About Miss G ...

 I have always been somewhat embarrassed over the years to write about my marvellous offspring. It seems like hubris or something, and I am quite sure their level of success and accomplishment is theirs, not mine. But. The next generation is just as marvellous as the previous, and I am going to rejoice here in this space. I just have to. You are now warned and can skip the post and come back later.

My granddaughter  - the one I used to post about as 'Little Stuff' - is a big girl now. She graduated from McGill Thursday evening. My tall, athletic, beautiful granddaughter. Her mother did tell me her Grade Point Average sometime, but I don’t recall the detail. There might have been an A- in there somewhere, but she was pretty well straight A, in a course that looked to me like a mountain to climb. It was a mixed Arts and Science program called Sustainability, Science and Society. She graduated with the highest grade point average in the Arts and Science faculty. Her mother did the same in her undergraduate degree and received a Governor General’s Medal for the highest marks in Arts and Science from McMaster. It will be interesting to see if that is still done and if Audrey gets one.

We just talked to her mother, who seemed to me to be a bit peeved that Audrey’ achievement was not better recognised. Katie said that there was a huge group graduating and that in essence they were all just marched across the stage, tapped on the shoulder and ushered off. However, Audrey looked beautiful, her father bought her flowers (held in place by a McGill teddy bear, I am told) and we will have time to make much of her before she leaves for England and the high-octane Master’s program for which she has been accepted. I don’t know much about it yet except that it seems to feature psychology and that the girl will ace it. (Again, as her mother before her. Katie got a UK Commonwealth scholarship and did a PhD in biology at Cambridge). Audrey has applied for funding, but has not heard as yet.

When she is not being a top student, Audrey runs. She was on the McGill track team as a sprinter and trained in Ottawa for some years with the Lion’s Track and Field club. Her latest is a venture into longer distances and she entered in the 5 Kilometre race in Ottawa last weekend – ran on her 22^nd birthday in fact – and placed not badly. She got a program on line to learn from and I think she expects to do better with more experience. This is a girl who does things Well.

Whenever I think about it, I marvel at our good fortune in our daughters. Both reached the top of their professions; Katie is a professor at University of Ottawa (and if you want to know what kind of professor she is, google ‘Rate My Prof’ and read the praise from her students). Wendy left the Foreign Service from the position of High Commissioner – that is what an Ambassador is called in Commonwealth countries. She was one of six Assistant Secretary positions at NATO, a really amazing post. She has had postings and positions all over Europe and in Africa. In her spare time, she has done things like canoe down the Grand Canyon. Although it is highly unlikely I will be around to see the heights Audrey may reach, I am sure she will climb with skill and determination.

All my girls have brains and good taste and wide-ranging interests. And cats. No one could ask for more. 

The Pageantry of It All

 

I have just spent an hour listening to King Charles III read the Speech from the Throne. It was the first time ever for me to see the pageantry and customs surrounding what has been a standard of parliamentary democracy as we practice it. The reminder that the present form goes back hundreds of years is something I did not need because it is something I value. I learned the ins and outs of the form as a university undergraduate by participating in ‘Model Parliaments’, and in formal debates. It is a good method, although at times it can seem cumbersome. It is a method that, I believe, would preclude the present mockery of democracy in the United States. A Prime Minister is not able to govern by proclamation; a government that tried that would fail and an election would be triggered.

The speech was interesting in several ways. It sounded to me as if the king had inserted little bits of it by himself, most especially the conclusion where he quoted the national anthem’s wording of “the true north strong and free.” Total kitsch. But right, in context. Can't fault it but I cannot see the government’s writers putting that in. And too many figures quoted. In addition, I have a few minor complaints about the format. One is that it seems stupid to have issued the man a floppy booklet to read from where he struggled at times to turn the pages. The other is that it is annoying to have an English language voice-over for the French. Most of us have enough second language to follow clear, slowly read statements, especially if they are repeats of the same material. I wanted to judge the king’s French accent and was unable to hear him.

Anyway, that was my morning. Trade barriers, energy conservation and management, housing starts, some lowering/increasing of fees and rates, increased military spending (we’ve heard that before), all stuff that came up in the campaign. Annoying that the Liberals are taking credit for the dental program; the NDP shoved that one down their throats. Mostly, though, the speech was about sovereignty. With the king making the running. It would be more amusing if it were less important.

I like our country, a lot, and never more so than when we do something as stodgy but as pertinent as this morning’s entertainment.

On Mother's Day

 

My father was newly home from the Navy - 1947

Today is the day set aside, as they say, for children to honour their mothers. As a concept, I must say it annoys me. The ‘day’ becomes an occasion to spend money on things like cards, flowers, small gifts. You might arrange to take mother out of the house for a meal she does not have to cook; good luck at getting into any restaurant where you have not made a reservation well in advance. You might, given the situation, fete your mother at home and cook a meal for her. This is supposing that you are part of a ‘nuclear’ family and your mother lives separately from you. The whole thing is a contrived event that does, for me, very little.

 Honouring a mother? What does that even mean? To ‘honour’ someone is to, (The Oxford Dictionary says),.”regard with great respect. Example: "They honoured their parents in all they did."

Similar: hold in great respect, hold in high esteem, have a high regard for, esteem, respect, admire, defer to, look up to, think highly of, appreciate, value, prize, cherish, reverence, revere, venerate’ worship, put on a pedestal.

Some of the similar terms I can buy into. I like “think highly of”, “hold in great respect”. My mother was a woman of blazing intelligence, driven to do everything she did as perfectly as possible, a curious, warm, observing, thinking person. She was funny, thoughtful, graceful, driven. Obviously, someone to “hold in high esteem”. But to “put on a pedestal’ is a step way too far. She could be opinionated, dismissive, wrong about something. She was a master at ignoring things. She could worry at an impressive level about things that were just fine.

 My mother did her best, and it was a very good best, to bring me up to be a model child and adolescent. And I did my best, mostly, to measure up. Good grades, good manners, participation in the things my mother thought were worth while like Brownies, Sunday school and swimming lessons. (I liked the swimming.) I was, until about age fifteen, a good girl. In fairness, I have to say that what I chose to read was never censored, my friends were always welcomed, my interests were fostered even if they were not hers. And as I grew up and grew out of the circled wagons of her expectations of me, I never stopped loving her and trying to make her happy. After I left home, for instance, I wrote a weekly letter detailing a great deal of what I was doing and thinking. When she arrived at my wedding with a white dress and hat for me to wear, I wore them. When she sewed bright yellow trousers for me to wear, I wore those too.

 Many of my housekeeping habits, my choices in reading, my expectations in interactions with people, are still in keeping with my mother’s tastes and ways. I fold my towels in threes the way she did. I keep a lot of books she would approve. (Well, probably not the science fiction and fantasy – she was not enchanted even with Tolkien.) I think of her often with love. I miss her, often. I tried my best not to bring up my daughters to be good girls, to be model children. But honesty compels me to say that I am not sure I did any better for them than she did for me.

As a new grandmother - Christmas, 1966

 It is Mother’s Day. But I know that my mother is with me for 365 days a year and I am good with that. Maybe the word I should use is “cherish’. I cherish all we had together. I remember things she did and said, often. I miss her. I loved her.

Sweet Violets

 The yard of the house I lived in as a girl was long and narrow, with a paved walkway down the centre that led to the trash bins, the back fence and the back gate into the alley. The alley itself was dirt and worked well for hopscotch. On the right side of the yard, just behind the back of the house, stood a single car garage. Behind that, again, was a huge old willow tree. My mother’s wash lines ran from the garage to the willow and from the willow to a post at the back of the yard. Behind the garage not much grew as it was shady, but there were, in season, clumps of small, hardy violets. A beautiful deep purple, they were very scented. My mother loved to hang clothes on the line above them as she said things came in from the line ‘smelling wonderful’.                                                                                                                                                                                                      

My mother was a determined gardener. On a trellis beside the house there was a clematis, one she had transplanted every time she and my father moved, and, as well, there was a bed of peonies and several rose vines of various lengths of thorns, the one with really vicious thorns beside the garage door. At the back of the property, to screen the alley, there was a line of flowering bushes – bridal wreath is the one I recall. I envied the children of the house across the alley as there were several of them to split what seemed to me to be endless amounts of yard work, including but not limited to policing the willow’s dead branches, cutting back the evil roses, sweeping, raking and, when I was older, cutting the grass. I don’t recall paying much heed to those violets.

Sometime in there the willow had to be cut down. It may have been damaged in a storm; I am not sure. My mother commissioned a post for her clothes lines and the new lines ran from the garage to the post. I don’t think my mother planted anything more except a new baby tree. But, when my parents decided to sell the big house in Windsor and move to our city, there was a firm directive to me to get out a trowel and some trugs and dig up enough violets that my mother could be sure some would survive to reach their new home. She also considered the clematis, but since their grandparents were moving two climate zones colder, my daughters persuaded their grandma to let them give her a new, hardy clematis that would thrive in Ottawa.

My parents’ new home was a bungalow on a huge lot, the original suburb having been on septic systems. It was painted white with a black front door and my mother immediately realized that it needed, indeed cried for, red geraniums and white in a border across the front. When she discovered a rhubarb patch, she was delighted, and she relished a back patio with the clothes line in easy reach. When she received a picnic table for a Mother’s Day gift, her pleasure was complete. The clematis was duly installed and lawn maintenance people hired. (Although if they did not arrive to my mother’s taste in grass length, I cut. And raked. And cut.) The violets were also duly transplanted, some at my parents’ place and some in a corner of my aunt’s backyard, the bit not taken up by the swimming pool.

Forward a number of years, and my aunt was being overrun by violets, she said. She dug the majority of them and firmly gave them to me. I brought them out here and planted a row of them in the low bush beside the cut lawn at the side of the house. And sort of forgot about them, except in the week or two that they flower and the scent is wafted across the grass.

 

The photos accompanying this essay illustrate that these violets are stubborn, take-charge flowers. Plant one and ignore it and you have a multitude. This week, as spring peeps up, they are front and centre in our lawn. And the scent is still wonderful.