Lighting the Lamp

By Reed Stirling

Lighting The Lampdramatizes the efforts of Terry Burke, a sympathetic, at times caustic and critical, but ordinary old guy, to come to grips with who he is and what his life has been.His struggle to accept retirement and to interpret the iterations of the voice in his head spreads to concern over the mysterious death of a wanderer.Terry's obsession to solve the mystery fuses directly with his personal history and leads him in and out of fascinating, half-remembered mythological landscapes.

A restiveTerry is enjoined to revisit the haunts of his youth.Family dynamics of the present, mirrored in Irish heritage of the past, come into play as do contrarian opinions encountered among cronies, distant friends, and lost loves.Motivated by his muse to tell all, what he seeks in addition to understanding is truthful voice and the purest possible point of view.Aware thatremembrance of things past in not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were,this quixotic Everyman eventually reachesbeyond self, beyond mystery, and beyond theodicy to a philosophical embrace of cosmic apotheosis.InLighting The Lamp,Montreal provides more than a background for potential jihad-sponsored terrorism, or ghosts out of the past, or a romantic trip down memory lane; the many-layered city takes on the function of a defined and demanding character and declares in a voice Terry hears clearly:"Know me and know yourself!"

• Language: English
• Publisher: BWL Publishing Inc.
• Release date: May 4, 2020
• ISBN: 9780228612025

Book preview

A FEBRILE STATE OF BEING

The usual flu symptoms : watery eyes, headache, puffy nose, sore muscles, chesty cough, chills, sweats, lethargy, and Tiepolo figures on the chalk-blue ceiling gawking at me from on high. Grace declares I make as wretched a patient as I do a retiree. I tell her she makes a fine caregiver, courteous, patient, and full of understanding for one beset by considerable misery, for a loved one lying unrepentant at death’s door.

I’ve heard it all before, she responds. Wait till you get to be Dad’s age. Then get miserable. Dear!

I’m retired now, yes. That’s a start. Death is the only cure for an affliction like this.

It’s just the flu. Take a deep breath. It won’t be your last. You aren’t dead yet.

No, strictly speaking, no. But then, why do I yearn for rebirth? If only I’d had the goddamn sense to get a flu shot the way you did.

Grace looks at me sceptically as is her wont of late. She knows my silly antagonism lacks conviction. Tolerating complaints works as part of her cure for what ails, and this, I know, goes beyond my having contracted the flu.

My sympathy extends to sniffling but not to snivelling, she declares, then hands me my pad and charcoals, which I impatiently put aside. Placebos! She leaves the room, shutting the door behind her with just a little too much emphasis.

Of course, Grace is right. It’s just the flu. O’Shea at The BlueNote is the culprit. On blues night, he sneezed all over the bar, me at the head of it. Had the World Health Organization measured, the R factor would have been off the scale.

Believing myself able to be up and about and doing something constructive, I rise from the bed (rhymes with the dead), only to stumble around my study in a dressing gown, pockets stuffed with tissues, wearing woollen work socks, grey ones with red and white bands at the top, and a backwards Vancouver Canucks ball cap. I feel nothing but feverish aggravation, the hot whiskeys I fix for myself notwithstanding. In the living room, I turn on the television for news and weather only to view scenes of pile-ups on the Trans Canada Highway. Typical, I mutter, retreat into the bedroom to stand before the picture window, and peer out.

The subdivision is virtually unrecognizable: dull light, snow mounds, blanketed parked cars, the firs looking like overdone sculptures, the deciduous like mimicked haiku. A sparrow flitting from bare branch to bare branch on our old maple leaves me feeling melancholy. A nightmarish shuffling of White Christmas images morphs before my very eyes into a parade of colourful toques. Men wearing red and blue sashes now snowshoe down the boulevard, and a young boy and his brother hold the cord of their polished new toboggan as they look on in wonder, vapour puffs rising over the bobbing heads of the racers, and the boys’ father saying that the guy at the rear in the Hudson’s Bay coat is dogging it. But this is not Parc Lafontaine, and I am not standing on a snowbank near Ma Maggie’s on rue Rachel with JB and Paddy.

I draw the drapes, not totally disoriented, just somewhat disoriented. I tumble onto a bed far in time and space from the Plateau Mont-Royal, but not before the vox berates me for my precocity. Later, when I describe all this to Grace, she suggests that the Au Coin de la rue Marie-Anne oil painting that evoked such instant recognition in me, the one we agreed not to buy last week in the Victoria Gallery, is working a subtle spell on me in my current state, the implication being that we should have made the purchase, and perhaps I would be feeling better at present without resorting to excessive kitchen-prepared medications. I haven’t the strength to debate the point.

What transpired that particular day was memorable. When Grace, observing my fascination, suggested we purchase the painting, I argued the cost was the equivalent of two first-class return airfares to Montreal and three nights accommodation in a modest hotel on Sherbrooke. But I knew the scene in the painting the artist Pierre Bellefeuille had effected, I knew the intersection, had walked along that very street with my brother under the conditions depicted—snow, pink under misty lights and neon from the dépanneur, a scene out of a childhood night. Grace and I could easily have afforded to buy it but decided not to for some reason beyond my recall. Presently, I indulge myself in a momentary regret, then escape into a memory of the painting that gradually fades into memories of actually being again in the scene that the picture evokes.

Rest is long in coming.

After a good sneezing fit, I reach reluctantly for my pad and charcoals. I feel only a little this side of miserable, operating for the most part in a febrile state of being, which Grace, in her typically sensible approach to things, can measure with scientific precision in Celsius. I put aside the pad and charcoals yet again, and then ask myself why in God’s creation phenomena such as influenza with its rheumy eyes and aching limbs ever evolved to confound human existence.

My thoughts take an abrupt turn to Brenda Vérité’s little friend with the double fracture. I’ll be back to the same old, same old before she can rejoin her gymnastics group to vie with Brenda Vérité in tumbling stunts. Small comfort, really!

I head back to the window, open the drapes, and look out. The snow continues to fall. It covers everything like a shroud, obscuring the memory of what is where. It flattens all, eliminates distinctiveness and individuality, buries, and in the process transforms the perception of what was or what may have been. The snow as a metaphor for an inspiration the vox has only just introduced to me. Unfortunately, at the moment I lack the words to bring it into being.

ODE TO OBLIVION

The next day of my flirtation with the flu sees me do a few careless dream-related charcoal sketches that echo the past, the captions all but minimalist. These abandoned, I pick up the reading material Grace left me. In one of the small, local magazines, the young fellow who works weekends at our bakery has published a poem. He’s a bit of a traveller from what I know of him, and now the recipient of some district Arts Council award. I read his short lyric several times.

Shoeless Child on a Salonika Sidewalk

She threatened me with a rose

At starting price of 500 drachmas

A bargain for those

Who would win a smile

From young Medea

Determined to make a killing

The symbol for love

EMOTION SWEEPS OVER me. Of late I get weepy-eyed at random things like birdsong in the morning, Mozart in the evening, the anthem sung at hockey games and the face-off at centre ice, funerals of individuals I hardly knew, a Leonard Cohen piece like Hallelujah playing on the radio, an effective speech replete with appropriate metaphors and rhetorical devices, echoes of Vera Lyn and prospects of meeting someone, I don’t know who or when or where, again; whereas before, I believed myself tough-minded. That tough-mindedness—mean-spiritedness according to Grace with sons-in-law in mind, mealy-mindedness according to cronies—comes out in my occasional letter to the editor. It wasn’t always that way.

Fine. Whatever.

There’s little that’s poetic about the letters. I make no claims to being a poet, but I like reading poems, almost made a career of explaining them—in two official languages at one point. Unlike Grace, who says she did crosswords before starting a university term paper, I attempted poems. These lyrical efforts were not odes strictly speaking, but I liked the sound of ode in a title: Ode to Oblivion, Ode on a Wire, Nickelodeon, and Ode for Monies Borrowed.

I read the poem once more. Who Medea is and her claim to fame remain uncertain, lost to me as she is, among all the ancient Greek heroines I’m able to recall and name, let alone place in any memorable mythological plot.

I pick up The Cowichan Chronicle. First, the Obits, a habit developed recently that provokes gentle mockery on the part of Grace’s two daughters: what’s the urgency, they argue, since I have no really good friends and very few acquaintances in the valley even among former office associates. It’s morbid. When I mention The Compass Café crowd, they laugh, Grace along with them. I join in the laughter, but it doesn’t eliminate my natural curiosity about the passing away of lives once lived.

I turn now to the editorial page, find my most recent letter, and read it, feeling satisfied that something sensible and orderly has been noted about zoning regulations in the area. Personally, I stand to gain nothing if changes are enacted. Along with the hot whiskey I hustle into the kitchen to fix, the letter serves as a bit of a pick-me-up. I feel more energetic, more hopeful when I get back to the rest of the news. However, ignorant of recent happenings, I get an unexpected eyeful.

Death of Another Itinerant reads the headline on the second page. Details are sparse, but the gist of the article is as follows: The body of a man in his sixties was discovered buried in snow at The Ways in Cowichan Bay. The death on Friday night, an accident involving a boat under repair, is the subject of an ongoing police investigation. The victim’s identity and address remain unknown. A hobo, a vagrant, comments one observer, who saw the individual wandering around in the vicinity of the pub and Government Warf.

Hobo, my ass! As if his apparent homelessness lessens the stark, cold fact of his having died. Not just died but died alone in an absurd, idiotic way.

When Grace comes in, I am bobbing around in the middle of the bedroom.

She takes my hands briefly in hers, and asks, How are you feeling?

Fine, I say, trying not to snivel. I hand Grace the paper and have her read the article that has made me want to snivel.

She nods her head and then says, Driving conditions on the Cowichan Bay Road have improved significantly.

Fine. But what about this? I point. Why didn’t—?

When the story broke, she explains, you were in a state of agitation.

This death agitates me. It’s tragic.

She waits for me to go on, but I don’t, so she makes additional conciliatory observations, most of them sensible, and then delivers an account of how the body of a sixty-five-year-old woman was discovered frozen in rural Saskatchewan after a blizzard. Her car had plunged into a ditch due to hazardous driving conditions on a highway northwest of Saskatoon. She was found four hundred meters from her abandoned vehicle.

Puts our local incident, inane though it is, into a larger context. At least the Saskatchewan woman was known, mourned, and seen to with dignity, I add.

Which is fitting.

Not so for this poor bastard.

Too much of death, Grace comments in an effort at closure. While I continue to ponder and fret, she flicks through the flyers that arrive with the paper. She hands me a Canadian Tire advertisement offering good deals on snow shovels and bags of salt.

For when you’re completely out of the doldrums, she says.

PRIMA FACIE RECOGNITIONS

Okay, fine. I do not make a good patient—

Truth be told, my world is already too full of prescriptions and minuscule pilules. Necessity dictates, along with medical professionals, and I comply. Used to be, I would mark time in the office counting, among other things, coffee cups; now, I mark time counting pills. How many I had when the prescription got filled, how many remain before having to get it renewed, which means I’ve survived another three or six months and look forward to the possibility of more.

Exercise and diet, I’ve been advised, also ensure a healthier life, especially diet. I spent my working years anticipating the end-of-work. Looks like I’m going to be spending my end-of-work anticipating the end, not the eschatological, just the ordinary end to breath, consciousness, and delight in forbidden foods. Cholesterol remains the biggest concern. Blood pressure follows next, after tinnitus. Osteoporosis waits in the green room, apparently. Control coffee intake, salt, alcohol. Who’s kidding who? Whom? And to leave bemoaning the ordinary aches and pains of outrageous aging out of the equation? Damn near impossible!

Not that I am unhappy.

I have, first and foremost, a wonderful relationship with Grace. She and I met years ago at Redux Books in Duncan, both diving at the same time into the reduced prices bin and knocking heads, she reaching for Colours for the Soul—an artist’s guide by Iris Eisenstein, and I for Proust Revisited—an esteemed critical work by Faustus Signet that complemented, from a literary point of view, other of my readings on memory, although these days it would be more in line with memory loss. Conversation led to coffee, which led to supper with drinks, which led to late-night things that led to more of the same, all of which led to suspicion on the part of her two daughters in their preening adolescence as to what my intentions were concerning their widowed and ever protective mother. Elizabeth and Jane: lovely girls, fair and winsome, practitioners par excellence of uptalk and voice fry, quite able (despite my obvious auditory discomfort) to communicate their concerns. I was an outsider, a man strange enough not to have any observable family connections of his own. George and Alice James, Grace’s elderly parents, were less suspicious: with their granddaughters maturing, they saw that Grace could focus more on her own needs. But it all took a little time, even though it was evident from the outset that I adored the woman.

Fortunately, for both of us, Grace can be very convincing when she commits. I was deemed an acceptable companion-partner for mother and daughter only when it became known that I was financially independent and had no designs on the family’s modest fortune, still overseen by Grace’s father. Fine, if that’s what it took. Above all, I hate feeling guilty.

Elizabeth and Jane, relations with them have indeed improved over the years I’ve been with their mother to the point where I can call them good. Both have their mother’s height and shapeliness. Both exhibit her calm, Jane more than Elizabeth (who is ambitious, some would say pushy), but not her work ethic or physical strength, her dogged determination to finish well once started. Both daughters can be charming, a trait inherited, Grace argues, from their father, the victim of a hit and run on a business trip to Toronto. The girls are mindful of their origins. Annual visits to the prairies, however, ceased after the paternal grandparents passed on. I have with more than detached interest watched them grow into fine young women, for the most part, caring, respectful, involved, although the choice of mates has often left me scratching my head. Gabriel Templeton! Arnold Charles! Gabby and Chuckie! Oh, boy!

Love is blind, Grace assures me whenever I launch innocently enough into a critical commentary: look what it has done for us.

Must-needs be deaf and dumb as well, I respond to add balance to point of view. 

Elizabeth has her two young ones, Brenda Vérité and Susan Félicité. Grace assures me these names are not as pretentious as they might sound, although the fact that Brenda Vérité believes there is something exotic, even mysterious, about the French in her name. This belief of hers undermines, at least to my way of thinking where children’s names are concerned, the stated Templeton need that combines oddball reverence for the emblematic with adherence to family tradition. 

Brenda Vérité is an amazing young athlete who rivets my attention whenever I see her in motion. Grace refers to this one as our Pre-Raphaelite girl because of her complexion and her curly, russet hair that she tames in place with decorative headbands of her own design. Add a few years to our Brenda Vérité’s age, I tease, and she might pass for Alphonse Mucha’s model in his Art Nouveau depiction of Dance, a print of which hangs in our foyer.  Assuming, I add, that time could be scrambled advantageously.

Susan Félicité is well beyond the toddler stage, a Botticelli child in Grace-speak, whose doll playing is as entertaining as it is indicative of her ability to both imitate and exaggerate adult language and behaviour. Hers are non-stop monologues—no, layered dialogues, rather, that enhance the child’s activity like a musical score, dialogues with a fascinating gaggle of characters, some of whom we can identify and some of whom we cannot. Through her imagination, little Susan Félicité gives birth to strange identities, among them angels and devils, and also assorted speculative beings not numbered among Templeton Family familiars. For the most part, her singsong iterations bubble with laughter and joyful surprise. Sometimes she summons forth invisible phantoms that cause her to recoil in frightful apprehension, if not total fear, but then she names them and puts them in their place next to the shaggiest of her shag-haired dolls. Gabriel has expressed concern because of Granny Templeton’s criticism. Liz has expressed concern because of Gabriel.

Grace has downplayed all concern, her response being: fret not because little Susan Félicité isn’t doing anything little Elizabeth didn’t do as a tot. It’s all benign. When asked for my input on the occasion of a birthday celebration, I said that Susan Félicité was simply familiarizing herself with universal archetypes, for which felicity I was directed from several directions at once to go figure, get real, get out of town, and go pour yourself another whiskey in the kitchen. I opted for the single malt.

Elizabeth also has her Sunday observances and those inevitable in-laws. After graduation, she worked in a bank until Gabriel Templeton entered her life. Their marriage was never an assured thing. The obstacle: religion. His. Implied in the Templeton family’s acceptance of Liz was the understanding that she would embrace the same faith with the same degree of fervour, otherwise any hope of a successful and blessed union could not be assured. Such irrational demands, I explained to Grace and the girls when tears, anger, uptalk, and voice fry co-mingled with Pinot Grigio one night before a raging fire, such demands were not peculiar to the situation Elizabeth found herself in: Ma Maggie, my paternal grandmother, was guilty of the same kind of sanctimonious opposition because in her view of the world, the postulant he or she, so to speak, had to be Catholic and preferably Irish Catholic. What foot? What parish?

Such the questions the old woman would ask and then snarl if answers deviated from expectations. I explained briefly how my brother Patrick successfully endured the old lady’s inquisition regarding his then-fiancé, Mary-Ellen Monahan, whereas I, in attempting to introduce my friend, Donna Haywood, to the family, failed miserably. A sense of inadequacy regarding age-old precepts still haunts me in moments of speculative meditation on the hereafter. More so since retiring. Call it lingering doubt.

On the other hand, Grace is, for the most part, at ease in this world and expresses no great concern about what lies outside its known parameters. She, like her parents and with the girls following, had drifted beyond the conventional practices of established religion. For them fundamentalism was way out to the right of that. Elizabeth, whose independence, willfulness, and sense of self-worth were things to contend with, caved in to Templeton demands.

Gabriel Templeton, Gabby, claims to be an administrator in an upscale seniors’ residence in Maple Bay, but his stories and anecdotes betray a too familiar knowledge of the ordeals and absurdities associated with the care of the more pathetic inmates. When I query him, namely, hint that his position requires direct, hands-on involvement, and is really a diminished position in the administration of the residence, he bites back, intimating that the worst of what he describes, based on observation and assessment, awaits me within five years and that I can count on it. Obviously, based on the same criteria, the self-righteous prig still has a distance to go before he wins my respect. I observe in this pious self-promoter very little of the milk of human kindness. Grace maintains my reaction to Gabriel reflects unwarranted paranoia, and that he is really quite fond of me after his fashion. One of the few things that I, after my fashion, admire about Gabriel, perhaps the only thing, is his antipathy towards Arnold Charles, aka Chuckie, Jane’s husband and the father of the impish Rickey.

Very early in our relationship, Gabriel, his sincerity not yet in question, his smugness not quite so blatant, asked me about my philosophy of life. Where I stood on contentious social issues, and what I professed to believe in, that’s what he wanted to know. A drifting recreant, who is constantly shuffling his deck of cards, is how I defined myself at the time, not quite open to revealing who I was in toto. Besides, I didn’t know. And I was definitely not applying that particular day out on the deck, with a glass of Irish in one hand and a pair of greasy tongs in the other, for the position of soon-to-be-in-law.

Shuffling what?

Doubt, fear, guilt, hope, freedom, scepticism, love, things like that, with potentially forty-six more cards of a similar nature to be held in a realistic and rational pattern. Especially after 9-11. I took it for granted that he knew exactly what I meant by 9-11. Plausibility, I went on, without excessive introspection. Too much thought denied personal freedom, he told me, while faith alone unshackled the soul. When I replied that the world was too much with me now, he shook his head sympathetically, and suggested I visit his church some Sunday, partake of the service, and get reacquainted with God. He’d already extended the invitation to Grace. Elizabeth must have informed him that I was, in the words that I borrowed from Ma Maggie and likely used in my apologia pro vita sua to Grace, a lapsed Catholic.

I might do that some time, I told him, but what had God to do with it? I would prefer to sit in an empty church, or preferably a cathedral as I had when much younger than he and let the stained glass windows lead me into a deep contemplation of the play of light in consort with the laws of physics; or the high arches allow me a greater reverence for the nature of gravity, and how, since you were born, gravity had been getting you down, and how to deal with that, and how, in the larger scheme of things, gravity was said to hold the cosmos together. And how the patina on the wooden pews and benches instilled in me an appreciation for the thousands of asses who shimmied there while attempting to unfetter their souls. He said rather angrily that he’d pray for me, totally pray for me.

While doing so, Gabby, I replied, don’t choke in your own ire and indignation!

I alone persist in calling this young gadfly Gabby rather than Gabriel, his frequently declared and preferred form of address especially where I’m concerned. In company, I sort of cringe when calling him Gabby just to make it seem like I’m consciously being a little bit naughty, and in all innocence, merely fooling around with Shakespeare’s quip about what’s in a name. Evidently it more than irritates Gabriel, my calling him Gabby, his incipient anger somehow managed and then contained in small, clenched fists. It’s gratifying, seeing him get uptight, his pained rictal grin a sign of acquiescence. It definitely satisfies some undefined psychological need of mine. Unfortunately, I can’t share even with Grace this sense of successful one-upmanship, perverse though it might be, or the gleeful satisfaction I experience when all is said and done.

Gabriel is just ardent about his beliefs, Grace says in an attempt to pacify me after a particularly heated discussion when I called him an angry little agitator with the zeal of a terrorist.

I’m as ardent about what I know and understand. And about what I don’t know and understand.

He’s young. You were young once too, Grace counters, continuing her efforts at conciliation.

Yes, but not to that extent!

After breaking out into contagious laughter, Grace goes on to say, As long as he’s as ardent about Liz and the girls.

He might prove to be less ardent about his proselytizing were he to take coffee with me down at The Compass Café.

Don’t ever take him there! Dear.

On the rare occasion of Arnold Charles and Gabriel Templeton’s joining forces, this time to argue a point about their times as opposed to mine, I was accused of being delusional, asserting emphatically that what transpired in the sixties was the coolest and the hippest. They both cracked up when I called that era the cat’s ass! Collectively, they brand me recalcitrant, uncompromising. Give me a break. Give old Terence Burke a break. He hails from a time before innocence came of age. He goes back to the fifties, for God’s sake. To a place where snow drifts were as high as housetops. The great snowfall of ’96 in Cowichan Bay pales by comparison with annual accumulations in those earlier decades. Yo-yos and collector cards, marbles in the schoolyard, and fifteen cent Classic Comics. Absolute innocence compared with contemporary video games where the objective is to blast an opponent into smithereens or simulate the following: choose a whore, screw the whore, kill the whore in as brutal a fashion as possible and get points for doing so. What an electronically sophisticated world!

Here the sarcasm was directed mostly at Chuckie. A far cry from chess and table-hockey. Papa Jon Augustus down at The Compass Café, I explained to them, was working on a game where opponents attempt to achieve perfect harmony in spite of imbalances and fortuitous weights and unpredictable biases (a Ying Yang thing the old fellow theorized).

Good luck with that, said Chuckie.

A waste of time, said Gabby.

Poor boys, they take me far too seriously. And, it could be argued, I don’t take them seriously enough. By a species of silent but mutual understanding, the three of us always call off the animosity whenever Grace enters the scene. That serves me more than it serves them.

Gabby accuses me of not hearing him when he tries to make a point. The shouting that ensues, however, can result from issues other than my impaired hearing, that is to say, from his selective inattention, from his unwilling suspension of belief. His adherence, as I’ve stated, is faith-based. Fine. Whatever gets you through the night, I tell him impatiently, citing John Lennon, although I doubt he really knows who John Lennon is. Gabby urges me, in the name of God, to get myself some hearing aids.

I do need hearing aids. Young Brenda Vérité laughs innocently when I ask her to repeat something she’s said. Other forms of aid for other forms of aliment are needed as well. I swallow neat little ccs of Ativan just to make it through a few games of bridge. I endure memory lapses: What’s trump again? Counting cards leaves me confused. Grace remembers everything while I labour in the agony of my quotidian mind to recall what day of the week it is. Or find myself wondering what it is I am doing there. I arrive in the basement, kitchen, or storeroom, forgetting what I’ve come for. I retrace my steps, get reoriented, then go ahead and start again, this time consciously holding on to my purpose, be it to get a screwdriver, a piece of cheese, or a roll of toilet paper. No doubt about it, I need hearing aids, but the type that I can turn off when Gabby starts preaching at me.

On the other hand, Chuckie just laughs at me for what I’ve forgotten, important things like new cell phone numbers, or the capacity of his latest electronic gizmo. On occasion, when addressing me so, he will gradually lower his voice to the point where I hear no words at all even though I see his lips moving and his hands gesticulating appropriately, all to get a rise out of me, all to elicit laughter at my expense. I seek no revenge, which is to say, none that is overt and traceable.

Jane and Chuckie have a big house in Cherry Point that reverberates with hip-hop. Nine-year-old Rickey wears a magenta topped Mohawk haircut. His fingers are constantly working not on piano keys or guitar strings, but electronic gadgets capable of producing nothing but an irritating sequence of beeps. The kid can’t read, nor do simple multiplication, and he’s absolutely clueless about hockey or football. His entrepreneur father is equally ignorant, although he has not fared too badly in economic terms for a Gothic refugee, to borrow Jane’s language when she is put off with him. I’ll give him that much.

I tried to teach Rickey the rudiments of the game the Christmas Grace presented him with a lovely chess set, a pricey Staunton replica in wood. Rickey proved himself very adept in lining up the pieces like tin soldiers all around the periphery of the board, and then, using thumb and index finger as a firing mechanism, right hand more efficient than the left as it turned out, he’d pick them all off one at a time, alternating between black and white. Most disconcerting to me was that he proceeded to wreak the carnage without any discernable concern for the order of their going, kings falling with pawns indiscriminately. The moves should be included in chess theory along with the Sicilian Defense Chuckie proclaimed with a perverse kind of paternal pride. My retort: Rickey’s talents, his dexterity, and his powers of comprehension were better served with Crokinole, or Pichenotte, or the toddler version of Whack-A-Mole.

Age-associated cognitive impairment, Chuckie quips, pointing his finger at me. It will be worse for him, I parry, if and when he reaches my age. How so? Because his impairment is a predetermined, technology-induced, diminished brain capability. How so? Because of the prosthesis-like electronic appendages he wears, the post-postnatal umbilical cord, for instance, currently sticking out of his ear. I take great delight in throwing out these jibes and barbs, passing off as deriving from my own wit, observations I read in Ewan Dailey’s well-received Ageing with Grace, a book I picked up cheap at Redux Books, or maybe it was at The Compass Café, mostly, but not solely, because of its title.

Hearing and memory loss are, of course, commensurate with hair loss. This I reflect upon at least once a day. The old order fades, yielding place to the new, some dead poet wrote, Tennyson, if I remember correctly, but a case can be argued for its yielding place to what is older, if not oldest. No, the oldest is Grace’s father, George. Sure, he has his reasons for complaint, but he has a great shock of dark hair, which I suspect is airbrushed with rejuvenating juices regularly, and a remarkable memory, especially when it comes to trump. His loudest gripe concerns excessive gas. The whole family shares that concern, even the granddaughters, Brenda Vérité somersaulting out of the room as soon as the old man excuses himself, little sister in pursuit dragging a couple of shag-haired dolls after her.

I do have a wonderful relationship with George and Alice. The James family history can be traced back to Montreal. When I learned of this, I was practically moved to tears. Grace took note, although she may have misunderstood why I had such an emotional reaction. Later, I got more details about these family connections from George, who told me his mother’s line in Canada goes back to 1642, or thereabouts, and to De Maisonneuve’s settlement on the bank of the St Lawrence River.

The Estuary Bed & Breakfast, her snowbird parents’ part-time business, has practically become a full-time occupation for Grace, but its future is undecided. George and Alice want us to continue in their B & B tradition, even though they’re off to Arizona for six months of the year, and upon return want to be treated like B & B guests. Okay. Fine. They’ve done their service. They close shop in winter and keep warm in their golden years. Elizabeth and Jane want Grace to keep the old place, but don’t do much to help around the house or the outbuildings dotting the three acres that make up the property. In fact, they don’t do anything but wax sentimental and resist with tear-filled eyes the idea of letting it go. Their protests lack real engagement.

Physical activity around the B & B is anathema to the two of them. To Chuckie and Gabby as well. Fine. That’s the way the younger generation is—a touchy topic that Grace and I resist discussing in any meaningful way. The point is the family’s up in the air about keeping the B & B. At least Grace is because the decision is not entirely hers. The options are simple: sell or continue steady as she goes intending to dump it eventually on that younger generation. Let them deal with guilty consciences and development. However, whether subject to a sale or not, the B & B requires maintenance. Since retiring, I have spent numerous days at this place, especially during the off-season, doing yard work and repairs, and occasionally applying fresh coats of paint. Menial accomplishments, certainly, but I sign on without too much resistance, all for the love of Grace.

Concerning work, I have acquired over time significant skill at shuffling paper. More of a pusher of the pen than the paint roller. Or the lawnmower, for that matter. I tinker, have done so for decades. The idea of physical labour, however, does not make me unhappy, just the effort required, given all my limitations, in seeing it done. Call it age-appropriate apprehension.

The reality is I actually do keep butting up against the indignities of ageing. Like her mother, Grace ages as would be expected, gracefully. Am I in denial? Do I poke myself in vain? I certainly sees things darkly in the mirror each morning: the blights and blemishes, the ugly little reminders of what once was a youthful appearance, varied attributes verging on the non-existent—a full head of hair, for instance. The strength and agility of the mature middle years gone too. All reflections of collapse. The body breaks up while the mind, though given to bouts of forgetfulness and distraction, insists on asserting its will under the impression that it is still in control. That wilfulness, however, gets pre-empted by an unravelling, to quote another dead poet, mortal coil bent on betrayal. Indeed, the mocking primary mover in the morning mirror is no more than a mask—grey shards of a life that was. Add to all the insult, skin tabs in armpits and places impossible to see reflected even in a glass darkly and requiring greater flexibility to view than I now possess.

The corollary to this sense of faltering physicality is the inability to settle into retirement. Articles read in Seniors Serenade do not assuage fears, just plot a destructive self-fulfilling prophecy: retirement equals no focus, equals anxiety, equals cardio-vascular, and other types of destruction. Financial insecurity, fortunately, is the least of my concerns. I have adequate income. When I refer to it as a nest egg among broken shells, Grace raises her eyebrows. And yet, a vague general malaise enthrals me, creating the need to eschew the present that lacks essential order. Formerly, slave to routine? Presently, too much time on my hands? How many hockey and football games can a guy watch? How many books can he read? Add to this theme, the gnawing recognition of a life lived neither very successfully nor fully. More problematic is the predilection for roaming the interior of the psyche, especially in the in-between world of day and night, when the mind prompted by the vox vobiscum seeks reasons for every impulse, every little twitch, every unusual sensation in the thigh, elbow, abdomen, or toe. During these nightly dirges, a thousand deaths grip me; in the morning I resurrect myself, pass wind as only I can in the privacy of my domain, swallow my damn pills, do prima facie recognitions, and eventually get down to The Compass Café where refuge of one sort or another is available along with the dark roast coffee. But not today.

PERSPECTIVES IN CHARCOAL

The morning after a sweaty, vox vociferous night, when a fit of assumed recovery from the flu hits me, I enter the study, willing to act upon another of Grace’s well-intended though ambitious proposals on my behalf: namely, to log and assess nocturnal musings as one would log and assess dreams.

Sift through the psyche, she exhorts me like a muse bent on peace of mind, hers in particular. Chronicle the night before and the day following. Establish sequence. Attempt order. Record the free associations and interior rants. Yes, I believe she said rants. Find understanding, and thus pass the time more positively. Expand the notion of recollection. Project a little new light into lethargic routines.

Fine! An inspiring idea. However, try as I might, consistent voice fails me. Older Terry? Teen Terry? Little Terry? Terry a student on the make? Who is being logged? Perspectives jump about. My mind, like my desk—a confusion of papers, charcoal drawings, books, magazines, and circulars from Canadian Tire—is a mess. Analogy breaks down. Meaning becomes tentative. Peace of mind grows more elusive. I return in frustration to my charcoals. And being ill with the flu, in spite of all attempts to draw, write, or trick myself into remission, is of no help at all.

At times I think my whole life has been in remission. From what, under the present circumstances, I cannot say for sure.  But if at age ten, say, looking out of the window onto Delorimier Avenue, I had imagined a future with me in it, I would not have pictured myself as I am. No, not at all. And if I look back honestly to that age, and then to what I would see of myself all these years ahead, I would see no one to commend, no one to emulate.

On the other hand, being who and where I am now is just a way of not being anybody else anywhere else that a ten-year-old might not have wanted to be. Can’t blame him. Being with Grace supposes a fortuitous piece of good luck that the ten-year old would not necessarily recognize. And so, I close my eyes on another piece of self-deception and open them to the patterns of free association written all over the ceiling. They come as a sick kind of compensation on these heady days of being housebound, if not completely bedridden. Such delirious forays into regions of dream and recollection, vox narrated, result, I am sure, from too much Grace-administered flu medication and too many self-administered hot, honeyed whiskeys.

To explain: my present occupation with charcoal drawing is another masterstroke of genius in Grace’s repertoire of keeping Terry busy. I do not resent it at all. In fact, I find it soothing and satisfying. It eases me back a few decades, back to the east, back to specific university Arts courses that offered more distraction than serviceable credit or indeed advancement towards a degree. Such reminiscence passes as pure entertainment. However, it took some settling into the present. During an eight-week basic drawing course at the Elder College in the Cowichan Centre, I developed a liking for working in this medium. Perhaps it was the smudge factor. I can’t say what exactly. But I took to charcoal readily enough. Beginning efforts that were wild, uncontrolled, and too spontaneous for their own good depicted, more or less, the winding staircases and front galleries conjured up from memories of certain Montreal streets. Subjects such as these, however, not even assorted fixatives could hold together aesthetically.

Although Grace, smiling inscrutably, termed them products of the fructification period.

Fructification, germination, gestation, call it what you will. Encouragement distilled is still encouragement, even if it comes from less than a wealthy patron or, which is more in keeping with my weekly experience, a talented volunteer instructor seeking recognition, and the occasional free coffee.

Titles and tags for these first attempts at the creative use of time grew into captions, then into short, then longer, paragraphs describing intentions or states of mind or whatever afflatus, so to say, prompted the drawing—entities onto themselves that Grace called Notes to an Elder Self on the Verge of Complete Self-Absorption. For example, an early charcoal drawing of a staircase barely discernable because of the deep snow that a blizzard dropped, which I called After The Fall, might have with a little more oomph, given my propensity to go on at great length, morphed into a metaphor for what I heard years ago called Humanity’s Fortunate Fall. Today, fall from grace seems more truthful.

Fine! Whatever. At times it was difficult to determine what exactly had become the obsession, the sketched stairs or the written commentaries. Of course, there are more recent happenings to consider: the night of the unidentified individual’s unseemly death down in Cowichan Bay, which is the night the snow began to fly, and I slipped, knocked my head, then found myself floating in a snow-packed reverie of memorable events from my early years in Montreal. And the ensuing miseries of the flu. But perhaps I’m getting too far ahead of myself at this point. Yes, I believe I am. Uncanny, though, the circles like little graviton orbits that life makes us go around.

Before long, figures appeared at different points up and down the charcoal stairs, which prompted Grace, her brow furrowed in puzzlement over one such depiction, to inquire who the etiolated figure at the top was. A Jungian archetype? she asked.

It could have been, I surmised, personified by old Jimmy-Jimmy Jump-up Jim out of the spectral hallways of my childhood, who assumed the podium of my vox vobiscum the night before I did the drawing.

Who? Grace asked, confusion still knotted in her brow.

My father’s uncle, I explained, James McGee. Scared the crap out of me as a kid. All of us kids. It’s possible the old devil, who was Ma Maggie’s bachelor brother living in the same house with her and my grandfather, roughed me up a little for ‘spying’ on him. A big family discussion after the incident.

Not guilty, of course.

Pardon?

Not guilty, of course.

Correct. Curiosity doesn’t necessarily entail espionage.

An amusing name, Jimmy-Jimmy Jump-up Jim.

"That’s what my brother and I called him between ourselves. And some of the younger cousins. We’d go Jimmy, Jimmy, and then jump out of the shadows or from behind a couch to scare, if not terrorize, one another. At family gatherings, Sundays in particular, when the adults were deep into family matters, biscuits, and tea, and bottled beer. Best was out in the coal shed where we were forbidden to go. The story we eventually learned was that the old man had long ago lost