A Mini-tour of St. John's, Newfoundland Yesterday

We get quite a few cruise ships in our wonderful harbour here in St. John's. Yesterday it was the Insignia. So I toddled down to the harbour front to have a gawp.

There was a lot of traffic down there so I couldn't get far enough away to get a good shot of the whole ship so I decided to go to the south side of the harbour, which is always devoid of tourists and vehicles and crammed with boats of all kinds, fishing, service and coast guard.

So I took another shot of the ship across the harbour.

It's always lovely over there, I saw this gull sitting on a pole surveying the scene. You might have to embiggen to spot him but he caught my fancy.

I love the houses climbing the cliffs surrounding the entrance to the harbour.

I then took myself off up Signal Hill, which was crowded with busloads off the cruise ship and I overheard some conversations. Apparently this cruise line speccializes in off the beaten track cruises and their enraptured comments about St. John's were pleasing,

I stopped to talk to a woman who had six dogs and I fell in love with all of them.

I am old so no one gives a tosser when I am listening to conversations, I have the advantage of being invisible. So I was sitting on a wall behind two thirty-ish men who were holding hands, standing extremely close to each other, pretending to be catching the spectacular view but their undercurrent was electrifying. Summary: they were on the cruise, had met the night before on the deck at midnight, were married (to unsuspecting women?) and were planning another midnight sojourn once more when the ship sailed later on, meanwhile they had to get back to their wives who were left browsing in the tourist shop. As they were whispering intensely I took this photo of a fishing boat heading out to the open ocean. I am always struck by the forty shades of blue we have out here.

And I pondered on the secret lives of others.
 

One More Gone

Yeah, I know I'm at that age.

Standing slightly tilted and looking behind myself. Not too much. Not too often. Not staring or anything. But with tears.

For he is gone.

Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.

And his dust was particularly rich.

He was incredibly kind to me.

And gifted. Gifted in humanity and compassion.

He championed me and mine. He stood up and his voice was heard when my voice wasn't.

And I, for one, am a better person because of him.

I wrote about him here. My story disguised him well. But his essence is there, his thirst for knowledge and incredibly long, involved conversations.

He listened.

He respected.

And yes, I loved him. Passionately.

And our time was lovely and memorable.

And far too brief because of my alcoholism which was in full throttle then.

I will never forget him.

Darling man.

Stories Around the Fire

I took a lover when I was thirty-nine, fresh out of a marriage. He was twenty years older than me. I felt the crush of my upcoming fortieth birthday bearing down on me like a boulder, whooshing all the air out of me as if trying to flatten me. He slowed it all down.

He had a soothing patience and a kind of bemused detachment that allowed me a lot of freedom. He was an ex-priest and in the seminaries he was taught well: he learned about not being a servant to the flesh.

I’d never been with such an old man, as he appeared to me then. An ascetic old man. But given that he was never a servant to the body he carried it to the extreme in that he never walked anywhere, it was as if his car was an extension of him. A greyhound, my mother would have called him. He ate carelessly and inattentively as if food was mere fuel for his intellectual life and if he could have gotten away with not eating he would.

His story had an interesting feature. He’d been a priest for twenty years and only left when he fell hopelessly in love with an orphaned baby on a reservation in Northern Ontario and couldn’t abandon her. Her parents had died together in a fire, triggered by drunken smoking. None of her relatives wanted her, there was some degree of fetal alcohol syndrome and her periodic rages and tantrums were intimidating to most. But not to him, he told me. He would gather her up and rock her and comfort her and he’d stop her pain instantly.

He wanted to adopt her, which was ridiculous, him being a parish priest, you see. At first I found his story a little creepy as it was an alien thing to me, this older man taking a non-prurient interest in a girl-child as I had been a victim of the other kind. But I met her and she was limited but charming and my overly suspicious eyes didn’t pick up on anything untoward. An extraordinary thing in 1973 – to leave the priesthood to parent a strange child.

After he abandoned the priesthood and set up house with the child, he proceeded to take his PhD in Theology and that’s how I met him; when he was teaching an exploration of world religions course. I was teetering on the edge of agnosticism, not quite into full fledged atheism and had yet to string the words patriarchy and religion together in the same thought stream.

We got into a discussion on Buddhism after class one night. And he was patient in explaining to me how it and Catholicism were interconnected and he could recommend some interesting books, in fact he had some at home which was near the school and he could lend them to me. Would I care for a coffee and continue the discussion in his house, he had a baby sitter who needed to get home.

Flattered, intrigued, I followed him home in my car. An old, old house on the edge of High Park. The baby sitter was leaving as I slowly pulled up outside while he stood in the open doorway, the amber light of the hall behind him, silhouetting his lanky frame, his curly grey hair like a halo.

He took me into his ground floor study-den-parlour, a room that was jammed floor to ceiling with books and small tables and three wing chairs. It even had a fancy library ladder for accessing the high shelves and a working fireplace that he’d freshly lit.

He was extraordinarily attentive, his head inclined towards mine as he weighed each of my words as if they were precious gems. And nodding slowly and carefully once he had absorbed them, as if into his very bones. I was flattered. I blossomed further under such focussed devotion, expressing more of my opinion, more of my quest. He got up and began to pile books on the table beside me.

He then spoke of his own faith and shared his personal story of the leaving of the priesthood and the child, Mee-waa, now known as Maria, who was then nine.

He went off to make the coffee and I fingered the books, all by Anthony DeMelo, a Jesuit priest who had lectured on Buddhism.

When he came back with a tray with the coffee on it, I didn’t hesitate for one second. I was surprised at myself as I didn’t have wine in me to loosen me up. Stone cold sober, I slowly ground out my cigarette in the ashtray and got up and went over to him as he was just about to ask the cream and sugar question and put my arms around him in a way that would not be misconstrued. Tightly. And threw my face up at him. Boldly.

And I said, I can still hear myself, all these years later, laughing I was, so confident, so sure of the outcome. And oh, so clear.

“Your move!”