Annotated List of Things Found While Packing, Part 2

Copyright registration card from the Library of Congress. 

• My grandfather, who left school at 13 to work at the tar plant to support his eight siblings and then worked shift work at the steel plant until he retired, who taught himself basic electronics and economics from books but refused to read fiction on the grounds that it was “all made up,” who did not watch feature films (“foolishness”) or go to restaurants (“waste of money”) or travel for pleasure (“for the birds”), whose idea of a day off was to plant carrots, fix the lawn-mower and then take down the storm windows, took the trouble in 1935 to write to the Library of Congress to copyright a song he had written with a friend. He played the French horn, but according to the card, he wrote the lyrics to “Dove of Love.” He would have been 18. 

Annotated List of Things Found While Packing, Part 1

1.  A list of books I read in 1997 (the last full year I lived in Bhutan).

• List includes She’s Come Undone, The God of Small Things, and Angela’s Ashes.  
• Question: How did I manage to get my hands on these and 72 other books in Thimphu, where the fiction section of the town’s main bookstore featured two volumes of Sherlock Holmes, The Red Badge of Courage, and the collected works of Ayn Rand?

2. A drawing of a picture of the Fourth King of Bhutan.

• Medium: brown and orange crayon on thick paper.
• Description: HM’s framed portrait sits on a carved wooden table.
• Artist: Dorje (but he spelled his name Dojer).

3. My son’s long-form birth certificate.

• “See explanation for last name in attached letter.” There is no attached letter, but I had to write one, explaining why the child did not have his mother's last name (Zeppa), his father’s last name (Dendup), or a combination thereof. 
• Explanation: there are commonly no surnames in Bhutan. Also, child's father felt that Pema Dorji (meaning "Lotus Thunderbolt") would not really be improved with the addition of Zeppa (meaning "beet root"). Child's mother had to agree.

4. An insane number of suitcase locks without keys and combination locks for which I no longer remember the combination.

• I hate moving. 

The Secretary's Desk Book

from The Secretary's Desk Book, 1935:

#27. The Evil One.
The names of the Evil One should begin with capitals. Satan. Satanic Majesty. The Devil. The Adversary.


I'm trying to imagine how many secretaries in 1935 had the opportunity to actually implement this rule.

To: The Adversary, Hell. From: Harvey's Menswear, Toronto. May 13, 1935
Dear The Devil,
It has come to our attention that your account is now thirty days past due. Please send cheque or money order. Thank you.
Very Truly Yours, etc.

Anxiety (aka Unnamed Devil Disorder)

At a recent reading hosted by The Bookshelf in Guelph, I was asked about the unspecified mental illness in Every Time We Say Goodbye. The characters in my novel cannot name their illnesses. Unnamed, an illness can be anything; unspoken, it often becomes the worst thing possible.

For example.  

When I was 18, I went on a religious retreat with forty other high school students and met the devil. For six months after, I was unable to sleep except in brief snatches; during the day I was shaken by strange surges, haunted by evil grinning thoughts, and clamped in an iron vice of dread.

The retreat was held in an office building. We went in on a Friday afternoon to find all the windows and clocks covered, and were immediately asked to surrender our watches. “Don’t anticipate,” we were told. “Participate.” Soon, we weren’t sure if it was day or night. (Later I would learn that this, along with sleep deprivation and hunger, is a common technique in cult programming. The body becomes disoriented and the mind follows.)

At some point during our clockless retreat, we were told to lie on mats in a dark room and empty our minds. I did, and into my emptied mind came an unspeakable dread. It was more terrifying than anything I’d ever felt, so I gave it the name of the worst thing I knew. I fixed my eyes on the low-lit crucifix on the wall and recited silent Hail Marys. Eventually, the devil retreated, but I was deeply shaken. If I wasn’t safe surrounded by crucifixes in the Catholic Information Centre in Sault Ste. Marie, I wasn’t safe anywhere.

The retreat ended, and I went home. I was in bed the next time the devil appeared, rippling out of the radio (probably on a Jimmy Page riff). I leaped out of bed, turned off the radio, and prayed like mad. Around four in the morning, I fell asleep. Two hours later, I got up for school.

This became a nightly pattern: terror and dread in sweat-soaked sheets, followed by fragmented sleep. Strangest of all, I told no one. I was afraid that if I told my grandparents, they would take me to a priest, thus confirming my deepest fears. And there was just no way to drop it into a conversation at school (oh yeah, and guess what else? Satan is trying to possess me, so if my head starts turning around, like 360 degrees, that's what's up with that).

One night, I woke up with tremors running through my hands and arms. Was I dying? I stumbled to my grandparents’ room. “Grandma,” I said. “My hands are shaking.”

She said, “It’s nerves.”

Nerves. Huh. Not a supernatural evil trying to get in, but a terrible pain trying to get out. The shaking subsided, and I went back to bed.

A few months later, in university, a description of an anxiety attack in my psych textbook confirmed my grandmother’s diagnosis.

Still, it took a long time to get help, partly because I'd learned as a child that the adults who were supposed to be caring for me were so caught up in their own traumas, they couldn’t be relied on. Also, I didn’t know where to get help, and it would be years before you could Google “heart racing” and “feel like I’m dying” and be led to an anxiety disorder website. But mostly, I thought I could banish my affliction by ignoring it. It took a long time to learn we only cure our ailments by calling them out.

Five Times a Day

In her beautiful memoir, Married to Bhutan, which I read yesterday in virtually one sitting, Linda Leaming mentions a Buddhist practice in which a person thinks about death five times a day. This made me wonder: Why five? Is that a lot? What kind of day do you have if you wake up and tell yourself, Today I’m going to think about death five times?

I decide to try it.

Thought # 1 (leaving for the gym): What if this is the last time I leave the house? People will say, “She was just on her way to the gym. She never even saw it coming.” (Ha! Little would they know....)

Thought # 2 (in spin class, pedalling as hard as I can): The instructor tells us to pedal harder, and in my mind, I pound the bike and say, “I’m dyin’ here.”  Does that count?

Thought # 3 (walking home from the grocery store in the rain, noticing tightly furled buds): I wish I could slow spring down.  “A peach blossom is beautiful...because it is temporary,” says the monk at the end of the Bhutanese film Travellers and Magicians. Yes, yes, I know! But if only it could be temporary a little longer.

Thought # 4 (staring at an empty Word document): Death is the blank page on which life writes.

Thought #5 (remembering Rome): It's so weird that my very Catholic mother doesn't believe in an afterlife.  We were standing in front of an Inferno-esque fresco when she mentioned, oh so casually, that she did not believe in heaven or hell. I was shocked. Can you be a Catholic and not believe in life after death? Isn’t the afterlife kind of the whole point? Also, if she didn’t believe in an afterlife, why was she dragging me into every church in the city? I asked what she thought awaited us after death. She said, “Nothing. I believe we live on through our genes, in our children.” I said, “Then can we go back to that restaurant near the place we bought the leather sandals?”

Thought # 6 (leaving to do a reading in Hamilton): What if this is the last time I leave the house?  OK, when you start to repeat yourself, it’s time to stop. Plus, I’ve done the required five.

Thought #7 (driving past a cemetery. A very big cemetery): “I had not thought death had undone so many.” Enough with the death thoughts already!

Thought #8 (on the way home from the reading): I talk with author Cynthia Holz about Buddhism, end of life care, the end of a life, the moment of death. Rain falls in the streets of the dark city. I am so absorbed in my life at the moment, I forget I am supposed to be thinking about death, even though we have been talking about it the whole way home.   

Cosmogony, for Writers and Word Nerds

Just read this in Stanley Fish's How to Write a Sentence:

One day the Nouns were clustered in the street.
An Adjective walked by, with her dark beauty.
The Nouns were struck, moved, changed.
The next day a Verb drove up, and created the Sentence.

-- Kenneth Koch, "Permanently"

Parents

The publication of Every Time We Say Goodbye has not been easy for my parents, given that I borrowed (stole) parts of their histories and reshaped (hammered and chipped, chopped and screwed) them to fit into a novel. In my anxiety over how they might feel after reading my book, I wrote imaginary blurbs from both of them:

“Well, it’s a very nice book, but I don’t know why she couldn’t write about vampires. They're very popular. And she’d make more money too!” – The Author’s Mother

“I swear I didn’t know the car was stolen.” The Author’s Father

My parents split up when I was two. I’m now 46 and can only remember seeing them in the same room on a handful of occasions (funeral, graduation, my first book launch). Even when they are in the same room, they don’t really talk (for personal reasons which cannot be explored in this public forum, and besides I already wrote a novel about it).

So estranged are they that it was a shock for my son to realize their connection. “Wait a minute,” he said when he was about six. “Grandma Judy and Grandpa Jimmy used to be...married?”

And so I was delighted when they seemed to enter into a playful rivalry over book sales at two readings in their respective cities.

In the Soo, my mother mailed out postcards of the book cover, called friends, family, and absolute strangers, and liaised with staff at the public library, where the reading was being held.

In Toronto, my father emailed invitations, called friends, printed up postcards of the book cover, and worked with staff at Ben McNally’s bookstore, where the event was being held.

At the Soo reading, the room was packed; the novel sold out and the booksellers had to resort to selling copies of my Bhutan memoir.  In Toronto, the room was packed, and people bought both the novel and the memoir. At the end of the evening, my father tallied up the numbers: he was up by one book. But when I conveyed this fact to my mother, she said I’d miscounted. "Congratulate your father on his success," she said, "but I won by ten books." 

No, it's not time to cue the Reconciliation Score, but in my family, that counts as conversation.

At least they'll have something to talk about at the next launch.