| still at home volume 5 part 3 - 1963 january-may | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
[La Glace] Jan 1 - 1.20 am 1963 A word I should have known last week was Sayonara - a unique goodbye, Japanese, that means, directly translated, "Since it must be so." Now how do I feel for 1963 as it begins? Terrible. Today has been worse than the painful last week because today there is no grief, only a frightening hardness, sourness, crust. Cynic-ism. "What is the point of it all anyway?" sort of feeling. Depression. Morbidity. There has been a lot of it this past while. Where from and why did it come? And where is the ol' life-joy of last fall? Where's this valuable unshakeably happy person I believed I (mysteriously, incredibly luckily) was? Now, Ellie - 1963. Shake it girl. Adjust. Be someone serene and mysteriously, incredibly luckily, happy. New Years Resolutions Hard, flinty, what's-the-point-of-it-all Ellie: 1. no more morbid books until you grow up a bit and can take it 2. some kind of religious adjustment. I need some aim and Christianity seems to give humanity that - work on it a bit. Read some books. (Help!) 3. some warm human relationships to cultivate. My warmest and nicest was Sayonaraed in 1962; now chins up, all, and please Ellie do not be so terribly hard; so obnoxious, morbid, sarcastic. How about some sun? Pep talk: you don't want to be an old sour puss. Think Japanese. Beauty and serenity and sense of humour. Which leads to another point: 4. cultivate a sense of humour. You are far too grim and grey, and no fun at all. Ah, 1963. [retrospect August 2004] (another summer, university next year, to be or not to be remarkable in June exams) January 2 Weds - one last frustrating day at home. I feel bitter, hard, a terrible person. January 5 Back to Sexsmith. January 10 Does everybody have to keep organizing themselves - digging and dusting off and filing consciousness to see what really is underneath? Tonight insomnia; I'm thinking of what I want to be. I don't want to be ordinary. I want to be a vibrancy in the static world - someone with vitality and joy and zest and affection. I want to be mainly what writers are, some: Jessamine West, Edna Ferber, L.M. Montgomery, Anne Morrow Lindberg, people like that. And they are all women. Conclusion - womanliness must be part of what I want. I want to be pretty - I haven't been for a long time - and I want to be appealing, attractive. I feel as tho' I've gained a bit: 1. I believe in love - thank you Frank - and I don't scoff at it now. 2. I believe there are absolutes, that God is very real, only I am not capable of understanding it. I want to be affectionate and warm and real: not polite or patterned or cold. How? I do like some people but how can I show it? I haven't been home for a week and won't be for two more, I think. I still hate to think of how it was when I was there last, at the end of the holidays with Father petty and miserable again - what a lot of chaos he strews in the personalities of his children and in the scrapped life of poor Mother. I thought one night last week "in two months from tomorrow I will be eighteen." The room was full of an apple smell and because I had only 2 months I took 4 shiny apples to bed and ate them in the dark. 12 Sat. Guess what, I'm 113 and a half lbs. 13 January, Sunday night 1963 Crazy in the whirling world - Every enlarged pore in my skin seems to me an indication that I am ugly, that the world is ugly. Every cookie I swipe from Mrs Wold's cookie tins is an avalanching evil in the world. Evil and ugliness in myself, therefore in the world. And then I, turning my body in the mirror after not eating for 36 hours see something not entirely good, and I smile good morning to the bland Chinese woman in Sexsmith's ricketty café, and I tell Mrs Wold with tears in my eyes about the piece of cake and the whirling world is less ugly and less evil. I in this strange brown house - did you know that it used to be a maternity hospital - Johanna's? The pink and blue walls, the tall white closet, my beautiful room ... were women kept here? I must learn more about Johanna and her babies. Today I ate 2 bricks of ice cream and a chocolate bar (80 cents - I only had a dollar) and a chunk of chicken and some dressing that I stole and a handful of dressing, and the piece of Christmas cake. I am seventeen, I will be for only a month and a half longer. I miss Frank, I feel the loss of him. I don't know why I took the cake. I wasn't hungry. Everyone else was in the livingroom watching television, and I went to the pantry, lifted the metal lid of her cake-pan carefully, unwrapped the cake - it was wrapped many times in layers of waxed paper and I forgot how it had been wrapped - dropped two pieces of the cake into my pocket, wrapped the wax paper around carefully again; it crackled even tho I was careful (and the guilt I felt seemed so much heavier because I was afraid of the sound of crackling paper. I put the cake back into the blue metal pot, closed the lid on it carefully again. And then, brushing my teeth so that anyone who had heard me in the pantry would not think I had taken anything because I was brushing my teeth - I walked briefly to the edge of the living room and eyed the growling strong Western man. And then I went to put the cake back, touching it in my pocket. I was much less careful about sounds now. One of the pieces had crumbs on them - I could have brushed them off. I didn't think. I said to myself it's dirty and I put it into my mouth. The other piece I put back. Then I went to wash my face. It was red in spots. I had been squeezing blackheads, trying to get rid of some little ugliness and creating more - and I had been crying earlier this afternoon, from sheer discouragement with my vast job of learning this Social Studies and Chemistry and Biology. My ugly face in the mirror. I went upstairs and waited for her visitors to leave. When they did I hurried down. She had coffee things on the table, Christmas cake among them. She said "Would you like a piece?" I said "No thank you, no." How ironical! "I wanted to tell you something." I bent to put on my boot. "I - while you were watching television I took a piece. I helped myself. I shouldn't have. I didn't ask you. It bothered me. I don't know why. I wasn't hungry." I wanted to say - "And this is not the first time. I am Evil. I am a thief." She said, of course, "You were welcome to it. This is a bad day, everything is bothering you today." I went out to the backhouse. I didn't notice whether it was cold. She said "You shouldn't bother about that. That was fine. You go upstairs and sleep." I feel better, I think I'm coming alive again. I've been dead and sick and cynical. Perhaps it will be better. I'll never take anything of hers again (and she gave me a bowl of jello with bananas and fruit cocktail too, before I took the cake.) I shall be a good girl. But I feel so much evilness. I want to be good. But it will be better. 14 Mon. Biol test, 90%. It is not enough. 16 Social Studies test tomorrow. I'm short of food. 17 Thurs. Home for something to eat. Bitterly - 30 degrees cold. 18 Babysitting for Richardsons 'til 1. $2.00. Wrestling with the kids. 19 Sat. A literary day working on short story. A note from - glory! - Frank saying he got there all right. Dreaming over scholarship list. 20 Sun. To church in the 42 degree above weather in red suit and white gloves. Elegant. Dined sumptuously on canned apricots and ice cream. January 25 Last night while I was working late at school Mr Mann came in, walked over to where I was sitting alone in my desk, said "Don't you ever stop working? What are you working for anyway?" "University" I said. "Is that good enough?" He has an odd habit of affection - I don't understand why or remember exactly how or know whether it is real or habit or what - but he put a hand on either side of my shoulder quickly and dropped his chin to the top of my head. Quickly. Casually. I wasn't aware, actually, of it, while he was touching me, only afterwards. I was - later - both touched and puzzled. At the Home and School meeting later I wanted to sit and stare at him, to crawl entirely inside of him and be him - feel him, think him, act him. But people are so apart that I can not even touch them. I was writing haikus in English period yesterday, not listening at all. I'll find them, wait a minute:
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January 28 English class What does it feel like to be a word on a blackboard, the word paramecium written firmly in white chalk? I am discovering empathy: I feel myself actually stretched out flat, with a sharp edged sort of anguish, looking down at the sharp chalk peaks of my body. Strange! I have been a word on a blackboard. And I have drawn a huddled figure: it has a roundness and compactness of grief that I can feel as I look at it. Is this art? To me even it is, I suppose. I am seventeen. Soon I will be eighteen. Last night on the table there were two envelopes - from Mr Dyck. I'd thought he wasn't speaking to me any more! It was a good letter, natural and rather cheerful. What is that fella'? He's a friend, I think. For several days I have been drifting through days wistfully, murmuring things like "darling, darling," in my mind and falling - melting - crumbling - in love with several people: Mr Mann, Dennis, the dear remembered Frank, and the letter-Peter Dyck. It's a sticky liquidy warm feeling, rather slumberous. Perhaps I need sleep. All of this beingness, livingness, existingness, wordness - things important happening and things important about to happen, being a word on a blackboard and puzzling about dear people and muttering my darling, my darling to life itself at night and thinking of answering Mr Dyck's letter and wearing a corduroy pink vest to school and a Nature's Helper bra that makes me look girlsome ... Wheee! The weekend was rather awful. I went home. One good thing - I had a stack of Dennis' records, 2 of Dave's, 2 of Terry's: it was a delerium, an orgy. On Saturday night and Sunday afternoon Judy and I turned the phono on to top volume and writhed in a sort of orgasmic musical giddiness - you know, leaping, skirt shaking laughing frenzy, singing too - operatic notes that irritated brother Paul. T's (can't spell) 1812 Overture with its cannons and bells in the wild sky (it was a family favorite), Chopin's Polonaises, Peer Gynt, William Tell Overture, Debussy Recital (sounds like reflections on the water - reflets de l'eau), Beethoven's 4th and 5th, the Mormon Tabernacle Choir in classic chorus - Halleluja Chorus from the Messiah, Terry's African Drums and a Latin American melange with a deep beat, the Oklahoma! score (I love it - Poor Jud is Dead, Beautiful Morning, I Cain't say No, and especially Many a New Day which says "Never have I walked through the rye, Wondering where has some guy gone. Many a new day will dawn before I do! Many a new face will please my eye." You can see why that is my favorite!), T's Violin Concerto in D Major. You can understand why I am still excited! I want to own them all, I want to keep them and memorize them. I want to greedily learn all about Cazendas and Arrpegios and 2nd movements and Polonaises. Next year I will buy a record player and keep it for my University stay and play it loudly or softly all the time. I love it! I will probably buy records and skip food. That wasn't all of the weekend tho' - on Saturday the piano tuner came and tuned our piano. While I was setting Mother's hair - which was Zulu hopeless after a perm - Father wandered in and began to make pseudo-funny remarks about her looks. Judy and I "froze faces" and stared at him. He seemed to think it funny. He has this terrible laugh (that sounds like Catcher) that he uses when he's a bit discomfited. It's really a hideous laugh. I thought to myself "I am mad," but half of my mind was gape-mouth stunned when I shouted "I would like to know what is so funny about hurting people?!" Judy said a stiff "So would I." He sat and laughed. My hand rolling Mother's hair onto a roller was shaking violently. I haven't been so angry for years. But I was - fiercely. Let me examine my motives. Was it righteous indignations and defence of Mother only, or was there lurking evil in it too? It was a hurting anger - I think Father was hurt - but was it a selfish anger? Am I all the evil I see in him? Can I not escape it at all? Oh yes I can! Sexsmith and music and books and social work contributions and my letters from people like Al Goulden (did I tell you he wrote, it was an exhilerating letter. I've answered it and mailed it and must write other people now) and some achievement and writing and keeping my room scrupulously clean - I'll escape it! And next year, University. That is going to be the biggest step away from everything tawdry. 30 After school, quite late, at the badminton game I met a funny raw-birdy little man who is writing a book - Windrim from across the road. January 30 Robert Frost died yesterday. Today I have been memorizing things he said. My literature book is open to Birches and I've scribbled a note beside his poem: "Died, January 1963." He wrote a lot of things about yesterday.
Reluctance The part of the poem I liked best - I've memorized this one, long ago - is:
Reluctance He was a birch swinger. He swung birches in everything of my consciousness - he swings them whenever I read
This poem talked about yesterday too. He said It's when I'm weary of considerations (I know about that - weariness of considerations)
(Cobwebs - I know about them too)
(I don't know about the intense adult sort of grief of lashing twigs, but I will)
(Was yesterday that misunderstanding?)
(You are going to miss it, you've "adjusted" so well; you'll wrangle a way back)
I've written this from memory - I have his merry, wry face up on my wall. I'm fond of it. It will go to university with me next year; I have a green volume of his poems. That will go too. Millions of people will be quoting millions of miles of his poems. I'm so ordinary in this! But part of his appeal is the fact that I feel sure he'd be pleased that I feel birches swinging and that he swings birches for me - and all of us, the millions of quoters - when I read the beginning of that poem. 31 How can I pin this day down? Blowing outside so I didn't stay at school but went home with Hilda. Cozy at home. Feb 2 Sketched Danny Richardson while I was baby sitting there for nine and a half hours. I'm glad I'm not home this weekend. February 3 I've been having a ball. Sunday today - orient myself. Where was I on this Sunday? - in Sexsmith. What did I do? - watched the curling downtown (a handsome man smiled at me - I wore the blue scarf around my hair and looked seventeen. I am! I am!), ate quite a bit of ice cream; a pint I bought at the "Chinaman's" (everybody calls it that - it's rude, but that's its name!), shovelled off Mrs Wold's sidewalk until my fingers ached from the cold, watched Peter Pan (Mary Martin was Peter) on television, and planned wardrobe for a make-believe re-happen of last Stratford summer. (Such a wardrobe!) Peter Pan - I clapped when he asked for those who believe in fairies; I'd have felt self-betrayal if I hadn't And I feel like Peter Pan! I don't want to grow up and get married; I want to stay dizzy and young and climb trees and love Peter Pan and skip in snow and long to choreograph my life in piroettes and strides. I thought of a good essay topic "The Adventure of Becoming." Becoming is an adventure because I feel as tho' I could become anything, and might But sometimes I am afraid. This to me sounds as nauseating-stuck-melodramatic as it does to you, but I'm afraid of the snarling evil in me. It may choke off what I could become. When I babysat at Richardson's last night it was different, but once, the time before, I was hideous - rage, pure rage and pure evil. The kids are fairly sweet but one - Kathy - is a sullen sharp-faced hollow-eyed small one who will not go to bed. I wanted them to go to bed but she wouldn't. No amount of telling, nothing would make them go to bed. I was rough. I slapped the child. That in itself is merely an uncouth putting-to-bed technique. But what frightens me most is the fearful teeth grinding rage I felt as I did it. God help me! I mustn't become what Father is! For the sake of the human race - which I love - God help me! 4 Mondays are good ... Cold Monday, school good, Sexsmith good. But I get so peculiarly wistful about Frank! 7 Home overnight. I'm a guest there, a hog-eating guest. Played records, all of them, once more. Judy is writing her 4-H speech about the Canadian Volunteers Service Overseas. 9 Strange night - bed fairly early, then woke at 5 and read The Trembling Years until 7 - then slept until 9:15! Bought huge Mexican oranges. February 9 A dream last night, a fantastic dream, a real dream. I walked in a woods, stepping over brooks, leaping tree-trunks, scuffing leaves. There were others with me. We came to a small house. Inside were clothes and letters, books, small boxes tied with ribbon. I wanted to search out the letters and read them, leaf through the photographs. I knew that whoever had lived there was a young girl, and was dead. The house was very small and gloomy like the inside of an attic; and yet there was light - a light that wasn't as bright as light is usually, coming through the window. I can see very dimly the inside of the room, I see an old whiskery man showing us a wooly old coat. It seemed I had been there before and he was dead now. I longed to stay in the house and discover who the girl really had been, but there was something terrifying about the house and I ran outside. Then I saw that the house had moved while I was in it, and was still moving, deliberately and slowly, toward the river. I felt that I had escaped some kind of horror. And yet the next time I saw the house it was again in place in the woods. I took some photographs, some of them of young pretty friends, some letters, and a diary. Then reading the diary in a high white bed I felt as though I had become this girl, and I knew she had been insane. There was poetry in her diary. I read some but don't remember whether it was good or bad; I think I couldn't decide. I don't remember it at all. From conversation with the people around the white bed I found that she had become insane and gone away to live alone in that small house. That was all. And even now that house haunts me, I felt as I did in my dream, terrified and fascinated. And while dreaming I felt that it was such a good story and that it would flow out of me effortlessly and be really good. Because I lost the story I was sad to wake. Let me keep this day. Let me keep all of my days, I don't want any to be forgotten, or anything. But they are and will be .... Not even a month to be seventeen!
Dear twenty - Let me give you this minute of when you were seventeen: Mrs Wold's slippers are thumping softly in the kitchen downstairs. There was a click as she turned off the light, sharp, rectangular. I am in bed, my head in rollers and the yellow bed-cap (I'm sure you'll have thrown it away - it feels strange to think of such a time leap) on the palm of my hand, my clipboard leaning against my pillow and my knee. My legs are drawn up, my feet are cold under their blankets. I have hung a Japanese-like fabric-print on the wall. It has tones of turquoise, green, black, white, green-grey against the blue wall. I put a bowl of oranges underneath it and I'm very pleased with the orange accent. I'm wearing my much-worn wild red shift. My pink poodle is lying in a heap with its legs up. You want to know about me - what am I? Seventeen, usually rather absent minded, often jubilant, often thoughtful, occaisionally desolate. I miss Frank (I want to know, ever so much, what you could tell me about him - is he a friend? Do you ever see him? How is he?), I actually miss him quite a bit altho' the full impact of our breakup may never fully reach me. My other relationships - I love quite a few people - Dennis Maxwell; Mr Mann; Danny Richardson, my freckled clear-eyed babysitting 'son' next door; my mother very much (how is she?); all of my family really. I write to Mr Dyck when I am communication hungry. I stay up late - it's twenty to twelve by Mother's watch now. I worry about philosophies a bit. I love the human race; I feel responsible to it, to do as much for it as I can by doing much to make myself better. I've decided not to eat anything tomorrow. I spent 50¢ on a Seventeen magazine because I love the clothes. Today has been a wonderful warm day, with exhilerating train sounds and the glimpse of a Greyhound and a letter from PEI, Lynn Murphy. A green chair is standing against the blue wall. I like the way it looks. I'm worried about myself spiritually, I feel so remote and detached from my childhood learning and believing. I hope I find my way back to it but I don't suppose I will - how are you? What are you doing now, Ellie-at-twenty? You will be in university, I think. When I was fourteen and wrote to seventeen, it seemed a long time. I thought I would be very different. But I feel that you will be very much like me, perhaps because of the youngly arrogant belief that I've gone about as far as I can go. Have you been to Europe? Don't ever forget - prove yourself, go! Have you published a story in Seventeen? Prove yourself! Did you win any important scholarships? Did you go with anyone - have you ever fallen in love again? I don't think you have - I don't think so. I can't see that ever happening again, but I know better, I really do. 1963 - another year of stress. The world wonders will we see 1965, 1966? I wonder, will I ever be twenty? But I think I shall, and perhaps I shall live until I am old. I'll give you no advice, Ellie-at-twenty, because tho' I might rebel at what you are doing now, what you do as yourself has nothing to do with little Ellie-at-seventeen. How do you look? I am pretty sometimes, not often, and then strangely. But I like my strange wild Russian face, tho' goodness knows it's no jewel. It suits me. 15 A Valentine from Frank - rough paper carved and nicked into a heart: yellow and grey muddles of color - and a few words: "I wonder if you wonder." 16 Until 3:30 am reading "The Hearth and the Strangeness," a profoundly depressing book that seems to know about all my neuroses and evilnesses. 18 Mon. Christopher Fry's "Venus Observed" on television! Some of these plays make me see a world of people I could become 19 Looking forward to weekend [Varsity Guest Weekend in Edmonton] and seeing Reiner and (I hope) Mr Dyck. Basketball game - our boys lost to Wembley. Rode home with Dennis and Dave in the falling snow - love 'em both! Edmonton Feb 23 Sat I am just thinking how utterly funny it would be if I burst into tears - an hour ago I would like to have honestly been able to. But now I feel grubby-fingernailed, alone. (Why those two feelings together?) I like men with hollows in their necks. (I'm safely out of the way here, too young and not quite eighteen and yet ---). But where - oh, is it anti-social and ingenue to journalize? Of course ... nonetheless. Yes, nice to have doors opened. But the spinster feeling still - spinster in a spin-dryster sort of idea. Glunk. This was written last night at a bowling alley where, ludicrously, I was Peter Dyck's "date" (yes, very much in quotation marks) with 2 other upperclassmen couples: thin pixy Elsie with the provocative hipbones; small slant-browed, soft faced, happy June; tall but-not-really tall, toothy awkward-appearing but continually bouyant Frank, and most of everyone - Ben. Now what it was about Ben may be difficult to say. I've said a bit already - "I like men with hollows in their necks" (the fay Elsie read what I had written to the words "too young," above, and I somehow dislike her for it - hmmm?) (altho' I wanted her to.) Ben? - gangly, horribly thin, long-faced, almost ugly but with sandy appealing eyebrows and a secret sideways way of speaking. One incident: we came to the café (where we had had bacon and tomato sandwiches toasted before, Mr Dyck and I) and he was hanging his coat. Jane was already seated. Mr Dyck motioned me into the booth beside Elsie. Then Ben came back and there was an awkward moment. Finally he half-pulled me out, slid into the booth beside Elsie. He grinned a quick I'm-sorry grin - I surprized myself by answering it aloud, "fine." He asked, in this secret mysterious way of his, "Did he teach you drama?" And in the same conspiratorial way of his, "Are those Stratford trips a good thing?" "Yes!" "Why?" I had the dismayed feeling that everyone was looking at me. (At this point I could begin a spiral of sorry-for-self poor inadequate I, pumpkins, cucumber cabbage - in short, vegetable - but Mr Dyck would thoroughly scold and delivered a great huge lecture on it yesterday. Note - I am at the moment in an end booth at the Tuck Shop, have just smiled at a British-faced maintainer man in a jump suit, have mixed orange juice and pepsi for breakfast, bought two blimey philosophy books to remember VGW 1963 by - crazy as I am I insist on becoming crazier by pickling my brain in "The Age of Ideology" and "The Age of Reason," to supplement my "The Age of Analysis"! That is as logicless as anything possible. HoweVAH! Are those giggling noisy creatures Ag students? Must be. I was talking about Ben wasn't I? He asked the reasons - a very persistant sort of questioner. I liked him. "Best of all was meeting other people interested in the same sort of things - realizing you aren't some sort of freak." "Interested in what sort of thing?" But there was a break in the conversation and I thought the question was safely gotten rid of. Then the secret voice at my shoulder again. "What sorts of things?" "Things high school students are not supposed to be interested in." "What sort of things?" - and then, "Oh, I know what you mean. I just wanted to hear you say it." And - Peter all this time - Karen says redheads improve with age. "He used to be sort of ugly. He's quite good looking now." He is - tall and tapered and topped by that smooth red hair. His face still has a certain ugliness but it is an ugliness that is in no way painful. How to analyse his attitudes ... He said "I don't feel tense, I'm relaxed. I don't feel fatherly. I don't know how I feel. Communicatal." And he explained Elsie to me a little as we arm-in-armed across the ice to his car: "I took her out a few times. Did you see her blushing? That was because of you." "If she only knew - ." "If she only knew" - chuckle - "true, you aren't a kinetic, but you're a potential." H-mm and double h-mm. Monsieur Deek, by that you meant exactly what? "I don't know about that. I don't like the word potential." And so on. (I don't like the word potential because it implies that I am vacuum now.) Yesterday was altogether too much Mr Dyck, too much tension. He phoned early, fifteen minutes later came in his white Pontiac, tripped down the icy steps with me, with my arm tucked into his, point-toed and laughing. A car tour about the campus, a walking tour through SUB (I wanted to meet someone I knew, but nowhere!) (A bit giddy, that one. Funsome.) Coffee in the Sub and the beginning of a psychological discussion there (sez he, he is becoming more tolerant; thinks I, he is maturing rather well! He's the one who tells me my attitude is maturing, while climbing steps in SUB!) And then downtown to the Cathayan, a woody colorful tapestried café. I came up from the ladies room with my coat off and in my heels and unbestraggled. I felt elegant and almost a date without the quotation marks. And over our Chinese food we spent another two hour being communicatal - psychology and philosophy and yousomeness and a bit, even, of mesomeness and even a bit of nonsence altho' I find myself dismayingly astonishingly nonsenceless ... He thinks girls like to kiss men who smoke. I say I prefer shaving lotion, Mennon. He say he still uses what his class gave him for Christmas. "You said something about wanting to crawl entirely inside of peoples minds ... why?" and "I was madly in love with a girl. I would have crawled gladly inside of her mind and been glad to stay there forever." I thought of Corine Stanke; I think that is who he meant. I feel strangely about her, almost envious. But I wouldn't want to fall in love with him. Voilà! Confuse comme d'habitude! And after the Cathayan we drove off to Convokation Hall for the men's chorus - and there, behold, was Reiner. I was dismayed, actually. He seems to have gained nothing since high school, no polish and no ease. He disconcerts me; I feel acutely uncomfortable with him. He sat with us through the chorus, said nothing. Felt what? I felt a keen - delight? at the faces in the chorus, and the enthusiasm in the face of the front row horse-toothed undergrad man who sang so heartfully. These stereotype people who pass me all about the Tuck shop. Are they all alike truly? Then, Reiner with us to Guiseppi's for coffee. And there, securely behind the garish painted door with its glass eye, we began our psycho-philoso communicating again - "Platonism, Socratic thought, what - precisely-and-exactly is Hegelianism?" Reiner: "What is the use of all this? What is it for?" Mr Dyck: "People have to ask." Ellie: "And it is pure fun speculating." Any one of us could have said any of these speeches; I just thought of that. Pencils in hand both Mr Dyck and I shredded the backs of our paper placemats with illustrations of awareness. I have the sheets. "I've gone from Impetuosity to Intolerance to Intensity." My reflection in the mirror is rather terrible. Yellow-grey in the yellow light. Oh well. From there to supper. Told Reiner no I will not go to Varieties with him. I couldn't bear the tho't! Next time don't tell him when you come, Elfchen. (Incidentally, Mr Dyck thinks "Elfreda" is quote beautiful, is highly incensed at my "betraying, running-away-from-something." Ellie: "I don't want to be Elfreda. Maybe I am and don't want to be." I must sign my letters "E". Oh, "Elf" is aussi okay.) And so Reiner went, dismissed as kindly and blunderingly as was possible. And after we had toasted bacon and tomato sandwiches and he told me about some of the girls he had taken out and we drove about in the lights a bit and he told me how conscientious a teacher he is (I do respect him hugely, tho' that sounds catty), then to the Ed building for "J.B." the studio theatre play. Urbane Mr Dyck, teasing ticket takers, cosmopolitan but self-confessedly somehowamazingly a blusher! "It feels good to have doors opened for me again." "I never thought I would be opening doors for you. I'm enjoying it tho'." Said with a warmth in the slate blue, one-color, pupilless eyes. Intermission, wandering upstairs and downstairs in my neat suit - so felt I - admiring some lovely art by one of the profs - a pink Italy, a bark-textured canyon. I wandered into a surprising conversation with a smiling man. "Do you like it?" "Yes." "Well enough to take it home if you could?" "I think so," and a smile. Dapper Mr Dyck drifted over and we continued back to our seats. A slight shoulder-brushing, some communicating in spots, his face usually absorbed. Once at the beginning of the play the young player Nickles dropped to his knees and cried something anguished about this acursed confused younger generation: we smiled at each other knowingly there. And in the second act when I [was] absorbed in the tension and the huge sadness of Job's human race I wanted him to put his arms around me, not from love or from passion but simply as a bond and a staying in the world. (I nearly said "from the world," but no, it is not true - in the world.) And then the rotunda; he left me to chat with Frank as he got his coat. It was fine - I overplayed my ingenue self-pity because actually I could have handled it and did then, beautifully. Urbane chatter. But later? A disintegration, not as serious as I think it was tho'. And then drive quickly home. "Here we are, pumpkin." (When he helps me into my coat he gives both shoulders a sort of clasp that is both appealing, urbane, and too smooth. But Peter is an unusual person and not to be numbered with ordinary mortals! Hero in a way. I love him easily but as for being in love with him - no more than he is with me. Platonic but not spokenly so - It should be spoken.) A last "Good cheer, bonne fortune, the pleasure was all mine, goodnight," and at last quiet. Fifteen and a half hours is too much of one person. Midnight February 28 I am seventeen. I have been studying French until now, in bed. And then I read a random chapter in my Bible. It was Isiah, a chapter that began:
The underlined phrase was pencilled-under in my Bible, and beside it was the question "me?" A message from myself when I was thirteen! Dear little Elliechen who was a little too plump and greatly self-conscious (both of which she still is, but does not feel because she is nearly eighteen) and who has dissolved away forever, except for the scattering of words that she has left. And because I know that seventeen will vanish as surely as thirteen, I must leave my scattering of words too, for later selves to touch and half-smile over, affectionately. Yes, I was going to bed. But when I clicked off the light moonlight swirled into its place and there was my body black-shadowed on the wall: naked, nymph, body with hollows and planes in the moonlight, and its reflection in the mirror (mysterious - I am the only one who knows anything about it). I looked at my body, thought once or twice "nymph," and was overwhelmed and frightened with the sheer arrogant joy of being seventeen, the sheer, sheer, arrogant joy. "I don't need you, world - I am alone and independent in my strange-hollowed nymph body and my strange nymph joy. Never was there anyone who stood before the wall and saw the outline I saw; never will there be anyone. Arrogance? Of course. I feel as tho' I could write something more important (merely more scatterings of myself - shavings of what I was, curling in little twists wherever I have passed?) and as tho I will learn everything and know everything - and write a faultless exam or two when I am eighteen. Ridiculous. But who can say? I have within me the dare-devil smile of a Peter Pan, half-fay, half-human, whimsical. I can feel it, a real smile in my mind, shaping itself. Here my word scattering is inadequate because I cannot show you the smile, but only tell you that there are mouth corners curling in my mind and I can feel the tug All right, you smile, stay with me. We're going to be all right! Yet there is a terrible daring, a tempting of the fates, being joyous, because joy is an unnatural human state? Could I throw my glove into the face of Fate and say "there - the weapon to be my joy and my youth and my nymph body, against anything you choose - ?" March 5, Tuesday Sexsmith School noon exactly I'm very glad to be pretty today, because I'll never have another chance to be both pretty and seventeen at the same time. Eighteen tomorrow! I'm going to wear my red suit to school in the nature of a celebration - there won't be much celebration otherwise for I'll be working late at school as always. Someone may remember to say "Happy birthday Ellie!" Mr McCue may tease me. There may be a card from Frank - perhaps one from Reiner. Perhaps a stray aunt will remember ... My birthday present from Mother and Father I already have. These birthday presents are rather sad for they are usually money ... Five dollars this year; the amount seems to increase - (When I was ten it was one dollar, and a great deal of money at that ) Pretty? M-hmm, quite - wearing my many-colored overblouse jerkin-style over a turquoise sweater, and wearing quite a bit of Judy's lipstick (we swapped this week - she's going to Calgary for the weekend - I wheedled Father into it, and would rather like to go too, but feel that I don't deserve it after last weekend ... Father asked me whether I wanted to or not - do I? - but - oh, and he really sounded as tho' he was thinking of sending me! - but I was noble. Just a minute! I could use my birthday money I returned from school tonight at about five to ten, pm. When I looked up from removing my boots I saw the box on the table - long, florist green, narrow. The address said "Miss Ellie Epp." Ripping of paper, snapping of green string, unfolding of white paper, wax paper, plastic. I noticed the soggy newsprint around the stems first. Carnations - red and white. A small card - "Happy Birthday Ellie." No name - only "Vancouver, B.C." Frank then. Pain, then; bittersweet, then. They are arranged and stand under the mirror against the vivid blue wall - fern drooping, six white flowers and five red (one broke off and it touches my wrist as I write). [sketch] Mrs Wold said "I didn't know who it was from - Peter Dyck or your boyfriend," and smiled a very pleasing shared-joke smile with me. Hilda said "They're beautiful. They're beautiful. I couldn't wait to see what they were." I turned off the big light and now have only my small glow. I am taking my mirror to bed - I want to look at myself tomorrow morning and for the last time tonight. It's nearly 11:30 pm. I'm trying to corner a story in my mind but it refuses to be pinned down. Perhaps it will come. There is an amazing apple-sauce-spice smell mixed with my perfume smell and the sensation of lipstick on my mouth (sensations - tactic and olofactory, tactic and auditory, do fuse into impressions). It is the carnations, it must be. It's a lovely smell. March 11 Yesterday was Sunday, (a gay glorious sort of sun-Sunday) and I was in Sexsmith for the weekend. In the morning, after finishing Pearl Buck's A Bridge for Passing in bed, I got up and into my brown pleated skirt and red wooly jacket. Church at the United church - I like their serene services and I like to see the people there - Gereaux (Mrs Gereaux tucks me under her wing), Mrs Brown with her cropped hair and her beautiful husband and her still girlish cheek-line. I sat in front of Mr McCue, listening to his uncertain tenor wandering through the rather flaccid hymns they sing there, ticking the backs of people's heads and saying (this is amazing) "This one I love, and this one, and this one) - Mr Mann, Bob Windrim, Mrs Mann (in her blue velvet hat and her feminine furry blue collar). Mrs Gereaux in green. And afterwards I skipped outside sans coat, sans boots and was lackidaisicalling down the sidewalk when Bob Windrim on the road hollared "Hi Ellie!" and lept across the snowbank to the sidewalk - and he asked me over for the afternoon to listen to records. Fine, I'd love to! And at three I tripped over there - the kids were rampaging and Mrs Windrim was "absent" - Mr was away preaching, Bob was relaxing around, and an old man they called "Grossfadder" snored under his orange moustache on the red chesterfield. The kids are swell - Danny, the bookworm, eyes green, eleven and freckled and wildly imaginative; Dwight, freckled, nine, eyes turquoise, proud of the new wristwatch on his thin wrist; Patty, eyes sea-blue, seven, freckled and dun-haired and tomboyish; Robbie, about three, eyes dove-blue, transparent-skinned, freckle-less (amazing!) and romping: a gay, well-adjusted, affectionate family. We had a wonderful afternoon: sitting on the floor; listening to the Grand Canyon Suite while enormous snow-feathers flew past the window, obliterating the elevators; teasing the kids; drinking coffee and crumbing toast and cookies and spilling cocoa; listening at once to the lovely Emperor Suite Van Cliburn, and Grossfadder's life story, while admiring Patty's jewellery and Dwight's watch and Robbie's book ("Not 'bird' Robbie, say 'Vogel.'") and grinning across the room to Bob; and then when Jerry Windrim came home, sitting and talking philosophy and religion under the lamplight; and then being joined by Doris. Jerry was quizzing me with the end of making some point in view. "Why do you live?" "Because I like it!" That was spontaneous. Doris said "The best reason I've ever heard, I think," but Jerry said "No, it's not." But it was fun! Their house is wonderful: the living room is a rangy thing, tan-walled, big-windowed. The center spot is held by a brown shining phono with long-leaved green plants in pots on top of it. There are many chairs, one with a deep hollow seat just right for the orange tabby to curl in. The chairs are old and shabby and stained, and the place is full of furniture - but no doilies, no knick-knacks, no fuss! And they have a cabinet full of records - full of records!! A worn reddish carpet (no pictures of families!), a wide boot-full porch, a kitchen holed in and neat with a wide window, a closet bathroom, a mysterious stairway that winds around a corner after three shallow steps up. It is a house full of corners and lamps and plants and children and music and books and affection and stray people and intelligent conversation. The awning over the front window gives the living room a hooded, secluded feeling, and the long green leaves in front of the window are exotic. The outside of the house is pale green and composed of strange blocks tacked onto one another. The light is often on until late, when Bob writes his books or reads until 2 am ("In this house people are always up until two." "In this house I assure you one more for supper is no difference.") It even has a doorbell, a doing do-oing type. And she asked me to supper - we had strawberry shortcake! Mrs Windrim reminds me of Judy Doerksen, or of what Judy could be if she was less of a rebel for the sake of being a rebel. (Rebel - I must remember to tell you that I wore my red earrings although the rest of what I was wearing was brown-turquoise-green.) After supper we dumped dishes - left them where they were - and waddled back to the living room to talk books and art. Mr Windrim asked a leading question: "How do you get along with your classmates? Since you are more mature." Gleeps! But no, really I felt an adult and felt almost considered an adult - it was good adult communication and I loved it, and ran home, coat flying, thrilled, because I feel as tho I have some new friends. Bob is amazing - sprite, leprechaun (half Irish, truly, and doesn't believe in the little people!), elf, old wise man, gargoyle-grinning-at-the-world with chin in hands, and pointed ears. I told him "You should believe in Tinkerbell, especially because you have so many Peter Pan characteristic." "Are you sure you don't mean Pan, not Peter Pan?" "M-hmm he has the pointed ears all right." And his pointed ears were blushing! He has a bony head, an almost bald head, a ridgy freckle-sprinkled nose, wise old green-grey eyes, and a wispy little-boy body. His teeth are terrible. His underwear is grimy. I like him. Queer to think of him ever married and a minister. Amazing! He isn't entirely human, or is he more human than us all? Or something. Jerry is a tall well-built man with shaggy red hair disappearing along the top of his head, teeth missing, and a lined wild philosopher's face. Doris has a face exactly opposite: round and full and very smooth and freckled. Her hair is just slicked back and bobby-pinned, and she keeps pushing it back. But her mouth is young and red, and when she speaks her voice is firm, rather crisp, with a beautiful accent-tone that is not quite an accent. 15 While [I was] playing piano Father was ranting irrationally and hideously, I jagged and sat by the piano and sobbed. 16 Grew very angry with Father for jawing at Mother again and screamed "You don't have to be always pecking someone down!" at him. 18 Monday back to our tidy warm house which we have to ourselves - some honest work. 19 On a scintillating morning reading "On Westminister Bridge" in class. It was that sort of morning. 3 National Geogs! March Hopped is how I feel - hopped up. And why not? After two and a half hours of recreation - reading Life mags and the culture sections of MacLeans - and four hours of work - French verbs, Social Studies, Massey Commission Report, pathogenic bacteria in Biology - a wind-striding walk in the drifts home from school with one hand freezing wet from stumbling into a sharp-crested snowbank and legs tingling, and all around me the stylized wind-sculptures in light and shadow, soft, sharp, clean, of blown snow, and my bowl of red jello chunks floating in milk for supper (I'm on a punishment spree for hogging on weekend and gaining weight. Mon, Tues, to Weds night, ate nothing. Yesterday 2 apples and a bowl of jello. This morning a small cup of rice with raisins, not boiled long enough, gritty against your teeth. It is nice to be free of appetite and able to feel my own sharp bones under my skin - I am an idiot of course). And I am here, I'm eighteen, I'm new, I'm a great huge potential! Not especially important, but existing and therefore valid. When I walk home from school and car lights dim and swing the shadows beside the road I think often that I could be struck and cease to exist, in this form anyway, and on this earth. The thought seems ridiculous and impossible. I, who am here, am now, am very very much here and now; I, not BE? Quite, quite impossible! P.S. Next morning Strange night. I woke in the soft 4 am grey, studied biology faithfully, then shifted about getting tangled in the sheets, then clicked the light on cautiously again and rambled for two hours thru' Epicurus, Epictetus, Augustine, Aquinas, Bacon, Descartes, Spinoza, Locke, Rousseau, Kant. March 21 - first day of spring I feel like a radiolarian, still a one-celled minutity, but with a thousand spines of joy-skeleton bursting from the nucleus that is my mind. Joy-spines, thousands of them, bursting out in rays. Is this 'radiance'? I'm eighteen. Why is this so important to me? Why do I always stop to say to myself "I am sixteen," and "I am seventeen," and now, "I am eighteen." I think that perhaps I do this as an orientation, as people on a journey always bend over their maps and separate from all the names on that map one pinprick to call "this-is-where-I-am." I have traced my finger on the vague map of what I see as my life and have said, "This is where I am. I am eighteen." The position of eighteen is vital because it is along the route that comes from my childhood, and because somewhere in a nebulous blur of map-color around it is the invisible-ink route of my future. And when I move on to nineteen, another stretch of that route will be black and visible behind me. The word that is like a landscape about the point called eighteen is 'amazing'. I shall remember eighteen as the area where 'amazing' grew on all hill-slopes and colored all clouds and was painted like an Indian caste-mark on the foreheads of everyone I met. You see, I stop in the halls when I am walking and my mind is echoing with the 'amazing' that I feel; I stop by my window at night, brush across my curtains, and say to myself "Here is the world, here is the street, and there across the street is light in the house of people that I like; and here I am. This is impossible, impossible but it seems to be real. Amazing!" And I walk out of my brown house in the morning and see the sun on the frosty twigs and think of Emily from Main Street who cried "Oh world, you are too wonderful for anybody to realize you." Amazing! And I listen to the poignant singing of a Mass in G Minor (from the radio on the chair beside my bed - barely loud enough to hear) in the dusty darkness of my room at night; and today I have been struggling in Christopher Fry's wonderful The Dark is Light Enough (listen a minute: "the sky heavily clouded; the darkness ... profound .... It is across this maze of leafage, and in absolute darkness, that ... the butterfly goes forward without hesitation .... It arrives in a state of perfect freshness, its great wings intact .... The dark is light enough."); the marvelous intricacies of diagrammed organic chemistry; and the excitement of talking to Dennis, now, in my spare period, about life and people and 'we'-someness (eg "Do you ...?" "No, I ...."). And on all this, perhaps stamped in assorted sized letters like a trademark, is 'amazing.' This is eighteen. March 22 Can I write - can I? Or can't I write at all? Is Mr Mann wondering what the expression on my face is? It is an intense dreaming, Mr Mann, but is it a hollow dreaming with nothing actually to give it substance? I tell myself that I am too young yet to have anything to say. I tell myself that when I am old enough my writing will come to me. But is this an opiate to something that says "You aren't writing anything because you can't write"? There are things I want to say. I want to tell about people I know: Irish, Bob Windrim, Frank, Mr Dyck, Gilles maybe, and always myself. But I need a theme, I can't just talk about someone I knew; I need a story and something - a message, yes, I need a message and I have none. But perhaps I will find one, and perhaps then I will write. Did I tell you what I'm doing about my sense of humour? I have a very feeble one, if I have one at all. I gave up wisecracking language - first because no one understood what I was talking about, and now because they're not funny even to me any more. But anyway, according to Mr Dyck, sense of humour is your ability to laugh at yourself. H-hmm! So I've adopted a manikin. He's a portly, small man in a vest and watch chain who sits on a tiny chair in my mind waiting for me to do something silly. When I feel sorry for myself he weeps huge tears the size of a teacup and looks absolutely hangdog; when I fly into a mild temper he flies into a stomping red-faced rage; when I am disgruntled with someone he glares and mutters curses and balls his chubby fist. He's watching ... a very imitative imp, my manikin; and watching his antics starts me grinning like a Chessie. Original type of sublimation, don't you think? March, Career Day, noon in the lab I'll have to tell you about a person, Mrs Watson, who conducted the university session of the career talks. Sitting on the platform she seemed 50% legs - very pretty legs - and very nervous with her slouchy posture and childish face. My first impressions of her said: nervous, awkward, coltish. Young. Skirt is too short. Good skin tho'. Indifferent grooming. Light makeup - favorable. Slouchy un-chic sort of hand-bag. Dress has good lines but that camel color shouldn't be worn with black. Nice shoes, well shaped. Her shape-sense is good but her color sense is careless. She needs pointier glasses. Legs very pretty. But they are wound around coltishly. She has a wry grin. Nothing very feminine about her shape - slim but little curve. But legs ! Nice wrist-watch - those chain bands are nice. Tidy fingernails. Hhm-m-m. Her manner was shocking at first, seeming unbelievably graceless for a girl who was both married and a much-educated university councilor. Married? That girlish lanky young-faced breezy hoyden? She had an accent. "Not only am I an American, but I am also a Southerner. What else, folks?" Freckles! She had freckles, scatters of them floating all over her pretty skin. She would take off her glasses, poke her nose with one handle, showing her narrow wily eyes, set the specs (on her they are specs, nothing else) onto the end of her nose, stride across the floor and around the side, making the first seat people twist their necks after her, shove her glasses back into place with a thin fingertip, droop her long body over an imaginary wall, fold her arms across her chair. I don't believe there's a place on her body that could be called the middle, because she was constantly bending all of it from all parts, pliable as a bell-rope in the wind. Her knees were bony, her slip showed a little, her hair was askew. She could hardly have worried less, I'm sure she never slides glances at mirrors when she passes them. Sometimes she gives one a good hard stare for five minutes or so, but none of this girly covert admiration. Her husband - what is the man like? What sort of a life does he have? Has she capabilities for [missing page] April Goat-footed Ellie reflected on the glass surface of Outside. This afternoon when I splashed and slurped through mud to buy a chocolate bar I thought of ee cummings.
Goat-footed Ellie hopping in the slush banks - the April afternoon was mud-luscious and puddle-wonderful. The stimulation of a book - Marjory Morningstar - is still with me. I began to read it at a little past two o'clock. It was six thirty when I stopped, but the blue outside my window was more a nine-thirty blue than a six-thirty blue and I knew that my watch had stopped. Reading was a total absorption; the book was 565 pages, small print. I staggered outside to the toilet once, and as I chattered hysterically to myself I knew that I was half-drunk or in a delerium. It was a joy-grief with no real name or location or even cause; I laughed and then grimaced a fool-grin and then stumbled across the room to fall laughing against the wall - Marjory Morningstar who loved Noel Airman, Marjory Morningstar who had been Morgenstein and Noel who had been Saul Ehrmann - thin and tall genius who loved the lovely Marjory, who was not Marjory at all, but Shirley - Shirley who loved a man virtuously for only so long, then had her 'affair,' then refused him after she had dragged him from rebellion to conformity - Shirley who married her moustached Doctor Max S (who was a lawyer, not a doctor, and whose name was Morton, not Max) - and Noel who came to the wedding in his old tweed coat and who should have grinned sardonically at the sentimentality and ostentation of the wedding, but who instead looked only slack-jawed and wet-eyed - Shirley who saw in a flash what her wedding was in his eyes but who knew she was the prettiest bride ever and who intended to be the happiest - the Shirley who had forgotten, years later, that Noel had been greatly gifted and who had forgotten that she was Shirley and not Morningstar. The book had a happy ending, and yet the very vegetable happiness of it seemed a vast betrayal that I cannot define. Perhaps it was nothing less trite than the loss of the dream and the settling into mediocrity morrass. Anyway I finished the book, banged around emotionally for a while, neglected my vital homework entirely, and then rushed away with little more than a dab of perfume and a borrowed book to the communication of Windrim's house. Oh, I also wrote a mental letter to Mr Dyck: Dear Mr Dyck, Please don't have any worries about this. I am long past crushes on 'older men.' Besides, though I like you I don't really approve of you (partly because I think you are running away from something too, and possibly from the same shoddy inadequacy that I am running away from. But do you realize this ?). No, I do not approve of you and what I fall in love with must have my approval. Ask Frank about that. So you mustn't worry; I'll not be a female conscience problem. All I want from you is a thin line rolled from your wonderful skein of communication. I see you as a friend and philosopher and someone who may have a few answers. And do you know, I love the fact of your communication and the fact that I am learning to communicate, a little, myself. It is important, terribly, vitally, exclusively. Communication a fetish? Yes, but why? Oh, I like you, Herman Wouke, I like this book you have written about people and values. I like your love scenes that are not escape orgies for brainless or hoping-to-be-brainless nurse-book readers. I like the drunken stimulation you give me and I shall read your huge Youngblood Hawke over Easter. And you, Frank Doerksen. Do you knew that I think of you often now, and oftener than I did while we were Going Together? Friend - I think of you as a wonderful, wonderful friend and as the Noel for my potential Shirley - altho' of course I would and can never think of Ellie as Shirley. You know, as it is my future is very uncertain. A woman should think, even if rebelliously, that she will become a wife and mother. At the greybeard age of eighteen I feel that I've had my last romance and altho' marriage seems to be a supreme challenge I know there are several very good reasons for my being a spinster unit at thirty: 1. I'm afraid of Father, still and perhaps forever, appearing in my husband 2. my physical handicap would certainly be no asset in the snaring of a Greek god to domesticate - also because of my own amazement at its ugliness and my own reluctance to give a man I loved something less than beautiful 3. my grotesque giant-sized image of the man I want would dwarf everything a man I could 'find' could offer - what do I want? Foremost, integrity. I have to respect the man, the man's goal or lack of goal, the man's ability to love me, and the man's communication. He'll have to be both intellectual and simple, strong and warm, masterly and considerate, egotistic and love-centred. Exists such a man? - And oh yes, he must have the romantic detachment of my friend Frank - "no necking without communication that needs necking." Here girl, is a note to you: you may never find this man but if
you should, you will want to have been quite stern about the necking bit
yourself: take a small note here. Bally ho! - say, do you think I'll ever
have a problem again? Do you think I'll ever have a date at university,
or ever ramble hand-holding along some street? I'm afraid that I'll be bored
. Nerts, idiot, there's always you, and if you should ever become so idiotic
and bloated as to be bored by everyone else, why there's always fascinatin'
littleole you. You crank, you neurotic, I'm afraid I love you a little.
But if I ever hate the human race I'll hate myself too, and that will
be quite a fall for universe-loving Ellie who goat-foots it so merrily in
this mud-luscious April. Here's an adventure for posterity! I went out into the porch to brush my teeth and came back into the house 15 minutes later with a bunch of lilacs and - You should know first about Shinglenail Mike: There is a dun-colored shanty on the "Nob Hill" of Sexmith, the "Street where the Doctor lives." It has a sloping roof, a bushy caragana hedge, and - this is the important feature - a half-row of lilacs. Mike is a shiftles town curiosity, a "scavenger" whose garage is reputedly full of spare tires, hubcaps, jacks, lawn mowers - belonging to other people. He is a little man, with an oblong soft face like a potato, with small eyes netted in circles of wrinkles, with scratchy rough hands, and a roguish expression in all of his shuffling carriage. I've spoken to him often when I pass his place after school; the first time, I was frightened because even his jesting is rather fierce. He speaks a rapid, explosive, but incoherent English, as tho' he were afraid the listener would vanish before he finished. I catch only fragments of what he says - he was in the German army for ten years - "I fight Poland, yah, I fight Austria, I fight ... Maybe you read in book?" April 15 Looking forward to a great holiday with many books and much loafing 16 On Sunday of Easter Judy and I stayed home, reveled in Rachmaninoff's Concerto and Tsychouskis #1. Baked raisin tarts and devoured them under the bridge when we walked down the road. Reading the enormous "Youngblood Hawke." 20 Holidays. Talking to Mom about things like sex and men and people. Listening to records. Talked philosophy and psychology. Reading about classical composers and studying them a bit - boning on philosophers and writers - a BUSMAN'S HOLIDAY! 22 School again after the holidays. I am an enormous 128 lbs and will diet feverishly down to perhaps! 110 sigh. 23 Everything here in Sexsmith is finally dry but the creek is flooding its banks. 25 Because noon hours are so sunny and wonderful I go home for dinner and puddle about and am late for chemistry! 26 Windy beautiful spring days. 28 A lonely day: 2 church services (Luthern and United), a visit with old Wilson, a talk with Mr Cook behind Ludingtons garage, and then a marvelous evening with Dennis listening to Belafonte, Floyd Cramer and classics and talking - relaxed and very friendsome. Fun! [May?] I am hugely pleased with myself tonight, smug and grinning. I had a date of sorts, was out for forty minutes with Neal Fimrite - that in itself should shock you horribly because Neal is somewhat of a junior necking maniac and all the world knows it. But the Neal behind the reputation intrigues me. He's a small boy with a slow talking lazy-voiced charm that I find attractive, and what's more - this is the main factor I think - he stimulates my analytic mother-psychologist personality cells, and I, therefore, and because he is at once so intelligent and so young and in a way so ignorant, enjoy talking to him. He telephoned at perhaps 8:45 and asked if I wanted to go to a movie. Grinning wryly, with Mrs Wold I think grinning too, I told him no, my parents did not approve, I really couldn't. Well then, could I go for a coke at about eleven? "No - we usually close down here at about 10:30. I don't think I could. But thank you for asking anyway, Neal." "Just a minute - we've got about twenty minutes. Do you want to just drive around a bit?" "Oh, we could go up to Buster's - on the corner you know - for a Coke - and then you could take me home and go to that movie - fine." So in five minutes he arrived. I'm afraid I didn't doll much for his company, not even any lipstick, no time actually, because I had been half in pyjamas, reading "I Live in a Suitcase" and continent-hopping contentedly beside the open window and quarter glass of orange juice, smiling at my blurry, prettier-than-real-life reflection on the window pane. So there was his car, and in the back, close together, Marlys and what-was-his-name (who was small and rather stupid-looking). The usual rather uneasy date-silence as we drove to Buster's, shreds of music escaping rather mechanically from the radio as Neal dial-twiddled. He was wearing a peculiar alpine hat stamped with Hythe in red letters, and his face looked red and sore - acne. He got us Cokes at the corner service station, then street-prowled once more in his rather uncoordinated way of driving (I notice that now - Reiner drives surely and quickly in the city, Frank was a master driver, Mr Dyck is smooth and very connected in his movements when he drives - Neal shifts uneasily and even jolts! swearing at mud puddles) (And so I told Mrs Wold "a funny little boy.") And after more insignificant sentences which draped themselves vigorlessly over the back of the car seat, we dropped Marlys and w-w-h-n off at the theatre and he drove me home. He parked in front of the house, lit a cigarette - and as I was about to clamber awkwardly out ("Alright, I'll let you go to your movie - thanks") said "Stay a while. I don't like the features anyway." So we talked for a while; he can talk intelligently, or his slow way of speaking gives the impression that he does. After two cigarettes he turned the radio down a bit, and with a great directness put his young head on my shoulder, his hand on mine around my Pepsi bottle, and said "I'm tired." This was better than I had hoped! A little boy - "Of course you're tired. You're the type." "Why do you say so?" His big brown eyes turned up to look at me. "Because you're a stay-up-late Joe." He shifted, took off his glasses, folded them deliberately and put them on the dashboard. Then he settled back. "You know, your approach intrigues me. It's very original. How did you develop the 'I'm tired' angle?" "I am tired." "M-hm." This on and on - I feel like a charming "older woman" with him, half mother, half fond aunt, half flirt (3 halves, I know). Very svelt, very chic, very poised. He's older than I - but so young! Eventually he asked "Why so cold?" "I could explain it to you. It's quite complex. You'll think it's very queer - do you want to hear about it?" "Mm - yes." And after I had told him my "It's like ice cream ... I like ice cream but I like it better if I save it for special occasions" story he was more than perplexed. "You've got it all wrong! No offence but there were a lot of people who thought that way about 1905." "There are worse things than being a square." "Like what?" "Well no really, being a happy square is very nice." "Yeah?" and "You admit you like necking." "Yes - depending on the who, where and why - that why is especially important. I think of it as communication." "So let's communicate." "I haven't got anything to say. Look, have you ever been in love?" "Puppy love." "Well wouldn't you like to think that whoever you are in love with hasn't been kissing all kinds of guys all kinds of times?" "Aw, you've got it all wrong." But that was the evening and I enjoyed it. Great fun! Oh yes, said he, "You mean you'd rather stay in and read a book than be out necking with a guy you'd only seen once or twice?" "Exactly." And now back to "I Live in a Suitcase." I like being eighteen. May ? Sunday Mathematics all afternoon, 6 pieces of toast for breakfast, ice cream for supper, French verbs before church, church at the Uniteds. And I went for a walk. Down my street to the United Church, then diagonally across the road to the Anglican church. I unlatched the high latch on the black door and went in: shining pews, a many-pedalled organ, an altar with golden vases and candlesticks. I piped wheezily on the organ for a while, then got up to leave. But I couldn't open the door. Someone went by and latched it, I thought. There was no back entrance. Locked in the Anglican church, I thought, and chuckled - an adventure, certainly. But there were children nearby, I could hear them but not see them through the triangular small vestibule windows. I knew that if I banged they would hear me (I was almost sad to give up the thought of search parties and a long night in the church.) But I lunged against the door, and it snapped open. Sunshine outside. The bridge, my reflection rippling on the murky water. Two buttercups on one stem. A wooly, playful puppy (sheepdog - half dog and half lamb). Raymond Olsen driving up beside me with his twinkly "Hi, Ellie Epp." A wave from Mr McCue. Edging up one side of a teeter-totter and running down the other. And then sitting for a long time on a board crossing the stream. >>1994 The water was a gold-orange color, rusty sunlight in liquid. I sat very still, a long time, listening to the mandoline-plucking sounds, only a few notes with varying tempo and accent, of water running among the stones. A water ballad. I thought of Debussy's "reflets d'eau," but this was pure water-song. Like a mandoline and a ballad. Bits of broken clay pipe had been thrown into the stream, and where the water curved over them on the stream bottom they looked like fragments of pottery left by long ago people. There was a bottle on the stream bottom, and an old plank streaked with green under the water. And there were nests of rocks, rust-gold colored and beautiful. A streamer of rushes growing from this nest of rocks and fanning out with the current, gold-green and black-tipped. Criss-cross lines, curved panels, on the water surface. Moving sun glints in the water, underwater, the scent of buttercup in my hand. The red-gold ring on my finger, [Great] Grandmother's wedding ring. I thought that I would like to have a ceremony there, and dedicate my life to some lost cause for sheer gratitude. And then at nearly ten tonight the telephone rang in the dark kitchen downstairs. "She's not home" I called to it before answering. "Ellie speaking." "- Hi, Pat!" "But I'm in my pyjamas." "It wouldn't take long to get out of them." "Seven minutes, okay." And seven minutes later, there were Pat and Raymond in Pat's jaunty red car. So we went to Grande Prairie for a hamburger and a long tall rootbeer. Pat had his ukelale and his castanets. So at the A&W we sang wildly and chortled and had fun. On the way home - singing like negros, one on either side of me in the narrow car, "Keep you mind on your driving!" "And when I reached Jamaica I made a stop..." When we got back, sitting in front of my house for a minute longer singing "Show me the way to go ho-o-ome ..." Remarkable. Why did they invite Ellie-the-bookworm? Friday night May 17 While capering home from school tonight at 9:30 I saw Mrs Mann silhoetted against the window in her kitchen. She waved, I waved, I tripped on. Then Russell appeared outside shouting "Why don't you come over for coffee?" So I did, and spent the next hour and a half perched on their piano stool drinking coffee and spasmodicly watching television. Mr Mann was completely curled up in his big chair, hidden behind an ironing board with a half glass of frothy beer. His voice was lazy when he called his greeting from behind the mound of clothes. A good evening. When I visit people like this I feel that something is different here. These are warm and friendly people. Our people are not like this. Perhaps I have always been too young to notice but there seems to be no husband-wife warmth in our peoples' houses. I love Mr Mann. He will be one of my original heros forever, I think. Warm, intelligent, a good man, a man with maturity - and thus a man with integrity. I'll remember him. Saturday, May 18 I kept my schedule until 1:30 today, but after that today has been the usually erratic Saturday. It took one incident only .... Sundry Events in the Life of Me - I'm not quite caught up on the details As Concerning Mr Dee. I'm confused again. Last Saturday I was lyricising about him wasn't I, sitting on the front steps warbling things like "flame-tipped"? The week between this and that Saturday smoothed off the raw emotional edges - sadly! - and my Peter-patters are bien subdued. We talked a few times after school but usually Mr Mann was there too and I only listened. (Uncomfortable for people who talk when I listen? My meat-grinder mind goes chock.chock.chock and pours out beady-eyed evaluation, every minute, like tag-phrases on snips of paper fluttering out of a computer. I should like to see them drifting out of my head and blizzarding down around the watched.) But - back to Mr D. I've been avoiding him a bit. Just casually. When he drifts across the hallway to join my conversation with Reynold I drift on down the hall. We ignore each other in hallways. Nothing pointed. A laissez-faire with an accompanying serenity. But on Friday morning he walked past twice on his way to the office, and on the second trip, with a strange rather quizzical expression and said "Good morning." So I said "Good morning." But I was surprised. Things are falling into place, but they're falling into place crookedly and I don't see the pattern yet. And today he knocked on the door here, with the book I'd wanted to borrow - an anthology of Pope - and another one, Johnson's Rasselas Poems and Selected Prose. I felt bemused to see him, looking shaggard (no makeup, a rumpled sweater, but poof!), and kept him standing at the door until I'd decided he wouldn't mind coming in. "Just for five minutes," unquote, said he. At four thirty, three hours later, he got up and went back to his studying. It was rather fun. A great many amusing thoughts come out when we 'communicate.' He asked was I afraid of teachers. "Not any more." "And why not?" "Mainly because I've discovered that they are vulnerable. But it is a little frightening to discover." "Why?" "Because up to that point your entire stability has consisted of adults. When you discover that they are vulnerable you have little to fall back on." "That's a challenge, you know - be a stable adult." Good for you, Peter. (She said experimentally - it's difficult to call him Peter, but Mr D is nearly right.) This conversation makes me think of something - in connection with today, is it possible that Mr D is rather vulnerable too? I think of him always as moon-hard and sun-hard stern or gay with no really urgent affections and no loneliness in his aloneness. He could be a friend, but not a depth-friend. His human relations are - or seem - very good: banter and subtle flattery and scientific interest, but no involvement. He seems very careful, and this self-carefulness makes me careful of him. I am. There is an edginess about our 'relationship' because we are both people who like to narrow our eyes critically at relationships, even if we are in them. And if both of us are sitting in corners watching, there isn't too much to watch. Howevah .... He said it very directly and very well: "Are we friends or are we enemies? I'm never sure." Ah oui, monsieur! Ca y est! Nor am I ever sure. "I don't know. I think we're friends. Perhaps it's just because I prefer to think so." And we made no commitments! But I like him, even if he is only human. He's a challenge. I'd like to crack his caution and make myself important to him. There, I'm afraid, is the root of his appeal - challenge. My need for challenge is almost masculine. Is it good or bad? But how to become important to him? That is a difficult question. The most obvious method would be to have him fall in love with me. Not practical, tho, for several good reasons. First, his giant self-defense network would send him flying into his solitude again, as to a fortress. (That may be more true than I know - he is vulnerable, as he shows by his very isolation - this may be contradictory because he seems to have friends and rapport, he seems to pace through corridors and streets with a merrie eie and a surface candour. But has he any hollow places in himself, and has he any real depth as a man? Emotions?) Secondly, he has a well-constructed Casanovanic attitude that he sketches carefully in his blasé conversation about sex; his man-of-the-world references to "beautiful women", all of whom want to neck or to avoid necking (hideous word); his brittleness on the subject of women; his almost smiling remarks about pretty-type girls. I know very well that I'm not the type! Thirdly, I would not want him to, because it would mess up a potential friendship horribly. Because I am as I am, my being a person is primary over my being a woman, and I'm thought of first as a personality and only secondly as a girl. This is an advantage, because I like men as friends. (Honesty is important - am I sure this is not sour grapes or pseudo-Pollyannaism? Nuts! How can anyone be sure of anything? Nuts again!) Voici la problem! How can I be important to him without the love factor, when I am twelve years younger than he is, and not his peer in living experience, so that we can't be the contemporary-type friends? I have a problem. I notice it more and more. I'm split between two worlds. I'm eighteen. Yet the chatter and concerns of the eighteen-year-old world bore me. I ignore the age, altho' I like many of the people. But it is when I listen to Mr Mann and Mr Dyck jawing, or when I'm at Windrims listening to Doris coolly conversing with Jerry, that I feel suspended, dangled. I'm recognized by adults as being eighteen, by eighteen's as being adult. I belong nowhere, when I want to step into (what I see as) the fellowship of adults, I cannot. And no more can I truly step into the role of irresponsable eighteen, a role I never had. But perhaps I will skirt twenty-one as I have skirted eighteen, perhaps I will flit along never really touching down in any age, remote and watching. I should dislike the thought but I don't. We talked about other things. ("I'm proud of my insanity. I don't know what I'd do without my insanity." "I don't understand your intense interest in philosophy.") Major questions remaining? Residue: why is he important to me and why am I so intensely curious about him? How can I be important to him? Is he really a vulnerable person; that is, does he need anyone, does he possibly need something I can be to him? Why did he come this afternoon, why did he seem to enjoy it, and exactly what am I to him? We seem to communicate by loudspeakers through a great plate of glass. What would direct communication be like? May, a lyric Saturday morning sitting on the front porch at Mrs Wold's. Last Sunday Mrs Wold blew in pink from a drive in the country and said to me, calling up the stairs with a knowing sparkle in her eyes, "Mr Dyck just arrived with Edna." I'd known he was coming. I'd thought it would be around four o'clock. And when she told me he was here I made an adolescent dash for the window to see if his white Pontiac was perched in the street. It wasn't - And later, just before going to Windrims for supper, I dashed crazily downtown to the Chinaman's, presumably for a chocolate bar, actually to see if I couldn't somewhere see the tail of that white car flitting around a corner. There was a white car in front of the café - "You idiot" I shrieked at myself with a half-laugh, "chasing a man." It has nearly come to that too. I'm not sure, but I may just have one foot in an adolescent crush - and me in my old age! I have reasoned it out, of course. What says I have? The actual physical excitement I feel when I'm waiting (or half-expecting) for him to wander in after school, the tension I feel in the waiting, the sparkle that leaps up inside me whenever I catch a glimpse of him in the hall, the anger that gnawed at me when I thought he was going to ignore me permanently (he didn't say good morning that first day when he stood like an indignant cigar Indian (but what a beautiful cigar Indian) at the top of the stairs. I've caught on there tho'. We are utterly oblivious during the day, avoiding glances, not passing in halls unless I have to. Whether this is because he simply is rather indifferent or whether it is because of his professional dignity, I'm not certain. Immerhin, if it is the latter case, I'm complimented. If not, well, SHUCKS! Ain't he only a mereman? But after school when he wanders breezily in for a chat, we're friends. Fine. I like it too. But I was angry the first few days. And that anger is one of the most pointed indications that I may just have fallen back into 'childish things' briefly. Why is it possible at all? Most of the reasons are not what he is, but what I am and need at the moment. In the first place, I have a distinct partiality for red-headed men. Mr D is by no means the only one. I feel attracted to Mr Windrim too, tho' he is homely and balding, and when I saw a red-head a few Sundays ago with gimlet blue eyes, I felt a sudden leaping inside - that's how it is with red-heads, particularly if they are thin and big-eared. Mr D is thin too, but his ears are too nice. For all that, tho', he's a beautiful man. Particularly because he's so ugly. Seriously! I'll tell you. On Monday, the first day he came to school, I didn't see him at all until he rambled through with Mr Mann. He was wearing a black suit, and - I said this before - he was beautiful. I kept saying silly things to myself, like "dirk-straight" and "flame-tipped." That's funny, isn't it? No, it's his red hair and his long leanness and his comfortably ugly face. Hm-m-m no. Comfortably ugly is not what his face is. Ugly, yes. But the sternness and the intelligence, the forcefulness in that face is not really comfortable. When I think of him I think of integrity. Last night we talked about integrity. He can't define it, but we'll get back to the topic. Windrims and I talked about it last Saturday night. We came to a sort of agreement - it is something more than adherence to a set of society rules. It is something connected closely to "unto thine own self be true - and it will follow as a day the night that thou can't then be false to no other man." Something like that. It seems to border on "know thyself" and on being very deeply honest in your conversation with yourself. Integrity. I want it. Frank has it, but doesn't know that he has it, he isn't certain that he wants it. Mr Mann has it, I think. Mr Dyck too, to a certain extent - he isn't sure he wants it either. He thought my wondering about integrity un peu strange. "Do you think introspection is good?" "It has to be matu-ah and balanced!" "Are you?" "I won't be if I don't know what's going on inside so that I can relate it to what's going on outside." "For evaluation? You have a point there. But I still think it's strange for you to be thinking about it at any length." Eh bien, Monsieur D. Strange, perhaps. But I am now only beginning to crystalize into a personality and I want to crystalize into something worthwhile. Integrity seems important. I may come to a conclusion. Evaluation. That is a good word. It is exactly what I am doing with all this introspection and extrospection - (in short, inspection!). I don't introspect only. I probe other people (ha! I probe YOU Mr D) and I probe values. I'm surprised at the Solomon (the solemn one?) in me - I'm eighteen, I want 'wisdom'? That's funny, isn't it. This is a long way from reasons for reverting to a crush, tho' indirectly it is not. Mr D, you see, seems to stimulate my precious consciousness, my mental fingertips, my awareness. And so he is valuable. That's a mercenary reason for liking someone, nicht wahr? Also, he is Communicatal. Rare and necessary. Also he has a sort of debonairity which he denies but which consists of the basis for his fatal male attraction. The sun and moon halves of him - sternness and effervescence. A woman wants both. He has it. It seems I'm a mere woman (in embryo, true) and so I'm in the category too. I'll have to tell him about it. I have a great scientific curiosity about him. Perhaps this isn't a baby crush at all. Perhaps it is nothing more - or less, don't underrate it, Ellie - than a huge scientific curiosity tangled in a bit of emotional kinship. Ie science + friendship = tingles. May-be! I'd like to think so. In fact, it is highly likely. But there are a few of the crush symptoms still, like a ludicrous jealousy and an ingénue wistfulness. But shucks, I'll go along for the ride. Why not? Je n'ai que dix-huit ans, la jeunesse - vive la jeunesse! Vive l'amour! Toujours gai! Last Tuesday I went home for the night. Mother is pathetically affectionate - I lap it up, but it's pathetic because she needs affection so much. And when someone needs love too badly he gets only pity and embarrassment. Cock-eyed world. (I love it.) There was a book at home, the adventures of archy and mahetibal. I liked one of the pomes especially - song of mahetabel: "wotthehell, wotthehell, toujours gai, there's life in the old girl yet." Quotable - especially that wry, risqué, WOTTHEHELL. Ve-ry quotable! I shall. Quote. I got Mom a compact for M's Day. On the mirror inside is written in red "You're Beautiful" - take it away Mom. I hope you feel that way. I love my mother! Later, pm - 11:30 I'm learning a few things. Tonight we had a party at the school, a wiener roast in the grass near the creek. It was different from the high school parties we used to have - no, I'm different. I felt like a middle-twenties aunt having a good time with the kids. I felt wonderfully free - how? The freedom was the freedom from want. (No, goof, not because of the hot dogs.) I was free of the loneliness and the wistfulness and the terribly poignant want of a "someone." This is the first time I've gone unescorted to a party, especially a firelit party, without pulling into myself with the pain of aloneness. But tonight was wonderful. I sat with Cheryn Innis, with Bert in his feathered hat padding the bongos, near owly-eyed Ray Olesen and Pat cross-legged, guitar strumming. I like the sparks careening among the stars, but redder than the stars; the firelight on faces; Pat singing "But I'm sad to say, I'm on my way, won't be back for many a day ..." (the song has pathos for me now); the soft thud of his wooden tom-toms, the seedy rattle of the castanets; the smiles around the music; the ash on Pat's hair; Dennis standing alone with his hands deep in his pockets. You see? I enjoyed it. I didn't think of Frank or of any mystical (preferably red-head) Someone. That's why I feel so free about tonight. Alone by choice and liking it. Never mind about the older aunt bit; it's not as bad as it seems. I watched the three or four couples who came and I felt a little sorry for them because they seemed so held by what was expected of them, by the necessity of being together and yet having so little to say to each other. And I thought, this is high school, these are the RED-CURRENT days. But it seems so pathetic, nearly. Not gay and glamorous; rather a little sad and a little desperate. No joy here, no serenity. I like to be an aunt! I was one of the first to leave, hating the tho't that Mrs Wold might lock me out, and not wanting to worry her. So I said my goodnight and walked across the dark field. It was a beautiful night, dark enough now. I was glad and light, and still savoring my freedom. Then a light swung up behind me, the white car I had half-expected to see. Dennis and Dave. I like the car because it is narrow enough so that when I sit in the middle I can touch both of them on either side with the length of my arm. We drove around quite a few blocks, around and around, listening to parts of Camelot on the car radio, ("I'll vivisect him, I'll subdivide him ") talking in the isolation (the wonderful isolation) of a car in the dark. And after a long while I came home. So I feel I have learned something. I feel enormously lucky. I feel warm from remembered fireglow and from the thoughtfulness of friends. May 24 It began to rain tonight. Even before I could hear the rain (as I hear it now on the slant-roof above my head) I could see streaks of it on the windows, long dribbling streaks with light caught in them. When I walked home there was left only a spattering mist and wet sidewalks - and an earth smell; a thick grey sky curving in and out around the trees; lighted windows (two ketchup bottles and a tea kettle silhoetted against the light in Knobby Clark's shanty); fluid red streaks of neon far down the street beside the hotel; gleaming new leaves, wet, heart-shaped, dripping; shiny boards on the footbridge too slippery to run across as I usually do; a glorious solitude and a sharp joy. I thought as I crossed the gravelly road to my street, "I would like to do this forever - work during the day in some busy, important place, and then come home at night to a street roofed with these giant trees and peopled by friends, everyone in houses that are individual and separate, all alone, but all friendly." I felt distinctly alone, distinctly separate too, but not painfully so. And like a child (children have the same sort of separateness) I chanted to myself "I am my own very private Me." The phrase seems exactly right - almost like a line from a primitive rain-song or sun-song or initiation-song. And I could hear very clearly the sound of rain on a patch of tin far down the street, splintering against a tin chimney. Then it was good to reach my own shabby, square house (square houses have a sort of architectural poise), to leave my shoes in the porch and drift upstairs to my own room - my warm, orderly room that is so full of "own private Me" things - a twig in a drinking glass, my typewriter, the 'Japanese' fabric print on my wall, the upside-down map of Norway on my ceiling, my raised-eyebrow Robert Frost, my mysterious-beautiful Catherine de Neuve on the wall, my curtains and my books and my straight green chair. There was a tatter of flute music on the radio, and when I leaned outside I could hear a train grating through the suddenly quickened rain-sounds. Soup for supper - an amazing red invention that I stirred together at noon - a tin of corn, a tin of tomatoes, a tin of vegetable soup, and half a left-over tamale. (Horrible things, tamales. Why don't Mexicans breath fire?) Now it is good to curl my cold feet under three layers of blankets, to hear the rain splattering slantwise on the roof, to see two books beside me on the chair and know that I can read for a while before I reach out an arm to click off the light, to remember the thick wet grass, to think of people I like, and to lean my forearm against a piece of paper for writing. I remember Frank in the rain, standing in a puddle on Grandfather's red steps with his arms very carefully around me. When I ran inside afterwards there was a tactical impression of his prickly chin along my cheek, and his soft-remembered "Ellie I hope we don't ever forget each other" like a tangible warmth in a hollow. (Words! I am not speaking in denotation now, but in a sort of image-language. A warmth in a hollow - it would mean nothing to someone else, but to me it seems a goodness, a softness, a dearness like a small warm chicken cupped carefully in two hollowed hands - a warmth in a hollow.) It rains - yet people say "Life is empty. Life is a space of nothing between a nothing and another nothing." No. And if rain and amazing rubber-sheet sky were nothing and nothing, sun would be precious and people would be good. No. Life is a notched and sticky red sphere of Much in a nebulae of Maybe. And I am my very private Me, leaning my forearm against a piece of paper for writing. May 25 The rain was still here this morning. I read Pope's Rape of the lock before breakfast - made biscuits - then walked to George Robinson's house to meet him - he wasn't home so Patty and I charged 65¢ worth of chocolate bars for the Windrim kids and I went to see Mrs Windrim. We had coffee - she had tea, I had coffee-flavoured lemonade (love lemon juice in coffee!) actually. And we talked. When I am with her I feel totally adult whereas otherwise I feel adult only in a way that is "one-tenth real and nine-tenths ham." We read some of her poetry. I like her honesty: she doesn't smear her poetry to pseudo-gracefulness and she doesn't clip it to pseudo-starkness. It is real poetry by a real person. I could learn things from people like Doris Windrim. She is a slovenly housekeeper, she screams at her children, she cares very little how she looks. But she writes poetry and she is a warm person. La leçon? Expect perfection in one person only - and that is: Ellie E! I was going to begin tonight by saying triumphantly - "I didn't, after all, graduate in flat shoes." But it seems petty; what is important about wobbling in white high heels and feeling relief because everyone else wobbled in white high heels? Graduation evening. There are several things I'm proud of. I wore a dress much different from what everyone else wore. I wore my orange and gold and I swished. The other six girls were in pastels and chiffons and brocade. (But Ruthie - pink cotton with composure. Rah!) White carnations on my shoulder - I smelled them through the whole ceremony. I thought once of Frank. I wanted to invite him, but I was afraid he would come. So I didn't. And I am proud of my speech, my valedictorian address. It was unconventional. I said nothing about life being a river meeting the sea or a road with forks. (Boo! Hisses from the gallery) I was very honest. Ruthie finished her Ogden Nash-ish po'm "... lest we should all end up distresses ..." and "Maxwell they call him, whom some say's a menace, but there again - it just depenace ...." And then earnest nervous Bert: "Our Valedictorian ..." Teachers Parents friends: Most early societies had initiation ceremonies to mark the boundary between adolescence and adulthood. Our modern graduation exercizes remind me of those early rites because they too are more than an official release from high school - they are also an introduction to the complexity - the challenge - the bafflement - of being adults. Every year the graduating class is - symbolically - the New Generation. This year, we are the New Generation. And as the New Generation of 1963 we will have to carve our way through the debris left us by other generations - chaotic politics - only half-rational moral issues - and worst of all, the ragged personal relations. It is from these that we will have to build a security for ourselves, and not only for us - we must build a serenity for the rest of the world. No other generation has been able to do this. Yet, we are expected to. We should be reluctant to leave high school. We should be frightened, as other generations are frightened for us. But we are not reluctant and we are not frightened. We are confident. - And we are not confident only because we are naïve and a little arrogant. We are confident because our years here have given us something to be confident about. Our message to you as members of the adult society into which we will step after graduating is both a thank you and a plea. We are grateful for what you have been to us. You have been more important to us than we know yet. There have been those among you - parents and teachers - whose warmth and integrity has made you people valuable to become - people such as we ourselves would like to become. Your success as adults reassures us that we too can succeed. It is because of you, more than anything else, that we are confident. There is something we want to tell you. We want to accept the challenges you hand us independently, as adults - but we want you to remember that we still want your friendship - and we want to continue to learn from you. Applause. Thud. Thud. But I know that very few people understood what I was saying to them from the heart of the New Generation. I was disappointed by people who said "I wish I could say big words like that." But I was delighted by people who said, as Mrs Windrim did, "Yours was the best speech there. Everyone walked all around the point, Jerry too. But you went straight up to it." That is why I am proud. And Mother: "I want a copy of it. It was oh, I want to talk to you at home!" >> 2005
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