Monday, July 11, 2022
For those in the know, let me first ease your worries. This will not be a standup routine. My grandmother had a charming humour, surely, but while I lack any regard for tradition and good taste, Marion Spencer retained that regard—up to a point. Nodding to her, then, I will put the silly guy away, leave the heavy irony for a different stage, and come to you here wearing another of my hats: the student of literary arts. A pretentious, self-important student, but a student nonetheless mad for knowing the depths of a human soul. Granted, there may be some irony, Grandma forgive me.
When I came into this consciousness thing, I was unavoidably aware of a matriarch—some ever-present care-giver and fun-provider who radiated love, kindness, and support. And it’s true, she radiated. Something about her presence, even the slightly nervous expectation of her presence, altered the tone of a room. An old-timey set of manners crept into our handling of utensils; a deep respect arrested our wayward tongues; eyes of the parents sparkled with relief at her approach but darted stern warnings at the grandchildren to be on their best behaviours. So little distrust in the four of us, so little faith. (SHAKE HEAD)
Now, a visit from this woman followed a routine. First, she would be attacked by pets ... There wasn’t a single animal I saw that did not come to her with natural trust and comfort. This to me was pure magic. I don’t mean she was some fanciful Snow White, but the woman had furry influence. My first best-friend, Xena, the elegant and calm black lab-German shepherd, could not get enough of this woman. I can still see my dad shaking his head, shuffling into the kitchen, shuffling back out to the living room with some paper towels and dutifully cleaning up an excited pond of urine from the floor. You understand what I’m driving at here.
Second in the routine, my dad would absolutely leap to take this woman’s coat from her and rummage in the floor of the front closet to retrieve the slippers which awaited her angelic feet. My father is the kindest man I know, doting on anyone graced by his company, and yet the speed and the passion of his kindness to this woman always grabbed my attention.
Third, my mum would shapeshift. Normally she is a rather crude woman, God love her, with little regard for propriety and reverence, but you better believe she was so dazzled by this arriving woman that she shed the child, she shed the girl, and became the adult daughter-in-law she believed this woman deserved. My mother changed for no one, except this doted-on woman.
Of course, I could go on to the next several steps, but in pursuit of brevity (something I obviously struggle with) I believe it sensible to gloss over these steps because you can understand rather clearly that this woman was universally loved. Regardless of her kindness and love towards myself and others, I still wondered why there was such fanfare always surrounding this woman. I knew many people who were kind and loving to me, and yet there inevitably were folks who just didn’t like them. Fair enough, that’s life. But who the hell was this woman that everybody liked? It drove me mad thinking about it. I was still too young, meek, and distracted at the time to reach into that inquiry, but the interest budded there for sure. I began to look past the veil of “Grandma” and wonder who Marion was.
Many weekends of ice cream, camping trips, and Scrabble later, my mum’s father died. Again, those in the know need not worry, I won’t dive into that mess. But I never really knew my maternal grandfather. He was around but tragically absent, so to speak. On the other hand, my dad’s father, Jim, died before I was even born. The reality that I knew so very little of both, that Janis Vilkarsis was for my entire life up to that point but a living ghost, and that he died in this context—all this was jarring for me. Something raged within me and compelled me to, well … to give a shit about the living. To really give a shit, to visit the two grandparents I had left and to probe their minds, their pasts, their hearts.
Luckily enough, my two grandmothers hung out … a lot. When I was young, Valerie (or as us kids knew her, Nanna), would spend entire weekends at Grandma Marion’s house in Binbrook. (Jim and Marion, I hear, were adamant to acquire the monikers Grandpa and Grandma, no if ands or buts. Valeria and Janis reluctantly made do with Nanna and Papa.) When I was in high school, Marion and Valeria lived practically two streets away from each other by Grays Road. I could visit both in the same day, and I did. I wanted to know everything about Valerie: her life in Nazi-occupied Europe, her time as a nurse in England, her journey with a family across an ocean to Hamilton, her struggle to assimilate into a new culture—the whole lot of it! But sadly she was a reserved woman, in that regard. She’d rather live denying the past, denying the awfulness, and instead putter around a mall buying tacky jewelry and vibrant pants. Can you blame her? I can’t.
Marion, however, was more forthcoming. She had less to be devastated by, of course, but the poor woman was born into the Great Depression; lived a full career caring for the sick and disabled; cared almost unilaterally for her dying mother; and watched her husband die far too early. I’m missing many more struggles, but we know she faced them all with grace and endless thoughts for others. And she was certainly prepared to talk about most of these things, so long as she was not seen as a victim or a cause for sadness.
In my voracious quest for a deeper understanding of Marion, I began with a simple question. If you had had the choice all those years ago to pursue any career you desired, what would you have done? With great pride and a dash of lament, she told me she wanted to become a minister. I knew Grandma as a nurse, the rest of her endearing traits besides. And here I was, sitting at her kitchen table, witnessing her entire presence metamorphose in front of me into a shepherd. Not just a care-giver, but a guide. A beacon of light and hope and love. Of course! If not for the backwards bullshit of old men committed to custom and intimidated by a most magnificent young woman, Marion would have been that beacon for an entire flock, not just her own family. But good lord, she gave us few kin the love she could share with a flock. I’m not a religious man, but I do count my blessings, and that my friends is most definitely one of them. One terrible mistake of a bygone patriarchy provided me bountiful love welling inside a tender soul just itching to be lavished on dozens and dozens of suffering men and women. Her love was often subtle, her guidance gentle, and her light never seemed to dim.
Except, for me, on only one occasion. The unspeakable happened. The most devastating storm ripped through my family and we were forever changed. The tragedy came through these halls, too, and some of us have struggled this week with an intense but now somewhat manageable resurgence of grief. My dad and I went to her house the night of Saint Nikolas, and to come to her bearing such news curdled my stomach. I was still young, still agile enough to overcome such horror, but Marion, great-grandmother to four little ones? I figured it would level her to know she outlived one. Well, it did. She practically fell to the floor in my dad’s arms. After some minutes she retained her composure, went into the living room to sit down, and while my dad left to check in on the rest of the family, I sat there with her entirely unsure what to do. No word was enough. No breath came easily. I had brought my guitar in some impulsive madness, and finally pulled it out and just played every Bob Dylan song I knew to keep me from falling apart. Marion sat there, on the opposite couch, just sitting and listening. I’d finish a song, and silence. I’d start another, finish it, silence. I kept doing this until my fingers ached, and finally put the guitar down realizing how futile it all was. But, let me tell you, through the whole affair, she sat there totally still and stoic. She didn’t cry. She couldn’t. Her grandson was sitting there and he needed her strength. God damn, what a woman.
One final thing, here. When Marion decided to move last year, she tasked me with a job—which turned out to be a bit of a trap. Like always, she looked at me and beckoned me with that one index finger and mischievous smile, and she showed me a number of books in the basement. She wanted to get rid of them but figured I would know how best to treat them. Now, being a bit of a bibliophile, you better believe I took those books home and researched everything I could on them, and returned another day to tell her all about them. I told her when they were published, the quality of each edition, the market value, etc. I was so wrapped up in talking about these damn books that I eventually slowed down and realized she was barely even paying attention to what I was saying. And yet I could tell she was most pleased that her grandson was sitting there with her sharing a great passion of his rather passionately. She knew how to bring the best out of me, not in that cheesy kind of way, but subtly with sincere regard for our self-worth and a loving interest in seeing us do what we loved.
I loved her so much, and many of you know that whenever you called her or received a call from her she always had the same sign off, so let me honour her by saying that one more time: Bye for now!
