Don’t get me wrong. Most days, they were cheerful and engaged, and focused on their goals. Like the majority of people lucky enough to have lived in North America in the last century, they experienced real-world happiness as a common occurrence. It was as common as oxygen, nearly as invisible, and almost as crucial to survival.
That makes them very different from their ancestors. In the deep past, my parents’ parents and more distant ancestors had spent their lives trying to keep their heads above the murky water, trying to get themselves free of other people’s treadmills, too busy surviving to offer the past a goodbye or the future much more than a shrug toward the horizon as they left to work the fields. My parents could see a brighter future than that, and were wholly focused on getting to it. They didn’t have a sense of either continuity or history because they had broken with the past and with the way people had done things in the past: families that exploited or abused one another, soldiers who had killed one another, bosses who put their boots on your neck and pushed your face in the mud, countries that invaded one another or dropped bombs on peaceful cities. That was over, and they were determined to leave it behind. Yet they didn’t see themselves as exemplary or heroic. They were ordinary people working their way toward a better future. Their world was a bright place, the future brighter still, and they were content to be who they were, and where they lived. But the sun doesn’t shine every day.
In the future they got, many things got better for them. My mother got her appliances, there was less drudgery for her, her children all grew up and married and had children of their own. Some of her wishes were fulfilled, most of my father’s were, but some of the things they wanted proved impossible or empty or preposterous. Gradually, the ideal family of 1945 descended into nuance and an ordinariness that brought pain to both my parents in different ways. The city my father predicted would have a million citizens at the millennium had barely 100,000 at the beginning of the twenty-first century, its forests depleted by logging and self-inflicted ecological catastrophe; its wealth stolen by the corporations or merely squandered; crime was rampant; and the city was losing population daily.
Imagine these two people on a wide river, not as flotsam, yet not as smug boaters on a Sunday lake. They see the river’s restless power clearly, its currents and eddies, and they accept that rapids and whirlpools might lie ahead, even though they have no deep expectations about absolute or final destinations, spiritual or tangible. Imagine them in a small blue boat drifting downstream. They are looking for ways to move their boat here and there, side to side— not to get to the shore but to avoid the hazards of the currents, and to take advantage of them. My mother leans over the water, sculling distractedly. My father sits upright, scanning the river for the means to devise a paddle—or better still, a set of oars so they can ply the currents together. It is April 1945. And, in the blink of an eye, it is December 2000.
HARTLEY FAWCETT fervently believed that he was a self-created man, and Rita Surry, just as passionately if not as loudly, molded herself and her life as the exception to every rule by which her family lived—or, in her view, ran amok. That made them both, like their own parents and immediate ancestors and unlike their siblings, pioneers. Pioneers are unrooted people, interested in acquiring property, making money, and building large families as a protection against old age and contingency. They are contemptuous of the past, oblivious to most cultural and historical nuance and indifferent toward anything other than practical understanding.
But my parents were a different sort of pioneer: less constrained by subsistence, and the frontier they sought was as much psychological as it was physical. They wanted to get ahead of other people, build solid material foundations for the future, and, most important of all, do things differently than their parents and siblings.
Pioneers are different from immigrants. My wife’s Eastern European parents, although born in North America, are typical of immigrants in that they are most interested in family and ethnic solidarity, educating their children and gaining social prestige. They have been obsessed by questions of obligation and social responsibility that held little interest for either of my parents.
Me? I’m Canadian, which is different again. I have a sensibility that includes elements of both pioneer and immigrant values, but has been shaped by the multicultural society around me. I’m trying hard, for instance, to infect my children with a sense of their genetic and social connectedness to both the people around them and to their ancestors, and I’d like them to have a deeper appreciation of the complexity of the present and past than I was brought up to observe. But like my parents before me, I have no ethnic chauvinisms, and I have their determination to do things my own way, their eye for practicalities, and I have their skeptical view of social convention: if everyone is doing it, that is cause for wariness.
Put another way, I want my children to understand the specific flavour of wild strawberries and I want them to know where to look for them. I want them to know how wild strawberries differ from the genetically modified and tasteless agribusiness strains, and in which ways—and when—the flavour of the local strawberries in season still resembles the wild ones.
Being Canadian this way, and with an almost infinitely better access to the specifics of the past provided by an information-enriched world, has convinced me that the people who raised me weren’t entirely self-created. Like most people, their family histories reveal more than a few things they couldn’t—or wouldn’t— have: the contrariness of their characters, why they got so far from home and from their families and the comforts offered. That’s why I’ve located the family closet, and have pried open its door. Out pour the skeletons—and the wild strawberries.
The wild strawberries I’ll pick and try to present with their flavour intact. The skeletons are another matter: they explain too many of the whys and whats to leave out, but they’re not the story, which is about two people who deliberately stepped outside the slow-moving continuums of history and genetics that made them. Thus, I’ve forced the skeletons back into the closet, and I’ve parked the closet at the end of the book, for the edification of those who want to open it.
How my parents first met isn’t a story that has survived in the form of a singular thrilling anecdote. Hartley Fawcett worked on the trucks for a meat-packing company and Rita Surry worked at the Hudson’s Bay Company, the largest meat and grocery outlet in Edmonton at the time, so it seems logical to suppose that she met him that way.
But maybe not. My mother once told me a wistful story about my father appearing at one of the dances she organized with her girlfriends. He’d been the date of an acquaintance, and she herself was there with a police constable she didn’t much fancy. She spotted my father the moment he walked in, and said that he spent the evening glancing at her. He was slim, handsome, and strongly built, with bright hazel eyes and a shock of jet-black hair. She said he had a reputation for wildness, but quickly added that what mattered to her was that he was a man with strength and ambition, and that his wildness could be tamed.
“He was a catch,” she said, ruefully. “But when you’re in love, you can’t really be sure of exactly what kind of fish you’re catching.”
Fred Surry, my mother’s father, ran across my father well before she did. Hartley Fawcett had shown up at the taxi stand next door to Fred’s book and coin shop to collect whatever he could of the thousand dollars he’d lent to one of the taxi owners, a burly pipe smoker in his late thirties. When the cabbie didn’t have the money he owed and showed no inclination to get and give it up, an argument ensued. Fred Surry heard the commotion, and arrived too late to catch the taxi owner taking the first swing at my father. But he was perfectly timed to see my father counter with a punch that put the larger man’s pipe through the side
