When I Was Young and In My Prime

by Alayna Munce

  Then a single voice from the same building—somebody leans out from his balcony and yells:

  WILL YOU SHUT THE FUCK UP IT’S FIVE O’CLOCK IN THE FUCKING MORNING TAKE YOUR MISERY SOMEPLACE ELSE

  And the keening stops.

  8

  Most of the time you don’t hear it, or not exactly. It blends into the background. It is the background, and you don’t hear it, not as itself.

  But sometimes you do hear it—especially late late at night or early early in the morning. Or, more specifically, in that still-dark hour that’s both late and early, that hour just before dawn when you’re, say, making your way home slightly drunk from a night out—seeing a friend’s band then dancing at an after-hours booze-can—and you pass a group of new immigrants (these ones look mostly Tibetan) on the corner of King and Wilson Park, climbing one by one into the Rent-a-Worker van that will take them to a factory on the industrial outskirts of the suburbs where they’ll trim the loose threads from floor mats destined for Hondas all day long, and the sight of them sobers you just enough to take in the strangeness of the hour. It’s then

  you hear the sound itself: the drone of the city, its main ingredient the traffic of the expressway, that prolonged

  whoosh. But also, somewhere behind that, a blurred and hard-to-get-at current. It’s a sound as constant and pulsing with force as surf, or a high strong wind in a mountain pass. As I said, it’s mostly traffic. Transport trucks careening obediently between A and B along major arteries. A ghostly sound, almost

  otherworldly. Listening to it, you feel that if you could somehow tap or reroute it, you could power a new kind of city.

  a small rain

  of copper

  Yesterday I woke up and, I don’t know, could be it was the sound of the birds, but I was buzzing there, you know. Bones felt restless. Like maybe they should be doing something. I started up pacing around. Trying to figure out what the hell was wrong with me. Well, after a while I think I put my finger on it. It’s spring. Work. Work to be done. And at the same time I remembered the house is sold, garden with it—I don’t have to do anything.

  Well, I sat down on the bed and looked around the room. Wagon by the door, the one I built for the grandkids. Old bird feeder on the dresser beside Mary’s reading glasses. She doesn’t use them anymore. I keep them anyway. And all the family pictures. As well as the picture of the farm taken from an airplane. Aerial, they call it.

  I sat there for a long time. I know I should have felt relieved. And I guess I did, a little.

  Mom calls. Grandpa’s fallen again. Cracked his hip. Landed himself in hospital.

  His life is peeling off him. In one swipe, two layers, at least: his apartment, his mobility. Astonishing how quickly he’s lost the use of his legs. So the outer layers go. Closer and closer to the bone. We clear out his apartment. He’ll never live alone again.

  An incomplete list of items in my grandfather’s apartment: A litre jar of local honey, half-full. The seagull ball-cap from PEI with fake bird-shit on it. An enamel jug and basin, mismatched. The old wooden coffee grinder. Two of every kind of screwdriver. The bird clock. Uncle Alf’s bell collection. Two round tin canisters, one for sugar (labelled in two languages) and one for tea (labelled in three, his shaky hand all the way around). A bushel of apples, dried to fit in a shopping bag. The Lawren Harris print of the glacier. His harmonicas. Seven shaving soaps. Sandy, the canary. A chest freezer full of garden produce, some of it dating back twelve years. A spool of string, tall as a forearm and thick as a tree trunk when it ceases to be a sapling and becomes a tree.

  For each item: Will he need this want this like this miss this in his room at the nursing home when he gets out of the hospital? (No one asks, will he ever see that room?) If no (he will not need this want this miss this), does somebody want to take this home? If yes (somebody wants it), and more than one person wants it, who should take it? Who has already taken what? Who isn’t here who might want or deserve it? (There are criteria both spoken and unspoken.) If yes, and only one person wants it, fine. If no (nobody wants it), what do we do with it? Auctioneer? Salvation Army? Garbage? What is it worth?

  No one asks will he ever see that room. He will not need this want this miss this. Somebody wants it. Nobody wants it. There are criteria both spoken and unspoken.

  (What is it worth?)

  The nurse comes in to give Grandpa a sponge bath, my cue to take my leave, head back to the city. He gives her a savvy wink and she smiles, says, “Now you behave yourself Mr. Friesen,” wagging her finger as she pulls the curtain, gamely following the script. I wait a second at the door, listen in. His voice is shaky, but he’s singing.

  Oh when I was young and in my prime

  I used to do it all the time.

  Now I’m old and getting grey

  I only do it once a...

  I probably wouldn’t let a man make innuendoes with me like that at the bar, but would I at the nursing home?

  Whatever the case, right now I love her for allowing him the dignity of humour.

  “And who darns your socks?” the nurse asks Grandpa as she’s putting them onto him.

  “I do.” His speech is agonizingly slow, but the nurse is patient. “Me, myself and I. Not the neatest job in the world. But it works by God.”

  She whistles and says, “You’re a rare man Mr. Friesen, darning your own socks.”

  “That’s,” he pauses, taking a long while to swallow, “my mother.”

  “She taught you?”

  “Oh yes. Punishment. Best punishment she ever invented.”

  Good Friday is the day we agree on for clearing out Grandpa’s apartment. He’s still in the hospital, growing thinner and thinner, oxygen tubes in his nose, IV in his wrist, a string to call the nurses safety-pinned to his gown. He lies there tied, bird-boned and awkward.

  We spend most of the day in separate rooms—Mom in the kitchen, Uncle Nick in the bedroom, me in the living room—cleaning, boxing, sorting. Every once in a while, one of us wanders to another room for company, then wanders back to our task. At one point, Uncle Nick strides into the living room, showing me an armful of shaving soaps.

  “I distinctly remember throwing out at least a dozen shaving soaps when we sold the house and taking home a half-dozen more,” he says. “How many shaving soaps does one man need?”

  Mom hears us and comes in from the kitchen, bearing a massive spool of string.

  “Okay,” she says, “who wants this? If you take it, it’s a commitment. We had one of these spools in the shed on the farm growing up, remember Nick? I still remember the day—I must have been thirteen or fourteen—when I went out to the shed to get some string for a package Mom was wrapping, and there it was, the last piece. I was stunned. Couldn’t believe there was actually an end to it. It had always just been there.”

  No one else wants his knives so I take them all, wooden-handled, thin-edged, curved concave with years of sharpening—seven of them, fanning like feathers from cleaver down to paring knife. I also take his whetstone.

  I’ve never sharpened knives before. Now there is this inheritance: the peeling away of a layer of his life, the laying on of a layer of mine. I’m sharpening my new knives daily. The sound of steel against stone draws me in. More and more I feel myself part of the cycle, the order of things—unchoosing, almost animal. Cutting is different now. I’ve always had cheap, dull knives; I’ve always cut with force. Now the introduction, the thin entrance of the blade. Smooth. Charming. I draw one of his knives through an onion with almost no resistance.

  There’s a superstition about the need to pay for the gift of a knife. Payment absolves the giver of any violence perpetrated with it. We haven’t told him yet about the clearing out of his apartment, so Grandpa doesn’t know that he’s given me his knives.

  I could drop seven pennies into the pocket of his coat that hangs in the hospital room locker.

  I could stack seven pennies on the oxygen machine at his bedside.

 
; Or, I could place them one after another in his palm and say it’s in exchange for seven thoughts.

  He’s awake lately only for a minute at a time—half a sentence at most. Again and again I watch his eyes close, his fists release. If I were to pay for the gift of the knives, he’d drop each penny one by one. When I left there would be pennies scattered among his sheets. When the nurses stripped the bed, a small rain of copper.

  seven thoughts for seven pennies for seven knives

  it’s about time that

  I’ll be damned if

  can you hear the

  when I was a nurse I

  lilacs are the only

  I used to love it when

  listen here—

  At Easter dinner, my cousin Max’s girlfriend is talking about a quiz she found on the internet which can supposedly detect your gender by how you answer a series of questions. Questions like, Would you rather have your bedroom painted blue or white? Would you rather work first and have fun later, or vice versa? One question in particular makes me look up from my ham. Would you rather be desperately lonely for the rest of your life or slowly bleed to death right now? I don’t catch which answer means you are a woman, but I do catch myself thinking with a deep unforeseen gladness which spreads in a wave from my torso to my fingertips, I’d rather be lonely. No question.

  Getting up from the table to go pee, I bend to kiss James on the neck as I pass him, and my heart gives a clutch at how heartened and surprised he looks.

  Clara and the triplets arrived late. She looks exhausted, says she’s taken to not wearing her seatbelt. I realize I don’t really believe in other people’s suffering much of the time. The triplets keep eyeing me as if I have an absurd haircut. Maybe I do.

  Every few minutes I remember that Grandpa is in the hospital, probably dying.

  Watching Clara with her triplet toddlers—the moment by moment decisions, when to chastise, when to console, what to emphasize and command, what to discourage and ignore, what to laugh off—it strikes me how short a distance good intentions take us. I used to think I could coast on them all the way home, but I’m coming to see they only barely get you started. After that you need assorted things like humour, bloody-mindedness and luck.

  Uncle Nick is teaching the kids “Ninety-nine Bottles of Beer on the Wall” as payback to Clara for her childhood. Also a song that goes,

  This is the song that never ends

  Yes it goes on and on my friend

  Some people started singing it not knowing what it was

  And they’ll continue singing it forever just because

  This is the...

  In all my eighty-eight years, he says, this is the fastest I’ve seen it. Each word is separate, slow—thick-skinned bubbles launched through a heavier air. When they burst, heard, the room is washed by the hollowness they held. It’s the first full sentence he’s spoken in English in days.

  Lately he’s taken to speaking in Low German, his mother tongue. The nurses call it delirium, but sometimes, when we’re alone, he translates. Ich kann nicht verstehen. I lean in close. Five minutes later, eyes closed: I can’t understand. As I leave, his eyes still closed: Adieu, Adieu, Adieu. Three white handkerchiefs hung out one by one on the line.

  Today I’m talking to him about spring, about the leaves coming out—how improbable the green, how quick, how if you’re not careful you miss it. I’m just talking, not expecting a reply. He has a view of the treetops from his hospital window. Then, like an upper branch showing up in full leaf one morning on a tree you took for dead, he says, In all my eighty-eight years, this is the fastest I’ve seen it.

  I asked Mom the other day if it’s true that time goes faster as you get older. “Oh Lord yes,” she said. “Faster and faster every year.”

  I think of those centrifugal force rides at the midway where you stick to the wall and your cheeks slide out of position and you can’t lift your head or even move sometimes. Round and round so that, by the end, the most you can hope to focus on is not swallowing your tongue.

  Grandpa in his hospital bed, not answering.

  You don’t have to do much to speak volumes in your last days. He’d make a batch of muffins and a pot of coffee and invite a nursing home volunteer up to his apartment to share them, and it was a grand gesture, containing a lifetime. Each day, on his way to visit her in Extended Care, he walked around the atrium of the old age apartments bearing the cockatiel on his shoulder, and it was an act stunning in its generosity.

  Terrible to say, in a way, but there’s a glamour in decay. All the sugars rising to the surface. Even the making of wine is a kind of controlled decomposition.

  The last days have an atmosphere in which everything stands out, backlit, finite. Photographers call it magic hour. As if death, closer now, closer every day, radiates a kind of pre-storm light.

  And then that pre-storm light lasts for a spell after death—for the living. Basic things take on new definition, demand attention but resist naming. The world flares and rears under me these days in areas I always thought of

  as solid ground (or, more precisely, didn’t think of at all). I slide off the slippery fact of things existing. I say to myself, you could spend your whole life saying to yourself, this could be the last time I ride a ferry, see a black and white movie, taste brandy, stand on tiptoe, roll out pie dough, write a letter, stamp it and drop it in the mailbox, see a fox up close.

  I want to count each time in my life James brushes an eyelash from my cheek, want to tell each recurring dream—the one with the violin, the one with the teeth. Each grudge is a tightly sewn parcel safely storing a wound. Each brick was laid by a human hand: evidence.

  That very soon Peter Friesen will never again have an itch he can’t reach or the tang of vinegar on the sides of his tongue makes me feel each itch and tang as a responsibility.

  There is a last time we each will swallow water.

  They’ve not told me, no not in so many words, but I know. It’s not likely I’ll be going home. That’s fine and dandy, I want to tell them—it’s not home anyway, that apartment. Sold the house when was it, last spring? And twenty years or more before that we sold the farm. And it was long before that when I last saw the land where I was born. Don’t talk to me about home, I want to say. Dad, they say, you sold the farm twenty years ago. To rub my face in it. Then they tell me all about some other room they’ve set up for me in the nursing home, a nice tree outside the window, they keep saying. You’re all goddamn fools I want to say. They’re the ones who’re confused. We told you Dad, they say, patient voices like a slap-dash whitewash job. We have to be realistic, they say. You can’t go back to the apartment. It’s a beautiful room, and you’ll be taken care of there. I lose track of which story I’m supposed to be going along with. Pretending I have a home, pretending I’ll walk again, pretending I care. Pretending we don’t all know the only way I’m getting out of this place is in a box. They can’t even draw blood anymore. Three different nurses tried yesterday. Sticking me again and again. Veins drying up like a creek in drought.

  Oh they skirt around it so carefully that I know it better than if they just came right out with it. And I hear them when they’re talking to each other and I’ve got my eyes closed because I can’t manage to even lift my lids let alone say something in response to all their questions. Sometimes after I’ve sat up the whole morning and lifted the fork to my mouth so many times in a row I want to holler or throw something or even weep but I wouldn’t have the energy, even if I had it in me to let myself go like that, and then the lunch tray arrives and after all that lifting I’ve barely even made a dent in breakfast, and I tell you I get to a place where the air itself is so heavy the smallest fraction of a nod feels as if I’m heaving myself up out of bed to stand at the window. Then one of them will show up like they think they’re the second coming and say, Look Dad, your lunch, and I just want to close my eyes and be gone.

  The funny part is how fast it happens when you can’t bring yourse
lf to make a sign you hear them, how fast they begin to assume you’re not there. They think I’m asleep and I can’t tell them there is a difference between this place and sleep.

  I want to tell them there was a time when I threw a football, perfect spiral, over the barn. There was a time when I pitched a shovelful of soil over my shoulder to another place with less effort than it takes now to lift a tissue and receive the bit of gristle I’ve finally worked from the back of my mouth to my lips. There was a time when my legs held me upright all day long and on into the twilight and when I sat down to the evening meal those legs waited, buzzing and bent and ready for anything. I close my eyes and remind myself there was a time when I moved easily. Effortlessly. It’s a kind of torture to think of it, but I tell you it’s the only direction in my mind left to go that isn’t closing up like my veins. I think of that easiness as a kind of country now. A place. One I’ll never see again. But when I close my eyes sometimes I can get a glimpse of it. Even straining under the weight of a sack of grain or struggling with a plough had an ease about it and I wonder now whether it was the hope or the muscle that made it easy. Not that I can remember the feeling of it. Limbs closing up shop. No feeling. So it’s just the picture in my head. Like a photograph of the Old Country. Same way that after Mother died I could look at a photograph of her till kingdom come, but it never gave me back what it was to sit across the kitchen table from her flesh and bones, never gave me back the feeling, you know. The inside of the feeling. The feeling that even if you knew exactly what she would do or say next, even if you knew her that well, as I knew Mother, well, she could still surprise you. Even if she didn’t.