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SUNDAY SPECTATOR
September 24, 2006
The oldies
">avid Warren has a mother?” a certain fellow journalist asked, with apparently genuine surprise, when she found herself introduced to the person who is, indeed, my mother, some years ago in Kingston, Ont.My mother of course laughed. She is of Cape Breton Gaelic stock, they laugh at things like that. She has since grown very old, and frail -- needs helping up from a chair -- but she still laughs, in the same way, at human discomfiture. She makes jokes about her own feeble condition, and affectionately mocks my father for losing his marbles. Fortunately, papa had a lot of marbles to start with, and my mother is happy to make up the difference. He has become shaky, too, from diabetes, but still walks like an officer, full of boyish joy in the world around him. There is a good sense in which people never grow up, notwithstanding what I wrote last week. Through the wreckage of old age, the same person shines, from out of a soul that is immortal. Sight, hearing, and every skill may go; sometimes even the ability to form coherent sentences. But character is always the last thing to go. It is inculcated through a lifetime of habit, and among the most moving spectacles this world has to offer is an old guy, beginning to lose the plot, still earnestly trying to play his roles as father, husband, citizen, friend. Or an old gal, stooped from arthritis, who can still call a young nurse to attention, having been once herself the matron of a ward. The summer, not quite over for me, has been spent in most free moments with my sister, mentally or physically moving these ancient parents from a small house and detached workshop, into a tiny flat in an old folks’ home -- at their own request, from the moment they realized there was no other choice. This has involved laborious, often awkward, and sometimes very poignant “downsizing”, as we have halved a lifetime’s accumulation of goods, then halved the half, and halved again, to what could be carried on the last earthly journey. All the objects that trigger old memories float up in turn to the surface. All to be dispersed, sooner or later, to people who will not know. To write this column, about which I’ve been thinking for weeks -- whether to write it or not, for it is so personal -- I had to pull myself away from sorting through my father’s drafting cabinet. It is something I coveted from childhood -- precisely 18 inches wide, by 21 inches deep, by 27 inches high; with shallow drawers, and carefully placed dividers; everything just so. Papa designed this cabinet himself near the beginning of his career -- when he was that young man in the photograph, back from flying Spitfires out of English airfields, and so many other adventures, including two years in a tuberculosis sanitarium. Who now had a degree, and a job, and was just married to the girl he met in Halifax during that war, and fell for, head over heels. (The demure one, with the long red hair, smoking the cigarette in that painting.) A friend who was a cabinet-maker built it very well: sixty years later, every drawer opens smoothly. And now I have the thing itself -- to replace my own cumbersome, warped, and inferior surrogate. And would that I could return it: but there’s no use for it, and no place to put it, where my parents now live. Many of us, around my age, have inherited such time capsules. Most of the small objects inside, though unused for more than a decade, still neat and ordered despite the jostling of the move -- “ship-shape and Bristol fashion”, by the phrase I was raised on. Not only the carefully-kept tools and gadgets of my father’s trade, but also, many that belonged before him to his father, a cartographer. Lead paperweights for the drafting table, pen knibs set out in hand-made leather wallets. What does one discard, to make space for one’s own paraphernalia? How, for instance, could I ever throw out the labeling plate for his drawings: the one that proudly declares, “James Warren / Industrial Designer”? It will never be used again, but so what? No, my own son will discover it some day, in a corner of this drawer. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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