I spent the past two astonishing days
at reunions for my elementary school (grade 6, class of '63) and my high
school (grade 12, class of '69). These reunions were brilliantly and lovingly
orchestrated by three of my fellow students from those days: Grant Mitchell,
Nancy Gray, and the fine actor (and dear friend) Nick Rice. For most of us,
this was the first time we had ever attended a reunion, and most of the 70
or so attendees had to fly in from wherever they now live to Winnipeg, where
we went to school so many years ago.
In the tumultuous late '60s we were an extraordinary group, academically
successful, ambitious and confident we could and would change the world.
We remain an extraordinary group, many with lowered expectations, some famous,
most somewhat battle-scarred but almost all thriving, happy, remarkable.
With few exceptions, we had not seen each other in thirty or forty years,
so the atmosphere was electric with curiosity. As I spoke to those I knew,
or thought I had known, it was clear that a considerable number of us were
looking for more than just renewal of old friendships. We were looking for
closure.
In the Spring of 1969 I fell deliriously, profoundly in love with a tiny,
intense young woman of quiet and staggering intelligence. Joanne was an
accomplished pianist and flautist who planned to study music at the renowned
Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York. I wanted to study philosophy
and political science and creative writing and an extensive and incongruous
group of other subjects. But most of all I wanted to travel the world with
Joanne, to transport us to some wondrous, distant place, wrapped in a mutually-woven
cocoon of idealistic emotional and intellectual passion and protected from
an outside world that I saw as nothing more than a coarse and rude intrusion
into the perfection and purity that was we two.
The brief time I spent with her that Spring was filled at once with ecstasy
and exquisite terror. I was utterly in awe of her, her incredible talent
and intellect, the way her eyes filled with fire and then tears as she expounded
passionately, gracefully on subjects that I could barely grasp. Her mind
was like a Bach fugue, operating on several levels simultaneously, artfully,
weaving several ideas in tandem that she would finally resolve in a handful
of words and then look right at you, right into your soul, showing that
she understood, and questioning, pleading to see whether you understood
as well. I wrote poetry and played music on the stereo for her, in homage
to her -- Satie's Trois Gymnopédies and Rachmaninoff's Second
Symphony and Second Piano Concerto -- and lit scented candles. We talked
for hours about philosophy and the environment and politics and economics
and language and literature and music and ideas and emotions and how to save
the world.
Every day, every meeting with her was an impossible challenge, an exhausting,
gut-wrenching performance, an attempt to keep up, an artless and inarticulate
wooing of this magical, wonderful, incredible person who wholly and flawlessly
personified my every ideal, my very purpose for living. Every evening alone
was an agonizing re-enactment of that day's performance, a humiliating admission
of unworthiness, unworldliness, incoherence, and a shattered preparation
for the futile attempt to do better the next day. I dared not try to make
our love affair physical, where I was even less competent and self-confident
than I was emotionally and intellectually. Besides, I felt no need to do
so, and hence squandered the opportunity to deepen our incandescent relationship
further, though into what unfathomable abyss that could have taken us I
cannot say.
Rapturous, living in mid-air, I tried to feign casualness, pretend that
this was merely clever intellectual sparring, the mental equivalent of a
pair of otters playfully circling each other in an elegant ballet of point
and counterpoint. Joanne of course saw right through this. I have no idea
how much she loved me and to what extent she only endured and encouraged me
because my amateur and desperate adoration flattered her. She did spend every
spare moment with me for those few short weeks. I would give anything, put
up with anything, to feel like that again.
When it was time for her to leave Winnipeg, I went into emotional shock
and began to come unglued. Agonized, exhausted, helpless, I shrugged her
off, told her (ridiculous, rehearsed words that haunt me to this day) that
it was the wrong place, the wrong time, and maybe, maybe.... After I walked
away she ran after me, and told me, crying, never to do that again. If
I had not been already, I was undone.
She came to visit me a year later and I repeated my callous, inept, distant
and outrageous act of indifference. I wanted to die. The next three years
were a blur of nihilism and numb denial, and then, with some money saved
and my idealism seizing control, I wrote and asked her to drop everything
and go traveling with me. I was so broken I hadn't and couldn't think my
proposal ahead any further than that. Her postcard reply was short and ambiguous
"not now, Dave". To resolve the ambiguity I went to visit her and spent a
few short hours with her asking why not. Whatever she said, I did
not hear, after the word "no". Even then, she left a door open, saying she
was surprised and flattered I would travel so far just to see her. Fucking
idiot that I am, I failed to determine whether this meant "don't give up"
or was just politeness. As I walked out of her parents' house that day I
died.
It took me many years after that to put the shattered wreck that was
left of me, through no fault of anyone but myself, back together. Over
the next few years I visited Joanne's house once more, and called one desperate
night by phone, both times talking to her tactful father, since she had
moved away.
It has been thirty years since I last saw Joanne. My wife of twenty-three
years saw some promise in me in 1980, shook me out of my self-indulgent
trance, and has made me whole, successful, content, productive, a competent
provider and a responsible citizen -- I owe her everything. It is a debt
unpaid, an extraordinary favour unreturned. But that is a subject for another
story.
For the last three days I have been wondering, half with curiosity, half
with dread, whether Joanne would come to the reunion. I expected that if
she did, there would be a rush of emotion, a catharsis, an answering of
thirty-year-old unanswered questions. Closure. I cried on the plane, listening
to
Helplessly Hoping
and Baby
Boom Baby
and I'm Going
to Go Back There Some Day
and, of course, Rachmaninoff.
This afternoon, Joanne came to the reunion. We hugged, traded histories,
acknowledged significant others, spoke of getting together, the four of
us perhaps. There was no rush of emotion, no catharsis. There was no asking
and answering of questions, although she offered the opportunity. Whether
there was closure or not, I do not know. I suspect that (my fault entirely)
there was not. Thirty years...
There is a dragon here, and unlike the
dragons I've written about elsewhere
this one is at once real and fabrication. The dragon is the half-true
story that I made up thirty-four years ago. Like any wonderful or terrible
story it gets better, richer, truer with time and re-telling.
But it isn't really a half-true story. It is a toxic mix of two
stories: What actually happened and what might have been.
What actually happened, what we really had and felt for each
other, is a true story with a lot of missing facts. It is possible, though
far from certain, that we will one day know the missing facts, and the true
story will be at least complete, if not free from nuance, from ambiguity,
from doubt. There could be closure to this story.
What might have been from the fateful day thirty years ago to
today, is not a true story. It is fiction. Like any might-have-been
story rooted in regret
it is of course dangerous, larger-than-life, unambiguously wonderful and
full of joy and redemption. It is tyrannical and the cause of grief, guilt,
discontent and madness. The power of this story is our wish that it be true,
and the impossibility of proving it 'false'. It can only be defused by recognizing
it, deep inside, as unreal, an impossibility, a fiction. What might have
been is what was not.
Joanne's visit has at last allowed me to recognize my might-have-been
story as fictional. That's not a denial that, if (huge if) something
that did not occur had occurred, it might have been. But, like a
vivid science fiction story that describes what might have been if an asteroid
had hit the Earth in the 1970s, it is still a fiction. Once you've read
it, you put it away and don't think about it further. It is unarguably unreal,
fictitious, even a lie.
Without the toxic catalysis of the might-have-been story, the what
actually happened story becomes moot. Can't change that. Done and decided.
Can't go back again.
Can you regret what actually happened? Of course, and closure, knowing
what actually happened and why, can help deal with that. But with the might-have-been
story back in the bookshelf, closure of the what actually happened
story isn't really that important. Yesterday's news. Far more useful,
and satisfying, is to talk here, now, about philosophy and the environment
and politics and economics and language and literature and music and ideas
and emotions and how to save the world. And maybe even actually make it happen.
Now there's a story.
Fellow graduates and readers that stumble on this strange and sad reminiscence,
may you find peace and closure through discovery of what really happened
in your own history, and may you have the extraordinary sense to put your
fictions of what might have been, to rest.
|
MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
