“Context is all” said John Updike. If you ever hope to have perspective on anyone or anything, it is context information that is basic and necessary.
My mother was a hard-working farm girl existing in a typically poor, large Northern Manitoba farm family of the 1930s and ’40s. She had to do all kinds of tough stuff and had few pleasures. She knew how to kill a chicken or turkey and how to pluck either.
In the 1950s, at Christmas and maybe even Thanksgiving a farm bird would be delivered in a frenzied-moving brown burlap sack by a relative via truck to our house in the then-Winnipeg sticks.
I still remember her digging out an ironically white-handled axe and taking the sack out to the large ruined shed (not pulled down till the late ’50s) in our backyard. There she would deal with the bird with a great deal of blood-curdling noise and come back with bloodied hands and clothes to the house. I never forgot the rustling of the sack, waiting in a corner of the kitchen before the primitive execution. Hard to believe she could do such a thing at the time, but girls and women on farms back then often equally participated in the facilitating of food for those two special annual occasions.
2. Despite my mother’s physical and emotional toughness, she could be and sometimes was victimized by my father’s wrath in his alcoholic 30s and 40s. Usually I would be in another room when they started arguing and he would become somewhat abusive. I would normally retreat to downstairs or outside when the tiffs started, but on one occasion I happened to be in the dinette when he threw a beer bottle at her head which missed her head and hit the wall behind her, leaving a half-ring bottom-of-the-bottle dent which was subsequently never smoothed out, only painted over afterward, leaving a reminder of perhaps his gravest sin against her until we moved out of the house when I was in grade 7. After that violent incident, she called in the cops who counselled her and he had a ‘habitual drunkard’ charge registered against him. I remember my mother explaining the term to me. (I was in grade 5.)
I will add the postscript that my Dad continued gallivanting, unpredictably bolting from home when least expected. Then he would come back, often with money to buy groceries and try to be a responsible family man. But his negative behavior continued into my university days and there was a point in 1972 when my mother seemed about to divorce him now that I had left home for three years and started teaching.
In September 1975, just as I was ready to start teaching the first day in Edmonton, I got a phone call from her in Sioux City, Iowa where she had gone after he had had a terrible car crash and had to be extracted from it.
He was near death, but she left her job to go to the States to personally nurse him back to health for 2-3 weeks. I had a difficult decision to make: to go see him before he might die, but my job would have been on the line along with the fate of my wife and newborn daughter. Going would have messed up my big new opportunity and my family’s life. It was not easy, but I chose not to go.
It was a miracle he even survived and that my mother, long neglected and abused, took him back. He was never the same after that–only his better/best/Dr. Jekyll self from that point onward. My mother was happier and they became a truly happy, entertaining couple with many friends, even in other countries, after that. It was an incredible, miraculous turnabout in two people’s lives and his. We all gave him a big second chance.
I should just add that my parents, amazingly, came to visit us at Christmas that year. My Dad still had bits of glass from the crash emitting periodically from his eyes. Fortunately, he was not blinded, though he involuntarily suffered temporarily from being in enclosed spaces and I once had to let him out of the family station wagon–memories of the crash, no doubt. He had gastric problems from internal injuries after that, but managed to live to 72 before esophagal cancer from smoking (the one thing that finally beat him) claimed him.
As mentioned elsewhere in the blog, my mother lived on till 77 till she died of the same cause. But she was never the same after Del had passed. Whatever happiness and good life together they had for about 20 years was gone forever.
I will just add that their closeness was magically, coincidentally, reflected in the fact they died on the same day–March 30, hours from each other, nine years apart. I have always taken that as an apropos sign, not surprising at all. From violence to final peace: my remarkable parents.
