EXPLORING PAST LIVES

I have always been one to scoff at the idea of the supernatural. The notion of past lives has been, for me, a literary device and nothing more. So it surprises me to say that, if, by some unimaginable chance I did have a past life, that life was almost certainly lived in Tennessee. I have been there twice in this life. I recognized this inexplicable affinity on the first visit, but was certain I would get over it as soon as I got home.
Everything in Tennessee seemed so familiar to me. I told myself it was just because I grew up with country music. I could sing you songs about Knoxville, about Gatlinburg, about Nashville. I could take you on a wild musical ride outrunning revenuers with a tank of moonshine in the back. Give me just a few opening chords and I could smell the air of Dolly Parton’s Tennessee Mountain Home. I told myself it was the long-remembered country music imagery that made me think I’d been there, made everything so coherent, so familiar.

I told myself it was the storytelling that made me feel I knew the people there. It was my love of the southern drawl, my admiration for those with such a superior grasp on my hobby. I assured myself that I most certainly could never have lived a past life in a state where they didn’t know we were having an election in Canada, a place where the notion of public transit has gone the way of the dodo.

But then a total stranger mentioned that East Tennessee University is offering a degree in storytelling with a minor in bluegrass music. And though I neither resigned my job at home, nor called the kids in Alberta with instructions to sell the house, both those ideas made a certain amount of sense. So here I am in Edmonton, a safe distance from ETSU, my Airmiles rewards reduced to nothing, generating great guffaws at the suggestion of a degree in storytelling with a minor in bluegrass, wondering when I might next visit Tennessee.

PILGRIMAGE TO JONESBOROUGH

I am just back from another hero worshipping expedition. It’s a funny thing, really, to write this down, given that until I reached the age of fifty I took holidays, and educational trips, but never, ever hero worshipping pilgrimages. It was back in the days before I heard Tim tingle tell the story of the Trail of Tears in Bellingham Washington. It was before I heard Elizabeth Ellis tell the story of her mother’s death in Jonesborough Tennessee. It was before I heard Carmen Deedy tell stories of her father in Denton Texas.

Last week I made a second pilgrimage to Jonesborough, the home of the mother of all storytelling festivals. Ten thousand people go to that event. It lasts three days. On the Saturday they simultaneously operate six tents, each capable of holding 1,800 listeners, and you have to get to your tent half an hour early to guaranty a seat.

When you make your plans for Jonesborough you think, “Oh I will surely get bored. I’ll take some time away from the festival. I won’t be able to hear stories for three days solid.” But when you get to Jonesborough, you can’t bear to miss an hour, even if your back is killing you, even if you are freezing, which is what makes it more like a pilgrimage than an educational event—or a vacation. .

MEDICINE HAT'S FINEST

One day last fall my phone rang. It was an offer—an all-expenses paid trip to Medicine Hat. All I had to do in return was speak at a staff development event focussing on palliative care. And though it would be dishonest of me not to admit that I had been hoping for an offer from Paris or Vienna or New York, I can still remember the time when I could only be invited to make an out-of-town presentation if I called up and asked to be invited, then agreed to pay all my own expenses. So I negotiated a modest fee with Medicine Hat and said I’d be there in early May.
I might have stayed in Medicine Hat’s finest hotel. Instead of doing that, I wrote to my old friend Janice and invited myself to spend the night with her and Ben. Janice and I grew up on neighbouring farms south of Lougheed Alberta and went in different directions to live our adult lives. One time we surprised each other by meeting at a conference and she,. Waiting until I had finished my second glass of wine, then seized the opportunity to persuade me to go white-water rafting on the Athabasca River. Once we survived that, we again went in separate directions until she began to notice references to me in the media and became a reader of THE HOPE LADY Blog. She said I should come and visit if ever I was in Medicine Hat.
It definitely would have been a mistake to have stayed in Medicine Hat’s finest hotel. Staying with Janice introduced me to the kind of service the queen might expect at the Ritz Carlton. Even though she was within minutes of playing a major role hosting the Alberta Archaeology Association Conference, you would never have known she was in the final frantic stages of pre-conference prep hysteria. She provided me with limousine services, hosted bar, poached salmon dinner and lots of laughs. While cooking me whatever I wanted for breakfast she told me she had been showing her friends the copy of my photograph that appeared with the pre-event advertisement in the Medicine Hat News. At my free public lecture she turned to the people beside her and said, ”We grew up in the same community.” Apparently even a minimal amount of reflected glory is better than no reflected glory at all.
So I’ve forgiven her for taking me on that white-water rafting trip, for I hardly think I would be as well treated in Paris, Vienna or New York as I was at her home in Medicine Hat. And if you are ever invited to make a speech in Medicine Hat, I suggest you prepare yourself for travel by making friends with Janice.

LEARNING ABOUT TEXAS

We went to the Texas Storytelling Festival.
Texans were surprised we had traveled so far.
We were surprised that they knew anything about Edmonton.
Americans rarely know anything about Edmonton.

We watched women’s basketball on TV.
It took four nights for Tennessee to win.
And we will forever wonder how we got so hooked
As to spend four nights on women’s basketball.

We ate and drank free at the Manager’s Reception
Meats and veggies and fine fruit salad.
Sometimes we were the only ones there drinking free beer.
And we are still wondering why that hotel offers a manager’s receptions.

We thought we’d be paying for hotel parking
We thought we’d be paying for university parking
We thought we’d be paying a toll on the toll road.
And we wonder why nobody charged us for any of it.

We walked the streets of downtown Dallas
And cycled the seawall that borders Galveston
Reluctantly boarded the plane to come home
For we still didn’t know quite enough about Texas.

TRAVELLING LIGHT

We packed for our trip to Victoria
Enough for three days and three nights.
We packed in a purse and a book bag
With each of us taking a backpack.
Our friends wondered, “Where is your suitcase?
How can you be taking so little?”

We went there with jackets and sweaters
With gloves, shirts, pants, socks, shoes and underwear,
With swimming suits, hair brushes, toothbrushes,
With toothpaste, two kinds of shampoo,
Deodorant, painkillers, cold pills,
Prescriptions and wallets and nail clippers,
Two digital recorders with earphones,
CD player, CD’s and books,
With playing cards, credit cards, dental floss,
Keys, pens and a Braille-writing slate,
Two cell phones with power adapters,
And a housecoat with soft woollen slippers.

How many would stare disbelieving
At our house overflowing with bounty
And scoff when I said we were striving
To pack light for a trip to Victoria?

SHIRTS ON THE CLOTHESLINE

The shirts and shorts and pants are warm from the clothesline. I like clotheslines.
I didn’t get the clothesline to help the environment, though that would have been an excellent reason to get a clothesline. I got it because I could remember the way the sheets smelled on my childhood bed, fresh and clean like life beginning all over again. I wanted to smell that smell as a grownup. I wanted my kids to know that comforting fragrance.
Even though I had a clothesline I kept the electric dryer. I remembered gathering the clothes in on rainy days, wetter than they had been before the storm. I recalled brushing past them where they dripped from the line in the kitchen, on the route between the stove and the table. I remembered blowing on freezing fingers, unpegging frosted towels as stiff as boards, and Mother saying, “Careful not to break them.”
The streets of San Jose Del Cabo, when we were there, wound their way past tiny Mexican huts with roosters crowing among the electric washing machines and fridges in their backyards. The breeze rustled bright Mexican shirts on the clotheslines. San Hose Del Cabo, according to the brochures, has 360 days of annual sunshine.
Just down the road, along the golf course, along the oceanfront, are the shiny new condos own by Canadians. We stayed in a lovely one, two bedrooms, two baths, cool floors of ceramic, in suite laundry, balconies to die for, pools and hot tubs. In a good Canadian condo there will inevitably be rules and there were rules at ours. Just a few rules out of consideration for your neighbours. Please use the electric dryer provided in your suite. Never hang towels or any other laundry on your balconies.
Back here at home, even on this fine day, I timble the socks and underwear in the dryer. It takes only a hsort time to dry them, with all the big things hanging outside. I am not sure how pleased my neighbours would be to see them, and yes, I am a little too lazy to hang them out. Bringing in the shirts, so effortlessly dried on this magnificent July day, I reflect on our half-hearted Canadian attempts to assist the environment, and I wonder when we will come to our senses and help the Mexicans by letting people hang towels on the balcony.

SOPHIA'S DIARY

We went to Hamilton Ontario expecting to find McMaster University and maybe a steel mill or two. We definitely did not expect to find a castle. But there it was, a real castle, Dundurn Castle, built for Sir Allan McNab in the 1830’s. In the castle there is a schoolroom, the place where the McNab children were educated. And lucky for us that they were educated, because young Sophia McNab kept a diary.

Sophia’s diary recorded information about daily life at the castle. Today that diary is perhaps the most influential document used by the guides who recreate the castle’s history for the tourists. They know which rooms were used for what purpose.

Doesn’t it make you just want to keep a diary, something to ensure that the record is accurate, a reference book for the tour guides in the unlikely event that your house is still standing 180 years from now?

HOW DO NUNS LIVE?

I almost found out how nuns live, something I have always wondered about. I never quite believed it was exactly like it is in Sister Act and Sound Of Music. And I really was curious about it, still am.

I probably would have found out. I was sitting right next to a nun on a flight from Edmonton to Hamilton. There was plenty of time to ask questions, only I didn’t know she was a nun. She seemed like an ordinary person reading a book. I was reading too.

The weather was bad on the way toward the ground, bad enough that even the most private traveler could not fully pretend to be reading a book. When we had landed safely, and the thundering applause of the passengers had faded away, leaving us only the sound of the giggling children, we began a little conversation, the kind of grateful chatter you undertake on such celebratory occasions. She observed that the children thought the bumps were included at the end of the ride as part of the price of admission. I asked a few questions, and learned she had been visiting a sister in Alberta. I assumed she meant a sibling.

Instead of racing off the plane, we stayed in the cabin, lightning flashing, hale pelting. When we had been there half an hour, and the stewardesses had given up trying to keep us from going to the bathroom, my seatmate got out a cell phone and made a call.

“Sister Anne,’ she said, “This is Sister Mary. I’m in Hamilton. Sister Joan is supposed to pick me up here, so if she calls can you let her know I’m here, but we can’t get off the plane until the storm passes.”

The voice of adventure spoke to me. This is your chance, it said. This is perhaps the only time you will ever be fully free to learn about the life of a nun by asking simple questions. But the voice of propriety spoke louder. It is rude to listen to telephone conversations, she said. It is even more rude to ask questions about the things you overheard while listening in on telephone conversations.

I went back to reading, vigorous reading, the kind of vigorous reading that inspires curiosity in others. I was reading Braille, as I so often do on planes. I had already finished the book I had brought, but I was hoping my reading, and our new friendliness would give her the courage to ask me a question about the Braille. So many other strangers have sat beside me over the years, waiting for the right moment to ask about my book. They say, "Is that Braille you are reading? Or, "Are those just letters or do some of the dots mean actual words?”

If only she would ask, then I would get a turn to ask. Just what I would ask I did not know, but I was sure I would think of something. Maybe I would start with, “I just couldn’t help but overhear your conversation in this small space, and there are some things I have always wanted to know.”

If she would just ask, then I would ask. But she didn’t ask. Maybe she already asked some other blind traveler about Braille. Maybe she’s a Braille teacher. Maybe she is simply too well mannered to intrude on the reading privacy of strangers. Maybe she isn’t even a curious person, not even a little bit curious, though I doubt that. Whatever the reason, she didn’t ask, and so I didn’t ask, and now I don’t know, which is too bad because I really wanted to know how nuns live in the 21st century.

WHEN WISHES COME TRUE

Just before Christmas I wished that my father could be a spectator at the Ford world Championship of Curling. He likes curling. But wishes don’t just simply come true. You have to work at them. So I helped to buy him a ticket.

Once the ticket was bought, I wished he would not have to go alone. And so I agreed to join him, even though I knew I would be tired from my trip to New York.

When I was in New York, I wished I would not have to attend the Ford world Championship of Curling so soon after getting home. But that was just idle wishing.

The weather in Newark NJ was fine and sunny, but Air Canada’s planes remained elsewhere, unable to land on the crowded runways. Hours later, when darkness had fallen, and other airlines were putting their planes to bed, and the restaurant and the magazine stand and the snack bar had all closed for the night, a plane found an opening and landed. It whisked us off to Toronto, where the normally buzzing airport was shrouded in the deep night’s silence that falls only when all connecting flights have long since departed. So they put us on a shuttle and sent us to a hotel, and woke us early for the first morning flight, which arrived when it was too late to go to the Ford world Championship of Curling.

Sometimes we think we are alone when, in fact, others are acting with us. It seems I am not the only one who acts upon my wishes. I never imagined that Air Canada was so serious about wish fulfillment. Even though they bumped me up to Executive Class, and gave me a pillow, and a seat that could recline without disturbing the passengers behind, and served me orange juice in stemware glasses, and poured coffee in a china mug for me at a time when they said it was too turbulent to serve hot beverages to the Economy passengers, and offered me melon and pineapple on skewers amid luscious strawberries and bunches of delicious grapes, and let me get off first, and took my luggage off first, I hope, in future, to be more careful with my wishing.

YOU CAN'T GO OUT ALONE!

“I will be getting around on my own in just a few days,” I said on the day after my shoulder broke.

 

“Too early to talk about that now,” said David.  “You can’t go out alone.  You can’t even stand up for more than a couple of minutes.”

 

He had a point.  I gave him that.

 

“I’ll soon be going out on my own,” I said when a week had gone by.  T

Here was no particular place I needed to go, but the thought that I could not do it was driving me to Cabin Fever.

 

“You can’t go out alone,” said David.  “What if somebody knocks against your shoulder?  “You won’t be able to stand the pain.”

 

He had a point.  I gave him that and grudgingly took a taxi when I went back to the office.

 

“I’m almost ready to go out on my own,” I said, after I had been back at work for a few days.  Sure it was below minus twenty out there with blowing snow and huge slippery drifts, bracing wind chill on top, conditions that would have sorely tempted me to take a taxi at any other time.  But Cabin Fever goes straight to the brain.

 

“You cannot go out alone,” said David.  “Think how terrible it would be if you fell!  You might be in a cast for weeks.  You might miss your trip to New York!”

 

He had a point.  I gave him that.  But then a temptation was placed in my path.  I was getting my teeth cleaned, and I had not ordered a cab or arranged a ride, not knowing exactly when the job would be finished.  The dental building had an indoor connection to the LRT platform.  The LRT exit was only a block and a half from my office, and I knew the university would have that path cleared and sanded.  I might have run the idea past David, but he simply wasn’t there. 

 

As a compromise to his objections, expressed in absentia, I promised to take no risks.  I walked very slowly.  I stopped at each door, carefully considering which hand to reach out, which hand to put in charge of holding the door.  And then, in a highly commendable display of self-discipline, I walked slowly down the stairs, even though the train was on the platform, even though I could have caught it.  I waved it a cheerful good-bye and stepped carefully on to the platform just as it began to pull away.  While I waited for the next train, I practised the speech I would give to David.  I would be humble, grateful for his loving protection.  I would explain that it is essential to move on, to push yourself, to achieve more than others think you can achieve. 

 

I was on the next train.  I got off at the right spot.  The university had cleared the path.  I walked slowly, slower than you ought to walk when it is minus twenty.  And when I had covered the first block, I became aware that my white cane seemed to be gaining weight.  Compact and light-weight at the journey’s beginning, it now hung heavy in my hand, heavier after each step, pulling hard on an upper arm muscle that had never announced itself on any past journey that I could remember.   

 

So I don’t think I will go out alone for a few more days, and I will grudgingly admit that David was right.  But he was wrong about the reason why I couldn’t.  He isn’t perfect, after all.

IF WE CAN TRANSPLANT HEARTS

Carter House, in Franklin Tennessee. 

Just another historic site listed in the tourist information. 

Just a place to spend a few hours on a holiday Friday afternoon.

 

The American Civil War is of little interest to me. 

So why do I hang on, unable to rush away?

Why am I asking questions of a tour guide who is clearly trying to leave?

The sun has bade me shed my sweater.   

So why does my blood run chilled in my veins?

 

Can it be because I stand in a farmyard where more than 8,500 soldiers died on Nov. 30 1864?

Or because their young Todd carter, away for more than three years, died only a few yards away from his home?

Or because a family cowered in their basement while the battle raged above?

Or because the buildings on this site are riddled with holes from thousands of bullets fired 142 years ago?

Or because I cannot imagine what it must have been like to leave that basement when the bullets had ceased to fly and walk upon the bodies of the dead and dying?

Or because the carters’ 288-acre cotton farm operated using the labour of 28 slaves, People bought and sold, people without a choice, people who had no future unless something happened to change things?

 

How audacious it must have been to hope that things could change!

How utterly devastating it must have been to pay the price of the coming change!

One hundred and forty-two years later there is evidence that enormous changes do happen.

 

If we can divert flood waters,

If we can go to the moon,

If we can transplant hearts,

If we can talk to people on the other side of the world,

Then maybe--just maybe—we can figure out how to conquer human oppression without fighting bloody wars. 

 

 

THE TENNESSEE STORYTELLERS WILL MAKE YOU SIT DOWN AND LISTEN

We were walking toward to Saturday morning farmer’s market in Nashville Tennessee when a loud booming voice drew our attention.  It’s Abraham Lincoln,” said my husband.  And sure enough, there was Abe, addressing an audience seated on folding chairs in the sun. 

 

What a man he is!  Dead a hundred and fifty years and still riveting audiences, still making people stop their journey and sit down to listen! 

 

And what was he doing there?  Well, defending himself I would say.  After all, he was speaking to a Tennessee audience.  Tennessee was not on his side of the American Civil war.  And he was also spreading hope, inspiring it in the adults, enacting it with the children. 

 

He told us how firmly he believed that the slaves must be freed, how painful it was to have so many of his wife’s relatives fighting for the south.  He got out his most famous speech, the Gettysburg Address, and delivered it with such trembling passion that I had to search for a tissue because tears came to the eyes of this previously disinterested Canadian tourist.

 

Suddenly he changed pace and began to enact a message of hope to the children in the audience.  First, he encouraged them to stay in school so that they might benefit from the best America has to offer.  Then he drew them from the audience.  To Emily he said: Ï hope that, in your lifetime, we will have the first female president.” To Jim he said: Ï hope that in your lifetime we will elect the first African-American president.”  He also wants an American-Indian president, but he thinks that might take one more generation.

 

When he had finished, we left our chairs and resumed our stroll among the vegetables.  But his message stayed with us, grounded in the past, delivered in the present, showing a hopeful way for the future. 

 

MUSIC CAN TAKE YOU HOME

I grew up in two places.  I was raised on the Alberta prairies, but it seems that part of me was rooted in Tennessee, even though I never set a foot on Tennessee soil until I was 53.  It’s the country music that made Tennessee feel so much like home.  Without being really aware, I knew as much about the front porch swing of Dolly Parton’s Tennessee mountain home as I knew about the Blue Canadian Rockies.  When I got to Knoxville, my head filled with the story of a man who loved and murdered a Knoxville girl because she would not marry him.  In Gatlinburg I could hardly restrain myself from asking directions to the saloon where the Boy Named Sue found his errant father. 

 

The stories I know of Alberta towns have come from my visits, and also from the daily news.  My stories of the Tennessee towns are more poignant, more detailed, more eloquently situated in my imagination.  They are told in the words of others in the country songs I heard on my mother’s lap.  I was a tourist in Tennessee.  But now I know what they mean when they say music can take you home.