Brother Love

I have a unique relationship with my brother, Rhett Preston Kirby. I don’t mean that in the sense that he’s better than other brothers, or that he does and provides what other brothers do not, though I feel that those things are true. I don’t place much value in comments of the type: “My brother, father, mother, wife, school, country, teacher, cat, chili recipe, etc. is the best that ever was!” Because, well...how could a person  ever really know? It’s meaningless for me to say he’s the best, without offering solid evidence. I’ll pass on the superlatives and just say why he is what he is in my life.

So, what’s so unique about him, anyway? First of all, unique defines his role in my life. Rhett is the only person I’ve ever known who is like him. Sure, you say. So he’s a unique individual. Aren’t we all? Well, it’s deeper than that. And here’s why. My brother and I are about as different as brothers can be. We have different likes, inclinations, personalities, ways of engaging the world. We have different skills and foibles, different things we strive for. We’ve carved out our places in the world using wholly different tools and maps. You could even say that, with all our differences, we inhabit different worlds, and that would be substantially true. What it comes down to is that, without the accident of having been born into the same family at approximately the same time, there’s little chance I’d ever have come to know him. And, it’s why I’ve never really known anyone like him. Which is what makes him so unique to me, as I believe I am to him.

It took me a couple of decades to realize this, and to begin to appreciate Rhett in a very special way. In the sphere of my life, he has perspectives on things completely unlike those of friends, colleagues and partners I’ve attracted over the years. And, because I love him, and he me, I am able to interact with this alien intelligence in ways deep and intimate enough as to instruct, enlighten and inspire me.

Of course, I exaggerate our differences. We come from the same parents, were born in the same city into similar circumstances, and through most of our pre-adult years, our physical and social journeys were parallel. And all these similarities, all that we share, is essential to the love and bond between us.

That bond has always felt absolute and unconditional. We have our disagreements; we used to fight often enough. As adults, we’ve mostly lived far apart, sometimes not seeing one another for years at a time. We’ve hardly ever exchanged Christmas or birthday gifts, and the odd time that something is given, one to the other, it never sets a precedent of creates any kind of expectation.

But emotionally, or spiritually...no, maybe deeper than that, even... on the level of who we are, we are bonded. Maybe it’s on the level of the “story” we believe ourselves to be living, how we situate ourselves and each other in the world of “meaning”. On that level, in that place, we are deeply connected, mirrors of one another, alter egos, each a kind of harmony to the other’s melody, the chorus behind one another’s center stage. We are joined, in simple fact.

He’s been with me from my beginning and populates my earliest memories. In one of them, he’s bent over on the sidewalk in front of our house, retying my shoe lace, teaching me how to do it myself. In another, he’s rescuing me from a tree down the street. With his encouragement, I’d mustered the confidence to climb up it, but wouldn’t come down again. There’s never been any doubt of our connection. And we’ve both noted, as we’ve journeyed through life, our surprise at how few other siblings seem as solid and sure, as quietly passionate about their bond, as we are of our brotherhood.

I came to realize, as I learned to ponder the whys and wherefores of my life, that there were reasons for all of this. Our mutual commitment got serious reinforcement when we moved from Detroit to New York, when I was five and he was seven. For a few weeks or months we were shuttled here and there, sometimes with our father, sometimes both parents, occasionally with strangers, while our parents tried to settle on some place and some way for us to all live together. We changed schools and neighborhoods a few times through the next few years, and so often, we were each the single familiar face in one another’s world. This shifting went on, in one way or another, until we entered our teens. At the height of our life as wanderers, we found ourselves in East Germany, where our mother sang in night clubs and stage shows, on a series on month-long contracts. We stayed in small hotels, and my brother and I would meet the local kids, and learn their games and a few new words. Once we taught a group of boys how to play baseball, in an empty lot in Leipzig, and a small crowd gathered to watch.



Our parents were there with us, but much of the time Rhett and I felt like it was us two against the world. Not ‘against’ in the sense that there was any painful struggle to it. Merely in the sense that everything outside of us was different, and only we knew who we were and where we’d come from. And no one else could ever understand all that. Why even try to explain. We had each other. And it was wonderful! We grew up feeling that, despite any differences, we were sharing one journey, one adventure, one perspective on the big world that lay ahead and all around us. It was one long adventure, and the two of us, the ever successful protagonists in some epic saga.

We moved and moved again, lived with one parent then the other, watched them become disaffected, then divorce, all the while sharing our whispered conversations in our bedroom when the lights were out, our speculations about our fate and what lay ahead. And all the while, Rhett was my protector, my biggest fan, my confidant, my guide.

At one point, we were in a couple of professional stage plays, sharing the same rolls on alternating nights, and bringing our very different energies and personas to the roles. That experience is a great metaphor for how we felt about our connected destinies. However different we were, we knew that we shared a path unique to ourselves, and not translatable to others. Trust, devotion, love. I learned the depths of those emotions from my brother, through those years of growing up.

Eventually, our lives settled. We wound up back in New York, with our father. A few years in the same place led to a renewed sense of home, to new friends who became old friends. We began to develop in our separate and individual ways. Rhett played basketball. I joined the school orchestra. I read books. He caroused with his buddies. So there came a point during our teens when my brother and I didn’t have much to do with each other. We were each too involved in finding and furnishing our niches in life. I remember feeling that he just didn’t fit into mine very well. I went away to school first; he did the same, a year or so later. And that was when one of the differences in us really began to assert itself.

My response to, first, leaving the extended family behind in Detroit, and then, the dissolution of our parents’ marriage, was to try to divorce myself from family altogether. I decided to go it alone, to let relations with family weaken and fall away. But Rhett’s response was to develop a love and commitment to family that’s stronger than in almost anyone I know. He simply didn’t let me drift away. For years, no matter how ‘uppity’ and distant I got, he called, he tracked me down, he visited. He remained “Big Brother” – and friend, fan, supporter, guide. The comforting and mythic reality of “Us against the World” survived everything that might’ve pulled us apart.

I just turned sixty, and in July, Rhett will be sixty-two. And the bond between us remains as it ever was. Rhett Preston Kirby is the deepest expression of love and family that I know. He will forever be the most unique person in all my life. He is my only brother, so of course I have no basis of comparison. Yet and still, the heart has grounds for making claims that no logic or reason can undercut. I assert it because, in this life I have lived, it is true. Rhett is and has been the greatest brother I could ever have had. Without him...well, I just can’t imagine.

X Times Seven Equals Life

It's one of the best research documentary ideas ever. And it makes for some of the most fascinating television I've ever watched. I wish I had a similar record of my own family, my own communities. Apparently the model has been copied in several countries around the world, including the US, Russia, and South Africa, but until doing a little web-surfing for this blog post, I’d never heard of any of them. Certainly it’s a model worth copying, as it offers up a treasure trove of insights into the journey through life and the human condition. And talk about “reality television”!

 

What I'm referring to is the 7-Up series of documentaries that began in 1964 in England, a product of Granada Television’s World in Action series  (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Up_Series). Seeking to explore the truth of the maxim: "Show me a child at seven and I will show you the Man", Michael Apted, then a twenty-two year old researcher, selected a group of seven year olds, from the privileged and the underprivileged classes. Apted has noted his regret that he chose no strictly "middle class" children. Also, there are fewer females than males, and except for one bi-racial boy, no minorities were represented. He says that at the time he “wanted to make a nasty piece of work about these kids who have it all, and these other kids who have nothing.”

 

The children were interviewed, asked a range of questions about money, class, race, whether they wanted marriage and children, and where they saw themselves in the future. It was conducted with the view to catching a glimpse of what British society might be in the year 2000. It was originally conceived as a one-off, though apparently the original show included this post credits narration: "If you want to know what happens to these children, watch Granada Television on Tuesday 2nd May in the year 2000.”

 

What actually happened proved way more interesting than even that thought-provoking tease. Because, when 1970 rolled around, Apted, now in the role of director, tracked down the children – now fourteen – and interviewed them again. By 1977, at the third go-round, the potential and promise of the exercise really began to show itself. Some of the twenty-one year olds were exactly what their seven year old versions had hinted at, but others were startlingly different. I won’t spoil it for you, but seeing the change in Neil, from 7 to 14, then on to 21, can’t but make you wonder what happened in his young life to cause such a transformation.

 

Apted, who eventually moved to Hollywood, where he directed such fare as “Coal Miner’s Daughter”, “Gorillas in the Mist”, “Thunderheart” and “Nell”, returned every seven years to track down the fourteen children and create another episode in the Up series. From time to time, one or another of them has refused to participate. One of the 14 hasn’t participated since he was twenty-one, though, ironically, he’s become a documentary film-maker himself.

 

The series has continued right up to the present, the latest episode, broadcast in 2012, catching up with the “kids” at age 56. I can’t recall for certain whether I was introduced to the series when the participants were 21 or 28, but being just two years their senior, I feel as though I’ve been taking my life journey right alongside them. One can’t help but contrast and compare, not only them against one another, but also against one’s self. But I imagine that this is the case whatever a viewer’s age.

 

Despite Apted’s original, incendiary intention, the series did not mature as a political piece. While there’s certainly lots of room for partisan or sociological analysis, it stands as a much more personal exploration of life’s challenges and rewards, its small joys and the abundance of sacrifices it demands of us. Watching the show, you develop affection for some, perhaps judgement of others. You empathize, mourn, smile along with. You understand.

 

I’ve missed episodes through the years, but have always caught up when I had the chance. And now, the entire series – except for the very last episode – is available on Netflix! A great feature of the presentation is that each episode contains clips from all of the previous episodes. This is an invaluable aide when several years separate viewings. When binge-watching the entire series on Netflix, they can become pretty repetitive. But even with that small drawback, I can’t recommend this series strongly enough. Though its diversity is limited in being set within the mono-culture of a single, European country, there is a deep universality to this series. It will give you much to think about: How much are we all conditioned to live the lives we lead? To what extent are we free to remake ourselves, and to what extent are we subject to the whims of circumstance? To the extent that we have choices, what have we made of them? How might we have done better, or worse? How have we touched the lives of others, and how have our lives been touched by them? And, the one that is ever present, for us and for the fourteen kids of 1964, on and off the screen, what lies ahead?

 

What Home Is

            I’ve been meditating on the subject of home, what it is, what allows a place to grow into that designation. I’ve lived in quite a few places, for varying lengths of time. The places I’ve lived for five years or more number 5, and together count for all but about 10 of my 57 years. There are another 2 places I lived for two years or more. Another 3 where I lived six months to a year or so, and a few others where I spent a month or more. That’s quite a few addresses; lots of different places that served the purposes of home in one way or another. But really, when I think about it, only 4 of those places became home for me.

            I started out in Detroit and lived there my first five years or so. But I don’t think I would’ve considered it home if that was the end of it. Those were my formative years, sure, but in the early memories I call up, there’s hardly any sense of ‘place’ beyond the house I was born into, and those domiciles of relatives that were interchangeable with my own. But Detroit was home in my consciousness for a long, long time, and there was pride in that before I knew any other place. Because I was born there, and my mother was born there, because it’s the place my father adopted as home when he ran away from his birth place on the night of his high school graduation. And it’s the place I returned to for long stays, summer after summer during my teens, when my growth was marked in large part by the changes I saw in my cousins, and that uncles and aunts saw in me. And whatever other places have taken Detroit’s place as home, it is forever the place I’m from; it remains a part of me, and I part of it. And it’s the place my family roots begin.

           New York City was my next home, both in the sense that I spent the next chunk of my life there, and that it claimed me and I came to identify myself as a New Yorker. My individuality developed in those years. New York was the place I began to know myself, to make independent and life-changing choices, where I began to see myself in the broader contexts of community, calling, and the world. New York was the first place I made the conscious choice to leave, and from then on, my destinations were largely my own choice.

            But then came a span of a dozen years, during which I lived in lots of places – some that I loved. But the bar had been raised, so far as what it took to make a place my home. And the next place to meet the standard was Seattle.

            This matter of home has much to do with the simple passage of time. But when choice is figured in, time spent in a place is no longer a simple thing; it can be a measure of commitment, or of hope. I lived in Seattle long enough for it to grow into home. It was there that I began to recognize that part of what home represents to me is the richness and personal resonance a place develops, from the layering of experience that comes with time. Like the difference between a short story and a novel, that between a place merely lived in, and a place that was home, is time and the blossoming of growth and change, including growth in attachment to and relationship with a place.

             A particular nugget about how and why Seattle was home is that I watched others grow there. The person in my life who came closest to being a child of mine was ten years old when I came to Seattle. And by the time I’d left, she was an adult who’d travelled the world and was attending an out-of-state university. Similarly, I did social work there long enough that I began to encounter young adults who were settled into jobs and relationships, or graduating university, or serving long-term sentences in prison, whom I’d first met as traumatized pre-teens in a group home. Some of my most substantial romantic partnerships took place there, and my first writings to see print were composed there. Perhaps the best way to sum it up is to say that the “I” that moved to Seattle wasn’t the same “I” that left there twelve years later. I didn’t even go by the same name.

            But finally, home became Toronto. I said earlier that I chose my cities of residence after New York. But, in fact, on more than one occasion that place was determined in partnership with a woman in my life, and that’s the case with Toronto. In fact, if not for the woman I married and came here to live with, it would have been inconceivable to me that I move to Toronto. It’s not that I had anything against the city. In fact, I’d never been here before the week I was married, and knew little about it. But I was – and still am, really – in love with Montreal, a place I spent large chunks of two magical summers in my university days. Yes, I love Montreal, like I Love San Francisco, and love Paris. But my time in these cities was transient, and my love had more to do with a time in my life, a freedom and sense of possibility, and with a romance of circumstance and mood and chemistry, than it had to do with growing in and knowing a place.

            Toronto is my home in ways that transcend my love for such other places. I was first attracted to Toronto because it holds in its streets the rhythms and accents of so much of the world. But what I came to love is a city of neighbourhoods, where each feels open to all others. It’s not just a busy city, but also an alive city, in which movement and art, invention and expression serve the broadly shared purpose of good living.

There are also the ways in which my personal life has intersected with the life of this city. I’ve been blessed to experience Toronto through so many of its cultural and social facets. And in the course of that, I’ve transitioned through entire phases of life. I even contemplate the possibility of my last life phase ending here.

But all of this has me reconsidering my initial premise: that places become home by meeting particular, time related standards. Yes, it’s so...in part. But maybe this makes for only a difference in degree, rather than a difference in kind. I remember another place I felt a sense of home, but in an oddly concentrated way, and for a very short while. It was my grandmother’s house, in rural Indiana. I went there to stay with her, in the ninety-fourth year of her life, after my grandfather had died. I went there to be company to her, to take care of errands and some house-keeping (not much, mind you; grandma was incredibly able and active at ninety-three, and didn’t relish turning over her routine so that she could sit and waste).

I didn’t much like the tiny town of Shelburn and environs. The landscape was ragged and stingy, and the weather oppressive. I found the inhabitants mostly as alien as they undoubtedly found me, and there was little culturally or socially that interested me. So why do I include this reminiscence, then? Why does this memory well up so unaccountably? I guess to reveal something to me, to form a lesson, broaden a meaning, to break down an artificial delineation

            Because there was home there in Shelburn. It resided in tiny doses, in the artifacts of family: in sepia photos folded in albums, in the biscuit dough that grandma worked by hand in the huge mixing bowl on the kitchen table, in the odors that lingered in the crumbling barn and the long-unused chicken coop, and in my grandpa’s Illinois railroad watch that she dug out of a drawer and presented to me one afternoon. And mostly, it resided in the single personage of that old woman, her tongue loosened for the first time in my memory, giving her over to sharing memories of my Dad and my aunt as kids, her marriage to grandpa, and their struggle with the local white folks when they became the first blacks to move into the community, even of her first time seeing an airplane, circling overhead at a county fair when she was twenty-one. Home resided in all that, and in watching her unwind her cascade of white hair every night, to comb it, then roll it up again, while she shared her wisdom, much of it to do with the faults and blessings of being a male member of my line.

             It’s a feeling and memory of home that brings things almost full circle, like a psychic return to Detroit, but through a different portal. Home embodied in small, personal details, and almost disconnected from the broader environment. Suggesting to me that home is something carried inside, and released in those places that call it forth, that allow it to open and breathe, places where my inner reality somehow finds resonance.

Which takes me one step further now. Wasn’t that a little bit of home in Atlanta that summer, taking evening walks in Piedmont Park, and in the music building at Exeter, where I’d go at lonely times to pick at the keys of a piano? Don’t those love affairs with San Francisco and Paris and Montreal all contain a little bit of home, of the self expanded, of kinship spread thin but amplified, of love circulating out, then back again?

Time Travelling on a Tune

Over the last couple of days, I found a number of new links on the internet, to my Mom’s career as a singer in the 60s and 70s.

Mom was a preacher’s daughter, born in Ferndale, Michigan and raised in the north part of Detroit. Granddad and Tootsie (the nickname an older cousin bestowed on our Grandmother) lived off of 8 mile road, and the Mt. Beulah Baptist Church wasn’t far from there. Mom was a smart, imaginative, dreamer growing up. She sang in the church, but may have had more of an interest in writing, going so far as having a small chap book of poems printed when she was still in school. I know that she and her cousin Earl talked a lot about how they intended to travel the world when they grew up.

Her first steps away from home were going off to college, to Bluefield, West Virginia for a time, then to somewhere in Oklahoma, I believe. I don’t recall with certainty what she studied, but I know that she dropped out in her final year, to marry my Dad, a charming, sweet-talking man even now, in his late eighties. He’d run off from small town Indiana to the big city of Detroit, on the night of his high school graduation, and returned there after a couple of years in the military.

When he met my Mom, he romanced her hard, taking her to clubs and ball games and shows, and had even the serious Reverend Hardwrick so won over that they had use of the family car whenever they wanted. Mom put her other ambitions on the shelf for awhile, married Dad, had two kids, and before long, seeing the world seemed the furthest thing from possible.

But it wasn’t a very happy marriage. Dad liked the ladies more than a marriage could contain, and somewhere in there, Mom began to nurture the seed of her own liberation. The story is that the seed broke ground the day she was riding in an elevator and singing a tune to herself. There happened to be an agent in the elevator with her. He said something like, “Hey babe, you got some sweet pipes”. And next thing you know, Mom is doing gigs in local clubs, then going on weekend trips to Columbus and Cleveland.

From there, things changed pretty fast. Mom got called to New York, and went. Dad, after awhile, loaded my brother and I into the family car, and followed her there. A year or so later, she got a chance to travel to Berlin, to be part of an international revue titled, “Schwarz/Weiss” – Black/White, that featured black and white performers from several countries. She was supposed to be gone a couple of months, but the show was a hit and she emerged as its star. When the show kept getting extended, our ever game Dad loaded us up again and surprised Mom when we all appeared at her hotel room door.

We were actually a good family there for awhile, bouncing from city to city while Mom developed a reputation and a career. My brother and I learned German and thrilled at being intrepid explorers in foreign lands. Those were the Golden years of our childhood, and created a bond between us that nothing has ever weakened. Ever since then, I’ve felt sorry for the vast majority of chronologically close siblings who fail to nurture any sense of special devotion between them; but I’ve come to understand that my brother and I had blessed circumstances in which to do so.

Dad may be coming across as the bad guy in this story, but it didn’t end up so. There isn’t a bad guy, or a bad gal. When our parents saw that their marriage just wouldn’t work, they did the smart thing and ended it, before the grudges and arguments could become a fixture in our lives. He returned to New York, then did a round trip a year later to take my brother and I with him. The plan was that we’d go back and forth between them. But that never materialized.

Mom’s career peaked over the next few years. She finally travelled the world, as she’d always intended. The next time my brother and I spent substantial time with her was when she came through New York as the star entertainer on the around-the-world, maiden voyage of a luxury ocean liner. It was apparently just too complicated a life – professionally and personally – for her to feel she could adequately parent us. Which was absolutely the tragedy of my young life. But, on the flip side, my brother and I were fortunate enough to have a father who, despite the entreaties of relatives on both sides to allow them to raise us (because no single man, especially one who liked to play like James Kirby, and who worked nights, should be trying to raise no two kids all by himself in no New York City!) insisted that he was going to raise us himself and love doing it.

Of course there’s lots more to it. I will always be proud of Mom that, in the late 1950’s, she, a young, black woman, broke away from a narrow and unhappy life as a housewife, and turned herself into a globe-trotting, jet-setting, diva glamourpuss! The parts of that I shared with her are infinitely precious. Among my best memories are the times I’d come from school and have long, deep, searching, anything goes conversations with her, while she dressed and made herself up for her show that night. And I missed her enormously all those following years when she wasn’t around.

So you can imagine the thrill when, every now and then, when I do a google search, I discover a missing piece of Mom’s life. The last discovery came as a result of my brother finding some long lost photographs, and that spurring me into doing a routine search. Amazingly, these last finds include a few seconds’s worth of video, close ups of Mom singing, fronting a band and wearing a sleek, glittery gown and stole, and a curly, almost platinum wig. It’s a clip from some 1970 Eurocomedy, and she’s off-screen as the camera focuses on the antics of a nightclub’s patrons. But Wow! It’s about the first moving image I’ve had of my Mom since she died twenty years ago.

I’ll have to send a note to the person who posted the clip, thanking them. What a treasure! What a lovely, heart-warming gift, to see my Mom again, smiling, singing, doing her glam-glam thing!

Generations

My Great-Aunt Audrey lived comfortably on the borderlands of her memory. She spent her last years hardly moving from the upstairs bedroom she inhabited in the house of my Aunt Bernice, which was the hub of the family for more than two generations.

I don’t know exactly how old she was, but to me, when I was twenty, she seemed to be in that place in life of not wanting or needing very much. But she took great pleasure it seemed, from having one of us younguns stop in and sit with her for awhile, and listen while she shared some memory of us when we were younger, or even better, of our parents, whom we so much favoured when they were our age.

Aunt Audrey was the repository of family lore, the keeper of the otherwise forgotten details of how we’d come to be what we were, where we’d come from, and why, and of all the comic and tragic turns that had shaped and informed us. I wonder why we didn’t recognize that, and value it more. Most of us, of the generation of her children and grand-children, enjoyed our sits with her, half an hour or an hour at a time, listening as she shared her recollections of uncles and cousins and nieces, their comings and goings, careers and scandals, and their marriages and dalliances, and the children that resulted from them. But we didn’t value them enough.

I spent a month in Detroit, in the month around my twentieth birthday, right after I’d dropped out of University, restless and impatient about discovering all the newness I suspected was out in the world waiting for me. I arrived there straight from Mardi Gras, and would go on from there to Atlanta, then would hitchhike to San Francisco and live there for half a year before returning to academia to give it another try.

Ironically, only a month earlier, I’d begun to record a journal, which I maintain to this day. But I recorded hardly a paragraph about my month in Detroit, and not a word about all that Aunt Audrey shared with me. I was too busy looking for that newness, too caught up in the changes happening inside me to accord much value to the rambling memories of a sweet, old woman.

But I loved and enjoyed my Aunt Audrey. And so I sat with her many long hours during that month. And She told me how this great-uncle had come to Detroit from North Carolina in the forties, and another from Georgia in the fifties. She spoke of the family from Oklahoma whose daughter had married her brother and then become a favorite aunt to most of her own nieces and nephews.

According to my great Aunt, the family had produced business people and craftsmen, hoboes and preachers (my maternal grand-father, her sister’s husband, had been both in his time), gamblers, musicians and crooks. Most of her memory sessions began with a detail, then took off into a broad sweep of family lore. She’d start in about how her sister Birdie loved music and to go to parties, and then remember that their older brother John loved music too, but didn’t care for parties and would only sing in church, which was something he got from their mom, a real church lady, who kept herself occupied as a seamstress, she had such a talent that way. And how she wasn’t so much of a cook, but she had this way of baking biscuits, different because in her childhood she’d been raised in Louisiana, and how their Daddy liked her biscuits fine, but always complained that she didn’t fry chicken right, the way they did in Alabama, where he’d been raised. And how you could always recognize a person from Alabama from the way they pronounced their ‘r’s, drawing them out – “aw-ruh” they’d say. But one cousin had come North determined to leave everything about the South behind him, so had worked hard to speak like the city folk, and so managed to ‘pass’ in that way. But others had been light skinned enough to ‘pass’ the other way, leaving their connection to the family entirely behind and disappearing into the white world.

It was Aunt Audrey that told me where some of the white blood had come into the family lines, in those days before the ending of slavery, and right after, usually some white man with a black woman, but not always: a white woman had born the child of one of my ancestors, then left the child to grow up in an orphanage.

I was most fascinated by her claim that one of our ancestors had been a “full blooded Indian”, and that another had come to America as a slave from Madagascar. She had some speculations about where in the family tree these two were to be found, and some few added details about their lives, but it never occurred to me then to write them down.

My Aunt died before I ever set foot in Detroit again. By that time, I was more aware of the importance of what she’d shared with me. But when I asked others in the family what tribe our native ancestor had belonged to, they knew nothing of him. And when I asked how it was a slave had been brought here from Madagascar – far off any slave trade route I’d ever heard about – they recalled nothing of that story either.

Many times since losing my Great Aunt, I’ve wondered about all the family history I do not know. I have no details to speak of that pre-date the generation of my grandparents. Of my eight Great Grandparents, I have the name of one, not stored in my faulty memory this time, but recorded in a notebook after a talk with another elder from another branch of the family.

And I’ve come to realize that this isn’t uncommon. Occasionally, I’ve met an individual with a reckoning of their ancestry back as far as two centuries or more. But always, it’s a history of merely one strand of their ancestry. That is, one strand of two parents, four grandparents, eight great-grandparents, sixteen greatgrands, thirty-two, sixty-four, one-hundred-twenty-eight, two-hundred-fifty-six, and on and on and on. Really, that amounts to not knowing one’s history at all.

On the other hand, there was a claim issued in a scientific study a few years back, that everyone on earth shares kinship, that we all have common ancestry. Somewhere in the past, as those familial inputs double with every generation, our connections get broader and broader, to the point where the numbers of direct ancestors is larger than the population of the world at a given time. It's only common sense, really. Whatever beliefs you have about the 'how' of it, the human population must have started off very small, so we all had to come from a common ancestry. An ancestry that spread itself with every generation, to the point where distant cousins could meet and marry with no sign or notion that they were related. Meaning that we are all multiply related.

Imagine the fascinating web, if each of us could go back even a hundred years or so, to know all we wish to know about each of our eight great-grandparents, or the sixteen that parented them!

I regret that I didn’t attend more carefully to the reminiscing of my Great Aunt Audrey. But even without the details, she left me with a great deal. She stimulated a wonder about the past and its connection to the present that has stayed with me. To this day, I wonder about the African, enslaved in Madagascar and carried half a world away, where he generated a line of descendants that eventually led to me. And I wonder about that Native American, and at the connection he made with a Black woman that led to them having children, mingling their bloodlines in my veins.

And I cannot think of them without speculating for a brief moment about all the others I know nothing about at all. Who might they be? What were their stories? And what an amazing thing it is to think that I am, in some small way, a distillation of all of those myriad stories, and the lived lives behind them.

Thank You, Aunt Audrey!

The World Is Too Big

There’s too much to do. And I move slower all the time.

I turned 56 this year, and there’s no escaping age and the narrowing of possibility.

I’m starting to lose original parts. They’re going bad, and either needing support, rehauling or removal.

My eyes, my back. That tooth I lost. The sugar imbalance that might’ve become diabetes....

I can’t sprint anymore. My speediest movement is what would’ve been an aggressive jog a few years ago. I’m not the Bear I used to be, when it comes to lifting and moving things. And I can’t just go and go like I once could with a woman I was wanting.

DAMN! I’m just getting old.

And the latest thing is my mind. No, I’m not exactly afraid of Alzheimer’s or some other dementia. One of those may come, certainly. But I’ll do what I can to stay healthy and not otherwise worry about it.

But my memory...

I’m forgetting things all the time. Where I left something. Names. Things I intended to do. So much easier getting caught up in simple complexities like negotiating a website or keeping track of my parking ticket appeals.

Every now and then I’m struck by the sight of a shrunken older man or woman, from whom not only all traces of youth have departed, but who have been bent or twisted by life, as though by a force bearing down on them for decades, and inescapable.

And, like they say, No one ever got out of Life alive.

But the most difficult part, the part that makes the world of possibility seem to shrivel between each breath, is the shortness, the stinginess, the waste and spillage of time.

So many things I haven’t done. And even as I do them – taste new flavours, bend myself into different shapes, consume and let myself be consumed by experiences and just by living – even then, time accelerates by, stripping away the months and the years, faster than I can fill them.

Such a big world. Such a vast world.

I’ve learned to play the sax, but not to drive a semi. And I never swam with a dolphin.

I attended a 10 day Vipassana retreat, and canoed on Lake Temagami, thumbed the interstate from Atlanta to San Francisco, and sipped wine in Kafka’s Prague, but I’ve yet to make the furniture for the roof deck, or see Quebec City, or buy that vinyl copy of Trane at the Village Vanguard.

And I’ve never fathered a child. And I’ve not yet seen Mother Africa.

And though I continue to write, through all these years, I’ll never write that novel I was meant to write in my twenties.

I can not win back any of the wasted time.

I can’t now say yes, and reverse the no from long ago. I can’t now unwrap the successes, or even those failures, I was too afraid to welcome, but which were mine anyway, to help me in the flowering of my life. Even looking backward at it doesn’t bring it near.

So there’s only now. Time ever shifting. And this big world.

And all I can do is use it up.

Abbey and Max

Abbey Lincoln died the other day. She was a jazz singer. When I was in my early teens, and living in a high-rise on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, Abbey lived in an apartment a few floors up with her then husband, Max Roach, the Drum King of bebop. Max himself died about three years ago.

As an eleven year old, just getting introduced to the trumpet, with a Mom who sang professionally, and who’d played Miles and Ellington and Coltrane lps on our record player, along with the Ray Charles and Dinah Washington, along with the show tunes and soundtrack albums, it would’ve been really special to know the music they’d created and had been a part of introducing to the world. But I didn’t have a clue.

If Mom had been there, and had expressed her appreciation of the music, it might have sunk in. But she wasn’t there, and Dad’s enthusiastic explanation that these folks were “Jazz Giants” just didn’t register. I remember listening to a tune or two by each of them, but honestly, it must’ve sounded very ‘old timey’ to my young ears, which were then into the Temptations and Aretha, Kool & the Gang and soul brother number 1, James Brown.

It wasn’t until many years and a couple of life stages later that I’d begin to go backward in my music appreciation. Backward into older styles and earlier decades, to the far roots of the fusion that captured my ear in the 70’s – back to the bebop, as wild and revolutionary as any music of that or any other decade.

It’s good though that I got to know Abbey and Max simply as good people, as the friendly and generous neighbours that they were. Our father, who was a social being down to his bones, sometimes went to boxing matches or ball games with Max. And one of their nephews hung out with my brother and I one summer. But other than those indifferent listens to tunes I would only have the ear to appreciate years later, I don’t recall that my life ever ran up against the musical side of Max and Abbey’s. They were just the famous couple that lived upstairs: very grounded, at the same time very dignified, cooler than most, but regular people nonetheless.

Coming Out From Under

My relationship with marijuana began in exploration and escape. In my late teens the exploration was about discovering the wide world, the layers and pathways of it. This meant discovering the new, but also re-discovering the familiar, via new experience, new thinking, new ideas, and new eyes. The escape was about leaving behind sadness, and skirting around the heavy consciousness of all the ways I was disconnected from people and places and events around me.

I loved the herb, and it wasn’t long before I was a devotee of “Yo Highness”. Was this addiction? I wondered from an early time. But the answer didn’t much involve me. So long as the exploration kept the world fresh, and so long as self-consciousness was overcome, well, why shouldn’t this be a way of life? It was a way of life that changed my life, and I had no way of considering that I would occupy an altered world for the next fifteen years, or what that might mean.

Three or four years into my near daily use of herb, I evolved a theory about the nature of being high. I speculated that what marijuana did was blend my waking and my dream states, so that under its influence I experienced a softness and malleability in the material world. It seemed that ideas, thoughts, feelings had more weight in this dimension, but also that physical realities counted for less. Understandable that music and art, books and nature drew me in more, and that my “ambition” gave way. Because the things I was ambitious about, my marijuana mind showed me, were less substantial than I had supposed. In the fuzzy, blended state I now inhabited, the meaning and weight of a thing was interlaced with that of many others. In the wild mix of possibility, everything was possible and nothing imperative. All things carried the added import of my dream sensibility as part of its materiality – the world had a kind of sixth dimension, a dimension beyond time.

After indulging regularly for fifteen years, I then practiced abstinence for fifteen. The journey into sobriety felt like a descent through clouds, through the trees and to the ground. And solid ground was an odd thing for some while. “Grounded” was the character that all of creation seemed to take on. Everything, even the watery and airy parts of existence, became very solid and heavy. There was a density, not only to matter, but also to actions and expressions, and to all the other tangibles and intangibles of life – even to such things as ideas, even dreams. Objects and beings no longer vibrated with essential energy, linked in that ideal, metaphysical domain of connectivity that marijuana had induced. This was, as an experience, much like a fall. Solid reality took getting used to. The impermeability of things made me feel like a superman robbed of his powers. This flatness felt dead and hard. It was difficult to adjust to. But only for the first year or so. After that, the herb dreamscape faded. It became the ‘other’ reality once again, and sobriety reclaimed Planet Earth.

In time, a beauty, a richness began to permeate my world again. For some years, I used mood altering substances hardly at all. In a way, it was a return to a consciousness that I’d abandoned in my late teens, those years of exploration. But it was different, in that I was no longer seeking relief through a distracted mind. In fact, I was going inward more, not seeking to numb or distract, but peeling away the reserve that had prevented me from exploring myself. And inside, I found a depth I had once mistakenly thought was only to be found out in the world somewhere. And this new “groundedness” translated into an abundance all through the material and experiential worlds. It was a time when I began to believe and to understand that the miraculous is everywhere.

Eventually though, through curiosity or nostalgia or hubris, I began to use again. Not like before. No more quiet, soft fogs that endured for weeks and months at a time, with only the occasional patch of fasting to refresh the enduring high. Now I used in short spikes, ranging from a single day to sometimes over a week, with stretches of two to six weeks in between. The highs I experience, as an occasional user, are richer and more transcendent than anything I experienced as a chronic user. Herb has become almost a sacrament as used this way, generating deep insights and triggering creative moments of synthesis on a regular basis. But these benefits only come after periods of abstinence. And I’ve learned that while a 1-day high clears in just one or two smokeless days, a binge that stretches to over a week will need a good two weeks or more to wear off entirely.

It is now both transitions between high and sober states that I recognize as revelatory. It’s a two way trip, as across a border between states, that border perhaps like the surface of a lake, or a doorway between dimensions. It recalls to me my early theory, about the blending of the dream and waking states, two modes of being we experience that parallel one another, each with an authenticity and realness when we are in it. The transition in one direction mirrors the transition in the other. There’s a ‘high’ to coming down, to the clearing of the mind, to the shifting away from the dream state, just as there is to the rush that comes after that first toke, the intake of smoke, and the shift, as intoxication comes on. It’s a very different high: slower, re-orienting rather than disorienting, perhaps more of the body than of the mind. It too stimulates creativity and synthesis, in a way that’s more social and interactive and engaged with the world than that other high. It has given me a new understanding of mind and self. It has created in me a new balance. And It is a realm about which my understanding is still growing.

My herb use has had a major effect on my life, and I still struggle over the import of this. Having a differently functioning mind altered the course of my life, and I sometimes find myself wondering whether I was diverted from my rightful path when I started to smoke, or whether I found it. To decide one way or another would require a commitment to particular philosophical or moral positions. For example, that any mind but the ‘natural’ mind represents a diminishment. Or, that the various perceptual and conceptual breaks with orthodoxy that my herb use stimulated represent a liberation. I don’t know that I’ll ever decide one way or another. I tend to think that I won’t, if only because I reject the notion that the "either-or" absolute of such a choice represents the only way of viewing the issue.

One thing that’s certain is that I don’t want to condemn any experience that’s part of my road. I want to believe that “I can reach heaven from Here”, wherever Here might be. It’s a reflection of my faith that all of my experiences can be a part of my positive growth, and that, in the words of the poem Desiderata, “...no doubt, the universe is unfolding as it should”.

A Month at Millay

Ten years ago this month, I was a resident at the Millay Colony for the Arts, an arts retreat near the town of, Austerlitz, in the eastern mountain country of New York State. I often refer to that month of Millay as being the first time in my life when I lived as a writer.

The Colony is located on the estate of the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, she of the bohemian, “my candle burns at both ends” aesthetic of the early 20^th century. The colony was founded several years after the poet’s death by her surviving sister, to be an open, creative space to which artists could retreat for a month at a time, to work, play, rest or merely exist, away from distraction or demand. Millay occupies a beautiful setting. There are fields and forests, and a mountainous state park a short walk away, and lots of gravel roads cutting through the steep and robust stands of trees.

At the start of each month, six artists - writers, musicians or visual artists - are welcomed to the colony, provided cozy bedrooms and spacious studios, a well-stocked kitchen, a prepared dinner every evening – and lots of quiet. During my month, four of us occupied a roughly converted barn, with bedrooms on the ground floor, and huge, corresponding studios above. There was lots of bare timber, uneven floors and mismatched furniture – rough and plain. I felt I was entering a space that had been cleared for me, and was ready to absorb and feed back my energies over the coming weeks. I bought along my 1940’s era, cast iron, Royal office typewriter, and when Gail, our hostess and manager, heard me clanging away on the first afternoon, she said it had been years since she’d experienced that sound, and she welcomed my noise with the same respect and accommodation with which all or our actions and requests were met.

It wasn’t merely that I lived as a writer for four week; I was treated as one, as one doing meaningful work. There’d been an application process, which included samples of work, a loose proposal as to how I expected the residency to further my artistic goals, and I’d needed a reference letter, which a more successful, writer friend had provided. But otherwise, not before, during or after the experience, was there ever an expectation to show work, to report on progress, defend ones worthiness or even to pretend to be working if one wasn’t. We were invited and expected to do with time and the universe as we pleased, and every time I said a thank you to anyone, it was returned, with a declaration that they were the ones honoured, by my presence there.

I settled into a rhythm of days that was dictated solely by my artistic pace, which I hadn’t known until then. I found that I naturally woke between nine and ten, feeling alive and ready to move. I’d immediately climb the narrow stair to my studio and do my morning stretches on my Royal beast. There was hot water on hand for hot chocolate, and I postponed my first cup of coffee for the kitchen. I’d do some stream of consciousness writing, look over my previous day’s pages, and jot some notes and ideas for future work. And by the time I took the walk for breakfast, I’d be into my day with purpose.

Breakfast was oatmeal or eggs or pancakes, but also a chance to chat briefly with whoever else was a late morning eater. Some of the others I rarely saw before dinner. Liz, one of our two painters, rose at about 5, and I sometimes met her improvising a lunch while I started my breakfast, she with anyone else’s full day’s work already behind her.

I’d get back to work after eating, and would go for two to three hours. This session was always an attack on a new chapter or section, churning out fresh material, pushing myself into the unknowns, and daring myself to take pathways that were confronting for reasons I didn’t generally know. This was always the most exhausting, and also the most exhilarating of the day’s work. By the time I finished, I was ready for a snack and a walk.

Upon returning to my studio, physically tired, but emotionally recharged by the outing, I put in another hour or two, generally augmenting and editing the early afternoon work, before keeping the solitary appointment of the day – dinner with my fellow residents.

We had a great crew that month. The six of us – 4 writers, 2 painters; 3 women, 3 men – philosophised and laughed together, shared about the progress and the hurdles of the day, drank wine and rejoiced in this time we knew was so special, even as we counted down the weeks, then days. I didn’t keep up with the others for very long, but Liz and I became lasting friends, and she’s remained an inspiration for her work ethic as well as her artistry.

After dinner, I’d write a bit more, but without agenda, letting my ideas dart about, small inspirations spark from the work and exploration of the day. And I’d usually have another short walk, into the night, to study the sky and stars. And it was a time to read. I’d bought along a stack of books that I got part way through, but the real reading pleasures were two-fold. First, my discovery of George Perec and his amazing novel, Life: a User’s Manual, that I found in the small library and sampled, morsels at a time.

Then there were the collective journals, in which residents over the decades had reflected on their stay, and on their artistic lives, often on their doubts and fears. The journal writers – and generally there were only one or two residents journaling during any given month – sometimes wrote about the workaday lives and families they’d left behind and would shortly return to, using the distance to see with fresh eyes how they were situated in life. I remember one writer’s entries, written in the dead of winter, comparing the quiet, mountain roads of the area to the city streets he walked at home. Another reflected on his isolation at home, and not quite understanding it. And he wondered at being now thrust into this very temporary family of kindred folk for four short weeks.

And yet another wrote about the joblessness, poverty and rootlessness waiting at home, and all the stresses that came with it, which would threaten to overwhelm the vision of the project that was then underway, with such a sense of accomplishment, zeal and purpose. “What will it be like to get off the bus at the downtown terminal, of a Tuesday afternoon, and not know what I’m going to eat for dinner?”, paraphrases one of his premonitions.

I’d have been devastated if told that ten years later my novel would still be unpublished, un-represented, and only barely finished. But – and I console myself – I’d have been proud of the feeling I have about the novel I have produced, with a beginning and an end, and 120,000 words in between, with characters who live and inhabit a breathing world.

That month helped bring Bursting about. It’s where the name finally came to me. I’d started the book three years before, and it would be another eight before it was done – a journey I’d never have imagined. At Millay – taking up from Rob, another of the writers – I’d begun to tape outlines and character notes, tentative chapter titles and poems, to the thick, wooden walls. It gave the world I was slowly scripting a dimensionality it hadn’t had before. Each of the days stretched long enough that I could dive into the book several times, and have slow, drifting ascents back into my quiet, barn loft studio. I took lots of walks into the hills and fields, while I let the story and characters take me over and reveal themselves. It was so much like what I’d imagined a writing life to be, and yet so different. I hadn’t known, for example, that five to six hours was the most I could manage, sitting at my beast and writing fresh material. But I also hadn’t known how my mind, mood and spirit would so wrap themselves in the work, that I was constantly working it, shaping it, feeling my way through it. The work filled me up, I carried it in my limbs and it overflowed my skull and brain.

I did finally finish my novel. There is some disappointment about it, flowing from the teeming mass of details of my created world that do not survive on the pages of the manuscript. And from how short it falls of the brilliance I have aspired for it to be. And doubt keeps me yet from sinking fully into a second novel that will test what I think I’ve learned.

But I continue to write. And that time at Millay left its imprint on me. I now know the rhythms that work for me. I’ve felt the scope of the creative dimension I can inhabit when I am focused and engaged. And when I find my creative zone, sitting on the second or third level of the Toronto Reference Library most likely, or in the window seat before my desk on Sproat Avenue, I know the place, and I am at home.