Hello Reader,
Got Free Fall?
It is summer and hot and I’m tired. You know what I mean? And lazy too. So at this point in time it would be easy to post some stuff from our weekly Friday “Free Fall writing” group. Easier than trying to compose a big fresh essay. I was thinking in my head that during the summer no one wants to hear political essays. By “hear” I mean read, of course. I suppose that sometimes a bland and boring blog is truly for the best.
As you may know, our Free Fall writing is where we read aloud after we swiftly do stuff composed off the cuff, off the top of our heads, out of our subconscious, while Susan volunteers as our group timer. Yay Susan! (We should appreciate our volunteers!) She’s my age. Sort of my opposite number, while of the opposite gender, you might say. Married, with grown up boys, one still at home but probably not for long. A good family… Not like how I grew up. Needless to say, I don’t cry or have any self pity, while at the same time, according to folk wisdom, living “a life worth examining” is like circling around an onion and peeling down to yet another layer of knowledge. If the onion makes me cry it is only when I am in motion, such as reading and pronouncing words aloud; not when I am silent at home and can therefore stiffen up my whole body to stiffen away my emotions. I once delivered a eulogy without tears by dint of white knuckling a hard cup. There is a good reason why repressed people don’t go around looking spontaneous, relaxed and free.
Lately, from memories voiced by my brother Liam, memories that I confess I’ve forgotten for a good many years, I’ve been putting another onion layer into my mind and into perspective. I’m ready for a deeper slice around the onion. Maybe my forgetting has been from a vested interest. And no, not to avoid making any excuses for my life being different than my opposite number, although that’s one (very minor) payoff… Mostly, things were too gross to remember. Besides, I guess I wanted to act as if I was like everybody else by putting the past behind me. Below, the writing prompt was correspondence school:
My dear dad could have done correspondence school, or maybe just gone off to trade school. He thought about it. He thought about being a baker, but those were family run operations. He drove for a baker, and for Canadian Linen, but those were not jobs with a pension. He once told his sister, who at Cold Lake was making more than the base commander, “Yes, but will you have a pension like him?”
So he found a life with a pension where he would merely tell strangers that he was a “civil servant.” None of the guards ever had to operate the electric chair, which is a good sign that we shouldn’t have capital punishment. Often dad would say, “I’ll be walking the tower today” which gave him lots of time to be alone with his thoughts. In actuality, of course, he probably just “vegged out.”
Year later, after the Munich massacre, I would have to walk sentry all day, and it was excruciating for me. I wonder now if father liked his peers, as they seldom visited, and dad used to talk to himself a lot. Meaning I don’t think he talked to them. The good news is that he got to leave the service early because he was taken hostage so he said he was all messed up. I don’t think he really was, because years earlier he had taken a knife wound and been OK with that, and hadn’t even told his children but his big bandage showed.
Prompt was shovel:
I like shovels, I like the earthy common touch conjured up by the name. As a boy, I never liked the word spade, because no one I knew ever said that word.
Here’s an old one from the peasant’s rebellion against feudalism in medieval England:
“When Adam delved,
and Eve span,
Who was then
the gentleman?”
My scout troop peers noted how I was pretty good with a shovel: crump, kick, lift; crump, kick, lift. On the old farm we shovelled drainage ditches. I’m sure we had a pick around, but except when we were digging bedrock in the east land, we never used the pick. No need, our land was black soil from the glacier.
As an adult I was to dig in God’s own country: “God made it, then forgot it” we said as the land was all rock with a little bit of dirt for decoration. Now I used the pick to do all the digging, the shovel then was a mere afterthought to throw the earth. No wonder people used the phrase “pick and shovel.”
Prompt was a catch in the throat:
Lately, my body has been less restricted, more free, and with more opportunities to have a catch in the throat. Not something easy for characters in fiction, not something common on the idiot box for time wasting shows down from vaudeville and radio plays. But there you are.
I’ve always known, without knowing why, that the last three kids in my family didn’t have the sense of humour of the first three kids; the first ones could laugh, the later ones were mannikins. Last night I was writing a letter to a brother who named labels. Our mother was like someone out of woman’s liberation where a super-violent person would be totally sane in public or around police officers. It was not healthy to laugh around her. That is all.
Prompt was campfire:
I’ve been thinking lately of my campfire days. Mother would always scream at me on days I came back from camp, on Sundays I mean, because she was angry that I got some time of happiness. It was stressful packing on Friday, but gradually I got used to it. I remember I would always find some cardboard and twine and punch holes and make an axe guard. Often I would file the axe sharper the night before.
Part of my stress was being criticized for what I packed: Call it “damned if you do, and damned if you don’t.” Once I defended myself in advance for packing dry wood, on a rainy weekend, and it turns out I got laughed at for defending myself for of course, ha-ha, they would pack wood too. One weekend we attended a district jamboree; my troop won. Result? We still got criticized for being not as good as troops from a decade ago. My family was curiously detached from time, giving no credit to the modern decades, as well as no credit to me for being a patrol leader and troop leader. If only I knew then what I know now.
A campfire was my chance to mingle closely with the kids who were otherwise so far away. Once we drove past an Indian reservation on our way to camp. Boys were playing hockey with home made sticks. “Wow” said the rich Scouts. ‘Nothing’ was what I said, nothing about having such sticks at home. My brothers and I also made our own bows and arrows, staining the bows with salmon berries and leaving them for a season to cure.
Prompt was family circle:
My brother recently reminded me of my mother’s frequent rampages, where you could hear her from the mushroom sheds a hundred yards away. Strange how he has been my memory for this. I had remembered my mother burning my toys, but not this. I had remembered violence from others, but not this. My mother stopped hitting us after a mother down the road killed her three kids with an axe, and after Liam stopped her. So she started using words that probably did greater long term damage. Strange. I had nightmares after I left home about physical things, but not the mental. I was so pleased one day to realize the nightmares had stopped which meant, I was sure, that I was getting more confident.
The whole family circle had trouble. My dad walked my cousin down the aisle for marriage because her father was too drunk that day. I know now that people use medication when they are not willing to feel. Maybe I am the only sibling to have escaped such escapes. Lucky and determined, that’s why. Lucky.
Sean Crawford
August
Calgary
2019
Footnote: Speaking of spades, if you are a native English speaker you may appreciate this one: I believe it was writer Philip Jose Farmer who had a scene near the Mississippi where an army general says, “Have your man take his shovel and dig here…” A young Lieutenant speaks truth to power, “Uh, Sir, that’s an “entrenching tool.”” The older man replies, “I’m a general; I can call a shovel a shovel.”
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