Wednesday Whispers From the Past

 

I offer you this.

I am curious about the man behind the camera. He's far from being a man of means.. He is the husband of the woman shown and the father of the child.  They live in a small flat above a chemist's on the main street of a small town. He's the town clerk.

He feels it important to capture the moments in his family's life so (I imagine) he bought the camera at a discount from the chemist shop downstairs, where he gets his photos developed. It's a Kodak Brownie.

The threesome have cycled a good distance today for he has had a special cast-iron seat installed on the crossbar of his bike to accommodate the child.

Their picnic is in the basket of his wife's bicycle. She doesn't want the child sitting on the bare cast iron seat so she uses the child's baby blanket on top of it to make sure she's comfortable. And they then sit on this for the picnic.

They're all a little tousled after the cycling. The mother has rigorously curled her own hair and that of the child the night before. And as the father readies the lens on the Brownie, she takes out a comb and fixes her own hair but devotes more time to the child who squirms as she reties the bow in her hair. 

The father jokes with the child to make her laugh and as she does, the mother smiles, holding her daughter's hand. 

He snaps the perfect picture, beautifully framed.

Risk Taking

Goodbye Cara the caravan

What forms us? What forms me?

Our stories surely. All the little stories of our lives. The bursts of joy, the hell holes of sadness, the reactions to casual cruelties, the love, the hate and all emotions in between. Though some say it's all boiled down to two: Love and Fear.

I write of my own childhood events, the memories so crystal clear. These are what made me with all my flaws, my strengths, my talents. My thirst for knowledge, my passion for language and Irish culture, my obsession with writing. Even my addictions. Whether they are bred in the bone or habituated as a coping mechanism, who's to tell and why speculate as to the origin. Sometimes things just ARE. I live with them. I accept them. I make changes, often kicking and screaming, I make changes. And I chance and risk take.

Over an unexpected lunch with friends in town yesterday we discussed risk-taking. Chance taking. How do we ever know unless we attempt something new - no matter how foolish, no matter how idiotic sounding. This couple take chances. The started several businesses that failed and then struck success with the final business started twenty years ago which they sold last year. This year they head off to Florida for the winter. To try it. And see if they like it.

I take chances - I bought Cara the caravan a few years ago to gypsy my way around the enormous island of Newfoundland, one outport at a time.

The fantasy of this idea came up against cold, hard reality. I've never changed a tire in my life or charged up unliftable batteries overnight or cleaned out a portable toilet system or pumped in potable water to a tank. I was not about to start. I'm simply not that type of pioneer woman.

Cara is leaving me in a few days into the custody and care of a man who does all these things and more and will take manage her. Our lessons are learned in practice and not from lectures. But I never would have known about my own inability if I hadn't taken the chance on her.

Now I do.

No regrets.

Next.

Mr. Geoffrey – a Love Story. Part 4 of 6

See Part One Here
See Part Two Here
See Part Three Here

Another afternoon, he said:

“Jenny, my wife, is re-reading Jane Austen to me every night. You must read or re-read Jane.”

I told him Pride and Prejudice was my favourite followed by Persuasion. We discussed the characters. I remember him saying that Jane Austen did not understand men at all and had them utter very few words in her books, it was all about the women, the clever women.

“I wanted daughters very much,” he said then, “And we lost our only child, a daughter. She was stillborn.”

He left the silence stretching out tautly around us. I felt my unborn child kicking in that long moment. I didn't hesitate for a second. I took his hand and placed it on my abdomen. He didn't say anything but left his hand there like a blessing until I got up and left.

We made each other laugh. He told me stories of his school days, fishing with his father, horse-riding with his sister. I told him old stories out of my grandparents, ghost stories, tales of my folk-singing days, of sailing days in endless sunshine in West Cork, of stage performances in operettas and when he teased me, sang the lyrics quietly to him.

Another day he asked could he touch my hair. He had never seen hair like it, he said and pardon him if he had to put his eyes up close to it, to see it properly, the different colours locked inside it, brown and gold and amber and red and some black, he would swear to the black when I protested there couldn't be. Yes, he insisted, there were a few threads of it in there. Rainbow hair, he said, the girl with the rainbow hair.

People went bald in the camps, he said, from malnutrition. If they didn't shave it off you first and sell it for wigs and mattresses. Women couldn't even get pregnant, he added, their monthlies stopped. Mercifully.

By that time I was getting closer to my delivery date. I don't know what he'd said to his partners and the staff but I continued to work there, converting files to the data management programmes that were then just beginning to loom on the business horizon.

Mr. Geoffrey – a Love Story. Part 2 of 6

See Part One Here

He appeared an old man to me then - for he was at least fifty years of age. He was always unfailingly polite and grateful and I soon got used to his heavy accent and grew to actually enjoy the richness of it. He learned the English language early in life he told me, for the house he was brought up in was multi-lingual.

After a couple of weeks of afternoon reading, we shifted into discussing the archeological articles I had read. He would ask my opinion and listen very carefully to my sometimes stumbling thoughts, his hands linked across his waistcoat, his head leaning against the back of his chair. I was amazed at the number of suits he had. Husband had only two along with a couple of pairs of casual trousers and one sports coat. In those days, I made all my own clothes. And even Husband's casual wear.

Mr. Geoffrey must have had twenty suits, all immaculately tailored, all with matching waistcoats and pale shirts and beautiful ties. Even his shoes were hand made. And his socks looked to be of the finest silks, the little glimpses I caught of them as he crossed his legs.

I would bring deliveries in to his office of different items for his wardrobes if they coincided with our reading time and noted the labels on the boxes and cloth suit and coat covers. The best tailors in Toronto. I would stroke the hatboxes and covet them. I had no hats and neither did Husband. But I always desired the oddest things and still do. Hatpins, Grandgirl's bookmarks. Stuff I have already too much of or have no use for. Mr. Geoffrey always wore a hat coming and going from the office. A hat that matched his suit and overcoat.

Someone mentioned there was a chauffeur that would drop him off and pick him up every day in a pearl grey Cadillac but I never saw it.

As I ponder on the luxury of his clothes today the phrase “sartorial splendour” comes to mind.

That he had in true abundance.

Mr. Geoffrey – a Love Story. Part 1 of 6

I've never written of this or spoken of it before to anyone. Mr. Geoffrey came to my mind early one morning last week as I lay in bed free-thinking. In that way when one's mind can dance and spin around itself, trailing black and white pictures with the explosion of odd sunbursts to make it more interesting.

I can still see him clearly, his leonine head pooled in the light from the strong lamp on his desk, his manicured hands, his eyes magnified far too much behind the thick lenses of his spectacles.

I had the thought of a one-woman play on this story. Next I had the thought that perhaps it was much
too fragile for that? So I'm greatly interested in feedback. I will never forget this man and the unspoken intimacy that lay in the air between us. We never talked of it as if that would have somehow demeaned or cheapened it. All these years later, I still feel warm and safe and, well, loved, when thinking of him. And extraordinarily weepy.

Part 1.

Some things seem quite odd in today's world. Setting: 1969 - downtown Toronto: afternoon in a wooden-desked office. I had the only calculator. A large cumbersome machine which had carbon paper interspersed with the double tape on it so a copy of my 'tots' could be clipped to a general ledger page. Ah, general ledgers, huge tomes with numbered pages. They held the entire financial transactions of a company. Erasures were not allowed. One had to stroke through an error and re-enter it. In pen. Errors were frowned upon. I would need a key, kept in the office safe, to separate the covers and add a new page to avoid fraud and falsifying.

In the summer a light breeze would slide through the windows on the fourth floor and cool us. Open windows in an office building! I would take the sales ledger from the sales clerk around two o'clock in the afternoon and begin to transcribe the totals into the general ledger. Ditto with the purchase journal. All huge books. Important books with columns of blue and red. Where brackets were not allowed but dr(debit) or cr(credit) inserted after each entry. I was 25 years old and considered myself terribly important as I was the first female accountant hired by the firm.

At around three o'clock I'd be awaiting the accounts receivable ledger (where the receipts of the day would be entered against the amounts owing) when I would go to the kitchen and get two cups of coffee and then into the office of Mr. Geoffrey. Mr. Geoffrey was one of the partners of the firm, a man whose main distinguishing feature were his bottle-bottom glasses. A man impeccably dressed with a heavy Germanic accent. There were embroidered logos of his initials on his french cuffs and on his handkerchiefs. I had never seen the delicacy of this before – on pearl grey silk or finest linen shirts there was discreet matching silk embroidery - GBF all intertwined. So delicate I could barely detect it. My mother was a fine embroiderer and knew her fabrics. I remember writing to her about Mr. Geoffrey's shirts and handkerchiefs as I knew she would probably have never seen such work either.

Even in the middle of the day with the sun pouring through the windows, a bright brass desk lamp would illuminate his desk. Beside it was the largest magnifying glass I'd ever seen.

By the afternoon, his eyes would be tired and he had made an arrangement with his partners that I would read to him: the early edition evening newspaper, any archeological articles from the National Geographic or essays from the Atlantic. He told me he'd chosen me as he didn't like the Canadian accent (whatever that was!) and he thought I spoke so well. I would sit beside him and he would have the reading material all ready in his preferred reading order.

And I would begin.

New News

(1) One of my stories is up at The Elder Story Telling Place

(2) Quotes

"I could end the deficit in 5 minutes .. Pass a law that says that if the deficit is more
than 3% of GDP, all sitting members of Congress are ineligible for re-election."
-- Warren Buffett

(3) And (tongue firmly in cheek) ad of the week:

The Smell of Fire - (Final Installment) Part Six

See Part One HERE
See Part Two HERE
See Part Three HERE
See Part Four HERE
See Part Five HERE

There was something so, well, unconscious, about her son, she confides. As if the spirit inside him had never truly woken up. It worried her greatly. He was drinking too much, did I know that? He was so much an outsider in that family. She said that, much the way she'd said Italian in describing her granddaughter yesterday. He was a lonely man, her boy.

She knew of the jibes of his schoolmates and his teachers too, she said. So hard on a little boy. And her eyes filled with tears. No wonder he couldn't wait to get out of school, a man who had the capacity to be an academic. Or a priest. And here she sighed and gripped my hand in both of hers a little more firmly.

I'm not asking you to wrench him away from the signorina, dear, she said, never. You are too spirited to handle him and he too dispirited to handle you. And that's the way of it.

But perhaps you can bring him a little ease? A little comfort to his days? Am I so far out of line here you think me meddling and appalling?

She didn't know it, or maybe she did. But she could have asked me anything and I would have done my best to provide it. Climb hills, ford streams: Martha, just ask.

I shook my head, no, she was no meddler, then I nodded slowly, demolishing the word “pimp” as it surfaced, unbidden, to my judgemental self .

I'll try, I said, I can try.

She didn't have to say it but I could never tell him of our meetings, for they were to gather and grow, little rewards perhaps for my attentions to her son, a cynic might say. But in many ways she was a mother/mentor - expanding upon my own personal vistas with encouragement, attention and connections.

Ian had a lot of free time, opened up substantially by his wife's regular jaunts to Las Vegas.

He would come to me after a bad fire and talk of it, talk of death or rescue, of children and animals and drunks with cigarettes burning or poor wiring and backdrafts and fire alarms and smoke detectors and axes and hoses and mighty red trucks and high to the sky ladders.

He would lay it all out before me, lying there beside me, for even after he showered, the smell of the battle would stick to his pores, drift through his hair, cling to the bed for days afterwards. He would take hours in the recounting of it all until he fell, exhausted, into a mumbling sleep.

And I'd lie there, propped up on one elbow, looking down at him as he slept, marvelling that the only passion he ever felt was in the quenching of the fires of others. And the only passion I ever felt for him was in the smell of it long after it was over.

But it has never really been over, except in the physical sense. Several years into this arrangement I met someone else and I got out of the habit of Ian while still meeting with Martha for dinner or drinks or her latest show.

And I still see her. In an artists' retirement lodge now. Near ninety she is. Alert, engaged, passionate. Teaching the fine points of her profession to any who'll have her. And many do. Wearing her signature yellow. She would not move in with her son and the signorina. It would have been signing her own death warrant and too soon, she says.

I run into him the odd time there. His seventy years looks ill at ease on him. As if he's too old for it, for he looks older than her now. He asks me about my books, my columns, my plays. He tells me as he accompanies me out to my car in the parking lot that he has never loved anyone like he loved me and I believe him.

Some would be flattered by this. But I am sad. For indeed wasn't it a poor excuse for a love affair we had?

And then I remember the smell of fire on him.

And I wonder what I missed.

The Smell of Fire - Part Five

See Part One HERE
See Part Two HERE
See Part Three HERE
See Part Four HERE

My room was all the way up in the attics. One small little dormer room, a single bed, a dresser, a cracked mirror, my trunk, that was it. Four stories up it was.

A terrible part of it was the blindfolding. Even though it all happened in darkness. I never knew who it was, you see. I'd get little clues, smells, grunts, the feel of different hands, some soft, some rough, odd scented soap, hair-oils, unshaven chins, brandied breath, garlic from the pasta. I was gagged too at the beginning, but when I begged them not to do that as losing my breath on top of everything else was paralyzing me so much I thought I would die, they stopped, making me promise not to talk or scream or cry out, I just became numb, you know?

I had nowhere to run, nowhere to go, neither flesh nor fowl nor fish that belonged to me in this strange huge city, such a leap from Ballycloyne, Brigid. You would have no idea.

I knew nothing of such acts. Nothing. I thought it all part of the service to the clergy. Doing my duty in the palace. All in a maid's daily work.

I went to his Excellency when the inevitable occurred. He called me some terrible names, if you can imagine. There was nothing worse that could happen to me, I knew that, so I stood up to him. So I did. I had nothing to lose at all. I had no intention of giving up my child so I asked him for ten thousand dollars and I would be no more trouble to him or his friends. That was a huge amount in those days, dear. I suppose it would be over a hundred thousand today. If he didn't give it to me I would go to the police, I said. He made a lot of threats, of course, saying I'd gone down the docks with all the sailors and he knew all sorts of characters, shady ones, that would knife me as soon as look at me, but he gave in. He must have seen something in my eyes. I would not go down lightly.

Cash, I'll never forget the sight of all that cash in his safe in the library. And jewellery too, diamonds and gold and the flash of rubies. My ten thousand was just a drop in the ocean. He piled it all up in front of me and then, a very odd thing, put an envelope beside it with St. Michael's College printed on it. Told me to use it for the boy's education. If it was a girl, he said, spend it on her wedding.

And that was that. Of course Ian is the head off him, unfortunate I suppose, I could never think of him as my son, understandable, I would think? He is so much of his. But Ian is kinder, he's always been such a gentle boy. But oh, so timid. I had dreams for him, but he plays life carefully, narrowly, have you met Signorina Rosa?

Here, her reflective mood shifts and she laughs as I nod.

Can you imagine how she hates being called Signorina?

Her delight ignited my own and we tittered companionably as she held my hand in both of hers, suddenly sombre.

I have a favour to ask you, Brigid.

The Smell of Fire - Part Four

See Part One HERE
See Part Two HERE
See Part Three HERE

I phoned her. Of course I did. I said I had to see her again, talk to her, listen to her. Without Ian - that was implied in my pathetic slightly desperate phone-call. I'd never done anything like this in my life.

What in God's green earth, I questioned myself. This is bizarre. This is lunacy. I told no one.

I did run it around my mouth for a while, the story I would tell a friend about Martha Carbery and her son Ian. I practised, complete with careless little giggles. “Oh, when I was over at Martha's there, Martha Carbery? Having tea, looking at her latest works......” I confirmed to myself it all sounded far too weird, far too off the edge. I, normally so talky I would attract attention if I muted up, avoided my friends.

A week later, I was back in her studio, dressed in jeans and a new silk shirt, denim blue to bring out my eyes which I had been told were quite a lovely shade if offered some encouragement. Silver earrings in old Celtic symbols (Newgrange circle) dug out from the bottom of the wooden cigar box I kept such stuff in and my hair bound up in a silver barrette to one side of my face. One of my aunts, the fanciful dreamy one, told me once I put her in mind of Veronica Lake of the forties films, and when I was feeling especially in need of getting attention I would do this sideways thing with my hair as Veronica had done. It is hard sometimes to call out the line between the ridiculous and the attractive. But I took my chances.

I got a brisk nod from Martha when she evaluated me and quickly went off in search of her cameras. When she returned, only an ephemeral trace of the woman that I had seen the previous week remained. As if she had tossed aside the script of the deferential persona that hovered around her son. Here was a woman of certainty and electricity.

She put me sitting on her kitchen table. Leaning back on my hands which gripped the edges vice-like. I was terrified of slipping backwards, splaying clumsily across its insetted colourful Spanish tiles. You see, I wasn't blessed with the grace of a gazelle and often laughed at myself, singing “Poetry in Motion” when I tumbled to the floor whilst attempting a new dance manoeuvre.

She took a series of shots, me pensive, sitting looking out from the well of one of the high windows, me, leaning against a whitewashed brick wall, hands in pockets of jeans smiling at her, so easy to do, she was so lovely on the eye.

Afterwards, when she talked to me, I felt as open as I ever felt with anyone in my life before.

I like you very much so I'll tell you, she said, though I've never told Ian and never will and you mustn't. Do I have your word?

I nodded.

I was a little under-maid, the upstairs maid, in the palace, she said. Do you know the palace in Forest Dale?

Who doesn't, I said, it's where the princes of the churches live, right?

Yes, she said, I was fresh over on the boat from Ireland, my mother had died leaving eight of us. Daddy put most of them into care but I was old enough at seventeen to be put off his hands so he talked to the parish priest who arranged for the trip to Toronto and good training in the palace with the fare being paid off out of my wages.

My job was to lay out the archbishop's clothes every morning and every evening, wash them, iron them, keep them repaired, starch his shirts and his hankies, run his bath, make his bed, change, wash, iron and repair the bed linens and those of his clerical friends who would come and visit and stay for a while. Going from dawn to dusk I was, with never a stop and only the half-day of Wednesday to myself and very little money until the fare was paid off.

It started not too long after I arrived.

Here she paused and gathered herself, straightening her shoulders, clearing her throat.

I've only talked of it very few times, Brigid. Some things are better off lying dead and buried.

The Smell of Fire - Part Three

See Part One HERE
See Part Two HERE

How on earth could a vibrancy such as Martha give birth to the carefulness and hesitancy that was Ian?

She must have seen my glance go back and forth between them while we were standing in her vast studio off King Street. You'd never think to look in an area like that for artists. I'd often rushed through it as I drove by. Decrepit, run down, full of rats and criminals and druggies, I'd always surmised.

The soft Irish mist of her voice assured me when I had shared this that of course: this was the whole idea. A secret enclave of studios and galleries hidden away, safe from intrusive eyes in a seedy section of the city.

Her speciality was black and white photography capturing the entrails of the city. Often featuring the beautiful and prominent. The mayor himself cast upon the detritus of his metropolis: sitting, ill at ease, on a blanket on an overloaded skip outside of a demolished building.

It's easy to convince them, she said in answer to my unspoken quizzical look, I tell them it's the only shot of them I'll consider and they all want a Martha.

Her unusual silver grey eyes evaluated me. Her heavy, black (assisted?) hair tumbled around her face. The woman must be near seventy, I thought. I, at 48, felt my own life, as yet completely unlived, heavy on my bones, with my drab grey flannel skirt and tweedy jacket underlying my own sartorial timidity.

Sixty-eight, she said, as if reading my thoughts. It was a month before my 18th birthday when I gave birth to Ian.

She was dressed in a bright yellow pantsuit, with the jacket cut in Nehru style, covering any sins on her neck. Her sleeves were rolled up displaying the hands I had seen on her son. Ian was deferential. I had never seen a son so attentive and admiring of his own mother. She on the other hand, bestowed a careless affection upon him, evidenced by an occasional detached glance in his direction or a soothing “Do you think so, dear?” when he assessed one of the enormous black and white prints hanging from the high ceiling of the studio. It was like walking through a maze to see them all, hung as they were on hooks on the rafters twenty feet above our heads, descending to a few inches above us on black silk ropes, and scattered (as I thought) haphazardly throughout the vast space.

Oh no, dear, she said to me when I mentioned this. There is a plan and a plot to it all.

We went from photos of the tent city on the shores of Lake Ontario to the obscene enclaves of the wealthy in Rosedale as we wended our way from left to right along the pathways of the huge photographs. A journey, for me, through a city I had never seen so intimately.

She gave us green tea in tiny Chinese bowls and kept up a conversation that landed on whatever took her fancy. My career, Ian's upcoming holiday to Ireland to trace his roots (“Whatever for, dear?”), Courtney, her Italian granddaughter (“Is she free of that poisonous man, yet dear?”) all said in that hypnotizing voice of low hills, shallow valleys: tiny inflections, as if all ordinary curiosity had abandoned her years ago, leaving her with only this passion for her art.

I fell in love.

The Smell of Fire - Part Two

See Part One here

Yeah, he was lonely. Yeah, there was no sex in his marriage. His only child, Courtney, was in an impossible childless marriage to a cocaine dealer. All of this rang with the familiarity of the old angelus bells at noon. His oddly hesitant honesty blurting out nuggets in the midst of his life's biography. He'd had a superb private education courtesy of his anonymous father. He'd been a fearful child, sensitive to the jibes and jeers of his schoolmates who learned of his unusual status in an era when “unmarried mother” was pronounced “whore”.

He wanted to get into the work force and quickly to avoid further stigmatization, so he dropped out of university and became a fire fighter at 19. He didn't like it, not one bit. He should have been an academic, he said, but the money was good and he met Rose, the cousin of one of his workmates, at the annual ball, she was a bit older and very serious. Just what he needed as he was a bit of a dreamer. Her dad had been a contractor when the vast swathes of the suburbs of Toronto were being built and died at sixty leaving his four daughters to share in a million dollars. Enough to pay off all their houses.

Trouble was, and here he was hesitant and his cheeks coloured in that strangely attractive way, his wife and her sisters went four times a year to Las Vegas and spent. And spent. So it wasn't like he was living the life of Riley in a mortgage-free house. They still did not have quite enough, even with the nephew's repayment (thanks to you, he said huskily) for him to retire. Even though he could buy himself out now and have a pension as he had just turned 50.

Way back, his daughter had been in high school then, he'd fallen for one of her teachers. Much like me. He'd gone for coffee with her and said to her what he was about to say to me. And that was his only attempt at having a special friendship until he met me.

He wasn't in it for sex, he had to make that clear, but he always had difficulty with friendships due to his childhood status. He never got in the practice of it then. And it became an even bigger challenge at the fire station. Friendships, that took poker and baseball and golf, didn't it? Whereas he just always wanted to be friends with women and talk books and ideas and theatre. And that was impossible, working where he was. And then Rose, how could she understand him hanging around with other women without her. She consumed Harlequin romances like candy. One a day. Though he wasn't critical of people's reading. Don't take him wrong. Reading was good no matter the content. But his field of private interest was medieval history, he loved the middle ages. And its music too. This made him an object of some amusement to his wife and her sisters and friends. And even to his own daughter. A strange bird, they called him. See? He never quite fit in anywhere.

That was easy to see considering his parentage. Old fashioned now, of course. Nowadays, one wouldn't bat an eye at a single mother or speculate on an absent father. But then, it was another story. His mother would never tell him or anyone who this ghostly Other was. Up to this day. And then he blurted out:

“You'll have to meet her!”

Now that got my attention. I snorfled into my cappucino and looked at him, licking the foam off my lips. Had I heard him right?

His face lit up. He became alive. I saw the boy he must have been, excited, proud, his hands coming into play (those lovely hands) as he described his mother's photography business. Her awards, her attention to detail, to unusual locations. Martha Carbery. Who hadn't heard of Martha Carbery? I had seen her exhibits, seen fabulous lake shots in local newspapers, seen her series on the old Toronto docklands.

“I'll ask her to shoot you,” he said excitedly, “Oh, she will love you!”

Ahem, said I, once his hands and voice went still and he sipped his coffee, his delighted eyes never leaving my face, what about Rose?

He looked surprised. Startled almost.

“Oh”, and there was an odd sort of relief in him, rippling slowly through his long, rangy body, “Oh Rose and Martha can't stand each other!”

Tell Me A Story {The Smell of Fire} - Part One

He would always come to me afterwards, the smell of the fire still on him.

I was between marriages then. I can't pin down the exact time it started because I knew himself and the wife for a while first. They had consulted me about a loan they had given to her nephew on which he had refused to make any payments. A delicate matter to be sure. But that was my speciality. Delicate matters that caused much grief to my clients and which needed to be fixed and fast.

I do remember the little jolt I got when I first saw him. A big rangy type with sensitive hands and unfortunate hair. Not sad enough to be called a comb-over but edging in that direction. The first time I cut it for him took twenty years off his face.

She was desperately trying to hide her Italian origins and anglicize herself as a second generation Canadian. I saw on some papers she was “Rosa” but she went by Rose. He had been the bastard child of an Irish house-cleaner. Rose informed me of this within the first hour of our meeting. He looked mortified and reddened visibly. She, proudly, was the fourth daughter of the Scarlat family of East York. She spelled it for me. Scarlatti, I surmised privately, tidied up by dropping the extra syllable.

She did most of the talking. She said her Ian would be able to retire early with the repayment of the loan by her oldest sister's son. But there could be no offence given. At all. The Scarlats were a very close family, very good to each other. And here Ian reddened again. I was curious about the careless woman who had given birth to him. But that was all to come later.

The matter with the nephew I resolved to both their satisfactions, so much so that Rose added a small bonus to my cheque. The CFO of the marriage, obviously.

I don't know when he first called. Hesitant. Wondered whether we should have coffee. I declined but found myself speculating for a day or so on the phone call. The why of it. I'd learned about philanderers. I'd been married to one which gave me an advantage and had been propositioned by so many husbands I'd lost track.

He called again, it might have been a week, a month. I could tell you I thought it was more business he was bringing me but I'd be lying to myself and to you. Dooney's on Bloor Street. Far enough away from his home in Don Mills to ensure I caught the subterfuge of it all and with their own roasted beans to let me know he knew his coffee.

He stood when I got there, old-fashioned (in manners only, I should add) men make me weak at the knees, and held my hand in his for longer than necessary. His hands were trembling, slightly. I was flattered.

Truth is Stranger than Fiction Department

I first wrote about an extraordinary internet scam way back in April of 2008 in which a woman was hoaxed into having an internet romance with a fictitious guy (actually a woman) who subsequently 'died'. The scam was perpetrated for the sheer excitement of it all and not driven by sex or money. Some of my commenters refused to believe it. I did -as Harlan Ellison, the well known author, validated what had happened.

Well now it appears that the scammer, a woman by the name of Janna St. James (who adopted up to 20 personalities to sustain her scams) is being sued by her victim, Paula Bonhomme.

Read all about it here

Blog Jam

Thanks to all of you who commented on my story. Writers are working in a void unless they have feedback. This was one of the stories my editor, no longer my editor, wanted to chop, change and strip. My workshop colleagues disagreed with her and judging from the kind feedback here, you all are in agreement with the workshop so the case is closed and I will move on and find another publisher. And yes, I will put more stories up from time to time.

I entertained the delightful Conor and his equally delightful partner to a loooong lunch here (a long lunch is 5 hours, ne'st pas?) in my paradise-on-the-bay on Tuesday, where we covered many topics and solved all world issues and wondered why we were not in charge of planet earth. Blogmeets are amazing. I am hooked. People who would never normally meet get to do so through their writing on the interwebz. At my age, I can take the two steps back from that and just shake my head in awe.

For many, many years I had an unidentified condition which I kept to myself it was so terrifying. I mentioned it to a doctor once, about 30 years ago, he did some tests and said it all had to be in my head. And how often do us women hear about all that stuff in our heads? It was a wonder our poor old heads don't explode with all the mad internalized ravings and fantasies projected onto us by Demz Wot Knowz Better. (Post Partum Depression? In your head. Get a grip. You're a mother now. Stop being so selfish. Give your head a shake. Grow up. Classics from my ObGyn back in the day.)

Anyway my symptoms were a sudden onset of tiny flashing stars in front of my eyes which gradually expanded and then faded off into the periphery of my sight into nothingness. The episode was random and would last about fifteen minutes. I have a weird other worldly sensation in my head before an event starts. Nothing I did or ate would trigger an episode. I had years where they never happened. And years like this one where I've had three episodes already.

My dear friend Mary, now deceased, broached the topic of 'silent migraines' one night over dinner about twenty years ago. I asked her to describe them. And was astonished that they were exactly like mine. Silent migraines. No pain. And I can't imagine them with pain. It must be horrific.

So after these latest episodes, I did some research on the web, and lo and behold, found an actual website dedicated to this phenomenon, stars being just one manifestation of the condition. And they have nothing to do with the eyes, interestingly enough. Just a vein/artery in the head spasming.

It's always a relief to realize one is no longer alone.

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!”

Stories of Friendship and Betrayal: Part 3

Installment 1 of this story is here

It’s a prickly place to be in, that narrow spot between a rock and a hard place. I couldn’t tell the bride what had happened, and ruin her wedding day. And what was the point of telling Ted about his friend and rugby mate? Would he exact revenge? Would she turn her back on me as a liar? I decided to forget about it after telling Billy he was never to touch me again and he was off my hug list for life.

Billy never pulled it together employment wise. He had been studying engineering in the hope of securing a great job like his older engineer brother but stories rippled forth about incompetent professors and inadequate instructions. Billy sat the same exams so many times that his co-students were eventually over ten years younger than him. Then he ‘didn’t fit in’. Ilona was full of sympathy for him, listening attentively and nodding as he filed his complaints to all who would listen. She never saw a flaw in him and kept financing his failed educational endeavours by turning her back on the finer side of her artistic talent and acquiring full time employment designing branch offices of banks.

I was very fond of her, for a variety of reasons. She was loyal, she was an energy force to be reckoned with and apart from the fatal flaw of her odd marriage, was a very interesting person. We all tolerated Billy because of Ilona.

She had the remarkable gift of making her friends’ lives appear fascinating to her other friends. She would extol one’s gifts and virtues (“Oh, you should read some of Terry’s work, she’s such a writer and a singer too - and her photographs, my dear, her talent is awesome, and Ted, he’s her husband - brilliant athlete, so tall and good looking and their daughters, she makes all their clothes you know and dresses them in black and white sometimes to show off their blondness, you just have to meet them all…..”). We all felt several inches taller and more exciting in our humdrum lives having heard Ilona’s press releases on us all.

Ilona had two children by Billy and not without some effort on her part as he was disinterested in the procreative end of things according to Ilona. He was a distant father and she was, to put it succinctly, an indifferent mother. Ted and I babysat the children from time to time and were shocked at their neediness and one time there was one of the worst cases of nappy rash on one of them that I’ve ever seen. I managed to heal it with a cure-all ointment from Ireland and doses of sunshine on the naked little bottom. I was frankly too scared to take the child to the doctor as I thought he might have turned Billy and Ilona in for child neglect. Really, really poor judgement on my part and I see that now. Ted and I were godparents to both children which hindered a balanced appraisal of the situation.

All was right in the world Ilona had created for herself. Until she phoned me late one night about twelve years into her marriage to say she had no money and Billy had maxed out all her credit cards in the past few months. Thousands and thousands of dollars in unexpected debt in restaurants, pubs, flowers, jewellers, none of which she had benefited from.

She had finally confronted Billy and he had admitted to an affair with the daughter of a prominent politician in Toronto and bingo, she was pregnant by him. Ilona was devastated. Billy had left an hour before she called me. By that time, Ted and I were separated and I was struggling financially myself. However, my policy in these matters, rather than giving money, is to ask what is needed. Food, she answered, in tears, and clothes for the children. Billy had provided little to no financial support over the years. And would not provide any now. That was a given.

So I did what I could for her, whilst dealing with my own demons of the time. We would get together as often as we could and I would take her children for a week in the summer.

Out of the blue about three years into her separation, I had a long message from her on my answering machine. In this she said that she had carefully thought out what she was going to say and here it was, she had always been interested in my husband (now ex) Ted and as he and I had been separated for a while now, she had bought theatre tickets and was going to invite him to the theatre in the hopes of beginning a relationship with him and she hoped I didn’t mind.

What made this message extraordinarily hurtful was that several years before, a bunch of us women had sat down and agreed that the worst damage one of us could inflict on another was to date/have an affair with/pursue each other’s partners, ex or otherwise. It was a pact.

Her wedding day came to mind as I played the message over and over. The secret I had never shared. And I so wanted to inflict this on her now. A “Guess what happened on your wedding day?” revenge phone call.

But I didn’t. Something about the high road, something about revenge being a dish best eaten cold. What I did was gather all her paintings and artwork off my walls. There were a lot - gifts given over the years. I placed them prominently around the garden at a huge garage sale I had when I was downsizing from the family home. I priced them all at one dollar each. They sold right away. The inner mean little me hoped that at one time she would spot one in a house and be told its sale price.

She and Ted lasted just over six weeks. She and I haven’t spoken to this day. Billy went on to have four children in four years with his wealthy partner who then dumped him. He went back to live at his elderly mother’s. Ilona moved to the country and was involved in a fraud scheme at a local art gallery and was held criminally responsible. Subsequently, her son was jailed for drug dealing. These two items I gleaned from the newspapers.

One couldn’t make this stuff up.

Stories of Friendship and Betrayal: Part 2

Ilona was a big young raw-boned Scottish woman. Her face had a strange unfinished look. As if by playing with her face a little more you would have a stunning beauty on your hands – perhaps by squeezing her nose just a little to make it smaller and her chin to give it a little point, and push those farmhouse cheekbones a little higher to give them more prominence.

Her hair was red, that golden red, and hung to her waist and it made you forget all about her raw-boned face for it was that magnificent. She was an artist and a visionary. One of her heroes was the Scottish architect Mackintosh, one of her many artistic pursuits was unusual needlework along with textile art. Her looks were at odds with these finer interests, her hands were enormous and to watch her expertly wield delicate handmade lace and fine embroidery into breathtaking pictures was a shock to the senses.

Newly emigrated to Canada, she was staying in this Scottish boarding house on the Beaches in Toronto and was dating the owners’ eldest son who shared her birthday. They were both twenty-five. I met her about six months after her Toronto arrival, through my husband, Ted, and her boyfriend Ian who played on the same rugby team. All names are changed to protect both the innocent and the guilty.

Funny that, when one is an emigrant to a new and more vast country than one’s native land, the new friendships that are formed are quick, intense and all encompassing in a very brief period of time. It was that way for me and Ilona.

A few months after I met her the healthy outdoor glow had faded from her face. Ian had met someone else. Someone so at odds in appearance with Ilona as to be almost comical. A young woman just turned twenty with a boy’s name, Robbie, who was so utterly tiny, delicate and fragile against Ilona’s heartiness as to make his jilting of her only more painful. Robbie was, and still is, the love of his life. Being in the small circle that we were in, Ilona still came to the rugby games and hung around, wearing, it seemed an extra coat of dignity and pride around the tiny little Robbie and her stalwart Ian. Only venting to a trusted few such as myself.

I was startled to see her take up with Ian’s younger brother, Billy, who was a bit of a waster in more ways than one. He could never stick to anything. His mother bemoaned his dependency. Bumming from her and her pensioner husband as they tried to make ends meet with boarders and the additional burden of supporting their teenage daughter and a grand-daughter, the product of their older daughter’s brief liaison with a long evaporated and ever nameless ‘foreigner’.

It’s funny that, how we can sit outside others’ life situations and decisions and take a psychological profile of it all and a lot of good it does any of us. They’re going to proceed on their life path anyway. The race was on, in any case, as to who would get to the altar first, Ian and Robbie or Ilona and Billy. Ilona waited. I think she wanted to make sure Ian was serious about Robbie. He was. A month after Ian and Robbie’s wedding, Ted and I were witnesses to the betrothal of Billy and Ilona.

The wedding was held in a tiny house in the Beaches, recently rented by Ilona. Billy’s suit of burgundy velvet with a lavish lace-enshrouded shirt pushed the bride’s creamy silk simple dress into backdrop. Cascades of lace protruded from both his cuffs and poured down the front of the burgundy jacket. His thinning black hair was tied in a matching velvet bow at the back of his head. He swooped around, posing fetchingly now and again against the fireplace, in the garden, in a wing chair while we took pictures.

However, the biggest shock of the day was waiting for me. About midway through the festivities as I was exiting the bathroom which was down a tiny hall off the kitchen, I was literally pounced upon by Billy who had obviously been lying in wait. He shoved me back into the bathroom, closing the door behind us and began kissing me. I was so shocked it took me a few minutes to catch my breath.

“This is your f***ing wedding day you bastard and Ilona is a friend of mine!” I finally exploded, “Get your f***ing hands off me!”

Except I used stronger language.

In response, he laughed. He laughed and laughed.

“Haven’t you heard of open marriage?” he finally sneered, “I’m in an open marriage!”

“Starting on your wedding day?” I said, “Does Ilona agree with your behaviour?”

“Frankly,” he said, “I really don’t care. Now are you going to play or not?”

Continued here.

Stories of Friendship and Betrayal: Part 1

We were in our middle to late twenties. I was the office manager, she was the receptionist. We formed an unlikely friendship. She was a shopaholic and just about every day, at noon, there was a delivery of items of clothing to her reception desk from a local store. Her blonde hair was maintained weekly - roots touched up, manicures and pedicures were de rigeur. I marvelled at the high level of her self-maintenance. She was most appealing in a roundish kind of way, hard to explain. She had a lot of dimples, in her cheeks, on her elbows, in her knees. These were the days of micro-mini skirts. Her face had an attractive smattering of golden freckles. I’ll call her Frieda.

We both had toddler daughters. She had a convertible. We would cruise Bloor Street, a high end shopper’s paradise in Toronto. The radio would be blaring, the girls would be in the back, pre-carseat days. The children would wave like royalty to the passing parade. We would have songs like “Brandy” and “Down on the Corner” blaring for the whole street to enjoy. The four of us would giggle uncontrollably. The world was ours. Husbands? They dwelled somewhere on the back burners of our lives. Truth.

Her husband, Len, was Italian. He was her brother’s best friend. He played hockey on Friday nights even though he was extremely heavy and completely out of shape for such a strenuous sport. He paid the price and had a severe heart attack on the ice at the age of 28 and was hospitalized and in therapy for 6 weeks.

I took pity on Frieda. At this stage she was a grass widow and she confessed she had never really loved Len. He had been kind enough to take her on as a ‘favour’ to her brother. You see Frieda had a child at sixteen, given up for adoption. She was considered ‘damaged’ goods and the family were grateful to Len for marrying her.

My husband played a lot of rugby and there was an active and fun social life associated with this. I invited Frieda to one of the Saturday night dances to cheer her up as she was so melancholy and had told me the weekends, after visiting Len, were very lonely and boring. The dances were a hoot - they always had a live rock band and manly chug-a-lug competitions. What can I tell you. We were young.

Halfway through the night, I noticed my husband was missing. I asked around. Someone mentioned he was on the long balcony off the second floor dance hall. I went out. And there he was. With Frieda. In an unmistakeable and passionate clinch.

I was sickened. I had to go to the washroom and throw up, literally. Afterwards, when I came out of the washroom and spotted him I tackled him on what had happened. He denied it. Said I had to be imagining things. It was someone else.

I had to see Frieda every workday, of course. Walk right by the reception desk. She reported to me. The relationship got very chilly and strictly business. Someone said she was having an affair with a guy in the office downstairs. He was married. I would see them together having lunch in the restaurant downstairs. Holding hands across the table.

Len came home from rehabilitation. He phoned me to tell me Frieda had left him. He was distraught. He really loved her. She had left him for this Adam guy who was married and thinking about leaving his wife. It was a total soap opera.

Adam was wealthy and rented a deluxe apartment around the corner from the offices. Here Frieda was installed. She had left the children with Len and her mother.

I was getting caught up with paperwork on a Friday night in September of 1971 when Len called. He was very depressed. He asked me could I meet him on the Roof Garden of the Park Plaza around the corner. Just for one quick drink and then we would both head home to our children. I agreed. In the way that we do when we are heart sick, he let it all hang out. He was going to live in the hope that Frieda would get over her Adam madness and come back to him, no questions asked. Way down below were the sounds of the busy city, the traffic and then sirens, so close by we remarked on them. Some trouble in the block we were in, obviously.

Later that night, Len called us. Sobbing. It seems that Frieda had gone to the apartment that Adam had rented and confronted Adam about leaving his wife. He said he had changed his mind. She straddled the twelfth floor balcony railing and either fell, threw, or was thrown to her death below. Those were the sirens Len and I had heard as we talked in the Park Plaza roof garden.

A couple of years later, we were at Len’s wedding to a nurse he had casually met on public transit. The wedding was held in Frieda’s brother’s garden. Frieda's parents didn’t attend. They were in the process of suing Len for custody of his children. They lost.

I'm curious as to feedback on this type of post. I have more stories of the truth stranger than fiction genre. All of which happened to me. Should I continue? Please be honest!

Something to Pass the Time on a Weekend

If you've got a bit of time and are a firm believer in truth being stranger than fiction, I recommend you read the following. It is an extraordinary story and features one of my favourite writers, Harlan Ellison.

It really floodlights that which we want to believe often overcomes the reality of a situation.


The Extraordinary Tale of Jesse James

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The stories in my day

Like this.The long call from Dublin, my friend since we were five. Telling me of her daughter who left the husband and almost the baby too. Her other daughter swimming upwards from bi-polar to teach dance to the elderly.
And this
An email with a joke and a howonearthareyou from a friend in Hong Kong airport.
And this
A friend sharing the news of a wake for one of her friends, died of cancer, ten years younger than us. Gone just like that. Leaving smiles and an unborn grandchild.
And this
A friend grieving her husband's fresh drunkeness, her son's stillborn child. He blessed it and wrapped it and comforted his devastated wife.
And this
And over dinner with a friend, sharing our thoughts on the rage, The Secret, why the focus on money? It is so American. What happened to passion and purpose?
And this
And meeting a man from Sligo, an old old man on a stick who spoke of being expelled from every boarding school in Ireland and how, in disgust, his father wouldn't speak to him for months on end.
And this
And a caring email from a brother at the end of my day, telling me his story of a wonderful weekend in Mexico with love and laughter and a wild ballet of colours on a magnificent stage and I post a picture of it here.

Ordinary stories in an ordinary day. And how extraordinary it all is when I write it down.