Care of, p.3
Care Of, page 3
I just read your piece about your father a second time. I’m in Ontario, like you, about two hours away from the city, in London. It’s Tuesday, April 7 now, around 10 p.m. Outside a huge storm is raging, flashes of lightning blind the sky over the townhouse complex where my girlfriend lives, lighting up and then disappearing the roofs and windows of the neighbours every 30 seconds or so, and the thunder sounds almost right on top of the bolts of light. I let myself imagine for a long second or two that this storm can wash away a virus, that after the weather moves on and the sky clears tomorrow morning this will all be over, and we can open our doors again, invite each other in. Sit at the same table and share the same food. Play music with each other and sing and tell stories. Share the same glass of whiskey.
I’m willing myself to keep writing. It is the thing I can do best, it is nearly the only thing about this life that still makes me feel connected, other than kissing Sarah, and feeling the dog asleep near my feet on the bed before the alarm goes off and reminds me of the world right now.
My phone makes a newsflash sound. Beep beep beep beep. Another bulletin. John Prine has just died. Now the rain is running down my face. John Prine was 73 years old. Same age as my father.
Your father was a doctor. He was graceful and slim and a good dancer, you wrote. Mine was a welder. My father does not have beautiful hands. His are wide and so scarred all over from all those burns that he can pull the roast chicken pan quickly out of the oven bare-handed and drop it on the top of the stove without further blistering his perpetually work-blackened palms and fingertips. There is nearly nothing graceful about him, except for how straight a bead he can draw with a welding torch in molten steel or aluminum.
They have almost nothing in common, your father and mine, save for the fact that they both have man daughters, and both of them tell both of us that they are ready to die now.
The first time my father talked about dying was right after the divorce. He was drunk and living in a little squatter’s house he built behind his rented shop. He told me that if he ever got so sick that he needed to piss or shit into a bag like his friend Willy did now that he wanted me to take that old elephant gun that he had inherited from his uncle John Francis and shoot him in the head with it.
“You’d do that for me, right? Put me out of that kind of misery?”
It was a test I knew I was going to fail before he even finished his sentence.
“No, Dad, I will not shoot you in the head. Not with that gun anyways. It’s an antique revolver last fired in the Boer War. It would blow up in my face and I’d spend the rest of my life in jail with an eye patch. Be realistic. Pick a better method, or at least a more reliable gun.”
He squints at me from his easy chair. Swirls what is left of the scotch on the rocks in his glass. Swallows it. Gets up to put another log on the fire. Doesn’t speak to me again for about 15 minutes, and when he does it is about other things.
I was about 30 years old then, and he was fifty-two. Pretty much the same age as I am now. He seemed old then already. I have to get up and stretch before I can write anymore tonight because my back has been sore today.
At 6 a.m. on the morning of November 29, 2016, my cell phone woke me up. I was in a motel room in Duncan, a small pulp mill town on Vancouver Island, on my last day of touring my new book.
The display on my phone told me my Uncle Fred was calling me. My Uncle Fred had never called me in my entire life. I only had his number saved in my phone because I text him on his birthday, and call him whenever I need to ask for advice about mechanical stuff. He’s a heavy equipment mechanic. They call him an engine whisperer. Legend has it he can hear or sometimes smell what is wrong with a motor without lifting a wrench. He tilts his head like the conductor of an orchestra, listening, with one forefinger raised, waiting for the engine to whine or cry out about what is troubling it.
I answer the phone, because I know it has to be an emergency. It is.
My father has attempted suicide, Fred tells me. He doesn’t know any details, and him and my Uncle Rob are driving out to Atlin to find out what is going on. They are just about at the cut-off, and about to lose cell service, but he will call me in about three or four hours when they can get back in cell range and let me know. Fred doesn’t even know if my dad is dead, or if they were able to resuscitate him at the little nurse’s station in Atlin. He will call me as soon as he can, he promises. Thought you should know, he says, and then his voice breaks up, and the signal drops and he is gone.
I had to go and teach a writing workshop to a group made up of about thirty women who were living in a transition home, and a gaggle of teenage girls in plaid-skirted private school uniforms, because life is weird and waits for no one’s tragedies to pass, and by the time the catered box lunches arrived my uncle had called me back. My dad was alive, and in an ambulance, and on his way to the hospital in Whitehorse, where he would be treated for his wounds, and then admitted to the psych ward for assessment.
Your dad was right, knives are messy, and self-inflicted knife wounds are unreliable. When he woke up still alive, and still drunk, my dad peeled the dried and bloodied sheets from his clothes and stumbled outside to the garage and locked himself in with the doors all closed, started up his pickup, rolled all the windows down and waited.
But his friend Lance woke up long before sunrise that morning with a bad feeling in the corners of his guts. So, he got up, threw on his sheepskin-lined jean jacket and drove his big truck down the little dirt road that runs between his fancy house on the lake and my dad’s humble home in the pine trees, to go and check on him. At first, he just drove past and nearly turned around and went home. My dad’s truck wasn’t parked outside where it usually was. Lance thought maybe my dad had just got up really early and gone into town. Thought maybe he’d just check on the house, since my dad had been pretty drunk the night before. Make sure it was all locked up okay.
First thing wrong was Buddy was still in the house, barking and whining behind the unlocked door. My dad never went to town without taking the dog. Then Lance saw the blood on the kitchen floor. He knocked, then froze, listening. Heard the truck running from inside the garage, and he knew.
Lance shouldered the door to the garage open and fell inside, falling to the concrete floor and cracking his elbow up pretty bad. Pulled my unconscious father out of his truck and onto the gravel outside of the garage door, and limped inside to call Dolores the nurse on the landline. Lance was over seventy at the time, and he had both of his feet crushed in a car accident years ago, and they still hurt him real bad, especially in the cold, and he often bragged about the scar on his ass and leg from a grizzly bear attack. He wore a tooth that he pulled out of that bear’s mouth after he shot it on a chain around his neck, with a gold nugget he mined himself embedded in it, just so you get a picture in your head of who Lance was. He died of a heart attack last summer, outlived by the guy whose life he saved that day.
That was nearly four years ago. If I was making any of this story up, I would give it a better ending than it has right now. If any of this were fiction Lance would still be with us, and my Dad would be clean and sober now, and doing little welding jobs for folks in town to keep a little money coming in on top of his government pension and planning what to plant in his garden this spring. If I could write my father a better life story, his second wife would have won her battle with that brain tumour back in 2013, and everything might be different now.
I just read the story about your father for the third time. You’re a great writer. Really. It’s a tough but beautiful piece of work. I can’t tell at the end if your father is still alive, if he still sort of knows you, or what he remembers.
My dad has memory loss due to alcoholism, it’s a syndrome, but I don’t recall the name for it now and I don’t use it, because it is named after the surname of the scientist who discovered it, and I truly feel like my father has invented his very own personal version of this affliction. It’s hard to tell what he can’t remember anymore, what he was drunk when he first learned, and thus has now forgotten, or what he simply didn’t care about in the first place, and so wasn’t listening to when you told him the first time around.
I just read that last paragraph back three times and considered deleting it. I don’t want to give you the idea that I do not love my father. Some days I wish I could make myself love him less than I do. If I didn’t love him it would hurt us both less, I think. I look a lot like him, especially in pictures when I am smiling, or looking down at something I’m holding in my hands.
When he is sober he is so funny, and charming. When I was a kid he could draw nearly anything, without ever erasing a line and starting over, like the picture was already there on the blank paper and all he had to do was reveal it with the tip of his pencil. He used to design and build boats. He could weld and fix anything. He built both of the houses we lived in growing up with his own hands, from sketches on napkins and on the backs of telephone or electric bills. He taught me to weld and drive a truck and trailer and a forklift and saw a perfect 90 on a two-by-four and cook a perfect pancake. He built the little house he still lives in today, too, for his late wife Patricia. A little two-bedroom in Atlin, a little town about two hours south of Whitehorse. They moved there full-time when she retired from the auto parts place, about six months before she found that lump in her neck and asked him to drive her back into town to see the doctor about it. She was going to ask him about the headaches, too, while she was at it.
I still know everything he taught me about the world of men and the things men of his class and age are expected to know how to do, and I am grateful for most of it. It was unusual to have your ten-year-old daughter in oversized greasy coveralls sweeping and sorting bolts in your shop in 1979, but he did it. Maybe because he knew I could and that I liked it, or maybe because of his lack of a son to bring to work instead of me. I still love the smell of that orange-scented mechanic’s hand cleanser. Lanolin. I still love the ozone smell in the air when someone is arc welding, and when the Skilsaw blade gets a bit dull and scorches the plywood on long cuts.
I am nearly fifty-one and still dismantling most of what I learned from him about masculinity. Trying to build the salvageable bits into something that might better serve the kind of world I want to exist in. One thing I have always loved about my father is his ability to cry. He cries at stories, at sad songs. He cries when a bird flies into the window or he drives past a road-killed deer. He cries for shame and regret and the people and things he has lost. I inherited his easy tears, and I am working on trying to shed the urge to apologize for those tears that I also learned from him.
My mother is the stoic one. The one you depend on, the one you call in an emergency. The one I don’t need to take care of as much, not yet.
I should stop now before this letter turns into a novella.
Thank you for taking my call last night. I was typing this letter, and stopped to check my Facebook, and you had just commented on that silly video I posted. So, I just clicked once on your profile, and then again on the little phone icon, and there you were. I read you your letter to me first, as it has been months since you sent it to me, and then I read you my response, as much as had gotten done so far. I couldn’t tell if you cried but I did. I’ve never done anything like that before, and I’m not sure why I called you, but I’m glad we got to talk. We finally sort of had that virtual coffee, 22 years after we first met. I told you I would call you back and read you the rest, and I will. I know we still have so much to talk about. Thank you again for your letter, and this connection that it has brought us, and I sincerely look forward to the friendship that I know will unfold from here. I have always seen the sibling in you, the family resemblance.
Happy Passover, fogel. It brings me great comfort to know you get to spend it with your partner, and your son. I hope to meet them both when we are on the other side of this.
Talk to you soon.
Much love and solidarity,
Ivan
4.
SHINY-SHOED STORYTELLER
FEBRUARY 26, handwritten letter passed to me after a gig at the library in Nanaimo. Handwriting slanted to the left, which reminded me a little of my sister, who is left-handed.
Ivan,
I’ll start with a secret, something I feel slightly guilty about. I had full intention of inviting my entire cohort of student teachers here tonight. It was the perfect opportunity for some of my peers to see that it’s not only me who uses these pronouns. That it’s not only me with these stories to tell. Two weeks ago I was going to send around an email. Last week I was going to mention it in class. Yesterday, I was going to remind a few key folks about it…I did none of those things. Rather than enlighten others to your beautiful mind, I continued to keep my mouth shut.
After a particularly rough week, I wanted to keep you to myself a little while longer. To savour your strength and be embraced by your warmth and humour. I didn’t want to discuss you/us the following day in class. I didn’t want to share you.
I’ve been coming home a little more tired lately, frustrated by the constant misgendering. A few nights ago, I tucked into bed with your new book and a cuppa tea. I stayed up until 2 a.m. reading, feeling like we were processing that day together. Sharing you tonight meant sharing those intimate moments that are holding me together this year. It meant sharing my truths and shame to people who still fail to see me. During a time when so much of my self, my vulnerability, is on public display, I just couldn’t bring myself to invite them.
But! Please know that next time I will. Know that every time you step on a school stage, I’m standing strong beside you. Proud to share community with you. Grateful for your vulnerability. Ready to catch you at any moment.
I constantly have students approach me in the hall or gym of my practicum school. Small comments like “your voice is squeaky” or “I’m confused by whether you’re a boy or a girl” or “I like your haircut…I REALLY like your haircut.” These moments are heartwarming. Said with such gentle curiosity, kids are making connections in a school that currently feels hostile to anything outside the ordinary. There are some really beautiful moments of being trans.
Anyway. I suppose I wanted to say that I hold so much love for these stories you share. Our stories.
Thank you,
Tem
P.S. When I first came out to my folks, I suggested that they go see your show in Victoria. They went and absolutely fell in love with you. My mum now follows you on Instagram (she’s a big fan of your cabin building posts) and my dad asks how you are, like we’re friends. I told him I’d check in with you this week. So, how are you?
JUNE 16, 2020
Dear Tem:
First of all, thank you so much for coming to my show at the library. I wonder if I wish I knew at the time it would be my last public show before the pandemic hit, and we would be here, 10 weeks later, in this permanently changed world, hunkered down in our homes, if we are one of the lucky ones.
I think a lot now of those last few days before we knew what was going on. Imagine now, cramming over 200 people into a library in Nanaimo? That gig would not have happened at all if it had been scheduled even two weeks later. It wouldn’t have happened if we had any idea of what was about to happen to the world we thought we knew.
I think of how many hugs I gave and received that night, and simultaneously feel grateful and terrified remembering each one of them.
Schools are closed still. Most teachers I know are scrambling right now, trying to adapt their physical classes and in-person lessons for students now sheltering at home with iPads and ADHD, and exhausted parents googling how to do grade 8 algebra while prepping dinner and Zooming with their co-workers. I’m not sure where the pandemic leaves you, a student teacher? How does one do a teaching practicum at a shuttered school?
I’ve been doing some form of my anti-bullying school show for 17 years now. I’ve performed for 2200 kids in a giant theatre in Auckland, New Zealand, and 400 uniformed and silent kids in a government school in Hong Kong. I’ve clocked thousands of kilometres alone in my truck, or rented cars, all over this continent, and on four others, too. I once made a hippie kid in a tiny mountain town near the BC-Alberta border laugh so hard he fell off of his chair in the library and peed his hand-me-down jeans just a little bit. His name was Rain, a detail I learned after the gig was over, from the librarian, and I laughed all the way down the highway back to my hotel room at that one.
I have a complicated relationship to school shows. It runs deep and thick, right through my veins and down into my marrow. I did a rough count last year, and I estimate that I’ve performed for over half a million kids now, give or take, a number which makes me feel proud and exhausted at the same time.
After each and every school show I’ve ever done, without exception, I’ve been approached by a kid. You’re a student teacher so you know this kid already.
A kid with a question that isn’t really a question at all. A kid with a little seedling of themselves wrapped up in the disguise of a question, and he or she or they hold it in there, in sweaty palms, and lift it into the space between us, and unwrap it just a little, just enough to let a bit of light leak onto it. Gymnasium floor beneath our feet and the smell of someone’s armpits floating everywhere around us, and this kid shows me a little of who they are, in an immense and sacred act of untested trust.
“Why do you cut your hair so short? My mom won’t let me. Yet.”
“Your story about your grandmother reminded me so much of my grandma. Does she still love you?”
“What pronoun do you use?”
“Where is your cousin Christopher now, the one that got picked on in school so much?”
