“I don’t believe in god, but I have a huge man-crush on Jesus”) admire the human Jesus, the teacher who taught and exemplified unconditional love even to the least, the lowest, the outcasts. People like Jesus if they can lay aside the baggage of divinity and accept Him as a great, admirable human being.

We humans, we can accept the idea of someone who is like us, only better. And we can accept — in mythology, at least, and in comic books and sci-fi — the idea of someone who isn’t like us, who is just playing the role but is really far more powerful.

But the early Christians, in formulating their doctrines about Jesus, didn’t offer us either of those options (actually, some early Christians did go for one of those options, but they were considered heretics, out of line with mainstream thought). The orthodox word on Jesus was that He was fully God and fully man, and nobody can explain that. Nobody can draw us a picture of what that might look like — it’s a statement of faith, a doctrine, but it’s hard to fit into a story, because it’s a paradox.

How do we understand a paradox? How do we love, worship, relate to a paradox?

I think we do the best we can with the pictures we have. We admire the human Jesus, just like so many non-Christians do — but we confess that He was more than that, though we don’t understand how.

On the other side of the coin, we admire superhuman characters like the Doctor, and recognize that Jesus was sort of like that, but not really. He wasn’t playacting. He wasn’t pretending. He truly shared our weaknesses and limitations; He didn’t just pretend to. And when we bump up against a picture of Jesus that sounds a little too much like a superhero and not like a real human being — as at Christmas when we sing “Little Lord Jesus, no crying He makes” as though He wasn’t an actual human baby who screamed when He was hungry and dirtied His diaper and sucked hungrily at His mother’s breast — then we stop and say, No, that’s not right. Maybe the Doctor is only pretending to be human; maybe Superman is just trying to fit in as Clark Kent. But Jesus wasn’t like that. Jesus actually was human; Jesus was one of us.

That’s inexplicable. But inexplicable doesn’t (for me, at least) mean untrue. It’s inexplicable, but it’s Incarnation.

The Most Chilling Thing I’ve Read All Year

Twenty-five years ago. It was twenty-five years.

I was a young woman then too: I was twenty-four. Unlike the victims of the Montreal massacre, I was not studying to break into a male-dominated field; I was already working in a traditionally feminine career. The day after the horrible news of the murders broke, I sat at the cafeteria table at lunch as we shook our heads over the thought of something like this happening in Canada. My male co-workers expressed amazement and disgust, not at the shooter — that went without saying — but at the male students who left the room on the shooter’s orders, rather than trying to “take down” the man with the gun. To them, this was a problem to be solved by male heroism, rather than prevented by men recognizing women as equals.

And of course, OF COURSE, it’s #notallmen, it was #neverallmen. But men like my co-workers, who would never have dreamed of committing acts of violence against women, didn’t talk about the fact that this was about one man’s twisted resentment of feminism, of women in traditionally male space. And part of the reason they didn’t talk about it was that they didn’t really get it themselves, and they weren’t entirely comfortable saying the word “feminist” out loud.

Already in 1989 when the Montreal massacre happened, women’s place in the world had changed so much from our mothers’ time. Brave feminists in previous generations had won us the right to vote, the right to get an education everywhere and the right to work for equal pay in every profession. From there on in, young women like me thought, it would be smooth sailing to full equality.

The horror of December 6, 1989 shocked me, shocked a lot of young women like me, but I think we thought of it as an anomaly. I did, anyway. The disturbed, violent man who killed those 14 women at Ecole Polytechnique projected his own inner demons onto women he identified as “feminists,” with tragic results, but one violent psychopath didn’t threaten the inevitable forward motion of feminism.

Flash-forward twenty-five years. I’ve spent the last two decades in my traditionally-female career. I’ve seen more women, including my husband’s engineering colleagues, entering traditionally male-dominated fields. I’m raising two smart young feminists — my strong-willed, independent daughter, and my son who has no problem identifying himself as a feminist, which was not usual for sixteen-year-old boys when I was growing up. We’ve come a long way, baby … and we’re still going.

But. 

But.

But.

2014 wasn’t a good year for women, in some ways. It wasn’t a great year for women online, for sure. And in the middle of the #Gamergate controversy circling around women like Brianna Wu and Anita Sarkeesian and others who have been brave enough to take up space in male-dominated areas of entertainment, amid the horrors of men “doxxing” women who dared step out of line, the most chilling thing I saw all year related to the letter I pasted above — the letter from the unknown man who threatened a campus shooting at Utah State University if Anita Sarkeesian’s scheduled talk there was allowed to go ahead.

In case you don’t want to read his whole screed (and I don’t blame you), let me quote: “You’ve probably heard of a man named Marc Lepine. He was a hero to men everywhere for standing up to the toxic influence of feminism on Western masculinity.” For this writer, Sarkeesian represents “everything wrong with the feminist woman” (for her unspeakable crime of critiquing the way women are portrayed in video games), and he promises that if her talk is allowed to go ahead, “a Montreal Massacre style attack will be carried out against the attendees.”

Twenty-five years after the Ecole Polytechnique shootings, a young man who most likely was not born at the time believes that Marc Lepine is not just his hero, but “a hero to men everywhere,” and that a “Montreal Massacre style attack” is a threat you can hold over women to stop them from speaking.

Is that writer typical of young men in the twenty-first century? Of course not. There is a small but vocal group of men who are unhappy about women stepping out of traditional roles — there always has been — and the internet has given them voice and an ability to connect with each other in a way that wasn’t available to Marc Lepine twenty-five years ago. It doesn’t mean feminism has failed; it doesn’t mean we haven’t made progress. But it does mean there’s still a lot of work to do, and we’re still a very long way from a world in which we can take it for granted that the battle is won and everyone accepts women and men as equals.

As I reflect on this today, twenty-five years after that horrific day in Montreal, the most chilling thing I’ve read all year is not the letter I posted above. It’s not that one man thought that way. It’s not that a man exists who sees Marc Lepine as a hero and his actions as something to aspire to. You know what it is the thing that makes me so discouraged, so sad, so unsure if we’ve really made much progress in a quarter-century?

It was when I read that Anita Sarkeesian’s talk at Utah State University was cancelled. The guy who thinks Mark Lepine is a hero? He won that round.

Real Choices

The issue of childcare — who gets it, who needs it, who pays for it and how much — is a huge political hot potato in Canada right now. And for once, I find myself enraged not only by the perspectives and rhetoric of people on the political right, but also by some of the things said by people on the left — my people. I think both sides are missing the point of what we really need to achieve with childcare in this country. While I’m now past the years of needing or providing childcare, I still have strong feelings about it from my own experience as a mother of young children.

Travel back with me in time, if you will, to the spring of 1997. Great changes were afoot in my life. The school where I’d taught and been part of a close-knit community for five years was closing. My job was about to change in a big way. My husband was a year away from finishing his engineering degree. And I found out I was pregnant.

January, 1998: Chris was born. I had been transferred to a new job in a different school, which was OK, but I wasn’t crazy about it. In January I went on maternity leave, earning less than half of what my teaching salary had been. Jason was in his last semester of university. I found, a bit unexpectedly, that I really enjoyed staying home with a baby. Though stay-at-home parenting definitely had its challenges, I enjoyed it more than I’d enjoyed teaching for that last semester, and I was actually getting more writing done than I had when I was teaching. I was well aware that full-time stay-at-home parenting wasn’t for everyone, but it was working for me.

August 1998: Jason got an entry-level engineering job making almost as much as I’d been making after ten years of teaching. I informed the school board that I would not be coming back to work in September. For the next three years, which included the birth of a second child, I managed to hold onto my position with the board through a combination of family leave and educational leave, both unpaid (I was taking part-time classes, usually one per semester, towards a Masters in Education). Finally, realizing that whatever happened in my future life I did not want to go back to teaching high school within the school district, I gave up my full-time position.

From 1998 – 2005, I did not work full-time outside my home for pay, though I did earn some money freelance writing and did some part-time work through the university for a few months when Jason was between jobs. He had two stints of full-time parenting, about three months each, while he looked for a job and I went to university, but for most of those years he was working and I was the at-home parent. When Emma started Kindergarten in September 2005 and I no longer had any child at home full-time, I started teaching at my current, wonderful, non-school-board job, and have been here ever since.

Why do I bother giving you that not-very-riveting sketch of my past life? Because as I look back at the choices I made in those years, I am happy. I did the things I wanted to do — got out of a job I didn’t love anymore, spent seven years at home caring for my kids, did some freelance writing, earned a university degree, and eventually went back to work at a job I liked better than my old one. At every step, I made the choices I wanted to make, and it was wonderful to be able to do so.

The reality is, a huge proportion of Canadian families don’t get to make those choices on the basis of what works best for their kids and their families. Instead, their childcare choices — does one parent stay home with the kids? If so, which one and for how long? Do you put the kids in daycare? When, and what kind? — are constrained by economic necessity. There are parents in the workforce who would rather be home with their kids, and parents at home who would rather be working, because their financial situation doesn’t provide them the flexibility to choose what works best for them. That’s a crying shame.

The feminist movement told us that women didn’t have to stay home with the kids if they didn’t want to — that they could take a place in the workforce alongside men, earning the same money as men. But the battles of feminism in this area will not have been won until:

1) a mother can actually make that choice without having to pay so much for childcare that it’s not worth her while going to work

2) a mother can receive both financial and moral support to make the opposite choice — to stay home if that’s what she believes is best for her and for her children.

3) a father can also have the choice to stay home if that’s what’s best for that family.

The Conservative government’s new income-splitting tax scheme is supposed to make life easier for stay-at-home parents by giving them a tax break. Believe me, during the years I was a stay-at-home parent I would have welcomed anything — a tax break, an income-splitting scheme, or best of all an outright paycheque sent to my mailbox — that would have replaced some of my lost teaching income and sent the message the the government of Canada recognized that I was making a valid contribution to society by staying home to care for my kids. That would have been great. I strongly believe something needs to be done to compensate parents of either gender who choose to stay at home with their kids, not just for the first year but throughout those crucial early years.

The Conservative scheme has also been criticized, justifiably, on the basis that it will only help about 15% of Canadian families. Families where both parents work aren’t helped by this scheme. Single-parent families aren’t helped. Families like mine was between 1998-2005 — where one parent has a well-paying professional job and the other stays home — will be helped, but a scheme that only helps a small segment of families simply isn’t good enough.

Instead, say voices on the left (again, the people I usually agree with), what we need is subsidized, excellent, widely-available daycare, so that both parents can re-enter the workforce when they choose to, and know that their kids will be well cared for and it won’t cost so much that it practically negates their salary. I agree with all of that — except the word “instead.” This should not be an either/or. This should be a both/and. The government needs to be providing better, more affordable daycare options AND supporting parents who choose to stay home and do their own child-care. But nobody, on either side of the political spectrum, is saying that.

Where I part ways with my red-blooded socialist sistern and brethren on the left is when they speak as if daycare is the ONLY right choice, the only thing the government ought to support — when they say that income-splitting schemes like Harper’s encourage an “outdated model” of family life where one parent stays home with the kids. It’s not an “outdated model” — it’s the best choice for some families, some of the time, and it deserves support.

The right gets it just as wrong by promoting schemes like the current income-splitting proposal that only help two-parent families with one stay-at-home parent, and ignore the many families who want and need daycare. They get it wrong when parents (or politicians!) characterize daycare as bad parenting, and make parents feel guilty for making that choice. Putting your kids in daycare is not bad parenting — it’s the best choice for some families, some of the time, and it deserves support.

It’s not either/or. It’s both/and. There are myriad reasons why a mom or dad might want to stay home with their kids while the kids are small; there are myriad reasons why another parent might want to get back in the work force as soon as possible. You can find evidence to support the belief that either choice gives a child a good start in life — as long as the daycare teachers are qualified educators in a well-run centre, and as long as the stay-at-home parent is engaged and committed to his or her child’s development.

Let’s honour and respect all these choices, and the people who make them. And let’s all work together to create a society where one of the reasons for making those choices never has to be, “I couldn’t afford to do it any other way.”

 

My Berlin Wall of Regret

I’ve been thinking a lot about the Berlin Wall lately — you know, as one does — because just as I finished reading a novel that dealt (among other things) with the creation and eventual destruction of that wall, the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Wall rolled around. My newsfeed filled with those iconic images from November 1989, and my heart filled with envy.

Because I wasn’t there.

I did get to visit Berlin eventually; in 2011 we stayed at a hotel where a metal line ran down the street in front of the door, commemorating the spot where the Wall once stood. I got my picture taken, like thousands of tourists before and since, in front of a fragment of what was once the most infamous and sinister border in the world. And I wished then, as I did this past weekend, that I could have been there when the Wall began to come down.

I could have been there.

I mean, my level of “could have been there” falls somewhere in between people who literally could not have been there because they weren’t born in 1989, and people who are like, “Aw, geez, I was in Berlin on November 8 and I just missed it!!” I wasn’t anywhere nearby, but I still feel like if life had shaken out a little differently, I could conceivably have been part of that giant street party that started on November 9 when Berliners from East and West began taking apart the Wall.

See, what happened was … I went to Europe for two weeks in the summer of 1987 with a friend (an eventful trip I have written about elsewhere). Unlike many of the young people we met in crowded train compartments on that trip, I was not taking a “gap year” or just “bumming around.” I had the summer off from my teaching job and could afford a return plane ticket to France, a Eurail pass, and two weeks of cheap travel that would get me home just in time to start the new school year in September. I was as responsible and practical as you could possibly be while travelling in Europe at the age of 22.

The friend I travelled through Europe with was there in November 1989 when the Berlin Wall fell. I can’t remember now whether she stayed in France when our trip was over or went back a few months later, but I know that she had previously studied in France and spent another year or two living there, learning the language. So she was there in November 1989 when she and some friends (as I recall the story) basically turned on the news, said, “Wow, something amazing is happening in Berlin!” hopped on a train, and went to Berlin to see it first-hand. She told me, later, about being among the crowd at the base of the Wall as people were climbing over it, sitting on it, chipping away at it. She described being hauled up onto the top of the Wall by a crew of somewhat drunk young East German men, all laughing and celebrating the thing they had spent their whole lives hoping for but never believed would happen literally overnight. She brought me home a few pieces of the Wall in a plastic baggie. I kept them for years, though I’m not sure where they are right now. It was my tangible connection, at one degree of separation, to one of the most momentous events of my lifetime.

It’s not like my friend asked me to move to France with her and I said no, or even like I seriously considered sticking around, or going back to Europe later. What strikes me, a this remove of 25 years, is how remote that possibility would have been from even my wildest dreams at the time. I knew lots of young people kicked around Europe, and other places, in their twenties, but that was never within the range of options I considered for myself. I graduated high school at sixteen, got a five-year degree in four years of college and was teaching just before my twenty-first birthday. It never occurred to me to take a year off between high school and college, or during college, or between college and starting work. I was hard-wired to do things the responsible way, to see Europe on a two-week vacation, to have a steady job with a reliable paycheque rather than go wandering aimlessly around the world.

If I had been wandering in Europe in the fall on 1989, or even if I’d come up with some legit excuse to live there like my friend did (“improving my French” in my case would have been improving on almost nothing) … I could have hopped on that train too, and joined her when the wall fell. I could have had memories of being pulled up on the wall by drunk German boys, rather than just having a baggie full of concrete Wall-chips that I can’t even find now.

I don’t know if I can actually look back from the vast pinnacle of mid-life and say I wish I’d been less responsible when I was younger. I mean, everything I have now — a wonderful husband and kids, a paid-off house, my dream job — might not have been possible if I hadn’t done those specific things in that specific order. But who knows? Life is weird and strange. You can’t plan that if you do a, b, and c at the correct time, you’ll end up with x, y, and z twenty years later. Sometimes you do a, b, and c and instead you end up with 3y to the power of 12, or something. I believe that when I was younger I thought life was more controllable, and that was why it was so important to me to do things the right way, which meant being responsible — going to school, doing well in school, getting a job, keeping the job … etc etc etc.

You know what else you can’t predict? The Berlin Wall coming down. Like nobody saw that coming. It wasn’t like in the summer of 1989 I could have said, “Well, I think I’ll quit my job now and move to Europe because things are shaking up in the Soviet bloc and I bet the Berlin Wall will come down sometime this fall, and it’d be cool to be within a short train ride’s distance when that happens.” You can’t tell when you’re going to be on the scene for history in the making. But I bet the people who aren’t so committed to a regular job and a steady paycheque get to see more of the interesting stuff. I’m sure there are downsides, like actually not having a steady paycheque and also having weird gaps in your resume because “those were the two years I spent meditating on a mountainside in Tibet” or whatever.

I can’t say I regret not having weird gaps in my resume. But I sure do regret not being there when the Berlin Wall came down, even though I’d have to take apart my whole life block-by-block to get back to the point where that might have been possible. I guess I’d have to be a whole different person.

This is all relevant to me again now as I have kids who are getting awkwardly close to the end of high school and thinking about what to do afterwards. And my high-expectations, high-achieving genes are kicking in right away, sure that I know the best paths for them to follow to get a safe, stable, reliable life.

My firstborn has already told that although he does want to go to university, he and some friends have been talking about taking a year after high school to go touring with their band. And my immediate response is to say That’s a terrible idea! You need to go to university RIGHT AWAY!! You can always go tour the country in a falling-apart van with a bunch of guys and guitars later!!!

Except, maybe you can’t. Those kind of things are harder to do once you’re committed to a job and a mortgage and a family. And maybe, just maybe, if one (or both!) of my kids goes off and does something unexpected and irresponsible, they might end up being on hand for one of the great, defining events of the early 2020s, and experience a moment they’ll never forget.

Who knows? You can’t plan these things. All I can do about my Berlin Wall regret is tell my children two things: First, I’m not nearly as certain as I pretend to be about what constitutes “good life choices.” I’m full of advice, but ultimately I know nothing, and you’re really on your own with this life stuff.

And second, once you’re out of the nest and I’m retired, don’t be surprised if I’m a little hard to get hold of. I plan to be a lot less responsible in my old age.

Aunt Gertie: My Tribute

I know a few people were interested in reading this, so I posted it here: this is the tribute I gave to Aunt Gertie at her memorial service.

So many of you gathered here today knew my Aunt Gertie, Gertrude Charlotte Ellis, only as an elderly woman. I want to take these few moments to give you a brief sketch of her life, the life that we celebrate here today.

Aunt Gertie had just celebrated her hundredth birthday a few weeks before her death. She was born on October 14, 1914. To put in perspective what it means to live a live that spans a century, she was born ten days after the Florizel sailed out of St. John’s harbour carrying the First Five Hundred, the volunteers known as the Blue Puttees who left Newfoundland to fight in the First World War. Her life spanned that war and the next, the Great Depression in between the two, and a hundred years of social and technological changes so great that the world in which she fell asleep last Thursday was radically different from the one she had been born into.

Gertrude Ellis was one of eight surviving children of Joseph Ellis of Hant’s Harbour and Mary Jane Porter of Elliston. Her parents married in St. John’s and raised their family there, and Aunt Gertie never ventured far from the St. John’s streets where she grew up, except for occasional trips to visit family and friends in Bonavista, and a single trip to Toronto in the 1950s. While all her siblings and, eventually, her nieces and nephews lived and travelled all over North America and sometimes beyond, Gertie seemed content to be the one who remained at home.

But she was not contented about every aspect of that life at home. She always told me when I was growing up that one of her greatest regrets was that she had not been able to continue in school beyond Grade Eight. Of course, Grade Eight was considered a good level of education to have attained in the 1920s, but Gertie was a good student — especially in Math, she used to tell me — and would have liked to learn more. She was an avid reader throughout her life and always followed the news and kept up a keen interest in current affairs. When I was a teenager and the magic of cable TV came to St. John’s, there was a period of several years when I used to come to her house after school to find the TV regularly tuned to the Parliamentary channel so that she could enjoy a few minutes of Question Period while she went about her daily chores.

Those daily chores formed the backbone of Gertie’s life from the time she left school at thirteen to become her parents’ housekeeper, until she was no longer able to keep up her own home in her nineties. In addition to caring for the family home, Gertie received an unexpected responsibility when she was just twenty years old. Her sister Flo’s infant daughter Joan, and her brother Sam’s four-year-old son Joe, were sent home from New York to be raised at home. While they were officially in the care of their grandparents, as was not uncommon in those days if parents were not in a position to look after their children, in practice it was the children’s Aunt Gertie who took over the responsibility of raising two young children. She took on the role of mother to my mother, her niece Joan, and her nephew Joe, raising both children till they were grown up. As a result, my mother, who never got to know her own mother well at all, was always very close to Aunt Gertie and in later years their roles were reversed as Aunt Gertie grew older and more frail and my mother took on the role of helping and caring for her.

When my parents were first married they lived in Aunt Gertie’s house until I was seven years old, and even after we moved out, I went to her house every day after school until my parents got off work. She was my constant caregiver and companion, my inspiration and the person who taught me so many things — some successfully, like baking, and some unsuccessfully, like knitting. Most importantly, I think, she taught me that even a woman of her generation whose life choices and experiences had been very limited by circumstances outside her control could still have a lively interest in and engagement with the world around her. She taught me that a life spent mostly in serving and caring for others could be a well-spent life and that there was little time to waste on regret over missed opportunities. She enjoyed the present moment and taught me to do the same.

Aunt Gertie was warm, gracious, generous and hospitable, as well as being opinionated and very funny. She always spoke her mind, regardless of who was around to hear it, and she had an opinion on everyone and everything. It was not unknown for her to greet a visitor she hadn’t seen in several years by saying something like, “Oh, I never would have known you, you’ve got so fat!” Her door was always open to family, friends or neighbours. There are dozens of people, some of them my mother’s friends from her generation and many of my friends from the next generation, who called her “Aunt Gertie” and knew that a warm welcome and a tasty snack would await them at her kitchen table. All those people who came through the doors of our home remember Aunt Gertie for her sense of humour, her hard work, her love for animals, and her readiness to make everyone welcome at her table. To me Aunt Gertie’s kitchen was not just the heart of the home but also the heart of the world, the place where, more than any other, I learned that the world was a good place to be, and I had been lucky to be born into her family.

I don’t know when exactly Aunt Gertie’s family joined the Seventh-day Adventist church, but I know that it must have been sometime in the 1920s, during Gertie’s childhood, because she often told me that she began her education at Centenary Hall, which was a Methodist school, and finished it at the Seventh-day Adventist school. She was the only one of her siblings who remained a Seventh-day Adventist throughout her adult life, even though, for reasons I never understood, she stopped attending the Sabbath morning church service sometime when I was a small child. It certainly had nothing to do with either personality or doctrinal differences with anyone in church; I think it might have had something to do with her dislike of dress-up, formal events. All during my growing-up years, while Aunt Gertie went out to do her shopping and other messages, I never knew her to attend a wedding, a funeral or any kind of formal occasion. She particularly disliked funerals and anything that reminded her of funerals, including white lilies,  white carnations, and the hymn “Abide With Me” — which we will not be singing today!

Although she hadn’t been to church for many years, Aunt Gertie remained a committed church member, listening religiously to the church service on VOAR, paying a faithful tithe from her small income when she began getting the old-age pension cheque, and strictly ordering any workman doing work around her property that no work would be done during the Sabbath hours. Among the many things that helped form the foundation of my faith was the songs Aunt Gertie used to sing to me as childhood lullabies — mostly old hymns, though not “Abide With Me” or anything she considered too much like a funeral hymn! She loved gospel songs, a favourite being “Just a Closer Walk with Thee,” the song that, when I volunteered at radio station VOAR, she used to always ask me to play for her while I was on-air. When I was little she liked to sing “Someone Will Enter the Pearly Gates,” “Give Me the Bible,” and, “When He Cometh, When He Cometh, to make up His jewels, all the pure ones, all the bright ones, his loved and his own.”

Aunt Gertie’s life was not without its hardships and challenges. When I was too young to fully understand what was happening, she was diagnosed with breast cancer, which was far more often a death sentence forty-five years ago than it is today. At the time my parents and I were still living in her house, and I’m sure there were times when she wondered whether she would live to see me grow up. Not only did she do that, but she lived long enough to see my children, Chris and Emma, grow up in the house next door, running in and out of her house in search of the forbidden junk food she loved to give them. She survived cancer a second time at age 90, and still had more life and energy left in her. Aunt Gertie valued her independence greatly and it meant so much to her to be able to go on living in her own home, which she was able to manage until she was almost 97. I remember thinking that having to go to a nursing home, something she had always dreaded, would absolutely crush her spirit. Instead, I saw her adapt to her limited mobility and new circumstances with grace and good humour, her cheerful spirit quickly making her a favourite with the nurses who cared for her and the friends and family who visited her.

Aunt Gertie suffered a stroke on Sabbath afternoon, the first of November, and died just a few days later. The last time she was able to carry on a conversation, with some difficulty, was on Monday afternoon, when I sat by her bedside and she told me over and over that she was feeling much better. “I’m feeling fine, you go on now,” she said several times, showing over and over that same spirit she always had — not wanting to be a bother or cause anyone any trouble. At one point on Monday she said to me, “I’m just tired. If I get some rest, I know I’ll feel better in the morning.” Now she is at rest, and I am confident that she will, indeed, be better in the morning. She taught me to look forward to that day when Jesus would come to make up his jewels, and now we who loved Gertie look forward to that as the day when we will see her again. I know that, like the stars of the morning, she will shine as a bright gem in His crown.

 

 

 

Gertie Ellis, 1914-2014

Last month, we celebrated my Aunt Gertie’s 100th birthday with a very happy gathering of family and friends, which she thoroughly enjoyed. Though her mobility was limited and her memory was starting to fail her, she enjoyed company and was bright and cheerful right through her birthday celebration.

On Saturday of this week she suffered a stroke that left her unable to use her only good hand, able to speak only with difficulty, and, most importantly, unable to swallow. Despite this, the last day she was able to talk to me, on Monday, she spent most of my visit telling me, “I”m feeling fine,” and “I’m feeling much better,” and “You should go on now” — not wanting me to worry about her.

She slipped mostly into sleep after that, and when I visited her both yesterday and today she didn’t wake up when I or the nurses spoke to her. Finally, just after noon today, I was sitting by her bed when I realized that her light, shallow breathing had stopped — it happened so gently it took me a few minutes to realize she was gone. If only we could all be blessed with 100 years of mostly healthy, happy life and such a peaceful passage out of this world!

I’m very tired now and I’ll share more about Aunt Gertie and my memories of her later. Right now I’ll leave you with this blog post I wrote several years ago, about making blueberry pie with Aunt Gertie, and this video of Christopher interviewing her for a heritage fair project when he was eleven and she was 95.