Perhaps Don still knows how the moodiness of the season --Thanksgiving, Hallowe'en, his birthday, Remembrance Day, the mouldy blowing leaves, the haunting wind running up the insides of my sleeves -- would affect me, and this is why he is channeling me through Alexander McCall Smith. I quote now a from paragraph two, page seven, in Friends, Lovers, Chocolate:
For the most part, the house was in good order; a discreet and sympathetic house, in spite of its size. And it was known, too, for its hospitality. Everyone who called here--irrespective of their mission--would be courteously received and offered, if the time was appropriate, a glass of dry white wine in spring and summer and red in autumn and winter. They would then be listened to, again with courtesy, for Isabel believed in giving moral attention to everyone. This made her profoundly egalitarian, though not in the non-discriminating sense of many contemporary egalitarians, who sometimes ignore the real moral differences between people (good and evil are not the same, Isabel would say). She felt uncomfortable with moral relativists and their penchant for non-judgementalism. But of course we must be judgemental, she said, when there is something to be judged.
Don also used to say, "To never judge is amoral," words that ran through me like a giant beam of restorative light, as did so much of what he said. He did not hold back on this, either. He looked at everyone, including himself. I tried to do the same. We both aspired to goodness, but goodness is a difficult achievement and the hardest road to hoe given all of the challenges we keep banging into along the way.
While I mean to never lose my temper (a kind of slow, simmering, often moving into volcanic eruption), my temper has to be my most calloused Achilles heel. That little buckle-up patent leather shoe still stamps in my brain (thus the calluses, I suppose) when people are mean or divisive or jealous, or when they play at something, and I know exactly what's going on and I feel I will burst if I do not say exactly that -- especially when it's about to cost me or someone I love in ways too big to enumerate here.
Apart from that, I don't want to be the one who is silent at the table; the one who has nothing to say against what I see are egregious mistakes or dangerous people. I am not, for example, ever going to sit in a room and condone Dr. Phil or Stephen Harper or George Bush or Stockwell Day or Ann Coulter or Rush Limbaugh or Bill O'Reilly (how many Americans? how many men?) or bullies or exclusionists or people who change their stories around to make themselves seem as if they have been injured when in fact they are the ones who have been skulking about in an up-to-no-good way. (The last two always cross one another, if they are not already one and the same thing.)
On the other hand, my mother always said, "Take people as you find them, darling, not as I or anyone else finds them." And there's the conundrum.
If I sit back and say nothing, not only do I feel as if I am leaning into obsequiousness or martyred victimhood, but I am absenting myself from the responsibility that I have to take full part in the life I was given for God knows how long. And if I say something like, "No! No! No!" I am risking the loss of relationship -- and not always the ones I care (about) as much as I care about the ones associated to that relationship -- although I try to strike the balance between what my mother meant (she was speaking of one-on-one relationships) and what Don meant. Still, it's not easy.
Don and I had almost always the exact same opinions on everyone's behaviour, including our own, and we spent the bulk of our free time together in what we saw as philosophic discussion about motivations, meaning, matter and responsibility. We took risks, too, because we saw risk-taking as our obligation to what is true and correct and healthy and honest and productive. We were as hard on ourselves as any two people could be, and in ways that we did not share and did not feel the need to share with anyone but each other. We second-guessed ourselves at times, and at others felt absolutely strong in our conviction about what we felt was right or the right thing to do.
I am still doing that, here without him and here with Mary, and I continue to find respite in like-minded and long-standing and less long-standing friendships; in old and not so old movies whose themes call out to me, and in authors who span the ages -- authors such as Alexander McCall Smith, who also wrote (page 80),
And then there was another one, a large picture that dominated the wall behind the piano, a portrayal of pride, an actor whom Isabel knew very slightly but who was well known in general, standing with a self-satisfied sneer on his face, a curl of the lip, pure arrogance. Did he recognise himself in the likeness, she wondered, or did he not see himself as others saw him? Burns had said that, of course, and it had been repeated at the last but one Burns Supper downstairs, in a bucolic address given by a former moderator of the Church of Scotland: the gift to gie us/to see ourselves as ithers see us.
And so I move on, in this morass and mystery of kaleidoscopic complexity, trying to do right by others, and trying to do right by me, so that I can do right by others so that...
Mirror mirror on the wall...sigh...
<:^)
Posted by Jennifer Coffey
November 12, 2007
