Miriam Toews - All My Puny Sorrows

My mother is wearing a patch over one eye. She’s sitting in a room full of old people who are all wearing a patch over one eye. I’ve come to pick her up. One man welcomes me to the pirates’ convention. It’s the left eye, for every one of them, that is patched over. We’re in a room at St. Joseph’s Health Centre in Toronto. I find my mother deep in conversation with a couple in matching windbreakers and she waves me over to make introductions. She explains that the cataract doctor does all left eyes one week and then all right eyes the next. She has been given six tiny bottles of eye drops with instructions for use.

For the next couple of weeks Nora and I take turns administering the drops. Our days are punctuated with these drops sessions. In between drops we have to wait a few minutes for my mother to absorb the hit. While we wait we play mad duets on the piano to pass the time. We play really fast. Sometimes we play my mother’s favourite hymns like “Children of the Heavenly Father” but at breakneck speed, which makes her laugh. Nora can play “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” in less than ten seconds and an even faster version of Handel’s Sarabande.

Six different types of drops, two or four or six drops from each bottle, three minutes in between drops, four times a day! We come at my mother with tiny bottles and she obediently removes her glasses and puts her head way back and pushes her soft white hair away from her eyes. When it’s over she sits at her computer playing online Scrabble with tears, real and manufactured, pouring down her face.

Invincible calm, I tell her.

Invincible calm, she repeats.

You will triumph, I say.

You will triumph, she answers.

A couple of days ago my mother came home from a walk around the neighbourhood with news that put her in a jubilant mood.

I’ve found something out, she said. I went into the funeral home on the corner and found out that I can be cremated for fourteen hundred bucks. That’s everything included. And they’ve got a door-to-door policy. They’ll pick up my body and return it in a can.

She showed me her new shoes, a quality pair of black leather slip-ons that she’d bought at a trendy Queen West boutique. My mother is not a hipster or a style maven. She’s a short, fat seventy-six-year-old Mennonite prairie woman who has lived most of her life in one of the country’s most conservative small towns, who has been tossed repeatedly through life’s wringer, and who has rather suddenly moved to the trendy heart of the nation’s largest city to begin, as they say, a new chapter in her life. She doesn’t know anybody in Toronto but she loves the Blue Jays, which bonds her to strangers of all kinds. She is the absolute embodiment of resilience and good sportsmanship.

I’ve started making a shit list of shops and cafés on Queen West here in the “art and fashion district” who treat her with less respect and professional friendliness than they treat their younger and more glamorous clients. My mother doesn’t even notice, she’s jovial and curious and delighted and oblivious to snottiness. She’s a bit loud because of her mild deafness and she laughs a lot and has questions about everything and no embarrassment in asking. In her mind there is no reason why she and a group of beautiful film students hanging out at the Communist’s Daughter could not party together every night of the week. She is the antithesis of what the Queen West crowd would like themselves to be. She’s comfortable in her XXL pink cotton shorts and the T-shirt she won at a Scrabble tournament in Rhode Island. She would like to engage these pale, thin retail workers in conversation, she’d like to get their story, she’d like to know where the products come from, how they are chosen, how does one wear this, how does it wash, she’s trying to learn more about her new home and to become acquainted with her world, which makes their cold bony shoulder treatment of her that much more heartbreaking. And then I boycott them forever. So does Nora, even though it pains her a bit because she is young and fabulous and ultra-fashionable and would like to go into these shops occasionally but whatever, we smite you, snobs.

My mom’s already pals with the dry cleaner guy on King who knows me only as Lottie’s daughter and she chats every morning with Straight Up Cliff, the waving guy across the street. She even offered to give him, or his sons, my couch. Three large men, one with a fresh cut on his nose, came to our door this morning and told me that Lottie had told them I had a couch for them. No, I said. I don’t. A misunderstanding.

Can you not give my things away? I asked her later.

A guy wearing a shirt, tie, jacket, socks, shoes, hat and no pants, none, no underwear either, walked past our house and my mother saw him and ran to her bedroom for a pair of her sweats to give him. He thanked her and then wrapped them around his neck like a fluffy scarf and she told him well, that would work too. When I asked her if she wouldn’t miss those comfy sweats she told me that she’d stop giving my things away but that she’d do whatever she wanted with her things.

She’s joined a church, too, a Mennonite one on the Danforth, and they’ve asked her to become an elder. Is that some official thing? I asked her. Aren’t you one already? You’re quite old. She explained to me that there are only three elders in the church and that she is very honoured to have been asked. Back in our little hometown of East Village a woman would never have been asked to be an elder in the church. A woman wouldn’t have been asked (told) anything except to close her mouth and open her legs. She’ll think about it for a while. She zips around town on the TTC visiting cranky shut-ins from her church, singing hymns with them, helping them to prepare meals, making them laugh, making herself useful. The church people have come around and planted things in our hideous front yard. Flowers, shrubs, perennials, some decorative rocks. And Alexander, our next-door neighbour, has spread wood chips all around the yard too, so now our house has become a beautiful sort of community project.

We don’t talk about Switzerland or whether I should have taken my sister to Switzerland to help her die. I’m pretty sure Elf never mentioned Switzerland to my mother and I don’t dare ask her about it. In the evening, when her Samaritan work is done, my mother pours herself a honking big glass of red wine and watches her beloved Blue Jays get creamed again. Nora and I can hear her from the second and third floors shouting at her television on the main floor. Send him home! Hustle, man! We don’t flinch. We’re used to it. She’s been a Jays fan forever and knows the stats and the stories behind all the players. All right, that guy’s blown his rotator cuff, that guy’s throwing garbage, that guy tested positive for some hoohaw. The CL they just signed? Well, he’s on the DL with a pulled groin! They’re calling them up from Triple A!

My mother had something like a date a few weeks ago. She told the old fellow, as she called him (I think he’s ten years younger than she is), that what she’d like to do is get a glass of wine somewhere — this wine habit is something she’s quickly picked up in Toronto, she’s been buying a Merlot lately with a label that says DARE! — and then go to a Jays game. She invited me along and the whole time I chatted with the guy who was not that interested in baseball but, I found out, smokes two joints a day for his advanced arthritis. You’re dating a pothead, I told her. Meanwhile my mom watched the game like a scout, hunched over and beady-eyed, and recorded everything, hits and misses and runs and errors, into her programme. When the guy tried to talk to her, to ask her if she’d like a hot dog or something, she said C’MON UMP! WAKE UP! WHAT ARE YOU DOING, SNIDER? TWO MEN OUT AND THE BASES LOADED! After the game, after we’d dropped off her date somewhere in the east end of the city, I asked her what kinds of things he did and she said she didn’t really know, he’d just got himself a phone though, so he wouldn’t have to call her from a pay phone anymore. He goes to the University of Toronto, she said. Cool, I said, what for? To shower, she said.