Dear Life

He and Josie have not had any children of their own, but I don’t think that bothers them. Josie is the only person who ever talks about Caro, and even she doesn’t do it often. She does say that my father doesn’t hold my mother responsible. He has also said that he must have been sort of a stick-in-the-mud when my mother wanted more excitement in her life. He needed a shaking-up, and he got one. There’s no use being sorry about it. Without the shaking-up, he would never have found Josie and the two of them would not have been so happy now.

“Which two?” I might say, just to derail him, and he would staunchly say, “Josie. Josie, of course.”

My mother ca

Even where the gravel pit was a house now stands, the ground beneath it levelled.

I have a partner, Rutha

He was living hardly fifty miles away from where I teach, which also happens to be where I went to college. I wondered if he had been there at that time. So close. Had he become a scholar?

At first I had no intention of replying to the note, but I told Rutha

He was shorter than he used to be, as adults we remember from childhood usually are. His hair was thin, and trimmed close to his head. He got me a cup of tea. He was drinking tea himself.

What did he do for a living?

He said that he tutored students in preparation for exams. Also, he helped them write their essays. Sometimes, you might say, he wrote those essays. Of course, he charged.

“It’s no way to get to be a millionaire, I can tell you.”

He lived in a dump. Or a semi-respectable dump. He liked it. He looked for clothes at the Sally A

“Suits my principles.”

I did not congratulate him on any of this, but, to tell the truth, I doubt that he expected me to.

“Anyway, I don’t think my lifestyle is so interesting. I think you might want to know how it happened.”

I could not figure out how to speak.

“I was stoned,” he said. “And, furthermore, I’m not a swimmer. Not many swimming pools around where I grew up. I’d have drowned, too. Is that what you wanted to know?”

I said that he was not really the one that I was wondering about.

Then he became the third person I’d asked, “What do you think Caro had in mind?”

The counsellor had said that we couldn’t know. “Likely she herself didn’t know what she wanted. Attention? I don’t think she meant to drown herself. Attention to how bad she was feeling?”

Rutha

Neal said, “It doesn’t matter. Maybe she thought she could paddle better than she could. Maybe she didn’t know how heavy winter clothes can get. Or that there wasn’t anybody in a position to help her.”

He said to me, “Don’t waste your time. You’re not thinking what if you had hurried up and told, are you? Not trying to get in on the guilt?”

I said that I had considered what he was saying, but no.

“The thing is to be happy,” he said. “No matter what. Just try that. You can. It gets to be easier and easier. It’s nothing to do with circumstances. You wouldn’t believe how good it is. Accept everything and then tragedy disappears. Or tragedy lightens, anyway, and you’re just there, going along easy in the world.”

Now, good-bye.

I see what he meant. It really is the right thing to do. But, in my mind, Caro keeps ru

HAVEN

ALL this happened in the seventies, though in that town and other small towns like it, the seventies were not as we picture them now, or as I had known them even in Vancouver. The boys’ hair was longer than it had been, but not straggling down their backs, and there didn’t seem to be an unusual amount of liberation or defiance in the air.

My uncle started off by teasing me about grace. About not saying grace. I was thirteen years old, living with him and my aunt for the year that my parents were in Africa. I had never bowed my head over a plate of food in my life.

“Lord bless this food to our use and us to thy service,” Uncle Jasper said, while I held my fork in midair and refrained from chewing the meat and potatoes that were already in my mouth.

“Surprised?” he said, after “for Jesus’ sake. Amen.” He wanted to know if my parents said a different prayer, perhaps at the end of the meal.

“They don’t say anything,” I told him.

“Don’t they really?” he said. These words were delivered with fake amazement. “You don’t mean to tell me that? People who don’t say the Lord’s grace going over to Africa to minister to the heathen—think of that!”

In Ghana, where my parents were teaching school, they seemed not to have come across any heathens. Christianity bloomed disconcertingly all around them, even on signs on the backs of buses.

“My parents are Unitarians,” I said, for some reason excluding myself.

Uncle Jasper shook his head and asked me to explain the word. Were they not believers in the God of Moses? Nor in the God of Abraham? Surely they must be Jews. No? Not Muhammadans, were they?

“It’s mostly that every person has his own idea of God,” I said, perhaps more firmly than he’d expected. I had two brothers in college and it didn’t look as though they were going to turn out to be Unitarians, so I was used to intense religious—as well as atheistic—discussions around the di

“But they believe in doing good works and living a good life,” I added.

A mistake. Not only did an incredulous expression come over my uncle’s face—raised eyebrows, marvelling nod—but the words just out of my mouth sounded alien even to me, pompous and lacking in conviction.

I had not approved of my parents’ going to Africa. I had objected to being dumped—my word for it—with my aunt and uncle. I may even have told them, my long-suffering parents, that their good works were a load of crap. In our house we were allowed to express ourselves as we liked. Though I don’t think my parents themselves would ever have spoken of “good works” or of “doing good.”

My uncle was satisfied, for the moment. He said that we’d have to drop the subject, as he himself needed to be back at his practice doing his own good works by one o’clock.

It was probably then that my aunt picked up her fork and began to eat. She would have waited until the bristling was over. This may have been out of habit, rather than out of alarm at my forwardness. She was used to holding back until she was sure that my uncle had said all that he meant to say. Even if I spoke to her directly, she would wait, looking at him to see if he wanted to do the answering. What she did say was always cheerful, and she smiled just as soon as she knew it was okay to smile, so it was hard to think of her as being suppressed. Also hard to think of her as my mother’s sister, because she looked so much younger and fresher and tidier, as well as being given to those radiant smiles.