enfinblue's Bluey (credit to Fifi for the nickname!) Diaryland Diary

"I am seeking, I am striving, I am in it with all my heart." -Vinc3nt V@n Gogh

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Questions to ask grandmothers. And I think I figured out the reason why I have them.

Oh my! I had such an interesting set of dreams.

But first, the end of last evening.

I actually went to bed late, like a bad girl. C. called me at 11 p.m. and asked if he could wake me up at 7:30 to go running. A debate ensued as to WHY THE HECK he has to run at 7:30 on a Sunday morning, instead of, say, 10:30?

If he'd had a good reason I would have been convinced, i.e. to avoid the heat.

But C. just has ants in his pants, and so I told him that he should go by himself as I was unlikely to be awake that early.

And it was a correct judgment: I was up too late, and I woke up too late.

Oh, and I am not going to that church, sadly, because it turns out that the majority of the congregation is voting against blessing gay unions, which I can't abide by. I really do understand the reasoning of some of the rational people (as opposed to the stubborn non-thinkers), but I can't live with that exclusion. So I need to find another church.

Also, to be honest, the minister gave me the creeps. His sermon was good but then afterwards when he was grilling me as to who I was and why I was there, I felt judgment from him. Like it bloody matters if I'm an Anglican (which I am - baptised and confirmed; I even had my baptismal bible with me, given by my god parents). It wasn't the home I'd known as a kid. So I'm looking for a home. I'm not really a religious person, per se. I'm trying to find my spiritual home. Usually I think that my spiritual home will be outside of the church, because I can just sniff out people who have an agenda and who don't really love people truly and purely, for who they are. Amazing how many of those people end up in churches. Well, it makes sense.

Anyhow. That was all an aside.

I stayed up late and watched a movie.

But anyhow.

Actually, the movie that I watched was interesting - L@st Night, about the last night of the world and what you would do. In the end all of the characters chose love. It sounds trite but the evolution to that point was kind of interesting.

What would you do in the last few moments on earth??

You know, and you're going to find this SOOOOOOO hilarious coming from me, but I'd make like the guy who went out making love.

Really.

So maybe I DOOO need to find a boyfriend!

Anyhow. Enough of that.

I had the most interesting dreams. Back to that.

In my dreams I was going around in the country - somewhere, I have no idea where,with some friends at some points, and sometimes not - meeting grandmothers. I wasn't meeting my grandmothers, but these women seemed like they could be my grandmothers. They were like adopted grandmothers. They had intuition that they trusted, which really amounted to years of observation and a certain amount of detached empathy. They trusted themselves and they knew what would work and what wouldn't.

Well anyhow, the dream ended and at the end I was with an old woman who had made this beautiful trifle. Only it was weird because she and I decided that we would eat the trifle, and instead we were eating something with the loveliest, lightest pie crust. And we were talking about the importance of your roller, and also of kneading bread dough, say. And she was telling me about throwing her mallet during the kneading of the dough. (Lord knows why - I'm sure I'm supposed to drag out why, from some dark recess of my memory.)

And then the dream ended because I woke up, but I felt like I'd spent the night among and within flowery bushes and floury kitchens, and I felt like there were suddenly closed circles.

I had two very different grandmothers, and even though they were both crazy I looked up to them in different ways. I could see their faults as well as their strength, but in each case I believed that they knew more than my mother and that from their knowledge and their suffering and their knowledge of suffering all might be derived.

I still believe that to be true.

My father's mother was patrician. She was tall, held herself regally, and had tailor-made clothes in silk. She had furs and fancy hats and little sweaters made of mohair.

She had a Master's degree in History from the University of Toronto earned in 1931, spoke several foreign languages, corrected my grammar and forced me to learn difficult words over breakfast. She knew something about everything - had curios from India, Africa, Polynesia.

She had teak cabinets and heavy silk drapes and large machinery in her basement, which she used as a lapidary shop. She made rings. I wear one of two of them every day. I wish I had more. They were interesting. I remember her wielding her welding torch.

She knew every semi-precious stone that there was, and where in the Canadian shield you would find them.

She knew plants and birds and trees. She had a gardener of course who planted everything for her, which should have struck me as odd. But then she would take me into the backyard or the woods and she would grill me to see if I could remember their proper, scientific names.

She had unfriendly hair that was always professionally coiffed. I am sure that she never hugged me. I was never allowed to call her "grandmother," but always by her first name (Margaret Ada).

She would take me to the museum and then to the P@rk Plaza for lunch, and I had to dress and sit and behave like a lady.

She used to take me to the ballet, and since she was a painter, too, who also had shows of her landscape paintings, she enrolled me in my first art classes at the Royal Ontario Mus3um. The children's classes were not good enough for me, she felt, so I was enrolled in adult classes!

Yes! Can you believe it!

She drove a big, white car with a white leather interior, and she used to curse at the classlessness and bad behaviour of other people!

She had had a daughter with bright red hair and a mass of curls who was born with spina biffida. This girl died in the bathtub when she was seven. I think that she was older than my dad, with my dad being the youngest. When my dad was first ill (he died at the age of 44), she told me that if she could have one wish from God it would be that she could have my dad's illness in lieu of him and that he could be well.

I must have been about seven because he had just been diagnosed, and I understood what she meant. She was rather old, actually, at that point, in my child's eyes, anyhow, and I thought that that made sense. Her other, eldest son was an arsehole - and still is so, I imagine. He made death threats against me when she tried to give me her house years later, which is why I don't have her house (not that I wanted it).

She stayed married to a man who gave her no love and no attention, because she liked her lifestyle. I never respected that.

But maybe I guess now that she was like me and she liked to live in her world of books and art and thoughts and nature and the man who paid for it was less important than this world being made possible.

I don't really believe that AT ALL. But I'm lucky in that I can pay for it myself and feel socially free to do it. She spent her entire life writing her name as Mrs. Donald Morgan ______.

Clearly, she didn't feel quite like herself without a man.

She hit a woman who bumped into her once at a mall, with her white, Chanel purse.

Seriously.

My other grandmother was the complete opposite. She came from the country. She was a school teacher. She had a huge bosom. She was not in the least bit regal, although everyone said that she was so beautiful when she was young that my grandfather was compelled to marry her the moment he met her.

I've seen pictures when she was young, and, as everyone says, I look exactly like her. Only I am definitely not beautiful. She was like an exaggerated me. Instead of my strawberry brown hair and freckles she had raven dark hair and porcelain skin. She had a finer nose and large eyes and a perfect hourglass figure. When she first started teaching before the war, she started buying her clothes from a tailor in Toronto, and she was always stylishly turned out.

I remember her beautiful satin dresses from the 1950s. My mother used to tell me how much she loved to watch her mother dress up to go dancing at the university faculty club.

(But good lord I have NO IDEA how she convinced my grandfather to ever go out to the faculty club. He must have had to go, for some function or other. It is difficult for me to imagine my grandfather having been a university professor, since he hates to be around people. Put him in a slicker and wellies and out in the mud in his back forty and he is happy. He is a farmer and nothing else.)

My grandmother by the time I knew her was comfortably soft and round. She thought of herself as fat and was constantly dieting, but really she was not that fat. She had a Marilyn Monro3 figure.

I loved the way that she hugged you and sang your name as though it were a bunch of flowers. I loved the way that she greeted people.

She could be petty and she could be mean, and she wasted most of her life finding the love that she needed but didn't get from her husband, by trying to control her daughters and by buying lots of stuff. The way that she was explains quite a bit of my mother's neediness and desperation, but that's another story.

I loved this grandmother, however, because she loved life. I've written about her many times before. Life wasn't a pissing match for her - it was to be lived.

She bought tickets to the theatre. She cross-stitched crazy sayings onto pillow cases. She careened down hills on wobbly bicycles. She drove like a nutcase to the ocean if she felt the desire to do so. She forced my grandfather to get off his homebody ass and take her around the world. She got him to write his memoir of the war - for which he later thanked her - and she made music like one rarely hears outside of a concert hall. She played the piano in such a big way that it made you want to weep at the soul of music. Really, it made me weep.

Her father was the sweetest man I've ever met. I won't recount his life. He was a tall old country gentleman farmer with Scottish ancestry. He was kind and gentle. Everything about him was a smile. During the Great D3pression when things were not so great on the farm, he took his family down to Chicago where he got a job as a butter tester. There his son died from a brain haemorrage after an accident on the baseball field, but not before both his son and his daughter had won gold medals on the piano at the world's fair. His wife, my great grandmother, was an intellectual. She was a quiet and sensible one, so she operated outside of notice. Her cousin was the one who became the first judge in the Commonwealth and who has a statue on P. Hill., and was with whom she corresponded her entire life. (Damn I wish that my aunt would share copies of those letters...but don't get me started.) I've talked about her many times before. My mother always wanted her china and her lamps. I wanted her books. I was fascinated by her books, her words. Why don't people understand that in words more things can reside sometimes than in things?

Really, I think the thing that I find fascinating about my grandmothers is that they had to find their lives inside. They lived in a world that wasn't very interested in their intellects. I had in all cases educated grandmothers and great-grandmothers. I think that they felt idle. They spent their lives trying to figure out how to use all of that displaced energy that would in this day and age have gone into some sort of a career or mental work. Some of them spent their energies trying to control their children; some of them spent their energies in quiet contemplation.

What I really wonder is how many of them felt that they'd gotten all that they wanted from life? How many of them simply accepted what they got? I'd really like to know the answers to these questions. If I have another such dream I'll ask.

Really though I think that the answer that I'd get is the following:

You don't get everything that you want from life, my dear. You learn to love and nurture what you get.

But then again, I could be wrong.

I could be wrong.

I often curse them in my head for not having been braver. I wish they'd not married or that they'd left their uncaring husbands and explored Africa or something, or taken their knowledge and love and done something for mankind. I know that that's crappy and mean and selfish and oh-so-rich coming from paralysed and useless me. But it is what I think, what I feel. Hmm...maybe I've figured out why exactly I had these dreams.

And I'm sorry to end this entry on a sad note, but I wish to God that someone would explain to me HOW I got the mother that I did. She has all the time and comforts of life and yet has not an intellectual bone in her body. She does nothing but buy new houses and redecorate. She wrote to me on Friday that she's currently in the process of replacing all of her antiques with new, better ones. !?!?!?!?! Really, God, please tell me how I got this mother? Please. She still hasn't sent me my Shakespeare anthology, that I have been begging for for months. (But apparently it's more important to get a better china cabinet first.) Sigh. I never cease to hope that I was adopted. Unfortunately I look waaaaaaay too much like my parents for this to have been the case. On a more positive note, however, I feel that gradually I am starting to break free of her. I'm starting to think and believe things about myself, about the possibilities of my life, that I could not have thought until I removed myself from her. This is good.

I also understand why it is that I hate decorating, hate furniture, and was thinking yesterday that I want to have *less* than I currently have, rather than more. I will keep my physical life small and my mental and emotional worlds big. Yes, I will.

10:29 a.m. - 2008-06-29

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