Archives for November, 2008

I once had to a give a eulogy for girl I used to know, which was strange because I hadn’t known her very well at all. The extent of my knowledge of her mostly centred on my being one of the first to know the exact two digits that comprised her body weight the night she died in her dorm bedroom.

I stood at the podium, a print out of someone else’s email spread flat in front of me, its creases and ellipses and jagged line breaks standing out like amateur cartography. I opened my mouth to say something, realised my voice was about to break, and stopped, surprised. “I think I’m about to start to crying,” I said out loud, slowly, wonderingly, following a stalled train of thought. The mic was on and there was some soft laughter in the room in response to this.

“I’m not supposed to be crying,” and this was to myself, though still out loud, in anger, because I knew I had no right to public grief. For whom could I possibly be crying; I hadn’t known her very well at all. The mic was still on. Even with my head bowed, eyes fixed blindly on the wood and the paper, I could hear the silence shifting, growing restive.

I don’t remember what I said. I hadn’t prepared anything. Someone else, a closer friend to the dearly departed, had been the one who was supposed to say something on behalf of the student community, but ten minutes before the memorial she decided she couldn’t. I don’t remember if she was there in the audience or not. Mostly I hope she hadn’t been there to hear me.

What I remember is that right after that, just before we all filed out of the heavily-panelled thickly-carpeted room, while we milled around, paying our condolences to her relatives and making small talk about next week’s year-end exams, I was excessively cheerful, trying to undo somehow the disarray of my opening.

And then I did what, I don’t know. Went and yelled at someone about community guilt, made heated and not entirely unjustified accusations of criminal negligence, punched something. 45, after all, is an easy number over which to get angry. All the while I tried not to entertain the one question that persists, two years later: would I have made the effort to know her better if I’d known she was going to die, or known how.

The question isn’t entirely rhetorical. The hope is that I will never know its answer; the fear is that I already do.

My father will occasionally have one us of check his emails for him. Every time we do so constitutes a technological intervention, beginning with the retrieval of his password and ending with a careful explanation of the metaphysics of the Internet. We remember to check his email so rarely, though, that more often than not we end up having to reset his password, only to find his inbox scrubbed empty all over again by Hotmail’s invisible slaveforce. When we do check his mail in time to read his letters, I skim through the emails, tell him who wrote and repeat the gist of their messages. Sometimes he requests a print out of his emails, sometimes he has one of us reply for him, and sometimes he types out a response himself, tortuously reassuring himself of the location of each letter on the keyboard before committing himself to touching it.

There was one man whose emails I never attempted to summarise to my father. Arjun emailed, I’d say and my father would never ask what he’d written, only tell me to note the email so he’d remember to read it himself. He emailed fairly regularly, a childhood friend of my father’s who’d moved to Ohio in the 1960s to do a PhD. Thirty years later, dissertation incomplete, he made a trip to Canada, wandered drunk into a snowstorm where he saw Jesus, and lost four fingers to frostbite, two from each hand. He had his surgery done in Toronto General and his baptism in Montreal. That December, sans former accoutrements of wife and children, he returned to Jaffna, from where he now sends rambling emails addressed to people who have nothing in common with the others listed in his randomly-generated CC fields. The BCCs are rendered only slightly less obscure when my father gets a letter in which his own email address is invisible, where his name shows up in the third person in a conversation with someone he doesn’t know.
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Justin Jones – Boots of Spanish Leather (zshare)

I decided I might as well write this here, since I don’t know if you check your email address anymore, or if you even remember your own password. And anyway, in light of everything, this space seems fitting.

Thank you.

I picked it up at the post office and it was wrapped in official Canada Post shrinkwrap and that was enough to make me smile, the self-importance of all that government-approved wrapping. That box could have been empty and I’d have been happy enough for the postage. Anyway, I was on my way to school, or I was on my way to some randomly chosen street, or I was going to the beach, or I was about to see someone for lunch, or any one of a number of or’s – the point is that I was going somewhere that morning and so, after signing the necessary forms, I put the package in my bag without opening it. I waited for the bus and I got on the bus and I took my favourite seat at the very back of the bus, where the seats are just high enough that my toes don’t quite touch the ground. That was also the day I got an anonymous postcard in the mail – through the mailslot, no pickup required – and so I pulled that out of my bag first and read that first, carefully, all three handwritten lines.

I waited for one stop to pass, and then the next, and then I took it out of my bag. There was the shrinkwrap to go through, then the ribbon to untie, then your choice in font to identify and consider, then the box to untape, and then — and I was expecting a book, or maybe fudge — I pulled it out and said oh my god and startled the girl next to me, and then I put it back in its box and I didn’t open it again for at least another week.

It still scares me, a little. You may have seen me without it, in which case I hope you weren’t offended. I was working my way up to it, but in all honesty, a part of me just wanted to frame it and hang it on my wall, but that would be strange, I think. Also, I was waiting for the right moment. That moment took three and a half months in coming.

I have trouble accepting gifts, especially of this magnitude, especially when I have no way of returning the gesture. It’s … educational, not having a choice in the matter.

Thank you
& take care,
-f.

PS: It’s just as well that my building has only 18 floors, else I’d have never gotten it.

Nina Simone – Ain’t Got No…I’ve Got Life (youtube)

It has been a difficult year. The thing about extended periods of hurt is that you reach a point when, unless you’re very careful, every conversation becomes pitiful. Sometime in June, when I realised I needed to stop talking, I did. Here, anyway.

But hi, I’ve missed you – the people I’ve met because of this space, and the conversations that we’ve had that I wouldn’t have had otherwise. So I’m back, with the one disclaimer that this space will no longer be as straightforwardly autobiographical as it used to be. I’m likely going to continue writing about me, but hopefully a lot less often and a lot less truthfully.

I’ve been thinking about grace for some time now and as I think about these last few months and the conversations I’ve had, I’ve come to believe that there is a grace particular to the act of reading: this willingness to suspend disbelief, to indulge someone else’s insecurities a while, to humour their arrogance. Thank you for that.

A note on Nina Simone:
I know no musician who can touch Nina Simone for sheer calculated, disciplined force. Of all her songs, this is my favourite. And of all its renditions, this is the one I love hardest, the one that most clearly demonstrates why the thought of her as a physical, breathing person makes me catch my breath a little.