The Last Exile

I came home last Friday to discover Revenue Canada wants me to clarify two things – my martial status and the custody arrangements for my two minor children. Set aside there has been no immediate change in my martial status for the last 9 years and I do not actually have any legal documents saying I have custody of my teenagers since one does not usually end up in family court suing for legal custody of children from a dead spouse. I suppose Revenue Canada is scrapping the bottom of the shakedown barrel or someone has far too much time and imagination to ever be allowed to work in any government department.

Of all the tens of thousands of legal papers floating around my home that I have acquired in a life time of living I have discovered that I cannot find the one paper I actually need – my husband’s death certificate. This requires I contact the Jamaican government and deal with the bureaucracy. If I said I would rather have extension dental surgery spread out quarterly over the next ten years rather than deal with the Jamaican bureaucracy would you believe I am actually understating the actual amount of dread and loathing I am feeling. Revenue Canada and the Jamaican bureaucracy – its a twofer or double whammy of misery. I must have really been evil in a past life.

One the plus side, the everything is now online but I simply cannot input my deceased husband’s name, dob, date and place of death. I need to obtain a death registry number before a copy of the death certificate can be purchased and sent. Of course, a copy of the death certificate still requires all the information above to ensure it matches the deceased. There are so many possibilities for error that my typing fingers are shrivelling just thinking about it. The forced expedition through my documents made me search in places I never willingly go – like the box holding all my husband’s papers, pictures and letters. This set off a trip to the attic of my mind and some of the lids of the boxes there aren’t very battered down all that well.

The Last Amazon in an effort to divert me asked me a question she found in her latest copy of Glamour magazine which forced me to open all the boxes in search of an answer because she really wanted to know. In fact, she feels I have a responsibility to answer her because she is my daughter. Simply put; what advice would I give her someone her age about love. I just didn’t know…I could give her dating advice, marriage advice, career advice, health advice but love…I was stumped. I am living in the attic, and directly front and center, are two huge opened boxes. One is marked Colleen and right beside is an older more tattered box called whose name written in the dust is Clay. It was among the first the boxes to go on my shelves of sorrows. It was a box of great joy and even bigger grief.

I was 21 and had never fallen in love till I meet Clay. By 21, I had loved, married and buried one husband but I never had fallen in love. I was raised by ruthlessly pragmatic people whose idea of ‘falling-in-love’ was as alien a suggestion as the idea that the Martians have landed and are in control of the White House.

I had met him strictly by accident when my beloved friend Colleen and I had to plan my escape from home as I had just broke off an engagement rather suddenly with a man my family wanted me to marry. I didn’t want to listen or be forced to participate in the drama. Instead, we drove off in her battered Ford Escort and headed towards the border so I wouldn’t have to chance being hunted down by relatives who might try to force their point of view on me. My grandmother’s last words to me as we drove off was ‘For fuck’s sake don’t pick-up or start anything with any man and remember you aren’t the fucking UN’. Colleen turned bright red in embarrassment for hearing an entirely respectable looking senior woman, dressed in fur and diamonds, swearing and suggesting in public – for the entire neighborhood to over hear – that we might be inclined to pick-up with strange men. Colleen’s obvious embarrassment only made me laugh all the harder and showed very clearly who might be the older sister but it didn’t mean she was the more experienced one. But then again, she didn’t have all of my obvious advantages having been raised by Gypsies. In my grandmother’s world, this was the equivalent of saying ‘good-bye, have a safe trip and I love you’ were in Colleen’s world as we hit the nevo drom – the high road.

We ended up in Buffalo, New York, where the booze was cheap, men were easy and the music went on till the early hours of the morning. This meant she could easily find someone to entertain her while I danced all night. We went to a half a dozen clubs that night but I couldn’t find my groove. Eventually, the man who joined my friend suggested we hit the East side and go to the Cotton Club. The guys at the door had no trouble letting me and Colleen in but her friend was too pale to pass the colour bar despite my best efforts. I cursed not opening the debate without my French accent. Although, one of the bouncer’s did suggested we try a club down the street called Etc.

This time I told the other two to walk behind and let me clear the door first. It worked too. Unknown to me, I was about to meet the man who would change my life forever. In fact, long after we were over I spent a good ten years searching for echoes of him in every man I ever met. Nothing had prepared me for meeting him. I never had school girl crushes on movie or rock stars or the boy next door. I was raised by people who believed ‘falling-in-love’ was only something the gagje movie stars did on the silver screen to fleece the gullible of their cash. Love was family, duty; the kampania.

I was married off and buried my first husband by the time I met Clay but I never fell in love. And who falls madly, careless, recklessly in love in the east side of Buffalo, New York? Apparently, I do, which all suggests one cannot ever know what lies just down the highway and over the bridge. It went on for years. In my naivete, I had only honesty and my famed bluntness to guide me. Tolerance, patience and forgiveness were foreign in my experience and I wouldn’t learn their value until I had children. The last time I saw him was in the late 80’s as I turned to back look at him just one last time as he lay sleeping in bed before I sneaked out the door like a thief in the night and out of his world forever – without explanation. It was last reconciliations of what feels like thousands of reunions. I remember laying in bed beside him and thought I just cannot live a life filed with anger – his, mine, and the world’s. I gathered up my clothes and slide on the door. It would take years before the sight of people like us wouldn’t enrage strangers in on the street and provoke anger.

So I was thinking about love and what advice I could give my daughter and I just couldn’t come up with a single piece of wisdom. I stared at the computer and the blank screen and suddenly I had the urge to look him up and see if he was on Facebook. He was there and very much as I remembered him. I spent a long time debating whether I would send him a message or not – my own personal Pandora’s box. In the end, the young woman who had to play with fire just because she had held the matches in her hand asserted her presence and I did.

I just spent hours talking to a man who I have spent the last 28 years separate and apart from. Its eerie how we so easily fell so easily into our Kate and Clay mould which was forged so long ago. It’s amazing how comforting it is to learn he is still alive and finding happiness. There was a time when we would break up and he’d call me in the middle of the time and say to me – ‘Kate please just talk to me…I just need to hear the sound of your voice.’ I knew things were ‘wrong’ and I wouldn’t fight him but do as he asked. There were times when I did the very same and he wouldn’t fight me. We just knew what each of us needed and we gave it despite all the bad blood that passed between us and our own inability to raise above our petty natures.

He sent me a message today which said he has been searching for me for years and he have never stopped thinking about you. I still have your earrings and I hope you have been happy. You have to call me.

So I did and spent hours lost in the surreal place where the past and the present converge.

Eventually, we talked about the first time we were intimate. I think it was so different for me from all the men I had been with before because it was the first time I let myself carried away and utterly lost in a moment. I approached it as entirely a one-off kind of thing which turned into an experience spread out of years. It was a moment that I wanted to feel forever in. I think the desire started the first time he took me in his arm to dance. Being a dancer I tended to relate to people first by the way their moved or carried their bodies. He just fit me. His body ‘got’ me and mine answered. The first time I danced with him brought out an entirely physical and emotional response in me.

We talked about that first time. He remembered as clearly as I as it left a profound mark on both of us. I think it was so different (at least for me) as it was the first time I let myself get absolutely carried away in the moment.  I thought of it as entirely a one-off kind of thing and nothing mattered more than that moment. A moment that I wanted to feel forever in. I made a promise to myself that if we ever got together then all the rules which govern relationships were off the table for just so I could fully experience and explore this strange attraction I felt for him. Well, all the rules but one – I would do anything as long as it felt good. All my famous walls and inhibitions were entirely down just for one night. I threw my entire focus into just enjoying him for the pleasure we’d give each other….just like I use to do when I would go on stage to dance – to live. I wanted to live forever in that moment and I, we, did.

There were other moments in that long first fall and winter. He had a living room wall lined by mirrors and he would lie down between my legs as I was dressed in nothing but my toe shoes as I practiced my ballet barre while he lay under the ground between my feet. I cannot begin to explain how incredibly the experience was…to be loved utterly loved and appreciated for merely being a woman. Heedy stuff.

I haven’t a clue as to what it all means. I am a fortunate woman, I have been loved many times – probably much more than I have deserved. Men have written stories for and about me – painted my portrait and I have more than my share of bad poetry and songs written for me.

In turn,  I have loved my share of men but I never loved anyone like I loved him. I am not even sure that I ever wanted to love anyone like I loved him.  It was both sacred and profane. The experience of knowing him marked me forever and I spent a good ten years of searching for the Clay in all the men I met and never finding him. Eventually, I learned not to look and found other things – sometimes wonderful things.

I have no love advice to give anyone except for this – if you are ever fortunate to experience love do not be afraid but approach love as a prayer, and pray you get to dance to the end of love.

There is far too much drama going on around me which has resulted in a number of unintended consequences. I have had little sleep or ‘alone’ time. This situation has resulted in my leaving my home inadequately caffeinated and unable to cope with the world at large in a civilized manner. Case in point – This morning I got off the bus and was patiently waiting for the light to change so I could cross the street. I would have been okay except the couple standing immediately to my left were making strange annoying noises in my ear. In my inadequately caffeinated state, the intrusive noise caused my tolerance level to sink to psycho and I hollered at them to STFU. I rarely swear, let alone swear at strangers on the street. So I now need to offer a general apology to the deaf couple who were signing on the corner of Bloor Street East & Sherbourne this morning for my boorish and uncivilized behaviour.

Apparently, my father sends my daughter pictures he doesn’t send me.

This is a picture of my great-grandparents (paternal-maternal side), who my daughter only knows from stories. This happens to be the only picture I have ever seen with the two of them sitting nicely together. Their battles are the stuff of family legends…is it still called a ‘legend’ if I actually survived the witnessing? Everyone thinks their family unique but my has a certain flavour which truly is different.

I can never remember a time when my great-grandmother did not wear a hat. Mention my great-grandmother’s name to my mother, and 34 years after the woman’s death, my mother still gets enraged just someone saying her name. Personally, I always got on well with her but then I never did try to cross her.

My great-grandfather left Eastern Europe in 1917 and worked his way around the world as a merchant sailor. He made his living but gambling, and in fact, he won my grand-mother in a poker game – when her father ran out of cash so he put her in the pot. We won’t mention her age…This happened in a seaport in Eastern Canada. He wasn’t sure what to do with her so he married her and eventually they made their way to Montreal.

They lived in the first floor and basement of a bordello where he ran the gaming tables and my grandmother cooked…or so I was told. Things were pretty prosperous for them until one night when my great-grandfather’s partner decided my six year old grandmother was too great a temptation to resist. My grandfather killed him when he caught Andre in the act. This necessitated the children being put on the last evening train to Toronto where arrangements were made to live with a Russian Jewish childless couple by the name of Cooper.

My grandmother told me stay with the Cooper’s was the the greatest year of her childhood. She had a clean bed with sheets and blankets all to herself which beat sharing a pile of rages in the basement with my uncle Richard and auntie Bernice. Not only was she feed three times a day but she got to go to school and had special school clothes. After six months, my great-grandparents turned up to claimed the children – much to the horror of the couple who had taken them in. The Coopers begged them to leave the children with them but my great-grandparents refused. My great-grandmother decided to honour them instead by taking their last name which is how they became known as the ‘Coopers’.

I woke up this morning and it hit me – how really good it is to be me. There have been many birthdays in the last 48 years when I woke up thinking the exact opposite. In fact, I can easily recall mornings when my first impulse was to curse because I woke up and realized this thing called my life wasn’t a dream. This isn’t one of those days. Oddly enough, the older I have gotten, the less those kinds of days plague me even though life has gotten much more perilous in so many ways. It is good to grow old and only the lucky do.

I woke up being profoundly grateful for what I have rather than worrying about what will come or what I lack. It’s not that I lack for things to be fearful of. My most beloved daughter has a neurological disorder of some kind and all the obvious potential explanations of what it could be are gut wretchedly horrendous. Although, I get through each day by praying it all ends up being one of those mysterious medical one-offs that no one understands or even can begin to explain. After all, the human brain is still a deep uncharted country. She looks fine, she moves fine, she thinks fine, she sees fine; therefore, for this moment she is fine and that is as far as I need to know today. Tomorrow will look after itself.

Sure there was one moment in the last month when I gave into the dark tea time of my mind and let my fears overcome my heart. I started down the path asking why her? Why my daughter, my only daughter, a daughter who hasn’t yet had a chance to fall in love, marry, have a family or even a career . But it wouldn’t really matter if I had 100 daughters, as I would only have one Kiki Tzipporah, only one Amazon. My daughter, who has spent most the last 19 years of her life helping others get through theirs. And if not my daughter, whose daughter would I pick to change places with mine? This is not something I can wish on someone else’s child, so this is our lot, our portion, and whatever the outcome, she is alive and what she needs from me is to show her how to live with the time she has been graced with rather than to die a little every day. I can do this. I was made to do this. It’s a talent of mine and I do it well.

And the future, the future is unknown but I will all face it when it comes, until then, there is simply today and that is really all that is knowable or important. No matter the outcome, we live and we live in today. So I woke up and discovered the house cleaning faeries visited my home and left everything shiny and gleaming. The magical house cleaning faeries even programmed the coffee pot to automatically turn on so all I had to do was pour, sip and survey my kingdom… and count my blessing.

I could blog about Canadian politics or the meltdown of the Obama-nation to our south. It just that it all blows for me right now as each side polarizes into absurdity and I find it just engages me less and less. North American politics has become so sporty – like a football game where everyone chooses sides and roots for their home team regardless of any other consideration. Ideas, integrity and principles are thrown aside for the sake of pragmatism in the quest to score the winning goal. Perhaps, it has always been like this and I have been wearing my rose-coloured glasses far too long.

So instead I want to mark a personal milestone. I’m a reader, my daughter is a reader, and my oldest son is a reader. We might even be called a family of readers except my youngest son rarely reads. It’s not that he can’t read, he just finds it boring beyond belief which quite frankly an attitude that completely baffles me is. I’ve tried just about every kind of book to engage him with to no avail…until two days ago when

I caught him reading for pleasure. And it was all purely by accident. I bought an English translation of a book by Israeli writer Etgar Keret called, ‘The Bus Driver who thought he was God & Other stories’. I am not a fan of short stories and avoid them much like one does to avoid swine flu. An acquaintance begged me to give him a chance and suggested I needed to read him to get a better grasp on Israeli pop culture.

I finally found one of his books at a used bookstore I regularly patronize. Let me say this, it wasn’t cheap even for a ‘used’ book. I bought it, brought it home, and read it in one sitting while I laughed and alternately squirmed under Keret’s prose. I knew my older son would appreciate how far Keret is willing to go to expose the thoughts of ordinary people doing often bizarre or irrations things for the most absurd reasons. Actually, reading Keret is kind of like sitting in G-d’s confessional booth. I wouldn’t be at all surprised to discover Keret has already written a story about G-d’s confessional booth.

Montana liked it and left it lying around the bathroom which is where Isaiah Sender found it. It was Isaiah Sender’s turn to clean the bathroom and he only gave it a quick read because he mistakenly thought it was a Captain Underpants novella he missed reading as child owing to the graphics on the cover. Or at least that’s his excuse when I found him reading it instead of cleaning. Apparently, the first story sucked him in and he’s stayed with it until it’s done. Now he wants more. Baruch HaShem, but did he have to pick an author whose books seem only to be published here at upscale prices? Anyhow, between Keret’s stories I thought I might try sneaking in a little Vonnegut.

This weekend other than my mother has spent the last two weeks seriously ill in hospital. After a lifetime of no one paying much attention to what she says, her sisters decided they would honour her wishes for a change and not tell me she was so ill – as in life and death ill. I’ve tried frantically to get a hold of her for the last two weeks and finally the mystery was solved. I agree that I couldn’t have done ‘any’ to help her condition, and yes, I am dealing with serious health issues on the home front, but still, she is my mother. And she wonders why I prefer my father’s family – they would have told me.

My Siberian friend once said to me that the reason we need to have children is to make life fair. We torment our parents, grow-up and then in turn, turn out our own personal set of tormentors. Then the children have children who torment them and we get to watch. It’s all good. Life is fair.

I have loved nothing more than having children. I made a big mistake years ago in not starting sooner so I could have had at least six children. Of course, it might have happened; if I could have a husband who’d lived could have at least managed to live out a decade being married to me. C’est la vie.

My children have been the source of my greatest joys but indubitably there is a full set of matching luggage which comes from having children. While my children have given me my greatest joy they have also been the well-springs of my greatest fears, largest worries and most desperate waking nightmares, and from where I sit and can observe; I have had it rather easy compared to some. This doesn’t mean my children are angels even if they are perfect. They still stay out break curfew, argue, talk back, break my rules and most prized possessions, torment their teachers and give me a fast race every day of my life. Most days, I feel like the Law Society of Upper Canada is meeting permanently at my kitchen table. I get no days off – not even for the Sabbath.

For all of that, I wouldn’t trade one single moment of the last 19 years for my childless days. I had a good life while I was single. I traveled, danced and music has filled my days. There was no angst worrying where the next date would come from and pining away home alone on any given night – unless I felt the need to pine. All I had to do was go out my door and I was bound to meet some man who was eager to pick up the social slack. Of course, I had friends, and my greatest trouble was finding the time to be ALONE to do the things I wanted to do…odd how that has yet to change.

I have friends’, who have never had children, when and if, they start to fret that they are missing something, they come to visit and take a seat in the back benches of my kitchen table. A couple hours and a few stiff drinks later the angst and urge usually passes. If we lucky, we live lives which give us choices, and if we are sensible, we are always grateful for what we have.

I went to see her Majesty. The Last Amazon and I were late to the party as we only walked over to Church and King Streets an hour before her Majesty’s arrival and found out we weren’t the only ones going to welcome the Queen. Then the Last Amazon and her friends met up to attend the Gay Pride parade…as the word went out to go out and make a stand against the hatemongers…apparently, Yisrael was out in full force.

I am not returning to blogging but I just have to get this off my chest. I am a more than a little peeved at being surrounded by people with a university degrees asking me if I felt the earth move. For frack’s sake people I am 47 – almost 48 years old, a three time widow and mother of many. Of course I felt the earth move – and buckle, contract, swallow me up and the sky come tumbling down on more than one occasion. I cannot believe I am surrounded by cultural illiterates whose secondary school or university English never included Ernest Hemmingway.

My daughter is returning today from Jamaica. Normally, this would be cause for celebration but she is returning with a sudden partial loss of vision in one eye as the result of some strange inexplicable (to us) condition which developed literally overnight. In these situations; google is not a Mother’s Best Friend.

As a result this blog is going dark and the most I will be reading is my Tehillim until this situation is resolved.