by Laurie Gough
For the Grandpa Tour, I was already imagining how cool Quinn would think this was and how it might set free a little of his sorrow: the three of us at the Toronto docks with my dad’s ashes, standing on the boardwalk by the water, letting the ashes loose into the wind as we yelled fuck off out at Lake Ontario. “We’ll be releasing fuck off back to where it originated seven decades ago!”
“I love it,” said Rob. “Not your everyday ritual, but who cares?”
CHAPTER 2
We were still coming up with ideas for the Grandpa Tour, planning to leave for Toronto in a few weeks, when the phone rang one morning. Rob’s eighty-seven-year-old mother, Anna May, was in the hospital. She wasn’t expected to survive much more than a few days.
The first thing that rushed into my mind was Quinn. How could he handle another grandparent’s death when he was still so broken by the last one?
Rob took Quinn with him to the hospital in Ottawa immediately, instinctively knowing that it was the right thing to do, something I hadn’t known the summer before, something I desperately wished I had known in retrospect. Quinn spent several hours that day with his soft-spoken French-Canadian “Nanny” as she hovered in and out of consciousness, hooked up to oxygen tubes.
“How did you feel about seeing Nanny today, sweetie?” I asked him that night as I tucked him into bed, the cheeping of the spring peepers in the marsh down the road coming in through the window.
“Okay. She doesn’t seem too sad. She was smiling a little. And she’s old.”
It was true that she was, indeed, old, and had been sick and immobile in a high-care nursing home for several years. I was deeply relieved at how Quinn was taking it. Anna May spent her last day in her nursing home with a lively assortment of friends and family, including Quinn, coming in and out of her room all day. Even though they were a Catholic family, they decided against a traditional Catholic funeral. A Catholic funeral wouldn’t match Anna May’s undemanding, down-home, simple sweetness. Instead, they decided on a “Celebration of Life” gathering in a room of the funeral home. I had no idea this was even possible. I thought any gathering in a funeral home meant it had to be religious. But this gathering was completely secular. Rob officiated, and, in front of his extended, close-knit, Irish-descended family, and relatives from the Gaspé, he gave the most moving eulogy I’d ever heard. He told the story of how when his mother was eight, her own mother had died. Her father, too beaten by life to care for his kids, had farmed them out to relatives. Anna May was sent to live three thousand kilometres away from the Gaspé, in a small northern Ontario fishing town where they didn’t speak her native French and she didn’t know a word of English. Rob recalled how strongly his mother had always felt about family because family was what she’d lost as a child.
He told the story of Anna May going to a hypnotist as an adult in hopes of losing weight. When the hypnotist asked her how old she’d been when her mother died, in her trance she’d answered, “I was eight when I died.” It took a moment for those of us listening to process this statement. She hadn’t told the hypnotist, “I was eight when she died,” but, “I was eight when I died.” Rob’s voice faltered for a moment at the thought of it and he had to stop to pull himself together. “It’s okay, we’re with ya, bro!” called out someone in his family. “Take all the time you need!” When Rob picked up his ukulele and he and his cousin started belting out “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” in the Hawaiian ukulele-playing Israel Kamakawiwo‘ole style, I wasn’t the only person with tears streaming down my face in that little room with its fake wood panelling and bright yellow flowers. I looked at Quinn beside me, his hand in mine, and saw that he had tears in his eyes, too. But he was also smiling. I was so grateful that he was getting to see his dad up there openly crying in front of everyone. This is how it should be, I kept thinking. We’re dealing with death as a family. This is what we missed with my dad.
I wondered if there was something primordial about grieving as a group that goes back millennia in our genes.
That afternoon at the cemetery, where Anna May was buried beside Rob’s dad, Rob couldn’t get words out to talk but he could sing. Over his parents’ graves he sang the haunting Irish ballad “Carrickfergus” and then led us in John Prine’s “Spanish Pipedream,” one of Anna May’s favourites that he used to sing to her. We also sang some old spirituals. I was thinking about how the music, like the Fijian women’s wailing, was drawing the grief out of everyone, but lifting us up at the same time. Quinn was singing along, too. I noticed he was still wearing my dad’s old silver watch. My mother had given him the watch the last time we’d visited her, two months earlier. The watch was at least thirty years old and much too big for his little wrist, but he never took it off, even wore it to school. At the burial, I noticed he kept reaching across with his other hand to touch the watch, actually tap it. I figured it must have given him comfort, thinking of his grandpa every time he felt his watch.
A few days later, I was next to him on the couch one afternoon in our living room, both of us reading. Not only was he now touching his watch more times than seemed necessary, he also seemed to be doing something I hadn’t seen him do since he was six and we lived in Mexico. We called it “evening-off.”
We’d lived in San Miguel de Allende for two winters and Quinn had gone to kindergarten and grade one at a Mexican Waldorf school just outside of town. While we were in Mexico, he learned Spanish from his classmates, bought tortillas on his own from our local tortilleria, and rode a rickety little bike around the narrow cobbled streets. But he also developed a strange habit in Mexico. If someone brushed his left arm by accident, he’d immediately reach up to touch his right arm, to make it even. When I saw him doing this the first time, a tingle of recognition stirred in my brain, recalling a long-forgotten memory. I remembered that when I was five and used to walk the mile to school, if I stepped on a sidewalk crack with my right foot, I would have to step on the next crack with my left foot. Otherwise it wasn’t fair. I don’t recall this going any further than the cracks on the sidewalks, although I do remember worrying that since I was purposely stepping on cracks I’d be breaking my mother’s back, as that odd children’s rhyme goes. But with Quinn, his evening-off in Mexico could get complicated, even to the point of annoying him. He would tap his left knee once, then tap his right, but then go back and tap his left knee four times, then the right knee four times. If he lost count he’d have to start all over again. I remember this going on for a couple of months in Mexico. To tease him, I’d often poke him on one arm, so he’d have to touch the other arm to even-off, which always made him laugh. One day I noticed he wasn’t doing it any more. He told me he’d gotten sick of it, so stopped.
But now, four years later, he was doing it again. Only now it seemed more elaborate. As he read his book on the couch he seemed to be unconsciously tapping each elbow onto the back of the couch. Four taps of the left elbow, four taps of the right. He was also tapping the watch. A few tapless minutes would pass and then he’d start the routine all over.
“Hey, I thought you stopped evening-off in Mexico years ago. You’re doing that again?” Ice was tinkling loudly in his glass of water on the coffee table.
He shrugged. “Yeah, I just like it.”
“Why?”
“It’s fun. It feels good.”
Over the coming weeks, his evening-off became more complex, seemingly full of complicated rules. Everything had to be symmetrical and if I jokingly poked him like I used to, he’d get irritated because he’d have to embark on a highly structured system of making things even again. One day he started turning his head as far as it would go over his shoulder, then he’d have to turn his head to the other side over the other shoulder. But it didn’t stop there. He’d go back and twist his head twice on the first side, then twice again on the other side. It looked like a neck exercise for old people. “Do the kids in school notice you doing that?” I asked him one day while he was b
uilding a Downton Abbey-esque estate on Minecraft, a new hobby, and TV series, he loved.
“Yeah, sometimes,” he said, not looking up from my iPad.
“Don’t they find it weird?”
“They just think I’m stretching my neck.”
I wasn’t particularly concerned. Life is a series of events that seem important at the time. When you look back sometimes you wonder why you ever worried about anything. Quinn seemed happier lately and that’s all that really mattered. Perhaps the spring weather was melting some of his grief. Recently he’d come home from school excited because he’d just given a speech for his grade four class on the topic of unicycles. Afterward he’d demonstrated outside to the class how to ride one. His teacher had mentioned to me how impressed she’d been with his teaching skills. I thought, so what if he was evening-off a little? Wasn’t this better than crying himself to sleep every night? Kids do strange things for short spells and then drop them all the time, just as he’d done in Mexico.
But a couple of weeks later my friend Tina and her son, Halla, came to visit from Montreal. The two boys were outside dousing each other in a water gun fight while I was making one of my raw vegan concoctions in the kitchen. Throwing some dates and pecans into the food processor, I asked Tina if she’d noticed the head turning. She shot me a look of something very close to worry. “Yeah, it’s impossible not to notice. I hate to tell you, but that’s not normal.”
The next week we had our first pickup softball game. I’d put an ad on our online Wakefield newsgroup saying I wanted to start playing pickup softball at a nearby old diamond beside the river. “If we’re hot, we’ll plunge in the river after the game!” is what I’d posted. Fifteen people — both adults and kids — turned up to play ball. The air that evening was weighted down with the soft scent of lilacs, the new spring grass a supercharged luminous green I felt like rolling in. It had been a long time since I’d played softball. As for Quinn, he’s athletic, but other than playing catch and batting the ball around, he’d never played an actual game, although he knew a lot about baseball from listening to my dad and watching Blue Jays games with him on TV. The village of Wakefield was different from where I grew up, where baseball and softball were part of everyday summer life. Still, Quinn took to the game that first night, getting a hit most times at bat. I was playing second base on the other team and noticed that when Quinn landed at first and waited for the next batter to hit, he started doing his neck turning. A lot. Then on second base beside me he was twisting away, then again when he reached home and stood behind the backstop. A friend of mine crinkled her brow in curiosity. “Why does Quinn keep looking over his shoulder? Is he afraid someone’s going to sneak up on him?”
I laughed. “It’s just something he does. No big deal.”
But to myself I was thinking the real answer might be: yeah, Death.
CHAPTER 3
Though it is not often that Death is told so clearly to fuck off.
— Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow
“You can do it, Mum,” I said, “Just another twenty steps and we’ll be in our seats.”
It was the hottest day of the year so far, the June humidity like a living thing that tangled around you, slowing everything to a crawl as we made our way up to the nosebleed section of the stadium. The Toronto Blue Jays were about to play the Baltimore Orioles and my eighty-four-year-old mother was getting winded from all the climbing. Still, she was elated. Like my dad, she was a big Blue Jays fan. Rob couldn’t join us in Toronto until the next day, so it was just the three of us for this first part of the Grandpa Tour. Soon, the game was underway.
“Keep your eyes on Bautista, Quinn,” said my mother. “He’s a good hitter. Oh, good, Adam Lind is coming up. Looks like Rasmus hurt his wrist.…”
My mother kept throwing out comments like this and it wasn’t long before the Iranian and Chinese teenagers in front of us began turning around to ask her opinion on various plays and what she thought might happen with each new batter. Quinn kept elbowing me at how funny he thought this was. He also loved that every time the smiling and bowing Japanese shortstop Kawasaki came to bat, the whole crowd would sing Kaaaaaa-waaaaa-saki, Kawasaki, we love you, Kawasaki, to the tune of “Yankee Doodle.”
By the sixth inning, the Blue Jays were so far ahead that a lot of the Baltimore fans had given up and left, so we picked our way down closer to the field. At the seventh inning stretch, everyone rose up to sing along to the sound system’s “Take Me Out to the Ball Game.” I worried that the traditional song would be performed in some modern techno-style and was almost cringing as we stood. But it wasn’t a techno version. What they played on the loudspeakers seemed to be an old-fashioned piano recording and the entire crowd began singing along heartily to it in the way they probably would have in the 1940s. To my surprise, I could barely get the words out to sing, my eyes brimming with tears. It wasn’t just the unexpectedness of the crowd’s enthusiasm for the old Tin Pan Alley tune, it was also that it was one of my dad’s favourites. In fact, as I was trying to choke it out, the song swarming the cracks of my memory, I recalled that my dad had taught me all the words to it while playing catch in our backyard one night. I must have been eight or nine. This is for you, Dad, I kept thinking. I had the feeling that as we stood there belting out the song, my dad was right there with us, thrilled we were watching his beloved Blue Jays, grinning like a kid that they were winning by such a ridiculous lead.
The Blue Jays won 14–5, and it turned out to be the last of their eleven-game winning streak — they never made a comeback that summer. When the game was over, Quinn and I rushed down through the crowds to the front row. I pulled out a plastic container filled with some of my dad’s ashes, dumped a small sand pile of them into my hand, then tossed them in the air over the field. “Enjoy the Blue Jays field, Dad!”
I looked at Quinn. He was giggling. “Do you want to try, Quinn? Throw some ashes?”
He shook his head, whipping his hands behind his back. I wasn’t sure if his reluctance came from the idea of the ashes themselves, or if he was simply mortified by the open-jawed stares we were getting from nearby fans.
Either way was fine. More of the Grandpa Tour was to come.
My sister from Colorado and my cousin Kathleen joined us after the game — they weren’t baseball fans. For the next part of the Grandpa Tour, I thought we’d walk around my dad’s and my Uncle Bill’s old neighbourhood of Baby Point Road. The sidewalks there were shaded by tall maples whose leaves that day were limp from the scorching heat. As we approached my dad’s old redbrick house, I noticed Quinn on the sidewalk in front of me, hopping and jumping. He’d always liked to run and often wanted to race whoever he was walking beside, but this jumping and hopping seemed different somehow. I watched him more carefully to figure out why it was bothering me. Then I realized: he was avoiding all the cracks.
Quinn was quiet as we stood outside the house, especially when we walked around the corner to peer into the backyard from an old laneway. My cousin was describing how her dad and mine had climbed a tree that was still there, how it had been third base in their backyard games. Quinn didn’t say anything but something in his face made me realize this knowledge was a little much for him, that it was too disturbingly tangible to see an actual tree my dad had climbed when he was Quinn’s age. I suggested we drive around a bit, so that we could get back into the air-conditioning of my sister’s rental car. Thankfully, the tour we took — to the wealthy part of the neighbourhood, Baby Point Crescent — provided an unexpected distraction. While the rest of us gaped at the multi-million-dollar mansions, Quinn started calling out, “Hey, it’s a 1988 Jaguar in that driveway. And over there’s a Mercedes Benz E-Class! And those people have a 2013 Porsche Panamera!” His mood had perked up. Being a car geek, he could hardly ignore exotic vehicles when he saw them.
At Runnymede Collegiate, we drove behind the school to the track where my dad had won
races and the field where he had played on the football team. Quinn and I got out of the car. I’d envisioned us running around the track ourselves but it was fenced off, and besides, it was too hot to run. “I didn’t think it would be like this,” said Quinn, staring through the chain-link fence. “It’s just a dirt track.” It was true that the whole place, including the school itself, looked run-down and a little grimy, a sad echo of its former self. Clearly things had changed since the early forties. I tried to imagine my dad playing football on that field, or running around the track, perhaps talking shyly to girls. It was hard to imagine. Still, I got out some ashes and threw them over the fence. Again, Quinn didn’t want to touch them. I noticed he was touching his watch, though, every time we mentioned my dad.