Sept. 5: Silver Springs

 

Family legend has it that my Great Grandmother Montreil, who died in 1973 at the age of 99, got married when she was 13. She became a mother shortly after that and eventually produced 13 children - my maternal grandmother, Lillian, being the youngest. There exists somewhere a grainy photograph of me “meeting” my great grandma. The quotation marks are there because I don’t know if babies can meet people; meeting someone seems to require an intellectual heft that babies are not capable of, and I was a baby in 1973.

In the picture, Great Grandmother Montreil doesn’t look too excited to be occupying the same space as me. I’m not sure what state of mind she was in. I wonder if she was thinking what the very old most likely think when they are presented with another infant descendant , maybea variation of “well, I guess I’ve been here long enough. Maybe it’s time for me to shuffle off this mortal coil and see what my genes can do.”

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For some reason, I was thinking about Great Grandma Montreil the other day when Ash and I were driving home from Hawkesbury after dining at the Deju Vu restaurant. Family legend also has it that Great Grandma’s Montreil’s husband, my great-grandfather, died shortly after my grandma was born. It made me think that my great grandmother’s life could be neatly divided into three parts – being single, being a wife, being a widow. Statistically, most women’s lives could probably be divided thusly, but it’s more striking, more original, for me to think of my great grandma in that capacity. I wonder which stage of her life was the longest and which was the happiest. The last one – widowhood – was likely the longest but I doubt it was the happiest.

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Ash wanted to take the long way home. She likes to drive by the water. In this case, the water was the Ottawa River, which touches Hawkesbury’s northern edge and which separates Ontario from Quebec. Her iPhone was connected to the car’s stereo system. It was playing Fleetwood Mac, a band she recently discovered. A grocery store in Cornwall was doing a silent auction of two framed Fleetwood Mac posters – fundraisers for Ducks Unlimited or something like that. The minimum bid was $200 per poster and the auction, coincidentally enough, ended on Ash’s birthday, which is August 29. If I had money to spare, I might have put in a bid, but His Majesty the King wanted that money instead. His Highness was terribly offended that one week earlier, I had been caught in Lancaster driving 20 km over the speed limit. Part of being a grownup is you have to take care of the necessities instead of the luxuries.

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For her birthday, I put up a montage of photos of Ash on Facebook. This was a risky move because she is notoriously photo shy, but she was delighted by my gesture anyway. In one of those photos, a much younger version of her is washing a table, part of a field trip she took part in when she was in elementary school. In the photo, she is about the same age my great-grandmother was when she got married.

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Today, whenever I meet a 13-year-old girl, I think about my great grandmother. I ask myself if the 13-year-old in front of me would be emotionally ready for marriage. The answer is always no. Today’s 13-year-olds play with Barbies and cry when someone calls them fat. But this is not a fault of society. It is a different world now. It is a world where women, by and large, have the same opportunities that men do and a side effect of this is that we can prolong adolescence. In 1887 France, things were much different. There was almost a war between France and Germany, for example, and dressing up like Taylor Swift would have been frowned on. It is also, coincidentally, the year they began construction on the Eiffel Tower. I wonder if my great-grandmother and her husband-to-be joked that the tower was being built so there would be a proper venue for their wedding reception.

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Ash’s favourite song by Fleetwood Mac is Silver Springs, which is about the breakup of band members Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham, who just happens to be a little over one year older than my mom. So much of Fleetwood Mac’s music seems to be rooted in hating each other. I have to wonder what kind of music they would write if they all got along. They would probably sound like ABBA.

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Great Grandma Montreil lived through two World Wars, but she didn’t live long enough to buy Fleetwood Mac’s 11^th studio album, Rumours, which the band says is the most important album they ever made. That album features a song called Don’t Stop, which tells the listener not to stop thinking about tomorrow. When you think about it, that advice is not just impractical, it’s also impossible. There’s no way I can always be thinking about tomorrow. Sometimes, I have to stop thinking about it. Today, for example, I was in Wal-Mart because I had to buy my son a pair of shoes. In order to do this, it was necessary for me to think about shoes, which meant I couldn’t think about tomorrow because I find it extremely difficult to think about the future and footwear at the same time.

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The Silver Springs that Stevie Nicks sings about is a place in California, she saw it advertised on a roadside sign there and thought the name to be an apt metaphor for utopia. It’s a very feminine song in that the narrator is chastising her lover, saying that he has to change in order to make the relationship work. It’s the polar opposite of what a man might say. He’d tell his lover that if she wants to make things work, then she’d better not change.

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Ash was surprised, then pleased, when I told her that Lindsey Buckingham was the one who wrote and recorded Holiday Road for the 1983 Chevy Chase movie, Vacation. It is, sad to say, my favourite thing that Lindsey Buckingham has ever done.

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Speaking of silver, my sister is now one year away from celebrating her silver anniversary. She has now been married for half of her life – her existence, at this exact point in time, is bisected between marriage and singleness. She would not have been happy getting married at 13. Then again, 1988 and 1888 were two very different times.

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When Lindsey Buckingham was born in 1949, Great-Grandma Montreil was well into her mid-70s. Come to think of it, she would have been similarly aged when my mom made her appearance too.

I’m not sure why, but grandparents always seem older to me than they really should be. Lots of people become grandparents in their mid-40s or early 50s. It is possible to be grandparent and a professional athlete or a newspaper editor or a rock star. But it shouldn’t be that way. I don’t ever remember any of my grandparents having a job they had to go to; I used to think that my Grandpa Morris drove his big green tractor just for fun. I vaguely knew that my other grandparents, at one time, worked with paint and/or groceries, but now that they were grandparents, they devoted their time to taking me and my siblings for car rides or making us cotton candy-flavoured Jello.

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There wasn’t a Silver Springs in the marriage of my dad’s parents but there likely was in that of my mom’s. When grandma got Alzheimer’s, grandad would visit her in the nursing home and sometimes, he would take her home to the condo they bought after he sold the farm. There exists somewhere a video of my grandma, her brain addled by that terrible disease, responding to the stimuli of music. She rises from the couch, shuffles aimlessly around the room, and then grandad takes her in his arms and they dance and they dance and they dance.

Grandad was a man’s man, as masculine as you could get, a veteran of the Second World War, the toughest dude you’d ever want to meet. But I hope that in those last moments he spent with her, he remembered the way they used to be – when they were in the prime of their lives and they were young and vibrant and the future was a big lump of clay waiting for them to grab it and mold it into something beautiful.

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In my parents’ garage hangs a picture of my grandparents farm in Saskatchewan, the place where my mom grew up. Whenever I visit, I always stop and look at that picture for a bit and I wonder if that house was a sort of Silver Springs and I guess I also wonder what sort of role it played in shaping me into the man I have become.