Daughter

D

Dearest, isn’t this how the nicest letters begin? News from the front, the wartime graininess of black and white film, the jerkiness of uniformed soldiers moving in what is emphatically not a joke. Dearest, how dark we are getting. Dear heart, is that lighter?

I will be in to see you tonight. It’s staying light later now as the year rolls toward spring; I hope that when I drive off the ferry, the sky will still have a rosy glow of brightness.

A

phone call from your dad at home to say my tea is still on the counter. Yes, I realized that half-way to the ferry, could see my stainless steel travel mug by the spalted maple bowl on the counter. I’d made a cup of fragrant candy apple rooibos to take with me and then, in a hurry, walked out the door without it. Well, I will buy myself tea on the ferry, likely Earl Grey. I tell myself the world is full of riches, just sometimes (often?) they are not exactly as specified in the scripts we all run in our heads. How clear our scenarios are in those frame-by-frame set of expectations. They have coloured flags like Buddhist prayer flags. Goodbye, I wave. Flap flap, orange, yellow, green, blue, they wave back.

U

Under cloudy skies, I watch the dark bulk of Portland Island to my left. Off toward Saltspring, the sun lays a rim of bright water around the island, a puddled halo. Yet the island top is shrouded in cloud.

I feel like newspaper in a woodstove when the fire starts to run along it, only instead of flame, what I feel is a gentle, tentative happiness. A not-exhausted happiness. A good cuppa tea pleasure. A looks-like-the-weather-is-clearing lightness. Off to the south, the cloud is lifting.

G

Good news, I say to the universe. Is that so much to ask? My favourite line from Fiddler on the Roof; “Would it upset some vast eternal plan if I were a wealthy man?” I throw out my assertion about good news to the universe the way a sailor pitches a coiled up bow rope to a person standing on the dock, Here, catch.

 Maybe the firs on the spines of the islands are the good news. Each shape is different; every one bristles distinct and lovely against the grey sky. Maybe the Glaucous-winged gull swooping beside the ferry is my wink from on high.

I want things to start breaking for you, opening up.

Today at lunch, a friend was harrumphing about the insufferableness of Eckhart Tolle and New Age beliefs.

“Speaking about the Law of Attraction,” I said, which we weren’t exactly. “I had a student last term …” I told my friend about the book presentation the charming student had made to the class about the Law of Attraction. “And you know what the really annoying thing was?”    

“Tell me,” my friend said.

I laughed so hard I choked on a bite of carrot in my salad. “By the end of term, this woman had manifested not one but two full-time jobs, glamorous and well-paid, and was doing both! She works as a music blogger and for Armani. She was in New York over Christmas, looking at the current collection.”

 My friend put down her toasted cheese sandwich. “That’s actually kind of disturbing.”

H

Hope is the currency of myth, of magic, of mothers. Hope is what I want for you, a measure of joy in getting up in the morning. I would settle for even crumbs of joy, a pleasure in the day about to unfold, a feeling that you have things to offer, that you can make a difference. But really, I’d prefer a whole toasted bagel of joy for you, not just crumbs. To be honest, and a mother. I don’t want a job at Armani for you nor one as a music blogger, but something that would engage your own skills, your intellect, your heart.

 Twenty-four years ago, you stood in our white kitchen in Ladner and chanted, “I’m a daughter of a daughter of a daughter…” while I chopped vegetables for soup. I kept thinking anytime now you’d stop, but whatever play you were gripped in had you tight and “I’m a daughter of a daughter,” went on past any reckoning of family history I had, seven generations in Canada, to England, to Ireland, to Scotland, to pre-literate society to Cro-Magnon history and the freaky terrifying thing was you were right: I was the daughter of a daughter and you were and my mother was. Every one of us couldn’t have been here otherwise. And you, at age five, chanted this truth like some miniature oracle until the hair on my neck stood on end.

 When you finished, finally, the silence in the kitchen rang the way a crystal bowl does when the person who has been circling the rim with a playing stick, stops.

T

Towards clarity, I tell myself. Life, the mechanical shaking of the ferry, the cold back nose of our new puppy surely all lead toward a space where we can stand unafraid defined by a kind of radiant clarity. If we insist on it. If we bend our thoughts and imaginations in this direction.

 And laugh, maybe. Never mind humans being defined as the tool-making animal: New Caledonian crows and Bearded Capuchin monkeys use meta-tools, tools that act on other tools. But surely humans are the only species absurd enough to reach out to the infinite and to inform it of our wants, to in effect hand over a shopping list.

E

Everywhere I look on the beach, our puppy arrows across my sight lines, all gold curls and stocky little legs. She is running in a circle now around two bleached driftwood logs, circling, then zooming with a scrabble of claws along the log I am sitting against.She flings an ancient (and empty) red crab carapace into the air, shakes a puff of black-green bladderwrack in her mouth like a cheerleader’s pompom.

Joy. Just joy in the sun.

Everywhere I go, my thoughts drift back to you, my daughter. Today, for once I am not worrying; merely greeting your image with a smile. We laughed on our last visit and you made us fragrant mint tea with chamomile. You showed me the Carlos Fuente novel you are reading and said, “You’d like it. I’ll lend it to you when I’m finished.” A gift from a PhD student in San Diego. Someone with a crush on you.

You told me about some small things opening up in your life and I said Thank you to the air that said nothing back.

Why is it sometimes we love one another so easily and other times it’s a difficult slog over a shale beach where the rocks are slippery? Maybe asking this makes as much sense as wondering why the puppy runs along a log at times and around it at others.

 All I know is that here now on the beach she breathes close to my ear, snuffles in the scent of me, and carries on, satisfied with snorting and digging into the shell and crushed grey rock of the beach.

R

Rrack, rrack, rrack. A raven calls, then scissors overhead. The puppy lifts her head. The wind has died down so the white points of light on the water at the far end of the beach are not as numerous nor as fiercely sparkling as they were earlier. The February sun is so warm I take off my jacket.  

I am warm with more than just sun. On last week’s visit with you I had gone to bed and was reading in the lower bunk bed in your daughter’s room, my granddaughter. She was away. You’ve made the room charming for her, with a string of twinkly white lights around the big front window, an Ikea striped circus tent in one corner, the old pine bookcase your dad made for me many years ago stuffed with books and bright fabric boxes of toys. There’s a reading light on the bedside table; it’s a bit dim but I angle my book to see.

You drifted into the room.  I looked up from my book, mildly surprised, thinking you wanted something from the closet. We’d hugged in the kitchen earlier and said our goodbyes; I leave so early in the morning we don’t see one another.

“Just thought I’d say goodnight,” you said. And you leaned over the bed and kissed me on the cheek exactly the way you do with your daughter.