The Truth About Luck: What I Learned on My Road Trip with Grandma (12 page)

“I do love the old records,” she says, opening her eyes. “It's a different sound.”

“It's nice, isn't it?”

“We've always listened to music in our family, haven't we.”

“Yeah, we always did growing up.”

“My dad loved music. And, like your grandpa, he loved to dance.”

“Was he good?”

“My dad was a wonderful dancer. That's how I learned. He taught me. But it wasn't like you see in the movies, when a child is learning to dance and they stand on the feet of their much older partner. No, it was real dancing we did.” She pauses. “At least it seemed like it to me. I just know I didn't do anything silly like stand on his feet.”

“What kind of music did you listen to then?”

“Mostly whatever was on the radio. We always had the radio on after supper . . .” She turns away and brings a hand up to her mouth.

“What is it?”

“Oh, nothing. Sorry, just thinking about all these old stories. I haven't thought about these things in such a long time.” She faces me again. “You know, my dad was never a letter writer. But when he was back fighting in France, not long after I was born, he wrote a letter home to Scotland. It was for me. I still remember how it started: ‘Dear Sweetheart.' I kept it for a long time, but I'm not sure what happened to it. I've kept a lot of things over the years, but I've probably lost just as many.”

“Your memory is excellent. That's what I have to worry about. I can't remember very much from my childhood and it wasn't all that long ago.”

“Oh, I don't know about that. You told me some stories yesterday.”

“I guess.” Although I'd be just as happy to forget about that diaper episode.

“Anyway, my sisters were often around, and my brother Pat loved music, too.”

“I'm not sure I know much about Pat.”

“Pat and I got along very well. I can remember him rubbing my back if I couldn't sleep. We were all different, but a close family. And because there was such an age difference between myself and the older siblings, they were almost like parents.”

“What happened to Pat?”

“He died young. He had a heart attack shovelling snow. We were in Canada when it happened, and I can remember my mom getting the phone call.”

“What about your sisters, what happened to them?”

“Which ones?”

“How many did you have again?” I think there were a lot of them.

“Sisters?”

“Well, brothers
and
sisters. There were quite a few of you, right?”

Grandma knows everything about my tiny family. I have only two siblings and no cousins. I know very little about hers. I know more today than I did three days ago. Still, I don't even know exactly how many siblings she had. I do know she's the only one left.

“There were seven of us. Well, really there were eight. Chinsy was the oldest. Her real name was Johanne, but we only ever called her Chinsy. Then Pat, whose real name was Peter. Lottie was next. She was Charlotte, but we called her Lottie.”

“Huh, Lottie from Charlotte. I like that.”

Grandma starts laughing and closes her eyes. “It's actually quite ridiculous when I think about it now. We had nicknames for everyone.”

“I like it.”

“I suppose if you use a nickname to someone's face it means you like them.”

“True.”

“Anyway, after Lottie was Jean. Her actual name was Jane. She was a real ham, a joker. She loved to tease and laugh. Next was Della. Her full name was Donnella. Okay, so after those five there was a fourteen-year gap before the next baby. And that was me. And then the youngest, Donald. Donald was four years younger than me. My only younger sibling, my baby brother. That's seven, right?”

“Yup.”

“The eighth wasn't my parents' baby. But they raised him. That was Dean. He was just a baby when he came to live with us.”

“Yeah, I remember hearing that name, Dean. But I can't remember who he was.”

“He also died quite young, during surgery.”

The record stops abruptly. I hear the needle lift and return to its resting position. “Should we listen to another one?” asks Grandma, interrupting herself.

“Yeah, sure. Which one?”

“You pick this time.” I roll over onto my stomach and flip through a few. “How about this one?” I ask, holding up an Artie Shaw album.

“Yeah,” she says.

“Or maybe . . .” I flip through a few more. “How about this, Grandma: Lee Morgan.”

“Yes, fine.”

As I change the record, Grandma continues where she left off. “Dean was my sister's son. Chinsy's third child. She died right after he was born.”

“What happened?”

“In those days, after women gave birth they were told to stay in bed. That was the thing to do. They called it bedrest. And she was still on bedrest when something happened, I can't quite remember exactly what . . .” She trails off and looks down at the floor.

“Well, it's so long ago . . .”

“But in any case she stood up or got up too quickly to try do something, and must have had a blood clot, or stroke. She died. It was very quick.”

“Pretty terrible.”

“Those types of things were much more common then.”

“So was having such a big family.”

“Really, it was almost like Donald and I had a whole bunch of aunts and uncles. Our siblings were almost a generation older than we were. In some ways they were.”

“How so?”

“Well, you know my dad fought in the First World War, but Chinsy also left home and went to Edinburgh to nurse. Jean was too young to train as a nurse during the war but still volunteered in the city. And Pat joined the navy. So for them, they'd all been through a world war. The war to end all wars.”

“It sounds like you're describing a novel to me or something.”

“No, really? You think? I'm sorry to be going on like this. I shouldn't be going on and on.” She shakes her head. “I never talk about all this stuff.”

“I'm glad you can remember. I don't know much about your family. Did everyone move out to Canada, or did any of them stay in Scotland?”

“We all went out, except for Jean. She'd already married a Scottish fellow. But it wasn't too long after we left that her husband died. So she left Scotland, too. She followed us out to Canada,” she says. “Did you ever hear about Chinsy and her husband?”

“No.”

“Before Jean married, or any of us children in the family, Chinsy married. She was only eighteen. And she eloped.”

“Really? Did that happen a lot back then?”

“No, I don't think so. But yes, she eloped. My parents didn't want her to get married. They told her no. You see, she met this fellow right when the war was breaking out. And he got called up to go over to France. So they decided they would get married before he left.”

“See, this sounds like a movie.”

“It does a bit, I guess. But it happened. So because he was going off to war, my parents didn't want Chinsy to marry him. They wanted her to wait.”

“Why?”

“Because of the war. Who knew what was going to happen? Of course, that was also what made them
want
to marry as soon as possible.”

“Yeah, I can see that.”

“And she did. That was Chinsy. She actually climbed out her window.”

“Come on . . .”

“Yes, he'd put a ladder up to the second floor and off they went. A week later he was off to France.”

“And what happened?”

“He lasted a few months before he was killed.”

“Unbelievable.”

“She remarried in Canada. In fact, Jean and Chinsy married brothers. They were farmers and lived in Saskatchewan.”

“Do you remember them, the brothers?”

“Oh, yes. They were hard workers. Neither was born a farmer; they both did it out of necessity. Farming is tough work when it doesn't come naturally. I liked them. I always tried to get along with everyone, I guess. In a family that size, there's always so many different personalities. So it can be pretty easy for things to get complicated. But we tried to be close. I never had to try hard to be close with Donald. I think because we were so near in age. And because, let's face it, it was Donald. He was always very good to me.”

“It seems like you guys all did stuff.”

“What do you mean?”

“I'm not sure. It's just, this is interesting for me to hear about your family. Seems like lots of stories there. Lots of intriguing, complicated lives.”

“Well, come to think of it, all the women in my family worked. Chinsy was a nurse, Lottie taught primary school, and Della taught at business college. Even my mom worked. She kept the store and rooms. That was our connection with the Old Country. My mom was a businesswoman. She knew what she was doing. It was rare in those days.”

“Yeah, see, that's what I mean.”

Again the record ends and we're counterintuitively interrupted by lack of music. “What about another?” asks Grandma.

“For sure.”

This time I go with Artie Shaw.

11:23 a.m.

WE'VE MADE IT
through two more full records. We've been talking less and listening more closely. We've moved from Shaw to Charlie Parker and on to Coleman
Hawkins
. Grandma has turned the conversation to me. She's commented again about how much she likes my desk and bookcase. She wonders if I had them when I lived in Toronto.

“You had a pretty small place in Toronto, didn't you? A basement apartment?”

“Yup, it was tiny. I didn't have my desk then. It wouldn't have fit.”

“Didn't you have a name for it, for your apartment?”

I'm surprised Grandma remembers this. She never saw my Toronto apartment.

“Yeah, I named it the Bunker, on the first day we lived there.”

“That's right, the Bunker.”

It was the most sensible name for the sunless basement apartment I shared with my girlfriend, Maeve. We'd moved in during the spring of 2006. The entire apartment, including kitchen and bathroom, was similar in size to your average family room — only much smaller, with fewer windows, and with less furniture and no fittings.

“We had to enter through a door at the side of the house. You couldn't see it from the street, Grandma. Our entrance was off an alley.

“The door opened to a staircase. At the bottom were two doors. Laundry machines were on the left. To the right, the Bunker. It had a table for two, and a warming-type instrument that wasn't really a microwave and wasn't really a convection oven but had the worst qualities of each. So most meals were either takeout or cooked on the hot-plate burner built into the counter. There was a dented, lime-stained sink, three cupboards, and a yellow wooden bookcase against the south wall. We also had a lamp.”

Grandma seems interested to hear about the Bunker. I haven't shared many of my memories of the apartment or my time there. She's brought her hands together on her lap again, interlocking her fingers. I continue telling her about my old place.

“Oh, and two convenient steps from the kitchen and dining space was our bathroom. For some reason it had a wicker door. Wicker as a bathroom door was definitely creative. You don't usually see that kind of thing. That's because wicker provides as much privacy as chicken wire. Two more steps through a frayed curtain was the bed and dresser.

“The walls of the Bunker were brick painted white and grey, but the first foot or so from the floor was exposed concrete. If it sounds kinda jail-cell-y, it should. It was. After we signed the lease, I told Maeve it just needed a good eye and a human touch to make the place feel a little more homey.

“So I hung two posters with Scotch tape. One was of Andre Agassi leaning on a red Lamborghini, wearing white jeans and his genre-defining mullet. The caption said ‘Ace of Hearts.' I'd won the poster after finishing third in a grade six science fair. Agassi lived in the middle of the room, above and to the right of the table. I also put up a creased paper map of eastern Europe from a discarded
National Geographic
I found on the subway. I hung the Eastern Bloc directly above our bed.”

“It always helps to have something on the walls,” says Grandma.

“The Bunker was too hot in summer and too cold in winter. The spring and fall were better, but in those seasons we had other issues,” I explain. “The bugs were worse then.”

“You lived there for a while, didn't you?”

“Yeah, we did. And I don't want to give you the wrong idea. It wasn't all bad. It was in the Bunker that I first started cooking. That's when I became a chef.”

More accurately it was when I became the Keith Moon of sautéing mushrooms.

“Really, that's when you started? And now you're so good at it.”

“I wouldn't say that, Grandma. I enjoy it. It's good to get your mind off other things. But yeah, that's where it started. In those days, I was working a couple days a week for a radio show, so I often worked from home. Maeve worked full-time at a hospital. So while Maeve was helping sick people, I felt I should be doing something, too. When my work wasn't going well, cooking injected my day with some tangible purpose.”

“I always liked cooking, too. I know what you mean. Especially when it's for someone else,” says Grandma.

“We weren't paying for cable, but for some reason we got the Food Network. It was a channel I'd never watched before.”

“I don't think I get that channel at home.”

“At first I thought it was boring and deeply inane. But after a couple of weeks I didn't hate it, and after a month or two I started to really get into it. It didn't matter what kind of cooking show it was. I became an addict. I was addicted to the Food Network. Shows with chefs making elaborate meals in thirty minutes were like heroin to me. The ones that were competition-style, pitting chefs against each other with secret ingredients, that was my nicotine.”