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| ... patina from 64 years of use ... |
I own mother’s cedar chest, the one that preceded the one that Moiya owns.
The really old cedar chest became I got mine in a similar fashion to the way Moiya got her newer one.
One Christmas when I was in my teens, Christmas morning had finished.
I hadn’t noticed that there was not a present from Santa Claus for me.
I must have been in my middle to late teens, for the fact is, Christmas day was going along merrily for me and I hadn’t really thought about “what is in this for me”. I had wanted a wrist watch that Christmas. But I hadn’t told my folks, which I now know is the obvious way to get gifts at Christmas.
I knew there wasn’t much money for Christmas. We didn’t use the phrase “being on a budget” in our family. We ate food from the garden, we got new shoes if we needed them, (only one pair at a time -- serviceable ones), and my dad bought a cow and had it pastured just a few blocks from our house. We got the morning milk. The farmer took the evening milk. I had enough spending money to get me to the movies, since I had regular babysitting jobs. At first I earned $.25 an hour. Then I got new clients who just paid me $.35 an hour. As I said, that was enough money to get me entrance to the movies, and an occasional pair of earrings.
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| ... the sides are in better shape than the top ... |
In fact, my dad didn’t have a regular job most of my life.
I thought that is the way most families worked. Doral was one of the early geologists who looked for oil in Alberta.
He also built an insulation plant but with that business, he worked from home or he was out selling his product in rural Alberta.
So back to the Christmas morning in question.
When the ribbons and bows had been gathered up and when my mother had straightened the wrinkles out of the Christmas paper that she hoped to re-use the next year, and when she had slipped a 25 pound turkey into the oven, Doral and Wyora took me to their bedroom and told me that my mother was getting a new cedar chest and that I would be getting her old one.
Now the kicker was, in those days the cedar chest was often called a hope chest.
I didn’t want to have hope.
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| Contents of the Cedar Chest: table clothes that are too hard to iron, bolts of out-of-fashion material that need to be sewn, black netting used to decorate at Halloween, Irish linen, too good to use, doilies, once popular but now out of fashion Catherine? If you take the cedar chest you have to take the contents. |
I felt a social pressure to say thank you to my parents, but I couldn’t really figure out what I was going to do with that thing – that wooden box.
I didn’t know the phrase having an albatross around your neck, but I now knew the feeling.
Well, I probably had a good idea what I was going to do with it.
Nothing.
I still have that cedar chest.
The only hope I have when I look at it is hope I can remember what I put in it last.
When Catherine was helping me last month, I asked her whatever am I going to do with that cedar chest when I die.
“I’ll take it,” she said.
I should write a nice provenance to go along with it.
Arta
Jeremy Pawlowicz, a potter, taught a lesson to David and me years ago in the studio that is now known as Viva Clayworks, a studio I still think of fondly as "The Workshop." We built projects out of clay by hand (as opposed to on the wheel). He shared with us some lecture notes he had received in University from a professor whose name I am sorry to have forgotten. The lesson went something like this.
ReplyDeleteHumans have been building containers since some of the earliest recorded time. Think about the function of containers and how that influences the design. [There were line drawings, almost doodle like, scattered though out the text that triggered the imagination. ] There are containers for storing and carrying food [insert doodle of a bowl and a water jug]. Other containers are built to house the bodies of our loved ones that has passed away [insert doodle of a pyramid, and another of an urn]. More examples were provided, and then the student was invited to think of something they might like to store, and imagine what that container would look like. The rest of the memory becomes fuzzy for me, and in terms of the actual completion of the project, I can't recall. But what I do remember ever so vividly is David's answer to the question. He explained to Jeremy that some day soon he would have the retainer removed from his palate, and even though he didn't like having it in his mouth, and it had been hard to get used to, it had become something whose absence he would notice, it would feel odd.and then he described a ceramic box he would make with a lid, that had a stud inside to house the retainer.
And now, this blog post by Arta, and this comment box has below has provided me with a place to store this memory.
Containers.
Thank you for your comment Bonnie.
ReplyDeleteWhen I was thinking about the word containment, I was thinking how, for me as a teen-ager, that box represented collecting items to use when I would be contained by the words wife and mother. I didn't want boundaries that narrow. I wanted a professional life as well, and I wanted the freedom to go out and see what the world was like. There were no items that I could put in that box that represented those hopes and dreams.
So I have a question. Does David still have the box that holds his retainer?
I will have to have David speak to this. The rest of my memory related to this may be stored somewhere deep in the recesses of my mind, but if it is, it is a location I have long since forgotten about.
ReplyDeleteI had a container as a teen that carried my hopes and dreams for freedom to go out and see what the world was like.
ReplyDeleteThe hopes began long before I got the container.
The hope took hold the first summer of the Bates family's visit home from Kuala Lumpur, Malasia. I can't tell you the year. I will make a guess, and perhaps a cousin in that family would be willing to correct me. I am going to guess I was between ages 4-6 (summer of 70, 71, or 72).
My memory has me in the living room of Grandpa Doral's house at 1235 16aStNW in Calgary. I am sitting on a sofa that has a large mirror above it. Is there a fireplace in the room? Fireplace or not, to my right is Wyona. She is opening pieces of luggage, and taking out objects. She is telling us about them and then they are passed around the room for Aunts, Uncles, and cousins to each have their turn holding and studying each object.
I can remember the feel of a hand-woven rattan ball in my hands. I wasn't skilled or drawn to soccer as a game, but my toes are curling up inside my shoes trying to protect themselves from injury in the imagined game I am playing with children in that country. I worry I might get a sliver in my hand, for the ball is not smooth like the plastic balls I have played with.
I can see the faces of my relatives as they too sit on the edge of their seats, waiting for the next mystery to be revealed.
I wonder if I will ever travel like my Bates cousins, see "foreign lands."
My next memory is a short but powerful conversation I am having with my mother. Conversation is not the right word, for my part of the dialogue is simple a series of moments of incredulity and then wonder. Her part is telling me that if I save the money I get, then someday I will have enough to go visit my Aunt Wyona and Uncle Greg aboard. Or, for a smaller amount of money I could just send a letter to Aunt Wyona of what I would like her to buy for me.
And the last memory I will add, the one that got me writing this morning, was the memory of the summer of 1980. School has ended early that year. May 27th the teacher's had gone on strike. I am travelling with my family on a what feels like a very long car ride to Regina, BC. The whispered joke in the back seat amongst my siblings is to refer to it as Vegina, BC (feigning difficulty recalling the right name, and stopping one vowel short of "a bad word").
I don't think we have been yet to the Bates home but we are now in a large store, perhaps something like "The Bay" but larger, with more items. The luggage catches my eye. My mother leans down to my ear and whispers something to the effect of "if you buy luggage, you will be one step closer to travelling to go stay with your Aunt Wyona at their next post abroad." I am thirteen, straddling that line in my mind between childhood and adulthood. I know a suitcase is an odd purchase for a 13 year old, but I count up the money in my wallet, study all the tags, and make the decision. I have found one I can afford. I ask my mom to go with me to the register to make the purchase. The surprise on her face tells me she didn't really imagine I would actually buy one, but there is no turning back. The hope is too real, too big. I need a suitcase in which to store it.
Thank you for your containment story: a suitcase in which to store hope.
ReplyDeleteYour post makes me reflect on two unassociated thoughts and if I don't write them down quickly, they will be lost.
The first is about the luggage that stores hope. I usually store hope somewhere in my heart, hopes to big to articulate, hopes that when they unexpectedly materialize astonish me at their fulfillment, even though they are my hopes.
The other idea is contained in that word, mothering. I could never tell which ideas I whispered into ears would take hold. So every chance I got, I whispered some kind of hope, intending that for every whisper planted, there would be hundreds whisked away by the wind.
I think one Indigenous nations calls this act, spitting in childen's ears.
Now that you are a mother, I know you know what that means.
Bonnie and Arta, thanks for writing these lovely, tender, vulnerable words.
ReplyDeleteAnd thank you for reading them, Mary. People's time is at a premium lately. Sometimes there is not even time to read. I am going a little slower, doing a little less, being more careful, hoping that again, that I will find a way to go faster and do a little more.
ReplyDeleteEric's grandmother had the exact same cedar chest. We got it when she moved to a seniors residence. I figure, I may as well have a matching pair. Love you to the moon and back. I won't be using it for linens but for papers -- family journals and heirlooms.
ReplyDeleteWhen I go to clean my cedar chest out, I get frozen. In there is a red table cloth for a Christmas festive setting. The trouble is that the edges have a cutwork, embroidered white decorative finish, and I dread having to wash that table cloth and then iron it. Especially, I dread the ironing which would take the equivalent of a whole morning. Well maybe not the whole morning, but a significant part. So? I can't use it. I can't throw it out. Far too beautiful!
ReplyDelete