commiserate. As I pulled my car off the road and glided through the supermarket’s parking lot, I was thinking, not of the immediate family death, but that of a close friend I went to high school with who’d recently died of a heart attack after 40 years trapped inside a schizophrenic fog. I pulled up beside a green minivan, and sat for a moment, lost in thought, tears rolling down my cheeks.
But an odd sound was coming from the minivan, and when I looked over, there was a 5-pound Chihuahua plastered against the driver’s-side window, snarling and splattering the window with drool as it tried to chew its way through the glass to get at me. As far as this mutt was concerned, I was Adolf Hitler and the Communist Menace rolled into one, and if I came near his property and even if not, well . . .
Crazed Chihuahuas that interrupt theme-based reveries just aren’t found in novels. In my world, they’re the everyday ciphers I navigate with.
So, I’ll spin you the love story I found, and I’ll do my best to make sense of the struggles of the main characters, whose lives, now over, were about equally filled with love and conflict. But both immediately and ultimately, this is as much rooted in slapstick as in romance or grim mortality: comedy is the unacknowledged third element that human life is constructed from.
I also have other ambitions for this. The serious part of me wants to uncover what two unambitious lives reveal about our dead-in-the-water civilization, where history and progress have broken and we are all off chasing private entitlements and BMWs and investment portfolios on a planet with dwindling resources, overburdened infrastructure and a rapidly faltering natural environment. We have too many of one species—ours, not those cattle farting in the meadow—and now we’re breaking up into a myriad of factions and tribes, most of them bristling with weapons, the hand-held automatic kind, and the larger ones, the WMDs that George Bush’s America couldn’t find in Iraq because the industrialized oligarchies of the Cold War have them all. That’s the mess we’ve made of the bright future we inherited from the rubble of the Second World War, and I won’t remind you of it again because there’s no need to. Everyone knows that the world is a mess, and it scares the hell out of most of us, me included. By the end of their lives, the main characters in this narrative knew it was a mess, too. Over their lifetime, its undertow grabbed at their resolve like it does yours and mine, and they could almost, but not quite, hear the rumble of the missile silos at the margins of some of their conver sations, not much differently than I heard them for 30 years of my life. It was a kind of “black noise” at the bottom of everything in the last half of the twentieth century, and it darkened the slapstick as much as the high drama, birthing a new strain of gallows humour on a global scale. This black noise is less recognized but more affective than the white noise that is technology’s constant signature in our doings.
Look at it this way: the three most influential public figures of the twentieth century, Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, and Mao Zedong, ordered—sometimes directly—the deaths of about 35 million people, and were indirectly responsible for 40 or 50 million more. No instrument can accurately calculate the pain and misery that these and a depressingly long list of other “exemplary” people have spread, and no language can articulate the affront to life itself those wasted or prematurely terminated lives constitute.
This is therefore unapologetically a narrative about how some ordinary people made their way through a world that changed much more than they did, and about how they adapted—or didn’t. It will be an account of cruelties and kindnesses, commitment and broken commitments, stupidity and wisdom, cunning and obliviousness, selfishness and sacrifice: the human condition, lower case, and close up.
Am I making everything sound bleak? It wasn’t. Not for them, and not for anyone who came in contact with them. And that brings me to my other ambition for this story, which is that, despite all the grim darkness that surrounds us, my parents’ lives were filled with life-affirming decencies and sweet, comedic interludes. Small, decent lives like the ones in this book might be the best accomplishments of the twentieth century. These were people who lived without violence, people who ignored the vaunted programmatic ideologies that shattered nations and laid waste to entire continents. They lived with grounded common sense, which they exercised without causing notable harm or displacement to anyone, including themselves, and they stumbled and fell a lot while they were exercising, almost as if they were reminding themselves of how inexact the instruments they had to work with were.
My mother, one of the two primary players in this comedy, lived her entire nine decades within the century she was born in, always distant from the furnaces of violence. She lived her life without spectacular ambitions or accomplishments. But what she did do during her life was create more laughter than misery, and she was capable of outbursts of brilliant, calming happiness that she recognized and learned to articulate so that others could be warmed and illuminated by it. Some of us were, when we weren’t stumbling around and tripping over things and otherwise getting mired in the mess.
My father, who spent nearly 93 of his 100 years in the twentieth century, had, well, a thorough if often selfish good time. Then— not to give the punchline of this entire affair away—he spent his last eight years making whatever restitution was needed, and in the process, changed himself and everyone who was close to him.
There’s something else that makes all this worth the telling: the two central figures in this story literally couldn’t have imagined that a story could be written about their lives. They both had the sort of modesty of expectation that prevented them from seeing themselves as central to anything, even, at times, their own lives. They didn’t see their marriage as drama, or their lives as a narrative that had a fireworks-and-orchestra beginning followed by plot-point catastrophes and epiphanies, and they didn’t see its ending coming until it was on them even though they both prepared for death in exquisite detail. They saw their individual lives and their marriage through the lens of a plan, one that they pursued relentlessly without talking about it very much, and except in moments they thought of as weakness, without looking back to see what had worked and what hadn’t.
This is also about the desire to find a human and humane happiness, about the goodness of the human spirit, about the unappreciated comedy of our expectations and it is about the will we don’t hear very much about these days. Not the will to dominate others, or make life about ourselves, but the often-interrupted will to love and be loved, and the contagious decency that arises from it.
My private motives? Like most people born in North America during and just after the Second World War, I grew up without the faintest curiosity about the people who’d brought me into the world, and even less about the ancestors who had gotten them to our staging grounds. Toward the end of my parents’ lives I began to understand that this lack of curiosity was a serious mistake, and in part, this book is my attempt at restitution: this is about them, but it is also for them.
IN 1945, my parents’ marriage, then in its tenth year, was as troubled as it was solid. My father, who’d been forced to quit school in the seventh grade when he left home, had a first-rate brain, courage, and an eye for making money. He’d worked his way from the delivery trucks of a meat-packing company to travelling salesman, and by the end of the war he held the largest territory his company covered, and was looking for other ways to build up enough capital to buy a business of his own. Within the definitions acceptable at the time, he was an excellent provider, and a capable if emotionally limited parent and husband. My mother suffered from mild bouts of depression even though that wasn’t a recognized affliction at the time, socially or clinically, and she harboured profound resentments toward my father. Some were private and specific, some were generic enough that they might have been found in a sociology textbook 25 years later.
Part of the conflict between them was larger than they were. It was the product of the Second World War. Yes, the war lifted North American women’s horizons. But it had
