The community room filled up rapidly. Transport routes mattered in this borough, where car ownership was not a given and the timing and routes of buses mattered to almost everyone. A small room beside the main hall served for junior children to play while their parents could listen, question and comment. A large window in the wall between allowed parents and children to see each other without opening the door while the red light above it was on. The moderator controlled this. Carol Jenkins was at one end where a puppet theatre stood beside an open area with trucks and building blocks and I was at the other at a line of three tables, one set up as a doll station and one as an art centre with poster paints and between them a sandbox on a table some few inches deep.
She was an early arrival, this first girl. Her mother barely had time to speak to her two older brothers who may have been school age before they spotted a train engine and sped off. She stood, small and resolute, black hair smoothed back in two neat pigtails, eyes fastened to hear every parting word from her mother, not English from the few that reached me. It might have been Albanian or one of any South American. Several outreach offices were sprinkled along Weston Road.
Her mother turned and we nodded as I guided the girl around until she seemed to have some interest at the doll table. She selected from a pile of fist-sized yarn creations to circle around a toy table. Meanwhile the room next door filled and the background hum of voices grew and one by one a new arrival peeled off to enter our smaller room.
In minutes the several tables with playhouse and dolls and the train station and track and building blocks grew busy with young hands. The sound volume expanded on both sides of the window. I spent some time persuading a toddler left in a stroller he didn’t have to throw his plush toy away and scream when it disappeared. Then came the sound of a disturbance at the sand table.
I went over to see two or three girls led by one sharp-faced brunette with ringlets dancing, hands on hips and voice raised in vigorous denunciation. First girl stood, looking from side to side, confused and on the point of tears. She lowered her braided black hair and regarded the attack troop in consternation. From her demeanour she understood enough English to know the sense of what was being said. The general gist of the tirade was that she had no right to jump in and take space already claimed. Ringlets spoke with confidence that she would be confirmed. When challenged by adult authority, mine, she stopped, turn back to the table with a toss of the ringlets and announced to her followers that there was more room at the other end of the sand table. Her sotto voice announcement as I turned to comfort any incipient tears rang clear however.
“It’s not as if she can help being dirty.”
First girl’s shoulders squared as she took one breath. Her deep brown eyes, on the point of overflowing, blinked twice then focused on the dwelling taking shape in the sand before her. Ringlets and her cohorts carried on behind and beside her, going from sand table to art table to dolls, making it clear with loud pronouncements that they had found the most desirable spot.
At last the meeting drew to a close, and the girl’s mother was one of the first through the door to gather her brood. Without a word or glance at her tormentors, first girl turned and stationed herself before her mother and in one fluid motion looked up, howled and shared her tears.
The whole scenario was a standard repeated a thousand times every September and at countless other offspring reunions.
Replaying it my memory bank went into overdrive searching for relevant experience on the walk home. My own mother was anything but unemotional, but when I thought of her crying I can remember only once. I was under five, and sat between my parents in the back seat of a car, a ride unique from any other time in a car.
Sometimes we would be church-dressed and ready to behave in my paternal Grandma Edith’s living room. No grandfather was present. My father had explained that his father died in the great flu epidemic when young. The visit started in trepidation pending permission to explore the lower shelf of the banker’s bookcase in the front room which held a whole row of National Geographic magazines and worlds wondrous and awesome. The following food and drink, whether tea and cookies or a whole meal, stole time better spent here. How could chomping cookies while keeping your dress unwrinkled compete with butterflies and maps and colours unfolding from page to page.
Other times we dressed in overalls, or I did, and went to my mother’s parents. Often when there we went to the backyard which was mostly vegetable rows while they decided, in animated Polish, what needed doing that day and where. They would point first at the pile set up for weeds and then along one row or another with dubious glances at the water can. My mother translated, one word for every twenty of theirs.
On that crying day we dressed for Grandma Edith but went to church, and then outside to a field with standing stones which I later learned was a cemetery where I had to wait in the car. But as I say, it was the only time I can remember my mother crying and when I asked why, and where my younger brother was, she stopped and said she cried because he was happy now and sleeping with the angels.
I didn’t grasp what she meant then, and for sure I don’t now. So what I learned from my mother about crying wouldn’t take space in a day planner. Like most girls there must have been a few tears shed over boys, boys you liked who did or didn’t like you back, and boys who liked you and you couldn’t like them back. Oddly, the ones who didn’t like you back and let you know it caused the least anguish. Even with tears involved, I remember the opportunity for drama. In particular one weekend stood out, with a couple of female friends aiding in recovery over too much wine and an introduction to Galois cigarettes with Edith Piaf playing non-stop and an interesting gravelly voice for a week after. If suffering isn’t interesting, what is the point?
Tears never came when you couldn’t like someone. Later I realized this may have been practice for Lesson Two, but just thinking it through left you tied in knots. I remember living next door to a woman who, being five or six times divorced, made perfect sense. Saying goodbye to someone there’s no reason not to like does not come easy.
Crying Lesson Number One was my mother’s gift though she never knew it. My father and I sat with a box of tissue between us at her memorial service, barely able to listen, exhaustion the only remedy for tears that could not stop.
Lesson Number Two presented that no-tear zone for crying when my adult brother died. Younger than me by five years, he had no business leaving so I tried to feel only anger, but his whole lifetime formed an ice block of tears that lodged somewhere in my centre and never left.
The third track for tears, ah woe. My good friend Eileen left us far too young after a brief but devastating illness. I can’t dignify this by calling it a lesson. We had served on committees and volunteered to clean parks and plant trees and serve dinners to little Cubs and large Scouts. So when, some time after the service proper, her family planned a Memorial service and requested that I speak it came as no surprise. We stood at the front, six of us including Reverend Wilkie. As the others spoke I remembered times past, in particular our last celebration. We had planned a retirement lunch for another member which included a cake with special message in the icing dictated and decorated cake by one bossy member. As we prepared the trays of food, we placed the cake on top of a long freezer in the kitchen, one with only the slightest slope. Who could think such a slight slope could serve as a slide. We stood there, steps away, unable to move as our doom unfolded. As this recollection replayed itself, Reverend Wilkie thanked the previous speaker and introduced me, just as Eileen’s little hooting laugh sounded in my ear, gasping out her comment, “More than one way to enjoy a cake.” And I started laughing. I could not stop. Biting my tongue, holding my breath, did not help. Reverend Wilkie stood aside for ten seconds waiting, then returned to the center to close the service.
Most of First Girl’s experience that night would fade, I hoped. But words can stay and sting, unlike a scorpion, over and over.
Dirt and dirty as adjective and noun are in common use and few of us dodge its negative side growing up. For most our parents, grandparents and great-grandparents wore the label as they arrived, wave after wave, using it in turn for those who came after and for the first inhabitants of the continent.
Both sides of my family knew this in different forms. My father’s side started as farmers and found dirt and dirty cause for joy. They were right. City life was and is more conducive adding the ‘dirty’ to whatever, hunkies, Polacks, Chinks, even the Brits had their turn. The added factors of internecine squabbles from religion, politic or language make for a constantly bubbling stew. My maternal grandparents’ fair share of ‘dirty Polacks’ was tempered by their imperfect grasp of English, possibly by the back garden.
Going through my mother’s things after the service we found her ‘special’ jewellery box with no jewellery. It held five envelopes, each labelled with month and age containing one snippet of baby hair. A sixth larger envelope held a ribbon and pressed flower with my baby brother’s name, medical notice of death stating ‘diphtheria’ and newspaper notice with a date which must have been that of the car ride. A smaller envelope held a letter sent the day after in Grandma Edith’s neat writing. She expressed her sadness at the death. She stated how necessary it was to sterilize all things surrounding the young and to maintain cleanliness at all times.
I’d like to think my mother read it and remembered Grandma Edith’s husband died of flu. I’d like to think she meant well. I’d really like not to feel like crying three ways at once.
