Dropped Threads 3 Read online

  For Gary, with love

  CONTENTS

  MARJORIE ANDERSON Foreword

  ANN-MARIE MACDONALD Introduction

  part one A KIND OF BENEDICTION

  MARGARET ATWOOD Polonia

  MARIE-LYNN HAMMOND Creature Comfort

  LORRI NEILSEN GLENN Believe You Me

  PATRICIA PEARSON Notes on a Counterrevolution

  M.A.C. FARRANT The Gospel According to Elsie

  NATALIE FINGERHUT In Praise of Misfits

  GILLIAN KERR Tiny Tomatoes

  JODI LUNDGREN Pitch: A Dancer’s Journal

  MELANIE D. JANZEN The Road to Kihande Village

  part two A CLARITY OF VISION

  BETH POWNING Barefoot in the Snow

  BARBARA MITCHELL Finding My Way

  JUDY REBICK Rebellion and Beyond

  HARRIET HART She Drinks

  CHANTAL KREVIAZUK Over the Rocks and Stones

  TRACEY ANN COVEART I Am a Mother

  BARBARA SCOTT Tethers

  SILKEN LAUMANN Uncharted Waters

  LIANE FAULDER About the Boys

  part three A LONG ECHO

  ARITHA VAN HERK Work and Its Dubious Delights

  BARBARA MCLEAN From the Ashes

  BERNICE MORGAN Love and Fear

  HEATHER MALLICK The Inoculation

  LAURIE SARKADI The Bear Within

  MAGGIE DE VRIES The Only Way Past

  J.C. SZASZ No Beatles Reunion

  JANICE WILLIAMSON Fú: The Turning Point

  JODI STONE Divorcing Your Mother

  part four GIFTS BEYOND RECKONING

  FRANCES ITANI Conspicuous Voices

  CATHY STONEHOUSE In the Presence of Grace

  ANDREA CURTIS The Writers’ Circle

  SUSAN RILEY Larry’s Last Resort

  NORMA DEPLEDGE My Father’s Last Gift

  C.B. MACKINTOSH Moss Campion

  LORNA CROZIER Animal Lessons

  JUNE CALLWOOD A Thought, or Maybe Two

  Contributors

  Acknowledgements

  FOREWORD

  MARJORIE ANDERSON

  My first discovery of the universe a word can hold happened on a December night in rural Manitoba, where I lived with my seven siblings and our parents. I had been at a sleep-over with a cousin who lived a half mile down a bush trail. In the middle of the night I was struck by a wave of loneliness so powerful it forced me out of bed, into my clothes and, stealthily, out the door of my cousin’s house. The path home, familiar in the daytime, had been transformed into foreign territory with its alternate strips of moonlight and tree shadow stretching over mounds of snow. I felt as though I had never been on that trail before and, moreover, that no one knew I was there. At that moment, I was outside every known person’s awareness—and I was inside the word alone. I knew it intimately and totally.

  The next week in school I learned that a classmate, an only child, had lost both parents in a boating accident. Immediately I understood that she too had crossed over to the interior of the word alone but, with a start, I recognized that her invisible landscape was vastly different from mine. My eight-year-old mind did the transference, and I was left unsure and wobbly where earlier I’d been certain I had discovered the absolute, shining truth about aloneness.

  These two experiences strongly shaped my relationship with language, and with what language builds—knowledge. Never again could I feel the charmed security of knowing something totally. Truth and meaning became provisional, someone’s small claim on a vast landscape of possibilities, one dot in a pointillist painting. My initial sense of loss was replaced by a fascination with the personal stories of others and their claims on what a word signified or an experience held. I sensed that if I listened closely and gathered in as many “dots” of meaning as I could, I might, just might, come close to the marvel of that mid-winter epiphany of 1952, when the gap between language and complete understanding vanished.

  I’ve come to understand the force of women’s interest in personal narratives as a collective version of that impulse born in me when I was eight. We need to know how to read the world beyond our experience of it, and we trust firstperson accounts, perhaps more so because of the lack of faith in political and corporate declarations of truth and meaning. Personal stories are one means of getting a trusted inside view—This is how wisdom, love, joy, betrayal, fear, regret have been for us. No assertions of absolute truth, no earth-shaking revelations or attempts to manipulate another’s belief, just individual voices making individual claims on the discovery of meaning.

  Several years ago Carol Shields and I had the privilege of tapping into this passion for an inside view of women’s experiences when we collaborated on editing the first two Dropped Threads anthologies. These collections of intimate stories on surprise and silence in women’s lives have been embraced by readers with an enthusiasm that left all of us—contributors, editors and publishers—amazed at the size of the community of shared interest we found. The fact that Carol’s wisdom and generous spirit were central to that community gives those paired books an especially treasured quality.

  And yet there has been an ongoing insistence for more, from both readers and writers. In the three years since the publication of the second Dropped Threads anthology, personal essays have continued to come in “just in case,” and in every women’s gathering or discussion group I’ve attended, inevitably there was the question “Will there be another collection?” The decision to go ahead with a new anthology was a way of honouring the creative fervour swirling around me and, happily, keeping connected to it. The idea for the new theme came easily when I thought again of how varied our encounters inside language can be. Instead of having women focus on what they haven’t been told, I wanted them to write about their significant discoveries of meaning, to pass on what they have to tell all us enthusiastic dot collectors.

  In direct invitations to established writers and in a cross-Canada call for proposals placed on the dropped threads website and in the Globe and Mail, the publishers and I asked women to consider the topic “This I Know.” The responses were immediate, as women released their well-earned wisdoms into stories, which rose up from across the country like happy vapours too long confined. The only hesitancy was with absolute truth-telling, with the ring of certainty that “know” suggests. Many writers obviously felt far more comfortable with a stance one of them referred to as “this I suspect.” Advice-giving too came in on a slant, delivered with humour and a clear-eyed view of the limited benefits of unsolicited counsel, no matter how well intended.

  There also seemed to be limits on the kind of stories women wanted to tell. None of the three hundred proposals and submissions dealt with what women have learned about long-standing love relationships with men, and only a few were about their experiences of professional work in the traditional haunts of men. As if … well, as if these topics have had adequate coverage, or verge on dangerous territory.

  What women did want to write about was the importance of other connections—to nature, to animals, to dance, to lives beyond the familiar, and above all to the varied choices and experiences of motherhood, a topic central to a third of the submissions. Another common theme was a sense of place: discovering it within families and in the world, but also asserting it by showing the unique experiences behind common terms such as victim, addict, rebel, celebrity. Women’s remarkable affinity for endurance and peace surfaced in all these accounts. Whether they shared intimate moments of grace and beauty or charted paths through minefields of personal pain, these writers left blueprints for ways of being that others could follow.

  The thirty-five pieces I’ve selected from this rich array of stories stood out for me because of the particularly fresh, engaging ways
they provide the sustenance we tend to look for in narratives. Each story either places us in a landscape we can experience anew—Ah, yes, I recognize that feeling, that thought, that phase—or takes us to new territory where we’re left altered in understanding and empathy—So that’s what it’s like inside an experience I’ve never had. Either way, we’re enriched.

  An eighty-two-year old friend of my sister commented when she heard I was working on this collection of women’s personal essays, “Tell her to lighten things up a bit for us.” Well, Rose, I hope you and all others come away from reading this book buoyed up by the courage and creative wisdom of the contributors. And by the fresh glimpses they offer of what might otherwise lie just beyond our own small circles of meaning and sight.

  INTRODUCTION

  ANN-MARIE MACDONALD

  When I was in elementary school, teachers would commonly assign to the class the task of writing a piece of fiction—a “composition”—with the advice “Write what you know.” This directive always gave me a sinking feeling, as if the teacher were attaching concrete blocks to my imagination. “What do I know?” I’d think. “I’m nine years old!” Leaving aside the fact that a writer’s point of view is pretty much forged by the age of five, and the templates for most of experience are cut by the time one is nine, I was not in a position, at that tender age, to mine my own experience and shape it in a way that might speak to others. What I understood from the teacher was that she or he was advising a concrete, literal approach: “Write about what you did on your summer vacation.”

  While, as a much younger person, I didn’t know what I knew, I did know what I could imagine, and I had no trouble authorizing myself to travel infinite distances from the concrete “known.” I didn’t have the words to describe it, but I know now that metaphor—with all its bright trappings of myth, fairy tale and fable—was my native clime, the universe in which I felt at home; and of course my stories about headless horsemen, nine-year-old spies and daring rescues at knifepoint said far more about the concrete facts of my life than any forensic description could have. As I matured as a writer, my stories became more and more rooted in the “here and now.” I didn’t need such elaborate masks to convey my meanings and I strove for a deceptive realism: a layer of what looks like solid ground that, in fact, is afloat on a sea of metaphor—the inverse of magic realism. In a sense, I started way outside of the “small circle” and worked my way back in. Or perhaps I dove down, spiralling into the centre of it, toward the vanishing point that suddenly opens up, like a wormhole, onto a strange new world.

  How can we know what we don’t know? What is it like to be someone else? Does cinammon taste the same to you as it does to me? When I see a round red fruit and call it an apple, are you seeing the same shape and colour? As a child, these were the questions that took my mind out to wander during long sermons at Sunday mass (along with fantasies of rappelling with rope and harness up the inside walls of the church) or at bedtime just after the lights went out, when thoughts of infinity (more circles) made me feel carsick. And in adolescence: how big are our individual circles? Are we doomed to be utterly alone in them? My skull is a circle: the ultimate prison. (See June Callwood’s piece for a wise antidote to adoloescent angst.) Now I take solace in a paradox: each of us is indeed alone, and it’s our awareness of this, along with our ability to empathize with the isolation of others, that allows us to become less so. Empathy is the raw material of compassion. Compassion is an act of imagination; a leap of faith into another’s closed circle.

  This ability to extrapolate from one’s own limited experience to that of many unrelated others is a type of magic, no less than the transformation of a scarf into a bouquet of flowers. Compassion is the power to transform the base metal of mundane experience into a kind of universal gold, recognizable—valuable—to all; compassion is the ability to see deeply enough into our own souls and memories that we glimpse a kind of prima materia, that elusive substance sought by alchemists, physicists and mystics from which all matter—including all life—is formed; that irreducible stuff or force (noun or verb) that we share with the merest particle in the farthest reaches of the universe. Surely we are all working with the same basic materials even when it comes to those carbon-based emanations we call thoughts and feelings. This means that, across great gulfs of time, experience, class, culture and gender, and more, we not only can, but must imagine ourselves into one another’s points of view. Not because “to understand all is to pardon all.” But because without understanding there can be no “fellow feeling,” which is what compassion is. And without compassion there can be no wisdom. No peace. Compassion implies humility. What could be humbler than the act of listening, of placing one’s imagination at the service of another’s point of view; even if on occasion we conclude that we must fight what we have heard and seen, or abandon someone we have put our heart and soul into understanding.

  In this book there are grab bags stuffed with toothsome pearls of wisdom; there are cautionary tales by turns humorous and harrowing; there are finely distilled stories of loss and letting go, of redemption through contact with unlikely others (including and, at times especially, other animals); there are accounts of the struggle to balance personal fulfillment with the needs of others, of the mortal combat that precedes forgiveness. Epiphanies are shared in the bracing and irreverent tones of a kitchen-table conversation, and mundane moments are lit with lyricism such that the familiar is revealed as fleeting, and terribly precious. And there are striking contradictions. A piece by a mother of sons mourning the absence of daughters sits cheek by jowl with a daughter’s account of the painful necessity of cutting her mother out of her life. Most of the pieces, however, inhabit the border zones: those uncertain territories where peace and strife are in constant negotiation.

  The writers themselves are a diverse group: journalists, authors, athletes, homemakers, teachers, artists, office workers and entertainers, many of whom combine several of the above. Some inhabit very large social and professional circles, others trace a shorter radius of home and family, but these differences are, I believe, far from definitive when it comes to a highly evolved world view: the Brontës and Emily Dickinson are evidence of that, just as an adventurer like Jane Goodall makes of her journey, far from human culture, an illumination of what connects us most intimately. And, indeed, this book is concerned with relationships—personal, political, environmental. Some of the pieces are funny, others are angry, many are both; some are poetic, others are barbed with satire. All are earnest, even the ironic ones. Each writer has done her utmost to share a scrap of wisdom—something torn from experience and saved against the day when it will find its place in the quilt—along with her doubts, in a way that is unmediated by ego or apology (that false humility which is really a disguise for fear). At the centre of this collection is each writer’s struggle to articulate a unique point of view in such a way that it can be launched like a message in a bottle to innumerable other “islands;” or, more aptly, to cause a ripple that dilates and intersects with other circles until the circles disappear and we are left with something that resembles more of a web: interdependent, inextricable. The result is thirty-five acts of compassion and little leaps of faith.

  In this book, confidences are shared that might not even be whispered otherwise, certainly not to a stranger in a bookstore. But the page is different. When I write fiction, I imagine that I am speaking to one person: I can’t see the face, which is indistinct in any case, hovering just outside my peripheral vision; but I am aware of a benevolently inclined stranger, a tender ghost, politely yet eagerly haunting my left shoulder, trying for a glimpse of the page. I have compassion for this hopeful ghost. She or he is craving something true, something nourishing. Reading is among the few truly private and intimate acts left to us. As such, it has the paradoxical power to bring us closer to one another than any of our high-tech amenities. This book assumes complicity and understanding. It assumes imagination in its highest form: compassion.
This book makes of the reader, a friend.

  part one

  A KIND OF BENEDICTION

  What advice would I give the young? That is the question put to me by the editor of this book, and it’s one I have trouble answering. Here’s why.

  Just before Christmas I was in a cheese store, purchasing some cheese, when a very young man of—oh, say between forty and fifty—entered, manifesting bewilderment. His wife had sent him out to get something called “meringue sugar,” with strict instructions to buy no other kind, and he didn’t know what the stuff was and couldn’t find it, and nobody in any of the shops he’d so far wandered into had any idea either.

  He didn’t say this to me. He said it to the cheese shop person. She too appeared to be without a clue as to the meringue sugar mystery.

  None of this was any concern of mine. I could have—should have—simply pursued my own personal goal of cheese acquisition. Instead I found myself saying, “Don’t buy icing sugar, that isn’t what your wife wants. What she probably wants is something like fruit sugar or berry sugar, which is sometimes called powdered sugar but it isn’t really powdered, it’s a finer grind than ordinary white sugar, though you’ll have a hard time finding it at this time of year. But really, ordinary white sugar works just fine for meringues as long as you beat it in very slowly. I use it all the time myself, and it helps if you add just a tiny bit of cream of tartar and maybe a half teaspoon of white vinegar, and …”

  At this point my daughter—who’d succeeded in identifying the required cheese—got me in a hammerlock and dragged me over to the cash register, where a lineup was building. “The white vinegar, not the brown,” I called in closing. But I was already appalled at myself. Why had I spewed out all this unasked-for advice to a complete stranger, albeit a helpless and confused one?