raw forming volume 1 part 7 - 1964 march-april  work & days: a lifetime journal project

March 7th

[journal]

- of a wild windy morning of no sleep.

Last night lying in half-dream with seaweed thoughts thrashing in my mind and the window thumping faintly from the wind. Until surrealist morning framed in my window -

Olivia coming in in the dark to smooth my covers and hang up my red shift. She doesn't hang up her own things. It was touching to see her hanging mine -

Lying on the floor, stretched flat with my elbows tight over my face, shaking with grief. Cathy and Olivia sitting behind me silent, and not hearing the "goaway, goaway, goaway, goaway" shrilling in my mind.

Flat, with tears sliding down the sides of my face. A feeling of retreat into a hard black triangle far away in grey nebulous ...

Olivia touching my chest and far away saying "Ellie what is the mattah? You can tell me. Tell me! Ellie!"

[Earlier] walking home with hard crooked steps - holding hands with Dennis unfeelingly. Calvin and Olivia behind us. Wes grinning at the door under his cocky hat.

Moments dancing slow dances with Dennis when there was nothing but the beat of the music and the sliding beat of our footsteps - his shoulder under my hand, my shoulder under his. My face along his. The muscles moving under his skin. His face along my neck. No person, Dennis: a shoulder of comfort and reassurance of being precious, as I remember Frank -

"I have been faithful to you, Cynara! In my fashion." Standing to look out the window on the cool dim street. With Dennis looking at me as tho' I were lovely. Responding with ludicrous earnestness to his gallantries, and laughing, then, later. Torturous dancing with Calvin so aggressive that I pushed him away in my mind, violently. Ellen's thin body entire animation and her pretty narrow feet flashing. The couple in the corner dancing in gay improvisations, he beautiful and dark, she light and delicate. Tyrone dancing with a girl in a blue dress, their arms around each other's necks loosely, heads tilted to talk. Olivia following complex calypso rhythms like a West Indian. Ghazali smiling and solicitous.

A feeling of isolation and loss; the feeling of being alone at a party. No contacts established.

And in the dissolving dark of it all this morning, my poetry book (all loose pages) and Auden -

Lay your sleeping head my love
Faithless on my human arm.
Time and fevers burn away
Individual beauty from
Thoughtful children, and the grave
Proves the child ephemeral.
But in my arms till break of day
Let the living creature lie -
Mortal, guilty, but to me
The entirely beautiful.
 
Certainty, fidelity
On the stroke of midnight pass
Like vibrations of a bell,
And fashionable madmen raise
Their pedantic boring cry:
Every farthing of the cost,
All the dreaded cards foretell,
Shall be paid, but from this night
Not a whisper, not a thought,
Not a kiss nor look be lost.
 
Beauty, midnight, vision dies:
Let the winds of dawn that blow
Softly round your sleeping head
Such a day of sweetness show
Eye and knocking heart shall bless,
Find the mortal world enough;
Noons of dryness see you fed
By the involuntary powers,
Nights of insult let you pass
Watched by every human love.

This morning a smile for the wind and another for the histrionics of last night.

(And remember Prokop's with Ghazali, the taxi and the steak.) [19th birthday celebration]

[back to letters]

Two things today:

- I am secretary for the CUCND for next term.

- I have a job.

Most important, I have a job. Here in Kingston. At Sunnyside. I am not excited primarily about having a job, or about the money (I could make nearly twice as much a month at the cannery - it is $125 per month plus board and room), but about the job itself. Listen. Sunnyside is a rambling white Colonial house about five blocks from here, surrounded by acres of grass and trees. There are two stone gateposts and a sign that says "Sunnyside." [Sunnyside Children's Centre] The house: a home for disturbed children taken from foster homes. There are about fifteen kids between four and eleven years old, not mentally retarded at all, in fact, most are above average in intelligence, disturbed in that they have trouble relating to other children or to adults or both. They stay at Sunnyside for a year or eighteen months until they are ready for adoption. During their stay they are kept in this enormous, wonderfully tidy but yet full of kid-stuff house with its dogs and cats and records and pictures and smothered with all the happiness and affection and individual treatment possible, and slowly they begin to act like bright normal kids. I spent last Saturday afternoon and dinner there as an interview to see how it would be and to have the place look me over. Tonight they phoned to tell me that I was - bar catastrophe - in. During the afternoon I met most of the kids, played baseball in the slush, broke up a few fights, and talked to Miss Detweiler (second boss lady) [psychologist, clinical director 1954-1967).

She explained that the staff includes a psychologist, a social worker, so on. All of the staff meets often to discuss the children individually, and each child is handled according to a special tactic almost military in character. Some kids get the overwhelming affection bit, some who tend to be over affectionate are reassured in other ways. All of them are given the happiest atmosphere the staff can manage and the results are steady and warming. Do you blame me for feeling very happy about getting on, pay be hanged? My job will be a sort of glorified baby-sitting: recreation, getting up and putting to bed, cuddling and cooing and scolding when necessary. They are very dear kids and I'm looking forward to it all especially. The whole summer of playing with kids. The job also provides for part-time next year, so that will be extra money then. And all this is near the campus and the library for the summer. There are also other college kids working at Sunnyside full and part time. And Olivia will be in Toronto.

See you post exams.

March 14

I've gone temporarily underground. To study - and quite literally underground because I've discovered that the musty mole-y corridors of the stacks at the library are the ideal place to study. Not beside the English shelves tho! (Temptation to browse, eg love letters of Carlyle). So I have a corner beside a lot of dusty grey Spanish books.

Spring is here - residence is in a constant manic state. But what about Sexsmith? It's a glorious place for March and April, when the water is roaring away across the street by the post office and the sisters are out in front of their house digging out their ditches with their sober black skirts flirting in the wind.

Am studying Synge and the Irish stage in English (not Riders to the Sea this time - The Playboy of the Western World, and it's beautiful.) Got the collected works of Gerald Manley Hopkins (and snatches of his journals and letters!) from Olivia for birthday.

March 23

It is almost impossible to realize that in exactly a month from today the exams will be over, my first year at university will be over, our Ban Righ III family will be wind-scattered forever. And then summer, Sunnyside, summer school studies (I hope to audit some courses - perhaps Spanish or German or both), books to read, explorations and wanderings on campus. The summer holidays begin so early.

It's nearly dinnertime and I'm so hungry that I can't study - half an hour to wait.

Report on activities: yesterday went to mass in Marg's wonderful hat to hear the Palm Sunday music. All the statues of Christ were draped with purple. On Easter morning the hangings are removed. The ceremony yesterday was wonderfully colorful: three priests in splendorous red and gold robes which they changed for purple ones later in the service. The small boys in their white choir robes filed through the cathedral in a procession carrying palm branches. The wonderful big organ thundered in the back balcony. Most of the congregation had small palm branches as well, and a little girl across the aisle was beating up a little uproar with hers.

Then last night listened to some of Bach's Easter music on CBC - perhaps you heard it too?

It is a beautiful, bright Monday - the ice in the lake is clearing out. People are down promenading along the sidewalk.

Olivia has finally begun to do some work - I got her up at 7:30 this morning and no one on the floor could believe their eyes because usually she tumbles into her clothes and slides into the dining room just as they are closing the doors at 8:30 - unkempt and a little surly.

Everyone is out in summer clothes -

We did the Schuman A Minor Concerto in Music a day or two ago - made me a bit homesick.

-

Five minutes before French class on Thursday morning - all is busy but happy - first exam on the 8th - thanks for sending the pin - it is a conversation piece on campus - it looks as tho' I'm 'pinned' you see and everybody wants to know who - a meeting with International House last night at Dr Colbourne's (math prof very interested in international students) with cocoa and apples and cakes - met a boy there from Camrose who has worked in Fort St John and sat jabbering with him excitedly about Beaverlodge sports days and Grande Prairie softball tournements and so on. And he has seen the La Glace signpost - it feels uncanny to meet someone who knows where La Glace is, as tho' someone else had trespassed in a private dream I had or a world I only imagine to exist. Something about working here this summer will be welcoming foreign students who arrive early, at the end of August to the Sept 16 opening of registration next fall.

We are having lovely weather, the sun wakes me at 7:30 every morning by camping on my face, my red twigs are bursting into leaf from their warm corner by the register.

We had a floor picture taken of all Ban Righ II and if you want a copy (they are large 6"-8" approx) please send $1.50 rather soon.

Congradulations, Judy, on your rhetorical triumphs, and luck on the GP eliminations [4-H speaking contests]. I've been thinking how close you are to grade twelve and how close, after that, to college. Every year reels by so quickly that I'll be in graduate school tomorrow and you'll be a freshette. - Oh I talked to some engineers last night, Paul, trying to get info on aeronotical engineering. But they were electrical and chemical engineers and knew nothing! - How is the calf crop? Don't forget to tell me what happened in the crucial girls' basketball game - and has the wonderfull wild-watery gumbo Peace River Spring arrived yet? I miss the savagery of our back-pasture torrents here where spring is so pastel and pretty, but tame. Muddy feet aching from cold and wood boats stuck in the culvert and a patch of earth under the window along the south wall with tiny green weeds beginning to grow. Getting stuck in the field on the way to pick crocuses. Pussy willows. Perhaps you've noticed that I still think of the 'Old Place' as home; the 'East Place' doesn't have that root feeling. Queer about nostalgia: you miss even the things, times, places, people, that you didn't enjoy much in the first place, just because you know there's no going back. Does everyone feel just a little frightened once in a while, not often, when they realize they are steaming ahead blindly and happily into a complete dark? Strange that we are so gay about it; you'd think we'd be more frightened than we are. But one of the reasons I admire man is precisely this irrational devil-may-care determination not to be frightened, the habitually stiff upper lip. And the marvellous ability of 'making the most.'

Reason for this philosophizing is a book I'm reading called The Tin Drum by Günter Grass, a very strange book told in first person narrative by a fictional hunch-backed dwarf drum-player in a mental asylum. Wow!

How do you like Great Expectations Judy? It's rather better, I think, than Copperfield. Olivia's best friend in Montreal has an old grandfather who they used to call the "Aged Parent." Some of the characters are delicious aren't they. Miss Havisham and Mrs Pocket particularly!

Oh I found a good word today: 'wanderjahre." Wouldn't you like to have one in Europe? Paul and Rudy don't realize - or do you? - how lucky they are to be growing up as boys and able to hitchhike. And make more summer job money!

Oliver hasn't a job yet but wants to work in TO (Toronto - as per idiom on campus).

The pancake trees of last fall are now stringbean trees because of their long (6" or more) springtime tassels.

Good ol' Sexsmith will soon be in its "mud-luscious and puddle-wonderful" glory.

Did you know that G'ma Konrad sent me a box of fruitcake for my birthday? The kids on the floor were overjoyed. Oh yes, and a doily.

I have up some new pictures stolen from a magazine: one is an underwater photograph of red fish in beet-colored water swimming like gold-eyed dreams with gaping mouths. Another is a self-portrait of Rembrandt in gold-brown tones, the other is a blue-green Diana by Klee - but I know I've told you about this - old stuff! Catherine de Neuve and Robert Frost and the guitar player are still up - all of them have a serenity about them - is that why I find them attractive?

- Oh, another thing I'm dreadfully pleased with was in my last modern dance class. We were doing improvisations to music. There were only four of us: the assignment was to work out an interpretation of a pagan bringing an offering (fearfully yet joyfully) to his wooden god (in this case the back of the piano), to music. (Interspersed necessary information: Maggie is an advanced phys ed major who teaches us modern dance. She is a beautiful dancer and has a lovely body - it is something to see her move.) The assignment was a good one and fun to work out - and for the first time in all of these classes I got a "That was beautiful" from Maggie, who meant it, instead of the summary "Good" she gives most people most of the time. Bit of a thrill. I've enjoyed those classes, tho I spent half of the first three weeping in the washroom! I'm sorry we're finished.

What a patchy letter this is, but you know why. Back on schedule post-exams.

24 Tuesday

Olivia stuck her head into my door at 6:15 this morning and asked if I would like to go for a walk - at 6:30 we were out of the big wooden doors with the paper boys and a loner taxi or two. Walked along the lake; sun just rising and glittering among the rocks and the ice. There was a huge chunk of ice out by our 'desert island' on the horizon and it looked like an iceberg. Quiet. Early-morning cool.

And devouring hunger by 7:30!

Am working quite hard and steadily but am determined not to go to 2 a.m.s or skip meals etc or drive myself into a frenzy of anxiety. I'm not really worried about them because I've not failed any exams yet! The Christmas exams were and always are severely marked - and I studied only haphazardly for them because I didn't want to mess up my schedule. The very amusing thing is the way it is always rather enjoyable to study for exams: the intensive self-saturation and the way things begin to fall into logical notches - think of how much anyone could learn if they were continually under this sort of motivation! Also, little romances seem to be putting up shoots: Moira Beattie (the Saskatchewan girl I've told you about) and Roger Hamilton (the Camrose boy I told you of last letter) have discovered each other and he comes to dinner at Ban Righ on weekends. I'm pleased!

In music we are doing a bit of work on contemporary music written in the twelve-note scale rather than the customary majors and minors: composers like Hindemith, Bartok, Stravinski. Odd dissonances and harmonies with tunes from a surrealist dream of some kind.

Good Friday morning

Last night after studying Olivia and I were doing personality inventories from a psychology book. We had to finish a sentence when given a beginning word like "man," "marriage," "my mother thinks my father," "I wish." The joke of the evening was the sentence keyed off by "a friend." Olivia's sentence was "A friend is somebody you can depend on;" mine, "A friend is an independent companion."

Clothes - you asked how the situation is. Rather comical! It is awkward not having a sewing machine because so many things get ripped and unwearable. Situation thus rather poor - my only summer clothes are my bathing suit and a pair of shorts, no kidding! And I have nothing Sunday to wear because the brown dress is sagging a bit and has been scooted down to the proletariat ranks of my one skirt and two blouses and a dress for classes. It was good of you to offer to make me a suit and I'd like one, but there are things I need more that I would like you to make - but just now I've not got time to look for patterns, and haven't got money to buy material - and by later in the summer there'll be no time for you to do any sewing Mom. I dunno. I have a pattern tho', for a housecoat which I badly need because my 'Joseph' shift is fraying at the seams and I've had to cut the elbows off because they looked like a big bald egg (ie elbow) in a multicolored nest of threads. My only problem is material; I don't know what to decide about that, so guess I'll leave it until April 22 - whee!

Meals at exam time tend to become Events because we take hours and talk avidly just as relaxation from books.

Lovely, beautiful morning tho' it stormed last night and all the seagulls whirled in hysterical high circles shrieking down on the earth - my red twigs are not only in leaf - they are blossoming in tiny white flowers. So they can't be willow twigs.

Railway fare return from Toronto to Edmonton is now about $65. Bus from Edmonton to GP return is about $20. So if I have 90-odd spare dollars (har) I'd like to come home for a week just before school starts next fall - but I've my $275 debt to pay and clothes to buy and next year to live through and a trip to Europe tentatively scheduled for next summer. All this runs rahther into money. Don't really see how to manage but perhaps somehow - I do seem to have 'flown' for good don't I?

March 29, 3 o'clock Easter morning

[journal]

I forget so easily what it is that I want to be - I forget and I ignore it. I have not been nineteen yet for a month, but I've forgotten as tho' I were thirty-four and fat - at the end of my first year in university, disillusioned with myself.

What or who to blame I'm not sure. Olivia hasn't been entirely good for me, but worse - because I am older - I have not been entirely good for her. I remember the exile of my first few months. Perhaps they were good, perhaps better than now.

Motivation is something I have lots of - I know this from last year. But my motivation is easily dissipated to the child in my immediate desires. Ridiculous to weigh 136 pounds this morning, twenty more than I did six months ago! Ridiculous to have spent my Saturday night watching poor movies on television. Ridiculous to have only silly co-ed conversations with people I like - to be so thoroughly 'adjusted.'

Tomorrow will be a good day for meditation: we are having a peace vigil at the Market Square downtown, standing and thinking of what peace is to us personally. Peace, to me, is opportunity. I will think about that. I will think of what I am not doing.

I am no longer hungry - strange that with satiation joy too is padded with the fat of plenty and loses the glorious knifing driving edge. Love loses its edge. Desire, exhileration are milky. Human relationships are flaccid and I find nothing to say ... Mattering insulated in white rolls of enough.

I had a vision of something I could be - others recognised it and warmed their hands to it - (Mr Mann kissing my forehead last fall to say "We will always be concerned about you: you know that don't you?" "I guess so") - (Peter "There is something good about you") - (Mr Block "your potential") - (Mother, "I think you are closer to being the memorable woman than I can be") - (Frank "You are one of my heroes"). And myself of last year, throwing a thin shadow on the moonlit wall and promising myself a future.

I'm a betrayal of these. I must clarify in my own mind what it is that I want to be and try to find my way to it.

[back to letters]

Saturday April 4

I'm down in the stacks surrounded by my books and tempted by the shiny big red breakfast apple that will be my lunch - this reminds me, Judy, of the good time we had last spring studying for our finals in the Sexsmith School teachers' rooms - the tomatoes and apples and soup and lilacs and the runs around the school with the caterpillars on the wall and ol' Peter grinning to himself at our calf-like antics.

I've ever so much to catch up with in telling-you-about's. There was Easter Sunday. Neither Olivia nor I went to church because we didn't want to join the hordes of newly hatted twice a year churchgoers. Instead we ran down to the lake where the ice had just moved out (shards of it were floating and ground against the rocks) and ran along it leaping like mountain goats. Olivia is an ideal companion on these abandoned runs because she feels no embarrassment about being seen and because she is capable of being so altogether happy. We ran far out across a boggy huge lawn under giant newly sappy trees and then to the end of a long pier with the wind howling about us and Sue's radio roaring an oratorio. And this is the funny part: to this oratorio music we twisted madly, just the two of us on the end of the pier with some male undergraduate popping his eyes out. Says Olivia, "I don't know why, but every Easter morning I get terribly happy."

In the afternoon was something different: our CUCND sponsored a peace vigil. I'll have to explain what and why this is: CUCND isn't primarily ban-the-bomb, but more let's-do-everything-we-can to prevent it from being necessary. So we had what was essentially a demonstration. About twenty CUCNDers stood in line along the market square in downtown Kingston with placards reading very simply "Peace Vigil, Easter 1964." We stood there for four hours without speaking (except for short coffee breaks) while the people passing in cars stared. The purpose of the vigil was double: to bring the peace-meaning of Easter to the attention of the public, to emphasize it for them (Easter is not a hat with a flower on it: Easter is brotherhood of man and love and peace), and secondly, to force us to spend some time thinking about the meaning of peace to ourselves.

To me, I think peace is predominantly two things: opportunity, and protection for the people I love. Opportunity because only in peacetime can we study and develop. Protection - I think of when you were not very much older than I am Father, and had to do some very grim thinking about peace and war. [My dad with the other Mennonite Brethern boys was a conscientious objector through WWII.] And I think of the friends I have now who would have had to go to war if they had lived then. And the utter, utter senselessness of killing.

I cannot really say I enjoyed the vigil because it was so bitterly cold and my legs were so frozen that I couldn't really think about anything but how cold they were, but I am very glad I participated. Some of the other people of the vigil were Tom Hathaway (who is studying harpsicord in Vienna this summer and at the Royal Conservatory next year), Alison Gordon [daughter of J. King Gordon, Canadian editor, diplomat and academic], and a lot of people I met at the seminar. Several ministers joined us, a Quaker couple with two small children, and a surprising number of people passing by. Publicity was good - television and newspapers and radio. Pictures of us standing meditating in the snow squall with hair and beards full of snow!

Across the street was a small bakery with a family of Orientals living above it. They sat at the window most of the time watching us - a young father with a wonderful face, four beautiful little boys and a lovely mother stopping momentarily now and then on the way to the stove with a saucepan. It made us think of how important peace is in relation to beautiful people. Beautiful people are important to us, and when people are battered we lose the beauty of them. All the beautiful people lost at Hiroshima. And I think President Kennedy's death was such a loss universally because he and his family were beautiful people - do you understand sort-of what I mean?

This paper is study paper so you'll be treated to some authentic scratchings. The sketch on the first page is a doodle I did in philosophy one morning, of an African girl sitting across the room. I translated her back into jungle garb but her face is lovely even in western clothes. The red-ink paragraph is just some thinking I did that same morning about how isolated we really are from other people because we have no direct entry into their minds, the "wonderful colors and scent and tilting and sliding" that we can never do more than infer - yet this is what we love about them. It is just thinking aloud and I hope you don't mind the patchwork nature of this letter.

I'm pleased that you are pleased about Sunnyside because I am too. I really can't afford the job because the pay is too low. But on the other hand, I really can't afford to spend my time in a cannery or café or office job with three times the pay. Doesn't that make sense? I'll just have to trust Macawber's "something will turn up" - and actually I have supreme confidence that the money will come from somewhere. Grant, bursary, loan - no problem

Have I told you about Maureen, my friend who is going to Germany this summer? She is a superlative example of this kind of faith. She came to university last year on twenty dollars her father gave her and a promise of a $400 scholarship. She hadn't counted on the initiation expenses, and her twenty dollars was gone by the end of the first week. The scholarship didn't come through until Christmas. She couldn't pay tuition, residence fees, or buy books. She didn't even have toothpaste!

So she went to Miss Royce and said "I haven't any money." Miss Royce threw up her unperturbable hands and said "Child! Do your parents know you've come to university without any money?" Maureen, all composure, "Oh they know about it, but they haven't that much to do about it." So she got a job in the library and took out the biggest loan in the history of the university, $650. And paid it back! And copped a $200 prize for the highest mark in German 1 and another for the highest in English 2. And now she has a scholarship to Germany. And she is the merriest creature I know!

Isn't that an exciting thing? I think it is nearly inspiring. Nobody has any excuse not to go to university because of money. And my little theory that if you want something badly enough and are willing to barge ahead on faith and your own discipline you'll get it (and it'll be sweeter for having struggled for it) seems to be doubly underlined by Maureen's story. Both of us feel sorry for people who are 'sent' to school and receive $30 cigarette money checks every month. And I'm a little sorry that it has been so easy this far. I'm looking forward to the fight next year.

I feel closer to you as well when I talk about old times, so that the feeling is mutual. I remember a great deal of enchantment in my childhood and altho there were rough spots, they are valuable for giving added piquancy to the delightful things. And there were really hordes of delightful things.

Thank you very much for the Easter CARE package. The paska arrived very fresh (tho' not as wonderful as when you take it from the oven Mother - that is a good memory too) and everyone with whom I shared a bit thought it was extremely good. Olivia is terribly terribly critical of all food, and she thought it was delicious.

PS My love to David Loberg!

PS A few days ago I went to see Dr Eichner who heads the Queen's German Department and asked him if I could go straight into German 2 rather than German A or 1 which are commonly prerequisites, on the condition that I do a private brush-up this summer. He hauled out a sheaf of old exam papers and asked me to translate - what a traumatic experience! But he was very nice and said he'd risk me if I did promise to brush up. - So I intend to take a German course next year. Also intend to do some child psychology study this summer in conjunction with Sunnyside.

Monday morning, very early, 5:15 April 6

[journal]

Woke at three this morning to discover that round and round and round my wooly mind were floating wisps of deontological intuitionism - this will never do I thought, took two aspirin and snuggled down to think about Frank. And somehow, between two and five a.m. I am always thinking I can write poetry, and lines form in my mind but drift away before I can lash them to an idea: "Suddenly / In the tumble-colored ...", "Stamp my imprint on your faces."

And I thought of the art exhibit at the Etherington Center (Maureen and I wandered through it yesterday afternoon): a driftwood painting, a ghostly square house and barn on a flat white snowscape, an orange-to-violet cross section of the world's history, a blue line on a purple plane, a series of color strips in orange, red, and brown in contrasting intensities.

Then a crow barked outside and I ran to the window - the sky orange behind the crooked line of roofs and treetops around the park, the buds on the trees about my window silhoetted, lake grey and recessive. I sat on the fire escape for a while with my blue blanket wrapped around, watching a bird, the blue shadow of a tree seen between the grating of the fire escape, the water on the roof glittering, the ivy all around me on the wall growing thick and stubby for spring.

[back to letters]

April 6

Am taking a holiday tonight because I wrote Phil today and am study-exhausted.

I spent this morning (classes stopped on Thursday last) ironing ALL my clothes and patching and fixing zippers - and lo, I have more than I thought!

Judy, incidentally, you know the blouse you have that is like mine, the material we got in Vancouver, long sleeves big collar etc? Well - I've discovered that mine looks much better if I hem up the bottom so that its new lower edge is about where the top of the side-slits are. It is then an overblouse rather than a shirt-tails or tuck-in, and it looks very chic.

By the way, you have never mentioned my great going-away family picture taken last fall - is it developed?

I'll send you our floor picture when I get some money. My balance is down to muddy level - not quite dry bottom but almost, and it'll have to do until a first paycheck - also I'd like to wait until I have time to explain in detail who everyone on the picture is and why they look so terrible or so good and that they really look much better than that or much worse, etc.

Rainy spring weather - little yellow crocuses are blooming beside Fleming Hall. They aren't like our fuzzy crocuses tho', they are smaller and more delicate. Crocuses in spring - our hardy big purple ones - are something I'll remember about my childhood. There are some up on the hill nestled under Webber's Folly rock this spring, in a little while no doubt.

It is thundering now, beautifully.

Quiet hours on Ban Righ Three have become very quiet, and noisy hours very noisy. Both Cathy and Marg are learning to play the uke and Karen Kn is practicing - so those three and Sue on her guitar - and the rest of us bellowing in three-part-and-a-discord harmony - have wonderful hoot'nanies. The floor below us today must have been keening (a very useful college term meaning 'to study grimly') because they sent a delegation up to see whether we could or would stop soon and we told 'em we bloody well wouldn't before the remaining 6 1/2 minutes of noisy hours were over.

The nearer the exams the wilder the pranks. On April 1 morning we staggered sleepily into the bathroom to find "Out of Order" signs on both toilet cubicle doors - poor groggy we, it was too early to realize what day it was.

Marlene got her revenge for the raid on her room (which I have told you about, I think) by crumbling chocolate cookies into Marg Allen's bed and then locking herself into her room. When Marg stuck her legs under the covers at 1:15 am (late movie on Friday night) urshkkcck! It looked dreadful - like dog food or 'something'.

And Marg Allen who has a lovely slim shape but whom all tease affectionately about being flat-chested, decided to make us all happy, so she stuffed, with her pyjama bottoms and a toy octapus, and sallied out - chest very much in advance - to show off. And Olivia didn't NOTICE!

Downstairs, people have been pasting apt little clippings on the doors - "Please make me over," "Boys and other beasts," "Don't disturb us, we'll disturb you," etc. Mrs Lush - our rather grizzly pub-faced house manager - lives on second floor - and her door didn't escape either. There was a small clipping "Well up on the social ladder" with a picture of an African chief with feathers and a bone in his nose.

Went down to the lake in a gale yesterday and stood for a while on a rock watching the waves smashing in and getting soaked. There was a boy way down the beach throwing rocks at the waves as they came in. Nobody else in sight.

Speaking of boys, my social life has degenerated to coffee dates only. Norm McLeod is becoming a good buddy. He won the campus speaking contest, and against some very experienced and glib competition! This summer he is working as a salesman, and looking forward to having to work on his wits. Ghaz is working hard and worrying a little because he hasn't a summer job.

It's pouring rain - the black squirrels are leaping about in the leafless ivy looking for shelter, the blackbirds are avidly gobbling rain-loving worms, the rooftops are lakes and our own slate roofs are torrents - beautiful and much too exciting to study through. Cathy and I have been standing at her window and staring and talking about the west - she works at Banff in the summer and loves our Wild West thunderstorms too. She and Marg Allen are so absolutely beautiful.

Bonnie, who has worked harder than everyone all year is now more frightened (with less reason) than everyone. Poor old Bonnie. She hasn't had a very enjoyable year.

You ask about lake dips this summer Mother - I don't know. Lake Ontario is pretty cold even in August. And as for lying on the sand - uh-uh. No sand, only flat pebbles and jagged rocks. Not like the beach we camped on at the Salton Sea.

When I spoke of "steaming ahead blindly and happily into a complete dark" I meant nothing more than tomorrow or next year - not necessarily death, just the unknown of eventually finishing college, perhaps marrying, working, having children and so on to the very very far ahead. And really, being frightened is only a very transitory happening, only once in a very long time because usually I'm very cocky about the future!

Thinking of this dark as death, tho', your analogy with night and morning was beautiful Mother -

Oo, nearly suppertime, good. HUNGRY.

PS Next exam on the 15th - French. 20th - English. 21st - Psychology. 22nd - Music.

Then 'summer' holidays; imagine beginning them in April.

April 24

Ban Righ III for the last time.

Hello again family and beloved typewriter.

What would you like to hear about first - the leave-takings, after-exam activities, how I am and how the exams were?

I am at last sending you the floor picture [*] and will talk about the people on it to sum up the whole Ban Righ III year - oh, but first, thank you EXCEEDINGLY for the ten dollars. My first thought was, "I can get some nylons!" Also can get shoes repaired and coat cleaned and necessary things like that. You won't be hurt if I return it when I get my paycheck?

I'll start off with the picture:

Back row, left side, Cathy Widdess. She is much more attractive than this picture shows her, very dark hair and a perfect olive complexion, hardly ever any makeup. She has an especially warm and outgoing personality (you'll be able to tell from her note on the back), makes friends very easily, seems to radiate personality. Cathy is definitely one of the outstanding people on the floor. She is very feminine, but dresses very unselfconsciously - as you can tell from the picture. Her family is amazingly close-knit, and all of them speak to each other without embarrassment about everything - as a result, Cathy has a completely natural and guiltless attitude to sex and a very happy philosophy of life. Her father is a producer in Toronto, and they're high high middle class. Cathy at first seemed a golden girl with everything. One thing we have really learned from this year together is that even the golden girls have problems. Hers is a physical one, something wrong with her kidneys and urogenital system which very nearly killed her when she was a child and still makes it impossible for her to ski, and which will make child-bearing very risky. Discussing things with her brought out an interesting suggestion - that it is worse to have a hidden handicap such as hers than one everybody sees, accepts, and forgets, such as mine. She left on last Sunday afternoon and the whole floor helped her bring her stuff down and stood around and cried when she left. Cathy won't be back next year because she is on a nursing science degree course and will spend her three years of hospital training in Toronto.

Back row, next, Olivia: in a typically Olivian way, her picture is quite bad of her, but you can tell her flopping mop of dark hair and her rather slight bone structure, and her vulnerable young look. She is often quite pretty. Olivia has grown up a great deal this year. Her note on the back is the one signed "an independent companion" but I think you'd have to know that even if I hadn't told you. Poor Olivia, saying goodbye to places and people and especially Andy is such a wrench to her because she wraps herself in them so wholeheartedly - especially Andy. Her mother and sister came to get her and spent the afternoon looking at the campus. Her mother reminds me so much of you Mother, that you could say perhaps that you had visited by proxy.

Marg S: she has a toboggan slide nose and a wide grin and a wonderful warm heart. Marg has so many problems, her parents' death and her feeling of rejection with her step-parents, her own overwhelming loneliness and love-hunger. Even on the floor she wasn't very well liked because she tries too hard, and the kids (sometimes thoughtless, even on our floor!) would back away from her. Toward the end of the year, tho, she developed a friend-relationship with Karen Kn who was also a little left out. I hope things work out for her because she is such a GOOD person.

Janet Mykitko: Jan is almost the stereotype highschooler, dates, Coke, boys, chatter, popularity, students' council, medium good marks without any real strain, cute, friendly, poised - the famous Mykitko teeth and legs are an asset: they are really very attractive. Her few little idiosyncracies were things like pounding stamps onto letters with her fists, stomping down the halls, a giddy incredible laugh, and a howling radio constantly turned way up during noisy hours. I disliked her earlier in the year because I thought she was a featherhead, but even she grew up toward the end of the year and my family-feeling of loyalty and affection to all of the girls included her.

Marg Allen: her picture shows her sense of humour and hints at her exuberant laugh, but can't really do justice to her exceptional prettiness and her model's figure. Marg is a paradox because when she dresses up she is stunningly stylish, yet it was the impeccibly dressed and groomed Marg who set the Ban Righ III costume of bluejean cut-offs and a sweatshirt and old grey men's socks and moccasins. Marg is also a very sweet person whom I have admired all year. She was the first to leave last Sunday afternoon, and all of us stood around with long faces, half of us (not me) crying while struggling to keep some dignity for the benefit of the engineers passing on the sidewalk! Marg and Cathy are bosom friends, and Marg will be nursing in Toronto with Cathy next year.

Susan Cheshire: the floor rich girl, a pampered only child with armloads of fur coats and millions of shoes and an entirely unsnobbish personality in spite of it. She is a boundless-energy girl, phys ed major, with a talent for music. Since Christmas she has taught herself to play the guitar with nearly professional skill. Whenever she was frustrated, sad, happy, anything, she would sit crosslegged on her bed and play her guitar and sing folksongs. The most that can really be said for her voice is that it is loud and carries a tune very accurately, but in a way it was Sue and her songs and her guitar and our hootenanies that gave Ban Righ III its unity. (And we are much more unified than any other group in residence.) Sue has grown up this year too, and altho I thought we had little in common at the beginning of the year we were quite close at the end.

Front row, left side, Bonnie W: Bonnie has a strange sort of intelligence: strange because it can deal with studies and concrete ideas, but is devoid of any sort of social sensitivity. You can talk to her, even communicate with her, but there is never the exhilerating feeling of having made contact with a vitally alive intellect. You know, the 'K.S.' feeling. Neither of Bonnie's parents had more than grade eight education and she is self-conscious about it. With you, it is different because you read and discuss and think and are self-educated and communicate intelligently, but her parents (and Bonnie as well, strangely enough, even if she is obviously anxious for intellectual prestige) don't read or think and still say "he don't." So Bonnie too has tried too hard to be liked and has succeeded in being one of the least popular people on the floor for two reasons: the insensitivity I've told you about and her dedication. The last one isn't quite fair - she shouldn't be disliked because she works hard and because her motivation is so high that she doesn't allow herself time for hootenanies and gabs. I understand her motivation and her hard work very well because I know her background and what she is trying to escape from and all that, because of last year. But this year has been different, and it has been worth a great deal to take off time for good and warm personal relationships. It seemed inevitable that dedication means isolation, though, and it is difficult to decide which is worth more: the goal you want or your development as a person among people. Are most people really worth spending time on or are you better off picking a few friends who can join you in your isolation and learning to live with loneliness. I think this problem has probably been very relevant to your life in La Glace - are most of the people with whom you have little in common worth bothering about? When I was in La Glace I decided that they weren't and I did in effect ignore them, and it was worth it - but it was painful and it seems always a little painful, especially at first, not to fit in. Basically, I suppose this is a problem of whether to conform and thereby hold yourself down, or to become a social self-sufficiency and accomplish things.

What a digression this has been! Next, Barb Wallace: a petite, pretty, poised creature, usually quiet, but equipped with a sense of humour that pops up and surprises both all of us and her with its acuity. Few of us know Barb very well, because she is inconspicuous. Her affectionate nickname on the floor is "little bitty bugger." (Boy, has my vocabulary broadened this year!)

Then, Marlene Griffin: the one other country girl on the floor, short and plump, cheerful, girlish, friendly. Thoroughly 'nice' but in no way very outstanding. Pleasant and likeable.

Karen Kn: tall and bony and rather unattractive, though not nearly as bad as she looks on the picture. Another warm-hearted girl with more than her share of problems: an idolized dead mother, a less than adequate stepmother and a bratty younger stepsister, nearly six feet of height to scare away all dates, and a drab inhibited personality - also a brilliant mathematical brain and a wonderful capacity for warmth that wasn't appreciated nearly as it should have been by the kids on the floor.

Nancy Rankin: a honey! One of the girls I've respected and admired most, an everyday practicing Christian (Alliance I think), a quiet always cheerful unemotional girl who never during the year had one flareup of any kind, either anger or depression. She was Olivia's roommate, and the two of them kept the place in a delightful outrageous mess. Their record was the week when their bed hadn't been made from Thursday to Monday!

At the end, Karen Kl: jolly practical joking, yet basically very wistful and sad. I've felt very close to her quite often during the year, especially when we've listened to classical music together. She is going into psychology as well, and will be working at the Smith Falls hospital for retarded children this summer. She'd be much happier if she lost about sixty pounds and could go on dates like the rest of us and feel pretty and feminine, but she hasn't had the determination to do it yet. Another thoroughly good and sweet person.

The notes on the back of the picture are priceless - I was touched by some of them: most of them say a lot about both the person writing and the sort of relationship we had during the year if you know how to read between the lines.

You were right Mother: it has been quite a year. It has been everything I wished for it to be, yes - not quite the way I had expected it to be, but certainly just as good. I know I have been especially lucky in the friend-making aspect: Olivia, the International House kids, and now Maureen who will probably be a KS (we went to a movie together last night, sat and talked in a coffee house until one fifteen, walked home singing hymns because we simply felt like it (some rousing evangelico ones, not the insipid higher church type - she has fundamentalist background), hung upsidedown on the fence railings at the lakeshore talking for half an hour, then lay on the floor in the common room talking until an indecent hour and listening creamily to a Johnny Mathis record. Maureen is a brilliant mind and an emotionally-socially sensitive very womanly girl, but she is - much as I am! - independent and a bit of an isolate. I'm working on breaking through her social mask to reach the real Maureen, and I'm making a bit of progress. Very challenging! This is much the same way that Olivia attacked me at the beginning of the year though she has a real gift for it and I'm learning very slowly. Strange tho, that what I've learned from her I'm practicing on someone else. One of the valuable things about friend Oliver.

I begin to work at Sunnyside on Monday night, and will move in tomorrow so that next letter will be full of my kids.

By now the yard is dry and you are starting spring fieldwork? Dusty faces and hands coming in for meal times.

I've been a little homesick, especially with everyone's parents arriving to get them - I've been coveting the families. Oh well I'll see you in September perhaps.

I'm almost busier now than before the exams - editing a speech for the CUCND report on last winter's seminar. It is a transcript of a taped talk by Julian Griggs of the Peace Research Institute who speaks very colloquially, and I have to weed his diction, red pencil his ers and ahs and wells and straighten it out generally. Lots of fun but a great deal of work. Tom (Hathaway) is working on this stuff too and it is a mountainous job, but good writing practice as well.

April 25, Saturday

Still from Ban Righ, for the last time. I'm moving to Sunnyside as soon as I have this dashed off. All of the rooms are empty, my Spanish guitar player is stored downstairs, my poodle, books, bags, junk is at the foot of the stairs. I've said goodbye to the floor and removed my nametag from the door of 49 and left the curtains still blowing in the defiantly screenless window.

There is always a feeling of "That's all of that, nothing will ever be the same, even if it is twice as good - an impossibility, surely - and now what?" But the afternoon has been bright and the daffodils are beginning to bloom and the leaves will be out soon and the lake was blue-green this afternoon, not grey, and I'm reading four books and have so much to study and it is sure to be a wonderful summer.

Spent most of the afternoon helping Maureen pack, then borrowed her bicycle and careened down to the lake on it. It has been so long since that the bicycle is a terrifying thing at first. And met a friend from Bombay walking along the lakewalk, talked to him for a long time about traveling, watched the shredded reflections of light moving over the rocks of the lake bottom, and boats passing. Oh, thoroughly alive again after dusty decaying study weeks! Even feel pretty again.

Mike will have his sailboat out soon because he is notoriously the first yacht clubber to launch a boat in spring and the last to store it in fall. And he has promised me some lessons so that I can become competent enough to qualify as crew.

There were so many mothers and families here today that I wished you could all have come to see Ban Righ during the exodus, on the last official day that residence is open. The kitchen staff gave us a royal dinner: turkey and Bavarian cream for dessert. And everyone is wishing everyone else a happy summer and we meant it in the case of the kitchen people because they have been dear friendly cheerful people all year.

The first to arrive and the last to go - and I finished the year exactly as I began it: with a bath!

All the rooms, all down the hallway, with the furniture piled up. The telephone booth still full of scribbles: "Cathy, boy, sounds like John," "Ellie, Tom Hathaway, phone back," "Olivia, Andy, will call back," "Nancy, boy, no message, said 'oh, studying again,'" "Cathy, long distance," "Ellie, boy, no message." Pile of magazines on the table, but not the Saturday night issue in a thousand sections that used to be strewn all over the floor when we came in from a date late on Saturday and sat around on while we gabbed. Freshman year, room 49 (beautiful room even now when it is bare), telephone booth, g'bye.


raw forming volume 2


raw forming volume 1: september 1963 - april 1964
work & days: a lifetime journal project