July: T'es Capab'
The month of July is brought to us by ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. Who cares? LET"S GO.
Le message reste pareil: T'es. Capab'. Tu es capable. Whatever it is: you can do it. Est-ce que c'est clair?
Unless your name is Joe and you write a thrice quarterly newsletter. What a failure!
Who the hell has the time to write all this down? I obviously don't. This seventh instalment from 2019—le mois de juillet—has weighed on me more than the syllabus and course I'm teaching at Algonquin College this September. I am instructing Editing in the program I graduated from (I mean the program "from which I graduated"). The July instalment has occupied me more than the week I spent reading my father's journals in August at a house-sit in Hintonburg. Because this newsletter is about July and July was a mixed bag of fun and utter shite.
Watching the Scharf brothers dance into the stinking summer heat to Alexisonfire was a thrill. Screaming almost every word to Backstreet Boys alongside my fiancée, mother, and sister was wonderful. But when I think about Bluesfest 2019, I think about a sore back that knocked me down for a week, and the death of my grandmother Marg.
Near the end, my grandma thought I was a doctor in the hospital. It's not that she didn't know me, she just knew me as her grandson and imagined I was a doctor. Grandma, on one of my last visits I found you in a delirium. You were shaking the side of the bed and upset. "I'm Dorothy's sister," you told me. "My boyfriend is out there." I told you this: "You certainly are Dorothy's sister. Lois and Sue's too," and, "your boyfriend went home but he'll be back. You can't keep him away."
"Yeah," you said with a little smile, and my heart hurt as I smiled back.
Then you said: "I think I'm getting a little weird." And that made me burst into tears and hug you.
I don't think you noticed I was crying. You just said, appreciatively, "Oh, you're nice and warm." And I cried a little harder but laughed too.
I love you for that, Grandma. Of the four Welch sisters, you were the weirdest. You were the wild card. You held it together—maintaining a dignity even in the face of horror. You wanted to go home more than anything, you were adamant about that. But about pain or despair or embarrassment you were even-keeled—built to last. What pain? What the fuck is despair? Embarrassed about what? I know you realized that the cutlery changed from silver to aluminium, that the view out the window was slightly different, that there were strange people all around that you didn't know. That you weren't at home with your boyfriend. You wanted to go home more than anything. I'm sorry you couldn't go home.
Now every time I hear the cottage's kitchen sink drain, I hear you going, "whoosh!" while it gurgles grossly. You loved that sound, and on a VHS I watched recently you told the camera: "Not everybody has a sink that makes a sound like that!" You weirdo. I love you so much.
Grandma, I finished this article. It's the most ambitious piece I've ever written. And I do not like the finished product. In fact, I hate the way it turned out. The content, not the layout. There was so much more to say. This feeling—a lack of satisfaction and slight unease at its existence in every hotel room in Ottawa—is mixed with self-aware ingratitude. I have a job, I have a podium on which to shout things, and I have a byline in every hotel room in Ottawa. But I think I really only liked getting the copy of the magazine so I could hand it to you, and you'd tell me, "Isn't this great?" I don't even know if you read it. (I don't care.)
I know you never read this newsletter.
I didn't have to ask you if you were proud of me because I know you were. I know you loved my house, and you were brave enough to climb the stairs from one floor to the next even when you couldn't walk properly. I could have lived on the summit of Mont Tremblant and I think you would have crawled up to see my dining table setting. I know you loved Karine. I know you loved me, even though you only told me a few times in my life.
So fuck the start of July. If we look at it in the present tense:
It's Saturday, July 6, Karine and I have a nice day ahead of us. We go shopping for a gravel bike for her and yellow paint for our new reading nook. Then, on our way to see the Toronto punk band PUP play the big stage at the 25th annual Ottawa Bluesfest, Karine is doored as we arrive to the venue. An Uber passenger exits the vehicle without looking or thinking, and the next thing I know Karine is on the sidewalk. Then she's up again, explaining breathlessly to the passenger just how stupid you have to be to open your door into a bike lane. She is okay. But Christ that is scary.
That night, at home, Karine is slightly bruised, my back is starting to hurt, and Marg dies in her sleep, around 10:30 p.m.
&&&
Okay, Joe. T'es capab'.
Looks like I already wrote that story, from my April newsletter, about Grandma tucking me in at the cottage. It's available on my still-online blog Do Your Best. (Have we recognized the theme of my online writings yet?) And here's a post that I made for myself when I was really hurting. It's from a novel. Novels teach us how to look at the world. When I lost my friend Baloo, my uncle Paul, and my dad Jean in just three months in 2011 & 2012, I needed to know what I could do in the face of such awful absence:
“When loved ones die, you have to live on their behalf. See things as though with their eyes. Remember how they used to say things, and use those words oneself. Be thankful that you can do things that they cannot… This is how I live without Pelagia’s mother. I have no interest in flowers, but for her I will look at a rock-rose or a lily. For her I eat aubergines, because she loved them…” —Louis de Bernières, Captain Corelli’s Mandolin
Baloo liked to make fires and smoke joints, Paul like to drink and flirt, Jean liked to cook and tell jokes. I eat tartiflette, homemade pizzas, and Red River oatmeal for them. You weirdos.
What else is there to say about July?... It shall live in infamy. And so shall Marg McNally née Welch, who loved honey on toast and to dig in her garden.
Call your moms, or just a mom who would love a phone call. And find yourself a reading nook to read for those who can't read anymore.
Okay.
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