Life - Part One
Chapter 4: Family Ways
Sharon works with me now on the Rendezvous thing. I never sent it out; things were too hectic for a few years there around the time of the breakup with Jan. And I still have this problem with it that Charlie was never able to solve with any final satisfaction: how to choose among a half-dozen possible endings. Once you decide to depart from the truth (or even, Sharon points out, when you try to describe the truth) any number of options present themselves, smiling cheerfully: "Try me! I'm your man! Never mind how it was: this is how it should have been!"
Still, Sharon insists on leaving the major editorial decisions to me, while she tends the garden. Maybe that's why I still haven't settled on that elusive ending. Plus, there are the demands of my current handyman's job, and two kids, and . . . the list goes on. Or, maybe I don't really want to see my name in Argosy. I'd be reluctant to exchange my present brand of utopia for the glossy-fame version.
It's so easy, in retrospect, to evaluate the wisdom of one's choices; so hard in present time. Now, at the end of nearly half a century of life - at an arbitrary end point that I designate by choosing to tell about what came before - I can say, just as arbitrarily, that it all worked out as it had to. If I go further and say it worked out for the best, I'm making a judgment about my current status in life, a shaky proposition. But what else can I go by? There is one obvious question to rely on: how does it feel today?
"Pretty good, Doc. . . ."
Fine as far as that goes - but immediately another, more precocious question rears its golden head: Have I yet attained the crown to my kingdom?
To pin down a lifelong quest to such a tangible goal, even in metaphorical terms, makes me wary. To gain the crown would be, I'm afraid, to succumb to self-satisfaction, inertia, smug stagnation.
I want to embrace, instead, the inertia of constant movement, riding with the irresistable force rather than becoming the immovable object. But here there is danger of rootlessness, of nursing a perpetual adolescence. So I justify this choice by bringing the field of change inward, away from the concrete world Jan was so attached to, to the inner realms. This kind of change has less and less to do with moving residences, changing lovers or jobs, and more to do with personal growth.
"Whatever that means," Jan would say.
It meant, in the case of her and Charlie, splitting up. Not knowing how clear the decision really was, on the plane of destiny, Charlie was torn. After all, marriage was forever, right? In the end he tossed a coin.
Tails.
I thought so, he said immediately.
Sometimes the outer world and the inner world have to change together, dancing hand in hand.
Wishy-washy, maybe; but at least Charlie knew when the time had come to call it quits. Jan knew, too; only the way it had to work out was a little more complicated . . . another part of the story. Suffice it to say that Charles Ash made a bundle for me in the real estate boom a couple of years back, and so supplied, took to the road to see what life still had to offer when allowed to deal from its own deck. Charlie's money, my destiny: a slightly confused identity, for a while there, but at any rate, I-Charlie found myself setting out on the road alone, away from that garden-utopia Charlie had come with Jan to find, and toward another that would suit me better.
My first ride, can you believe it, after a two and a half hour wait, was a single woman with a three-year-old kid named Eddie. She was pretty good looking, even if a couple of her teeth - I couldn't help but notice when she smiled - were a bit crooked and the car was kind of messy with the kid's clothing and toys and food wrappers. . . . Did I really want an involvment with a kid, with a single mom, right off the bat? "Fate gives to those who put out their real needs," I recalled someone telling me once. And I thought I was out for a real opening to fate, an unending series of exotic escapades. . . .
"Sure," I said after thinking the above so fast that it was like not thinking at all. "How far you goin'?"
Now I live in limbo, as the world is. Delaying, and ready: as always.
Where will I travel next in this astral body? I can go anywhere I want now, having achieved a point of rest. Maybe I will choose this very point where I already am. Maybe the same but with a new wrinkle, like the Tibetan boy in the tale who grows to be an old man and with total choice in the bardo-state chooses the same village to be reborn to, this time as a girl.
Sharon and I had a daughter of our own, Constance. Or was it that Constance decided to have us?
Sharon: of all the women in the world I would choose to be with, I choose her. At every moment I choose again, reaffirm that choice - if only by not choosing something or someone other. Some moment in a world to come I might change that choice. Or the power to choose might be taken away from me. Nothing is guaranteed.
So I savor this fact of choice at each step. Paradise, last night: simple, yet elegant. Three inches thick, a band of dusk-light in the window shone between window frame and roof line. From our angle of repose, in the bath at the end of a Friday afternoon of oddments (toilet and chimney cleaning, homeschooling with Eddie, changing a tire, cleaning up scraps from the fence project), it was a vision of a higher realm. Both kids were away for an overnight, the first time ever. We were able to relax that night into a rare and beautiful honeymoon space, of quiet music and candlelight turned by tired eyes into cascading threads of twisting gold . . . to remember that present wisdom that I keep forgetting in times of anxiety about career and self-image, lifestyle viability, social proficiency, waning sexuality - not to mention assorted vague fears concerning the world situation, the environment and the economy; and dim wonderings about roads not taken.
Old, moss-grown wonderings - not regrets. Now, everything is perfect. I can work near home; I don't spend half my time bitching with my partner; I have the privilege of caring for two good children; there's a snug cabin to live in with no mortgage to pay off.
As far as the basics go, I have to say I'm satisfied; yet I have this residual urge to make things better. It's the fuel that's driven me past all those previous, incomplete situations to one I can live with, long-term. But now what do I do with the leftovers?
Five minutes of news on the radio supplies a long list of places to put that energy, longer than my leg. There are so many in the world who have needs so much greater than mine that it makes me feel I must find a way to help them. Am I wasting my time with this puttering job as a handyman?
When I open up to Sharon about these nagging concerns of mine, she tells me not to worry about it. "If your heart's in the right place," she tells me with the stroke of a single finger down my chest, "you're helping the world."
"But is it in the right place?"
She looks at me with big, shining, clear eyes. I have my answer.
How come she doesn't bother herself with such silly questions?
Spring and summer, she's out there working the hoe in the garden, back and forth, back and forth.
To me (I confessed to Sharon early on in our relationship) a hoe is more than a hoe: it is an instrument of profound harmony, or of enslavement: depending on one's attitude, one's subjective stance in the flux of time.
"That may be," she answered with a placid and magnanimous smile, "but it's still just a tool."
"Yes," I persisted, "but what kind of tool? That's the question."
"I'd call it a hoe."
"How come you know so much?"
Little Eddie wants a sandwich now, and the phone is ringing; I gotta run.
Mrs. Edgart wants her hedge trimmed. Two hundred feet of it.
"Daddy," Eddie says to me, "what am I gonna be when I grow up?" He spreads his own peanut butter, licks up the spilled bits from the table with his tongue.
I try to remember back to when I was eight, what I wanted to be. What difference did it make, then?
Or now?
I just want to be me. To make a living, sure, in any way that makes sense, feels good. For now, a handyman; another time, who knows? I've got this far and I'm still alive, that's the main thing. After that comes the new, improved utopia. . . .
Shit, there's that goddamn phone again!
This time it's my neighbor, Cynthia Jenks, in charge of the twice-monthly Help Our World (HOW) discussion group, informing me of our topic for this Thursday night:
"What are the positive prospects for social change, and what could be my personal role in them? Or, what are my personal potentials at present, and how might they further the cause of social change?"
So they worked out the wording. I knew it was coming; that's why I've been on this melancholy track today.
Why melancholy? I should be enthusiastic, fiery, filled with idealistic fervor and hope for the future . . . just like in the Sixties. . . . Oh, well. Maybe it's just the gray sky blowing snow in, winter starting.
Half a dozen of us gather around Billie Katuntxit's ("say it like 'zits,'" he says) pot-bellied stove. Billie's got the coffee on. He's a broad-fleshed native trapper who lives alone, and who takes encouragement from the well-meaning white folks in this group. There's Cynthia Jenkins, on her night out away from Harvey; young Tamantha and her partner Head-o in his dreadlocks; and Phil Morrison, veteran of union politics in the lumber industry all over northern BC, now retired to his garden, orchard, fishing and armchair politics with the rest of us amateurs. All except Billie have had a drive over snowy roads to get here, from our houses scattered along a highway in the middle of nowhere: our habitation invisible from the average tourist but for the inconspicuous entrances to our long driveways into the bush. Tonight, we've had to park along the highway and follow Billie's snowshoe trail to the cabin with its cheery plume of white smoke. There's nothing to recognize as a settlement around here; no store, no post office, not even a gas station until Cansell, twenty-five minutes further on. But there is community.
I take off my wet feltpacks at the door.
"How's the wife and kids?" Billie asks me with a smile as he offers me a wooden chair with pale peeling paint. He always asks me that, I guess because he doesn't have any - at least, not to live with, any more.
"Doin' just great, Billie. How's the beaver and muskrats?" This, too, is my standard reply.
"Ha, ha. They's keeping me goin'. You want coffee?"
"Thanks."
"I wonder if we can get started," Cynthia says politely. She's our group facilitator; a slight, middle-aged woman of delicate yet softly intense bearing; with that rare combination of efficiency and tact required for moving things along smoothly. "You've all had a chance to think about this week's question, and I've let Billie in on it by coming here a little early tonight."
"Yeah," Billie adds, "not like I haven't thought of what you people want to talk about before. My people brought up all the children with the knowledge of the ancestors and what is necessary for the generations to come."
Billie talks slowly and deliberately; Cynthia moves swiftly during a pause to outline her agenda. "I thought we could start with a bit of a round with each person sharing for a couple of minutes on the topic, and then throw it open for general discussion. Does that sound all right?"
Silent assent, nodding heads.
"Then, Billie, do you want to go on?"
He's sitting now in his chair by the stove staring at the floor, reflecting, his lips pursed, his hands folded over his ample belly, his feet in cowboy boots stretched along the outside of our circle. "Naw, I'll wait a bit now. You people go ahead. I'll hear what you have to say. You are my guests." At this he beams broadly and looks at each one of us, his black eyes bright.
Cynthia looks at me, and can tell at a glance that I'm not ready to speak yet. "Tamantha, would you like to begin?"
"Okay." She adjusts her long flowered dress, sits up straight and scratches her braided blonde hair. "I guess, it's like, I've been wondering about this change business, and then thinking about you older - you who are older than me, who've been through experiences - I mean, like Phil's talking about strikes, and maybe Charlie, in the States: I wonder if I kind of missed the boat on the revolution." She laughs a little, adjusts her wire-rimmed glasses. "Not that there was a real revolution, you know, but like, the Sixties and all that. Or maybe, maybe the real one, if there is such a thing, a time of love I mean, is still a ways off, twenty-five years, maybe, or - I don't know. I guess that's all I have to say."
"Head-o?"
Head-o's a young man about the same size and age as Tamantha. He's wearing a woven rainbow cap over his dreads, and a thin growth of light-colored hair on his lip and chin. Pondering the question of our personal role in social change, his brow is even more deeply furrowed than usual.
"Uh, yeah." He nods meaningfully, then begins gesturing as he speaks. "Like these guys, Gandy, King, Lenin even, did they really create social change? That's the question, isn't it?"
"Yes," Cynthia tells him. "That's right. And looking at what we personally can bring to bear on the situation."
"Oh, yeah." This thought plunges Head-o into further deep concentration. "Okay. What I was going to say was, did these guys really do anything that wouldn't have happened anyway? It's the flow of history, I think. What's gonna happen is gonna happen, you know? So they were there. Yes, they joined in. They helped it along. Like you help the current along with a paddle when you canoe on a river."
Billie looks up. "Hey, no. Your paddle, it's going backwards against the current. The current's with you. You ever actually canoe before?"
"Uh, not really."
"Not really? You oughta come canoeing with me some time. I'll show you how it works."
"All right, gentlemen. Can we get back to our round?" Cynthia nods in Head-o's direction.
"Yeah, okay." It's not clear whether he's accepting Billie's invitation or responding to the facilitator. "So, what I was saying, if these superstars, so to speak, can't even really have a real effect, then what about us average eco-freaks or whatever? But we gotta do our part anyway, I guess."
My turn next; and I feel inspired to respond to the young man's point: "Right. That's what I've been thinking. About how all the little actions add up. Mrs. Average Housewife who uses recycled paper towels; or the yogi in his cave sending out peaceful vibrations. All of these things have to help. Sharon tells me, it's all in having your heart in the right place. I believe that. Then whatever we do will help move the whole thing a little closer to where we want it to be. Yeah. I guess that's all I have for now."
I notice Phil next to me twitching his loafers as I speak. Is he registering disagreement or formulating some other tangent on the question? In any case I'm prepared for his characteristic brand of argumentation.
"But - " he begins as always - "how can you suggest that this yogi, this well-meaning housewife is making any difference when the whole works is going to hell in a handbasket? Do you people have any idea what's really going on out there, in the boardrooms, in the meetings of the Trilateral Commissions and the World Banks and the transnationals, the security agencies and Pentagons, and God knows what else? It's no picnic, I can tell you, with paper towels and meditation. No sir. You talk of revolution, and the Sixties. The Sixties was nothing. You know anything about the Winnipeg General Strike? Haymarket? Jesus. I can't see it happening in my lifetime, I'll tell you. And yet if it doesn't happen soon, it's gonna be all hell."
Cynthia breaks in to ask, "Phil, could you share something of how you see your personal role in changing some of the world situation?"
His bushy eyebrows flutter, and he sits up and folds his arms. "Well, uh - look, I guess I did my part. I spent the better part of thirty years union-organizing, negotiating, picketing, leafleting, lobbying, you name it."
"And do you think it did any good?" I venture to ask in as objective a tone as I could manage.
He eyes me carefully, uncrossing and recrossing his legs. "Uh, yes, I suppose I'd have to say it did do some good. We got the companies to give us decent bunkhouses, isolation and travel pay, shutdown pay, dental plans, sure, it all made things a little easier for the working man. Now, for the world situation, though - well, I guess that's why I'm here." He pauses. "What about you, Cynthia?"
"I've given this question a great deal of thought. More and more, I suppose, recently as we've, Harvey and I, have moved here and appreciate this wonderful natural environment we live in. Though in his work for the power company he's not able to actively help things out, I suppose, he does have a strong faith in Christ and this has helped us both to . . . to come to terms with who we are as people . . . to be humble and yet to do the best we can. Personally, I don't have many credentials to look at: a schoolteacher for many years, and I still serve as a trustee for the district school board. These are valuable, I suppose, for it is the younger generation that will make the difference in the next century."
I look at Tamantha and Head-o and have to wonder. Are they representative of that coming generation? They are throwbacks to my youth, with their Sixties clothing, slang, and lifestyle. Head-o is a treeplanter: an occupation with its own compromise between what a radical would call "complicity" with the corporate machine, and a hands-on effort to "green" the earth . . .
Now Billie begins to speak again in his rich, deep voice. "Seems like what it's really about is happiness, isn't it? Isn't that what the big boss in the multinational wants? In the form of lots of money, I guess. Or the big general, with their bunch of troops all lined up, or their territory on the map all in their color. Having things, having things your way . . . the native peoples' ways are different but seems like we all want this happiness. Even this Jesus fellow, isn't that what he wanted for all of us? That's what I get out of it, anyways. And me, poor old Billie Katuntxit - what am I gonna do about it? I guess just be happy. I guess I am that. 'Cept my wife and kids not here - why was that? I was drinkin' then. Killin' that happiness. But now they're gone, and I guess they're happy where they are, with the cousins up the river. I get along. Maybe my way is to sit and talk with you people, offer you coffee - anybody just help yourself, here it is. You see? The elders told me it's all worked out. You go with it, your paddle in the river no matter whichaway. So I don't worry. It's happening, see? You people, white people, come here. I go to your house, drink your coffee. Even this fella here with his paddle and his honey in their tipi. Indian tipi from the plains, white cloth-canvas, but that's okay. That's good. Teach you to live with the cold. That's our way. And I have the big cookstove in the trapper's cabin. That's our way too."
He pauses, looking at us with black eyes shining brightly. "You people, you make me happy. You're my family now."
