Whoah, said Nelson. You hear that? He was looking at the girls. You hear what grandma threw down? Shit! The girls clapped and asked her if it was a song or what and I held my bottle aloft and made a new toast, to the lees of life, I said, a callback to another poem my mother sometimes pulled from her hat but also to the Alfred Lord — referenced inscription in my mother’s old high school yearbook, the one beneath her photo: Lottie drinks life to its lees! She winked at me.
To the what? said Nora.
The girls had to pee and I suggested they do it into a cup and throw it under the front steps to keep the skunks away, like the renovation crew guys had recommended. Don’t worry about my mother, Nora told her friends, she’s a hippie. When she was a girl she had nothing to play with but the wind. You don’t have to pee into a cup. We have a washroom.
Nelson and my mother chatted briefly about poetry and the power of seas, their riptides and undercurrents, all of their invisible strength, and the girls eventually wandered off into the night. I went downstairs and had another look around my mother’s part of the house. She had insisted that all the bars come off the windows. My renovation crew had balked at this, they worried about her safety on the main floor. I won’t live in a prison, she said. They’re coming off. I wandered back into her living room. I took a pencil from my backpack and climbed up Nelson’s ladder, to the top, and wrote on a part of the ceiling that he would be painting over very soon, maybe even later that night. AMPS. I climbed down and then hollered up to my mother that we should go and get some sleep. Tomorrow morning the truck with my mother’s belongings would be arriving from Winnipeg and she and I would supervise the move, instructing the movers where, in which room, to put what and how to assemble certain pieces and then we would stay here in this place and live.
My mother is wearing a patch over one eye. She’s sitting in a room full of old people who are all wearing a patch over one eye. I’ve come to pick her up. One man welcomes me to the pirates’ convention. It’s the left eye, for every one of them, that is patched over. We’re in a room at St. Joseph’s Health Centre in Toronto. I find my mother deep in conversation with a couple in matching windbreakers and she waves me over to make introductions. She explains that the cataract doctor does all left eyes one week and then all right eyes the next. She has been given six tiny bottles of eye drops with instructions for use.
For the next couple of weeks Nora and I take turns administering the drops. Our days are punctuated with these drops sessions. In between drops we have to wait a few minutes for my mother to absorb the hit. While we wait we play mad duets on the piano to pass the time. We play really fast. Sometimes we play my mother’s favourite hymns like “Children of the Heavenly Father” but at breakneck speed, which makes her laugh. Nora can play “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” in less than ten seconds and an even faster version of Handel’s Sarabande.
Six different types of drops, two or four or six drops from each bottle, three minutes in between drops, four times a day! We come at my mother with tiny bottles and she obediently removes her glasses and puts her head way back and pushes her soft white hair away from her eyes. When it’s over she sits at her computer playing online Scrabble with tears, real and manufactured, pouring down her face.
Invincible calm, I tell her.
Invincible calm, she repeats.
You will triumph, I say.
You will triumph, she answers.
A couple of days ago my mother came home from a walk around the neighbourhood with news that put her in a jubilant mood.
I’ve found something out, she said. I went into the funeral home on the corner and found out that I can be cremated for fourteen hundred bucks. That’s everything included. And they’ve got a door-to-door policy. They’ll pick up my body and return it in a can.
She showed me her new shoes, a quality pair of black leather slip-ons that she’d bought at a trendy Queen West boutique. My mother is not a hipster or a style maven. She’s a short, fat seventy-six-year-old Mennonite prairie woman who has lived most of her life in one of the country’s most conservative small towns, who has been tossed repeatedly through life’s wringer, and who has rather suddenly moved to the trendy heart of the nation’s largest city to begin, as they say, a new chapter in her life. She doesn’t know anybody in Toronto but she loves the Blue Jays, which bonds her to strangers of all kinds. She is the absolute embodiment of resilience and good sportsmanship.
I’ve started making a shit list of shops and cafés on Queen West here in the “art and fashion district” who treat her with less respect and professional friendliness than they treat their younger and more glamorous clients. My mother doesn’t even notice, she’s jovial and curious and delighted and oblivious to snottiness. She’s a bit loud because of her mild deafness and she laughs a lot and has questions about everything and no embarrassment in asking. In her mind there is no reason why she and a group of beautiful film students hanging out at the Communist’s Daughter could not party together every night of the week. She is the antithesis of what the Queen West crowd would like themselves to be. She’s comfortable in her XXL pink cotton shorts and the T-shirt she won at a Scrabble tournament in Rhode Island. She would like to engage these pale, thin retail workers in conversation, she’d like to get their story, she’d like to know where the products come from, how they are chosen, how does one wear this, how does it wash, she’s trying to learn more about her new home and to become acquainted with her world, which makes their cold bony shoulder treatment of her that much more heartbreaking. And then I boycott them forever. So does Nora, even though it pains her a bit because she is young and fabulous and ultra-fashionable and would like to go into these shops occasionally but whatever, we smite you, snobs.
My mom’s already pals with the dry cleaner guy on King who knows me only as Lottie’s daughter and she chats every morning with Straight Up Cliff, the waving guy across the street. She even offered to give him, or his sons, my couch. Three large men, one with a fresh cut on his nose, came to our door this morning and told me that Lottie had told them I had a couch for them. No, I said. I don’t. A misunderstanding.
Can you not give my things away? I asked her later.
A guy wearing a shirt, tie, jacket, socks, shoes, hat and no pants, none, no underwear either, walked past our house and my mother saw him and ran to her bedroom for a pair of her sweats to give him. He thanked her and then wrapped them around his neck like a fluffy scarf and she told him well, that would work too. When I asked her if she wouldn’t miss those comfy sweats she told me that she’d stop giving my things away but that she’d do whatever she wanted with her things.
She’s joined a church, too, a Mennonite one on the Danforth, and they’ve asked her to become an elder. Is that some official thing? I asked her. Aren’t you one already? You’re quite old. She explained to me that there are only three elders in the church and that she is very honoured to have been asked. Back in our little hometown of East Village a woman would never have been asked to be an elder in the church. A woman wouldn’t have been asked (told) anything except to close her mouth and open her legs. She’ll think about it for a while. She zips around town on the TTC visiting cranky shut-ins from her church, singing hymns with them, helping them to prepare meals, making them laugh, making herself useful. The church people have come around and planted things in our hideous front yard. Flowers, shrubs, perennials, some decorative rocks. And Alexander, our next-door neighbour, has spread wood chips all around the yard too, so now our house has become a beautiful sort of community project.