She pauses, pensive. “I’m a floater. I skim along on the surface of life; get swept along by the currents. But you seem more like a diver. You search into the depths of things.”
“But you have the sunlight,” he says, touching her hand for the first time. “It can be dark and lonely in the depths of the sea.”
He invites her over to his place on Halloween to carve pumpkins. It’s their first date. When he answers the door in his orange polo shirt, they burst out laughing—she’s standing there in an orange cashmere sweater. They reach their hands into the fleshy caves of the pumpkins, scrape and scoop their stringy, slimy entrails and slippery seeds. They carve one with a laughing face and one with a frown—like orange masks of comedy and tragedy. His mother insists on a taking a picture, so he stands behind Sylvie, circles his arms around her. She rests her head against his chest and crosses her hands to clasp his forearms.
Long after the jack-o’-lanterns burn out, long after the smell of candle wax and charred pumpkin has drifted away, the two young lovers are still luminous.
In the back of the notebook for his film studies course, Jeff writes,
Silver is the way—
your eyes are
captivating me—
capturing me
I can’t stop thinking about you
And the way you make me feel
DESIRE—I am so full—I feel I will burst into flames.
I want to be the one
to put my arms around you
and keep you safe and warm.
FOREVER & EVER.
Sylvie becomes a flight attendant with Air Canada, and has to relocate to Halifax. As an Air Canada employee, she can fly to Ottawa cost free. By putting Jeff on her buddy pass, he also gets free flights to Halifax. Soon, he’s visiting his whole family there. It’s 1994, and posting time again—back to Nova Scotia. Marion, fed up with PMQs and the transient military life, resolves, I will never move again from the province of my birth. This time, she and Russ leave without their children and buy their first home, a two-storey heritage house on Williams Street across from the Halifax Commons. Back in Ottawa, Jeff moves into an apartment. Nineteen-year-old Mica lives a few streets over with a friend’s family while she completes the math and science courses she needs to enter university.
A few hours after their parents have left for Halifax, Mica receives a call from her brother: “Are you doing anything tonight? Do you want to go to a movie?” In the next year, they become best friends. They go to the gym and work out side by side. They visit bookstores so Jeff can search for more titles by philosophers he’s reading—Hegel, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Foucault—not for his university courses, but for his own personal study of philosophy. They chat late into the night about movies, directors and books; have heated discussions about politics and religion. Mica grows frustrated with her brother; he’s so logical and articulate in explaining what he reads, and his argument is always stronger than hers. She’s amazed at his knowledge in so many areas—art history, Aboriginal spirituality, Buddhism, pop culture. It’s as if he’s shed his skin, left the sullen, cynical youth behind; matured into a thoughtful, erudite man. Already, she envisions him becoming a professor.
Mica is accepted into the human kinetics program at St. Francis Xavier University, and follows the migration to the Maritimes in the fall of ′94. For the first time, Jeff is living without the closeness of his family or Sylvie. He writes to his grandmother:
Everything here is OK. School takes most of my time. This year is tough! I’m just trying to balance—you know—like paying rent, working, school, car, bills, etc. It’s good though—I like being independent. I feel better now that I’m responsible for myself! I really miss you. I think about you all the time. I love you Granny.
On Friday the thirteenth of June 1997, Jeff isn’t at Carleton’s spring convocation to sashay across the stage in a black robe and tasselled mortarboard. It’s not his style to bask in the limelight. But when he opens his transcript to see five A’s in his final semester courses, he beams in the solitude of his room. Then he crosses the campus and climbs the stairs to the Arts office to pick up his white scroll—Jefferson Clifford Francis, B.A. (Honours)—his passport to the next tier of the tower.
AS DUSK DESCENDS outside the classroom window, Joselyn Morley feels her attention fading with the light. In her notebook, she has a full page of doodles. It’s the third week of Canadian Studies 5001: “Conceptualizing Canada,” the core course for Carleton’s master’s program in Canadian studies. She wonders when, or if, it will get more stimulating. For three hours each week, the prof drones on about theories of knowledge, knowledge as technology, Ursula Franklin’s warnings in The Real World of Technology.… The blank faces and glazed eyes of the thirty other students reveal a similar boredom or confusion. She can see by their fresh, unlined faces that most of them are several years younger, except for the guy who always sits in the back by himself—tall, shaven head, broad shoulders, muscular arms. He’s older, too, and noticeably wiser. When the prof catches the class off guard with a question—a fitful attempt to involve them, or keep them from nodding off—he is usually the one to offer an answer.
During the break, Joselyn picks up a latte at the coffee bar in the foyer and notices him reading at a corner table, oblivious to the hubbub of conversations and Musak. “Mind if I join you?” she says, extending her hand. “I’m Joselyn.”
“Sure. Have a seat.” His face flushes. “Jeff Francis.”
“How are you finding the course so far?”
“Well, to be honest, I think I might be missing something,” he says, closing his book. “The theories she’s hammering into us are pretty basic—knowledge, technology, language. All the stuff I did in my undergrad courses in mass comm.”
“Yeah, and her tone puts me off.” She grimaces. “The word pedantic comes to mind.”
“No kidding. Not what I expected in a graduate course,” he says, turning his coffee cup in small circles.
“I’m really looking forward to the course Pauline Rankin is teaching next term. ‘Place and Space,’ or something like that.”
“Hey, I’m in that one too.” His eyes spark with interest. “She’s a great prof. I took one of her undergrad courses. I’m a TA for her this term.”
Chairs scrape around them, and they follow the cue. Joselyn grabs her cup. “Let’s hope the caffeine gets us through the next hour.”
Throughout the term, they become friends, conversing during the twenty-minute breaks, and sharing their academic interests—Joselyn’s in Canadian women’s studies and Jeff’s in Canadian culture and cultural policy. They joke about their common upbringing as military brats. “My dad was in the air force,” Joselyn says with a wry smile, “and my mum declared herself a pacifist. So there were two camps in our house. In high school, my brother trained with the air cadets, and I demonstrated against American imperialism and cruise missiles with the Disarmament Club.”
“I was somewhat of a pacifist during high school myself, or idealist might be a more accurate term,” Jeff says with a knowing grin. “Easy to be a pacifist if no one’s holding a gun in your face.”
Joselyn rants about the frustrations of being a student and a mother—juggling kids, dogs, housework, classes, assignments—never feeling like she’s doing a great job on either front. Jeff prefers to listen rather than talk. But when she questions him, he tells her about his family, and Sylvie, living in Nova Scotia—and how he misses them all.
Dear Mom,
I’m writing from my room in residence and from my window I have a good view of the trees that are turning color and there is still snow on the ground from the minor snowfall we had two nights ago. I am in the middle of reading Away, and I am also reading a lot of Canadian history and The Group of Seven and there is a chill in the air that at first notice is kind of depressing—but at the same time it is very comforting—as it gives a warm feeling inside me. I remember feeling this same kind of feeling last fall, and the
fall before that. I never really understood it—or I never really tried to understand the feeling—even though some curiosity existed. It just felt really good. I think now I have realized what it means—why it gives a warm feeling deep inside me—beyond rational understanding. Autumn reminds me of that place—the innocent youthful place of love that I have memorized and saved since I was very young. Of coming home after school, and the sky was grey and cloudy, and darkness was taking over the day—and there was that cold breeze that would make your journey home a bit faster—because you knew that once you got HOME—(that place) there would be warmth—not only physical but emotional—the smell of dinner, the excitement of family that somehow coincided with the season. Our home, though never rooted, was always stable—in the sense that love was always there. Sometimes never spoken or shown outright—but it was always there, and deep down—it was known it was there. The feeling that I get now at this time of year is recognition—memories of the period when growing up and learning how to feel—and to experience the different seasons—Halloween, Christmas, Birthdays, Valentines, Easter—will always be special to me—because of those memories with my family and especially because of your love—for if not for that—our experiences would not have been the same—so thank you. I only hope that I can pass that on, as you did, to my children one day. Love ya mom, Jeff
The Rideau Canal is a variegated frieze of skaters and snowbanks piled five feet high. Students hustle across the campus in down jackets and toques, seeking refuge from the January freeze in Carleton’s heated classrooms. Inside Dunton Tower, Jeff and Joselyn are two of six students seated in room 1212, a small seminar room that smells of chalk dust. Book-filled shelves line one wall; a bank of windows looks east onto the canal. They sit on orange Formica chairs around a square wooden table, two students on each side, the professor at the front. No one spaces out or blends into the woodwork in this class—“The Politics of Location.” As fiery as her red hair, Dr. Rankin meets their eyes as she speaks and challenges them with questions about the assigned readings: “So after reading Rob Shields’ article, what do you understand about the concept of liminality? What are the characteristics of the liminal state?”
Their eyes flit around the table, then drop to their notebooks. The steady tick-tick of the large-faced clock behind Dr. Rankin’s head magnifies the extended space of silence. Jeff swallows, his mouth dry with apprehension. The answer seems so obvious; it can’t be that simple. He touches his upper left arm where his tattoo of “the Void” is concealed under his sweater. The way of the warrior—facing your fear head on. Stepping into the boxing ring, bouncing at the bar on Saturday night, voicing an answer in this seemingly benign classroom—it’s all a testing ground. He hears Carlos Castaneda’s Yaqui Shaman whisper: “A man goes to knowledge as he goes to War, wide-awake, with fear, with respect, and with absolute assurance.”
“Well,” he clears his throat, “it seems to me that liminality is a state of transition characterized by ambiguity. It’s the places in-between, like borders and crossroads where people pass through but don’t live. These are liminal zones. Or liminality occurs when people are in transition between one stage of life and another. Like after graduating and before getting a job, when your identity is unclear. As a postmodern concept, it seems to share the same semantic space as Bakhtin’s notion of the carnivalesque.” He throws out his condensed ball of thought. Its threads dangle tenuously in the air above the table, waiting to be pulled and probed.
Dr. Rankin pauses, a smile half forming on her ruddy face. “That pretty much encompasses the main concept … interesting comparison with Bakhtin. And so, Jeff,” she asks, her blue eyes intense with curiosity, “how did you arrive at that analogy? Tell us about the steps that led to your conclusion.” His face reddens, as he begins to explain, guiding them through the maze of his mind, gradually unravelling the ball of thread that leads to the centre of his thinking.
JEFF’S UNIVERSITY NOTEBOOKS reveal an engaged student, a voracious note-taker. Every page is crammed with his writing—no white space, no margins, no skipped lines between topics or lectures, which are assiduously numbered. It’s as if so many facts, thoughts and ideas had to be garnered and recorded that he might not have room for them all. The pages are teeming with the black or blue inked words of “the prof”: passages from Claude Lévi-Strauss, Marx, Jung, Foucault, Joseph Campbell.… His small perpendicular script—a mixture of print and cursive letters—never touches the top or the bottom of the blue lines, but is suspended between them; the words float in space. In a black spiral-bound notebook for a sociology-anthropology course, he copied many passages from Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces and The Power of Myth:
The basic motif of the universal hero’s journey is leaving one condition and finding the source of life to bring you to a richer more mature condition.
If we engage in the Hero’s journey, we will live life on our own terms.
Trials and revelations are the means by which consciousness is transformed.
IT’S 1998, THE SECOND year of his master’s program, and the spectre of the thesis haunts the corridors of Jeff’s mind. He has always struggled with writing term papers. They are not vehicles of further comprehension for him, but boring exercises, drained of the joy of learning. So he usually postpones them until the last minute, then rattles something off to get them in on time. But a lot is riding on this thesis. He will use Foucault’s theories to examine the CBC’s role in generating a distinctive Canadian nationalism. He luxuriates in the reading, the research, the thoughts that leap and tumble around in his mind, the bright flashes of eureka moments. He sits for hours with his adviser, Dr. Alan Hunt, talking over piles of paper in Dr. Hunt’s book-lined office, or over mugs of beer at the campus pub.
As he contemplates Canadian identity, he ponders his own personal identity—that shape-shifting entity he’s never been able to pin down. It’s as if he, himself, occupies some liminal zone—always passing through. He’s not rooted in a particular city or region—the Maritimes, the West, or “Upper Canada,” but connected to all the places he’s inhabited, east to west. I am a part of all that I have met. First and foremost, he realizes, he is a Canadian.
But he procrastinates about the writing; has yet to tame his sprawling limbs of thought, and force them into the straitjacket of ordered paragraphs and chapters. A week before the deadline, he types all day and most of the night. He leaves his cramped apartment only to work out at the gym or to load up on triple-triples from Tim’s. Just before the office closes on the due date—April 30, 1999—he hands over his one-hundred-page document to the secretary at the School of Canadian Studies: “Assembling the Nation’s Culture?: The Relevance of Foucault for Studying the Role of the CBC in Emerging Canadian Nationalism, 1925-30.” He does not beam with accomplishment, but sighs with relief: Consummatum est.
In late November, when the barren branches of Carleton’s maples are stark against a steel-grey sky, he returns to the office to pick up his laminated certificate: Jefferson Clifford Francis, M.A. He shoves it into his backpack with his texts and notebooks, wonders if he will ever see it framed, on the wall of a windowless office at some university. Not an overriding ambition, he realizes. He thinks of his grandfather’s Second World War service certificate hanging in his granny’s living room, and his own scroll emblazoned with the chancellor’s gold seal seems meagre, solipsistic. What do you do with an M.A. in Canadian studies? You go on to do a Ph.D., Dr. Hunt advised. So, wanting to resume his study of popular culture, he transferred to the Sociology Department and gained admission to the Ph.D. program. Those adult decisions about career path can be postponed for a few more years.
It’s been five years now that he and Sylvie have been living in different parts of the country. They make the two-hour flight between Halifax and Ottawa whenever they can, spend long weekends and summer holidays at Fanjoy’s Point, and manage to keep the flame burning—tho’ it were a thousand mile. In the back of his notebook, he writes,<
br />
Today was incredible
—hours felt like weeks
God I miss you.
I hate explaining to people our situation
Why we are so far away from each other—they always give me that look—
you know—
that look that says—yeah right, long distance relationship …
—they never work.
I feel like saying to them
“You don’t understand”—we are really in love.
You don’t even know what that means!!”
If our relationship can last through that—nothing will come between us.
I think of you constantly … wondering what you are doing at that exact moment.
Sometimes I think I can feel you—your warmth, your laughter, your lips.
God, I love you.
Jeff strolls across the campus to the cafeteria and nods at a couple of students from his comparative literature seminar. Sharks, he thinks as he passes them, out for blood—skewering other students in the seminar, boasting about their publications like so many notches on their mortarboards. He knows he’s lacking that cutthroat competitive drive—to appear “intellectual” with scholarly presentations and articles in obscure academic journals. Thank god Joselyn is still here, he muses, settling in with his coffee to wait for her at his usual table in the corner.
She bustles in, her long brown hair dishevelled by the wind; a leather satchel slung over one shoulder and a stack of books under her arm. “Sorry, I’m late,” she says, setting a steaming cup on the table and collapsing into the chair. “There was a long line at the library. I had to get these books. A two-thousand-word paper due on Monday. I haven’t even started the research.”
“Having fun yet, Jos?” he chuckles.
“Fun? Who promised you fun?” She smiles, stirring her tea.
“Playing with ideas is great fun,” he says. “If it starts to feel like I’m training for a bloody marathon instead of enjoying the race, then I’ll know it’s time to quit.”
For Your Tomorrow Page 7