Category: Friends and Family

November 22. Where I was.

I sat there studying. Until this huge bell started to toll, not on any schedule but in the middle of the afternoon.

The little icon on the side of the screen says Nov 22.  I know where I was in 1963.  I was in Oberlin Ohio, facing a mid-term in introductory Calculus, the section for math majors, and I was also taking introductory chemistry the serious one. I was a freshman (even women were freshmen in those days) living in a cinderblock dorm with a roommate I didn’t get on with, who had borrowed from the lending collection and hung in our small shared room a print of a not-young woman from Picasso’s blue period, a picture I found disgusting. I had a boyfriend, my very first, and an English introductory literature class that thrilled me, and a lavish enough allowance to go to the college bookstore and buy almost any book I liked. That’s where I was.

I carried whatever I was buying that day to the counter of the bookstore, the counter in the back. There was a TV running in the background.  Black and white.  And the woman at the counter, a not-young black woman, said “the President’s been shot” and my first thought was that it was the president of the college, President Carr, and why on earth?  And then I took it in, a little.  But I am not always a fast processor. So I went to the library, I found one of the desks up in the stacks on the south side next to a window overlooking the former theology school, and sat there studying.  Until this huge bell started to toll, not on any schedule but in the middle of the afternoon.

I think we all knew what it meant. Put down our books and streamed in with students and professors coming from every direction to Finney Chapel, the largest building on campus. I have no memory at all about who spoke or what they said.  There was probably some sort of prayer. I wasn’t a believer in those years. 

When I was getting ready to go to college, my dad had suggested I buy a tea pot and a set of cups. I bought the tea pot in Atlantic City, a black English one with flowers and gold painted on it. The cups were pure 60s straight sided coffee cups with white saucers, each one a different bright colour including, of course, orange and green.  I had never made tea for my friends but that day I did, boiling the water in the pot with an immersion heater before putting in the tea bags.  Somehow we got milk and sugar, maybe from the kitchen downstairs, and we sat on the floor together. Somehow I did know how to do that.  We didn’t have the internet or even a running television and we weren’t frantic to get instantaneous updates.  We needed to not be alone with it, and for that short space of time we had each other’s company.

Photos: Kennedy motorcade in Dallas from WikiMedia public domain, rendered here in black and white; the other images may be subject to copyright. Coffee cups image from 1stopretroshop.com; teapot image from Ebay. Finney chapel from website/blog http://jerrygarciasbrokendownpalaces.blogspot.com/2011/11/finney-chapel-oberlin-college-90-north.html

Valentines

And then I got distracted.

No envelopes in the mail today. No silly little valentines card circa 1953 signed “Guess Who” in my grandmother’s round schoolteacher handwriting. No carefully folded brand new linen hankie in a card with a pink frilly image from Aunt Jeanne.

But I woke up thinking not about Valentine’s Days Past, or about myself, but about a friend whose husband had died in the past year. Theirs was a great love. So deep a loss I drew back from connecting with her. As she said, people send text messages and think they are keeping in touch. The phone doesn’t ring.

She phoned before Christmas. Could she pay me to do a favour? The single sheets, good smooth cotton ones, she had bought for the hospital bed they brought into the house, weren’t really needed any more. Instead of giving them away, she wanted have them made into pillowcases that she could use on her larger bed. I was so glad. To help. To be shown how to help. To do this.

So I woke up thinking I would sew them today, on Valentine’s day. Utterly appropriate. And let her know, too. Call her. And then I got distracted.

Yesterday, friends came to town. They invited a few people to my place for tea. This motivated me to clear space for the guests. And to “ferret things away.” Boxes and boxes of papers, labelled at least, and then, at the last, simply heaps of things in closets and in the small bedroom. One of my newer friends came and loyally helped. Do I dare even post a photo of the result? The seen and the unseen, the public and the private? Maybe later. As one friend said about the small bedroom where a lot of the debris got piled, “We all have rooms like that.” On the other hand, I had been able to clear the hall closet and even add a second rod to accommodate more coats. Felt smug when people asked “where do we put our coats” and I was able to say, breezily, “in the hall closet of course.”

Waking, I was still enchanted by the result. I could move through my rooms entirely at ease, nothing to stumble over, no coats and boots on the floor by the door, no little piles of deliveries coming in or out. Could I possibly keep it this clear? Oh, I wanted to so very much. My office was a wonder. I had moved the desk sideways and could enjoy the carpet.

My dad had designed and hand knotted that carpet in the early years of his retirement. Bringing life to his beige living room. It was the largest and most ambitious of the carpets he made; he worked so intensely on them, he got stomach ulcers and had to give it up. I have this one and most of the others in my house now. The colours are SO not mine, but my office has pale green walls and so I decided to use it there a few years ago. The first thing I did this morning was vacuum it and admire it.

Then I opened the narrow office closet and took out the things I had stuffed in on top of everything else–papers from my desk that needed attention or had simply been at the bottom of the piles of OTHER things on the desk. The kind of stuff I call “toxic sludge” or “screech.”

Because it was morning of a sunny day in a newly clear house I began by actually processing each thing that came to hand. So when the sheet of labels that comes in the back of every Leuchturm journal came next, instead of putting them somewhere I looked for the notebook whose spine had NOT been labelled… the red one from 2017. Took it down from the shelf, and there inside the front was the photo of Romero that gave me the idea of this post, I saw it in my mind’s eye with the pillowcases I had thought to construct.

And then, when some of the papers in the closet slid down behind, this is what I pulled up with them next:

My husband John Geeza, who is now married again and has his own studio in Guelph, drew this portrait of me because I loved Matisse so much. I’d framed it at one point, and then reused the frame for something else; the drawing is wrinkled, but that can be fixed. It seemed a wonder to me, this morning, to touch in with so many expressions of love. Happy Valentine’s Day!