Pop 89: Thrown Together
By Madonna Hamel
I’ve heard family defined as the people who have to take you in when you wash up on the rocky shores of life. In 2010, when, in the midst of sporadic successes in my professional life, my personal life was foundering, my father, newly widowed, took me in. And thus the prodigal daughter and the bereft husband were thrown together to muddle through until the dust settled and the darkness passed, if only for a while.
I recall the day Dad and I visited Mom’s grave, and he turned to me and whispered sheepishly: I bet you wish it was me who died instead of her. To his brave and sad suspicion, I replied: It’s not that Dad. It’s just that I knew her so much better than I know you. We’ve been thrown together, so we will get to know each other.
I got to know some other people at that time - friends who helped us move through a new chapter in our lives - our neighbours Alyson and Al. Al and Al are consummate hosts. They bring people together under their airy roof, feed us vintage wines and exotic cheeses, and pull from us stories we’ve been dying to tell. Or never knew we held. Stories that only needed nudging.
Some days, Evan, a hockey player from Saskatchewan living across the street, would come over with his three little girls. Other days, Alyson and I would make our way to the end of the road and dive off rocks into the warm Okanagan Lake. We’d talk about books and her kids, or we’d just float and bob silently on the water til sunset, and sometimes we’d laugh, and sometimes we’d cry. Walking back to her car, gripping our towels around our wet bodies, I always felt lighter, washed clean of the day’s sorrows and worries. Those days made me feel my life was not a shipwreck but a boatload of friends holding life preservers in the shape of stories.
For three summers, we lived like that. I gardened my mother’s garden and fed my Dad whatever he wanted for supper, which was usually chicken wings or barbecued ribs, then watched Jeopardy with him. After he went to bed, I’d call over the fence to Alyson: “Hey neighbour, whatcha doing?” And over the fence came the reply: “Come over.”
Last night, she called me over again. We don’t live a hedge away. But we’re in the same town as long as my father is in hospital. I’m staying a few blocks away with my sister, who takes turns with me, sitting with Pops while he eats, making sure he consumes more than pudding, then playing checkers to keep him seated upright for at least another hour, even though he just wants to sleep. These are the obligations of sisters and daughters.
“You’re not going to believe this,” says Aylson over the phone. “Evan’s Dad is in town, and he told me about this column in a prairie newspaper by a writer named Madonna. You have to come over.” John lives in Eston. When Evan was young, he moved from Eston to Swift Current to play hockey. It turns out his PE teacher in high school is a friend of mine. In fact, we know many of the same people he knew as a child, people I met when I moved away from Kelowna to Val Marie.
Over and over, I marvel at the ways our lives, all our lives, urge toward meaning and connection. The longer I live, the easier it is to understand what the Franciscan author Richard Rohr means when he says: “Religion can only use the language of metaphor because it points to transcendent things. Basically, you can translate The Kingdom of Heaven as The Big Picture.” We are constantly invited to live in “the final and full picture, and not get lost in momentary dramas, hurts and agendas.”
And as I age and allow for The Big Picture, I find, paradoxically and mysteriously, that my world gets smaller. That is, all the random events and strange acquaintances become welcome and necessary guests at the wine and cheese table of life.
Just this morning at New Year’s Eve mass, I ran into Johnny, one of my brother Doug’s best friends from high school. I immediately called Doug and shoved my cell phone into Johnny’s face because no one has a laugh like Johnny; it’s a balm for weary souls. As a kid, Johnny cheered Doug in the same way Alyson did me in my later years. And after a hard year recovering from a stroke, my brother could use a laugh. This evening, seated next to me at Al and Al’s, Evan introduced me to his beautiful young wife. Turns out she’s Johnny’s daughter.
I am reminded of the day in Quebec City when I realized I was related to my new neighbour. “Bien sur!” She laughed. “We are all relations. This is an old country, Quebec.” And on the prairie, nobody seems surprised either - families go generations back. Indigenous families even farther. We are ALL relations; they remind us, even when we feel haphazardly thrown together.
We don’t get to pick our neighbours. And even when we think we are choosing our mates and spouses and friends, we have no idea the rich and confounding pantheon of little gods and grubby angels that come with the package. If we did, we might not have the guts to go through with it.
On the prairie, if you get caught in a storm, you pull over and trudge to the nearest home, and they will take you in. We call this a Storm Stay. You watch and wait for the storm to pass, telling stories, drinking cups of coffee. It occurs to me, as my family goes through this storm of illnesses, longing for clear skies and land to light on, that life is just one big storm stay, and we are thrown together until it passes.