• • •
Cats are confounded by mirrors and the surfaces of pools. Strangers to Narcissus, they don’t need the compliment of their reflection. There’s so much in the world: sunslick and dapple, moth blunder, black spider skating on the porcelain of the bathroom sink.
• • •
On winter mornings from the picture window, I’d watch Tiny and my brother head off on his paper route, her trotting ahead, running up the steps to the houses that took the news and passing those that didn’t. Our neighbours thought this was the smartest, cutest thing and tipped my brother with change left over from the milkman. Once I went off with them because Mom was curling in a bonspiel out of town and left the house early to make the first game. All down the block every house or so, Tiny leapt straight up as if springs had been buckled to the bottom of her paws so she could see above the snow piled on both sides of the shovelled walk. When my brother’s bag was almost empty, he lifted me and set me inside on top of the papers he had left, Tiny bounding ahead on her short legs and doubling back. I was so happy then. If he’d told her any time, “Go home,” she’d have known exactly where to go, but she didn’t have to. The three of us had work to do, lights coming on one by one in the windows down our small town’s winter streets, blue as they were back then, before the dawn.
Because my brother tossed too much in bed, Tiny slept with me. A cranky little dog, she’d nip if I moved my feet. I learned to lie like a courtly lady’s effigy on a tomb, dog on a carnelian cushion at my feet. I can still sleep like that, the blankets and sheets flat and smooth when I wake in the morning as if no one lay all night in that neat bed. What else did I learn from her? No matter what I did, she remained my brother’s dog. No matter how much I loved her, the same love didn’t come back. My brother reaffirmed this lesson when he left home. He was eighteen, I was eleven, and though I don’t blame him any more, he rarely wrote and never visited. I missed him, but he didn’t miss me. Two years ago, a friend stopped seeing me because of some terrible thing I’d done, she said, but she couldn’t explain it. Next to my husband and mother, she was the most important person in my life. My saying that out loud meant nothing to her. Again, my love for her was more than what she felt for me, and there was nothing I could do to make things right.
• • •
A cat can walk on snow without breaking through; it can walk on clouds. If you follow one for a day in the garden, your feet will grow lighter. By night, you’ll be walking on your dreams. This is the first lesson in flying without wings.
• • •
A few Januarys ago, a freak snowstorm hit the West Coast, where I now live. Before the worst of it when we couldn’t make it through the backyard, the snow thigh-high, my husband and I walked to the pond to check on the goldfish. Two of them lay still, embedded in a skin of ice. He broke through to scoop them out and set them on the snow at the edge of the circle of stones while we peered in the pond to see the others. Alive, they drifted in the cold viscous water as if suspended between two elements like someone waiting to be born.
I stared at the two dead fish. Their presence seemed magnified, weighted with significance. Part of their power was the startling beauty of paradox—against the snow, two gleaming fish the size and colour of candle flames broken from their wicks. No matter how long I looked, I couldn’t figure out what they meant. They remained unreadable, like glyphs from a language not my own. Looking at the fish, a still life on white canvas, was like looking at the sky where some believe a paradise is waiting. If it does exist, there are few signs of it more powerful than the small miracles you find right here.
• • •
The inventor of the camera’s shutter and light-filter mechanisms had been studying the pupils of his cat. Every photograph has a parallel a cat has taken—without a touch of sentiment, a perfect composition of the never-seen and shadow.
• • •
The black-and-white cat on my lap under the apple tree stares at the fir against the fence. When I follow the translucent arrow of her gaze, look over and up, I see the raccoon I didn’t know was there, peering down at us. The blue-eyed cat on the deck fixates on the ivy that climbs the chimney, his ears swerving left then right. I sit beside him and hear a woodrat’s feet scuttling along the stems of the vines under the sticky leaves. Instead of multiplying cat years by seven to figure out how old they are in human terms, I divide my age when I’m around them. I grow younger, alert to what a cat attends to. This morning I am eight and full of wonder. Over a hundred years ago, Charles Baudelaire wrote, “The Chinese read the time in the eyes of cats.” The time, he said, was eternity. When I spend my hours with cats, make my eyes their eyes, note the twitching of their ears and their nostrils’ flare, this is the eternity I sense: the smell of rust in the air before rain; all things the wind startles into beauty; the winter hare in the belly of the moon, its heartbeat soft and sure as the fall of paws.
I’m not sure anyone can explain how wisdom is attained; yet many people are wise. Unhappily, human development is an exceedingly private matter, so secret and individual that it leaves no footprints for someone else to follow. The nature of inner growth is mostly snail-paced and evolutionary, rather than the clap of a revolutionary resolve that calls attention to itself.
For instance, my work habits are of the nose-to-the-grindstone, obsessive-compulsive variety, but I don’t know why. My parents were hard-working people; maybe that accounts for my somewhat driven behaviour.
Also, I find that adversarial situations depress me, my strong preference being for the bliss of amiable collaboration, but the anguish I feel when tempers rise can’t be attributed to early influences because there wasn’t much open conflict in my childhood. If my family members didn’t like one another, they kept it to themselves. Unless you count as a contributing factor to my horror of conflict the fact that my mother hated it too. It would drive her out of the house, and her mother was the same. A clue there.
The literature on the subject of early childhood maintains that good (or bad) behaviour is shaped early in life according to a seamless twining of the infant’s innate character and the environment in which the small person is raised. Conditioning often results in a degree of permanent patterning, but it is also true that most adults retain a capacity to be impressionable. Profound change can happen in a click because of someone’s example, or a casual comment that sinks in because it holds a truth. The power of random events to alter behaviour is grist for fiction and the real stuff of human lives.
It takes practice, I’m told, to upgrade a personality. Aristotle said that humans are what they repeatedly do. It’s hard and lonely toil, without end, as people stumble from peaks of sweet harmony to the caustic depths of regret. I’m a work in progress myself and I’m in my eighties.
Jean Piaget, a Swiss child psychologist of note, decided that humans acquire knowledge and their distinctive dispositions by a process of accretion and substitution. Accretion is the layering of information (how to tie a shoe, the names of clouds) and substitution is the factor of Oops, that was wrong, better not do that again.
In my experience good people can’t explain why they are good. I once asked an outstandingly fine woman who lives a selfless life why she is such a good person. She said, “My parents were good people.” That’s a reasonable answer, since people are shaped more by parental example than anything adults may pass on in the way of instruction. But in her case it doesn’t really explain much. Her brother is in jail.
If people are a mystery to themselves, which is what I think I am getting at here, I don’t know what any of us can offer the young beyond loving them and setting as decent an example as possible. The rest is rules, such as to be punctual (it is inconsiderate to keep people waiting); to strive for economic self-sufficiency (you’re safer); and don’t step on ants (they have a life too). The objective is to shape a conscience that neither produces crushing guilt nor forgives bad behaviour easily.
• • •
I
can’t think of any life-enhancing counsel I have ever passed on successfully to our children, except that they all know not to interrupt writers when they are thinking—only when they are typing. One of my grandchildren, indeed, was asked this very question on television. Said the interviewer, “What life lessons has your grandmother given you?” She responded, “How to butter bread.” Oh well, good table manners always come in handy.
Similarly, on a television show I was hosting, the producer scheduled an item which featured my mother and older daughter. The point was that we were to discuss the continuity that flows from mothers to daughters, and back. I addressed the pivotal question to my mother. I asked, “What do you think we three have in common?” She answered thoughtfully, “We all wash dishes the same way.”
My answer would have been, “We all have a sense of humor,” but it amounts to the same thing. She wasn’t prepared to offer an analysis, which, at best, would capture only a thread or two of the thick fabric that binds our three generations. “Washing dishes the same way” was the short form of the very complicated stuff of family relationships. In our gang we are affectionate and loyal, we have similar views on matters of social responsibility, and we laugh a lot, but we are very, very different people. Even love, which Freud poetically called the “oceanic feeling,” can’t dissolve the secrets a heart holds.
Behavioural scientists say that people discover when they are only two years old that adults can’t read their thoughts. That realization carries with it a shocking message that, essentially, every individual is alone and unknowable. The universal search for the meaning of existence owes much to the uneasiness felt by those who sense, to their horror, that they are hunkered down alone on the high seas of perpetual angst, and where is land?
This gives rise to dread, which in turn accounts for the popularity of how-to books and advice columns. The field is a splendid one for the improvement of a writer’s income, however clueless the author may be. I myself used to be quite good at giving advice until I noticed one day that no one was paying the slightest attention—unless what I had to suggest coincided with what they planned to do anyway.
In any case, dramatic and helpful insight often comes unsolicited and out of the blue, and from unexpected sources. When I was about twelve I was a member of a swimming team in Kitchener, Ontario. My best event was highboard diving, and I was taking first place in every competition until Dorothy Schaeffer came along with her forward layout flip. I couldn’t bring myself even to try it, so she moved into the winner’s circle. One evening during a meet, she over-rotated and went into the water with a huge splash. I was delighted. “Oh good!” I cried. A boy next to me, also twelve years old, said in a low voice, “That wasn’t very nice.” Drenched in shame, I discovered in that instant that I wanted to be a nice person a whole lot more than I wanted to win a ribbon. On reflection, I count him among the most influential mentors I have ever known, and I can’t remember his name.
Ever since the night of the swimming meet I have been working on a theology which looks pretty simple: it is that kindness is as close to godliness as humans can ever get. There is a law of physics that states that the only thing absolutely true in the universe is the speed of light. But light bends, I believe, so maybe that isn’t exactly true either. I am unalterably convinced, however, of the truth that kindness is holiness in action. I am not speaking of the one-way kindness of acts of charity, that humiliate the recipient, but of the kindness that leaves both parties feeling better.
If I hold a door for strangers following behind me, the strangers are no longer exactly the people they were before that happened, and neither am I. They have been brushed by a very small act of consideration, which cost me nothing, and the world seems to them minutely more friendly, and safer. And I feel better too. On the other hand, people who let doors shut in someone’s face lower the human pool of goodwill.
I doubt anyone becomes kinder by being ordered to, but everyone can learn civility, which actually amounts to the same thing. Rules of good conduct are quite precise. “Please” and “thank you” are signals of respect. In most cultures, people greet one another by saying some version of, “How are you?” That show of concern has become ritualized, but it still carries a message that the well-being of others is an important matter. Similarly, the prohibitions on lying are not because the liar might be caught and suffer censure, but because the lying breaks the code of trust that is the glue of relationships. Good manners, fundamentally, are exercises in empathy. If we were not helpful to one another, our communities would turn into jungles full of angry animals, and every inmate would be lunch.
“We are all in this together,” sighed Kurt Vonnegut, “whatever this is.”
Thoughtfulness for others generally is learned in childhood when the principal adults in a child’s life show consideration to all comers. Rules of behaviour can be learned by rote, of course, without the support of genuine thoughtfulness, but they don’t do the essential job of warming a room. People have an unnerving capacity to reflect what comes at them. If there is a primary assumption that another person is reasonable and good, that individual is quite likely to react by being both. On the other hand, the expectation that the other person is of a lower order of intelligence and worth deeply discourages co-operation. The best people can give one another is respect; actually, that’s a lot.
The rudder of conscience that steers me is homemade. Since I don’t know what built it, I am not in a position to pass on a training manual and, in any case, I cannot presume that it would serve another person. Mine is customized to fit me, just as others put together individualized rudders out of the stuff of their own lives.
It is, therefore, not particularly useful for me to pass along something that gives me calm, but I’ll end with it anyway. I find peace in my sense of insignificance; if I ever thought otherwise, I would be immobilized. I learned this about myself when I was a teenager racked by confusion. One hot July night when I dragged my mattress out to an upstairs balcony to be cooler, I discovered stars. I was enchanted. Such glory, such constancy, such mystery. By day I studied astronomy and at night I picked out the galaxies. At some point I was awed to realize my irrelevance in the vastness of space. Perspective set in and I felt my adolescent angst evaporate.
Since I live in a city now and the stars are opaque, I restore equilibrium these days by watching endless waves break on a shore. They rise and fall, rise and fall, one after another, after another, after another; forever. Long after I pick up my beach towel and depart, long, long after I am gone from the planet, the waves will still be coming in, as indifferent to my absence as they were to my presence. That is a comforting thought.
CONTRIBUTORS
MARJORIE ANDERSON
My life was first made rich by being part of a story-telling family living on the edge of Lake Winnipeg, where we were surrounded by the wonders of its mists and lore. After years of teaching various combinations of writing, literature and communication at the University of Manitoba, I’ve shifted my professional focus to editing and being immersed in literary projects such as this one. My personal joys are still being with family and spending time at the edge of water, now with the mists and moonlight at our lake cottage.
MARGARET ATWOOD
I am the author of more than twenty-six books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, and my work has been translated into more than thirty languages. My most recent novel is Oryx and Crake. I live in Toronto.
JUNE CALLWOOD
I’ve been a journalist for a very long time, and I don’t know any other profession that gives such a window on the world. In my era journalists rarely were college graduates and I never heard of a journalism school, so we all learned from patient colleagues—and developed a newsroom camaraderie that isn’t common any more. For a nervous teenager, far from home, newspaper city rooms were my introduction to the kindness of strangers.
TRACEY ANN COVEART
Growing up, I was described (not always kindly) as a mother
looking for a place to happen. Eventually, I happened. I blossomed with my three children—now teenagers, two on the verge of fledging, one a perpetual nestling—and they are my opus. A full-time mom and part-time writer and editor, I live on a hill in Port Perry, Ontario, within spitting distance of the world’s most devoted parents. Over the last twenty years I have managed to wedge a number of works—both published and unpublished—into the nooks and crannies of the time-space continuum.
LORNA CROZIER
Precious moments have come when I’m able to erase the outlines that separate me from another species and enter their sensory world, even briefly. I try to do that while being Chair of the Department of Writing at the University of Victoria, where I teach poetry. I’ve recently become more interested in the personal essay, partly thanks to Marjorie Anderson and Carol Shields, who first invited me to explore the form. I live and write in an old house on Vancouver Island with a big garden tended by Patrick Lane and appreciated by our two fine cats.
ANDREA CURTIS
I grew up in the shadow of Georgian Bay with my nose in a book, went to school in Montreal, tree-planted in Northern Ontario and wound up as a magazine editor in Toronto. My first book, Into the Blue, is a creative non-fiction work about a 1906 Great Lakes shipwreck that devastated my family. I live in Toronto with a houseful of boys. “The Writers’ Circle” recalls a time when I yearned to write more, imagining that committing words to paper would not only free me, but might also offer solace to the profoundly marginalized at a Toronto women’s shelter.
NORMA DEPLEDGE
“My Father’s Last Gift” is part of a larger work in progress, the working title of which is How Slight the Shadow. Other pieces of my short fiction have been published in literary magazines—including the Malahat Review, Room of One’s Own, Grain, and Atlantis—aired on CBC Radio, and anthologized in Love and Pomegranates (Sono Nis). In collaboration with my friend and colleague Claire McKenzie, I published a writing textbook with Prentice Hall. My novel, A Better Plan, was published in 2004 in broadsheet format by the Victoria Literary Times. I live and work in Victoria.
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