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We came to refer to these as the 27 Depravities, like some reckoning of hollow-cheeked church theologians. Since then I've sometimes had to remind myself it was my list, not hers. I think it was a fair analysis of her complaints and I took a self-destructive pleasure in calling out the accusations as if from her own unforgiving heart. Such was my mood those days. I was trying to involve her in my failings, make her see how she exaggerated routine lapses, make her appear shrewish to herself, the bitch of legend.Every day I'd recite a few entries, go into deep meditation, working up new ones, polishing old, and then come back at her with the results. For aggravating effect I'd sometimes use a female voice. It was a week-long operation. Most of the items brought silence. Some made her laugh sarcastically. I had to learn that people who try to be perceptive about themselves are taken for self-hectoring fools, although it's more accurate to say I was trying to be perceptive about her. The oral delivery was a devotional exercise, an attempt to understand through repetition. I wanted to get inside her, see myself through her, learn the things she knew. Thus Kathryn's cutting laughter. "Is this what I'm supposed to think of you? Is this the picture I have in my mind? A masterpiece of evasion. This is what you've compiled.”What a funhouse mirror is love.By the end of the week I was using a vibrant liturgical voice, sending it toward the distant ceiling of our renovated Victorian house in Toronto's east end. I sat on the striped sofa in the living room, watching her separate her books from mine (bound for different garages), and I stopped reciting long enough to ask casually, by the way, "What would happen if I followed?”Now, six thousand miles from that cobblestone street, the family sits down to di
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Owen Brademas used to say that even random things take ideal shapes and come to us in painterly forms. It's a matter of seeing what is there. He saw patterns there, moments in the flow.His pain was radiant, almost otherworldly. He seemed to be in touch with grief, as if it were a layer of being he'd learned how to tap. He expressed things out of it and through it. Even his laughter had a desolate edge. If it was all sometimes too impressive, I never doubted the unsparing nature of whatever it was that haunted his life. Many hours we spent in conversation, the three of us. I used to study Owen, trying to figure him out. He had an unsettling mental force. Everyone was affected by it to one degree or another. I think he made us feel we were among the fortunate ordinary objects of the world. Maybe we thought his ruinous i