Of course there is a lot more to Canterbury than just the lay of the land.Like any other town,it was a living thing,that made people what they were and are.People who lived there and left there never left completely and never left without taking something of the place with them.And that would have included my mother.
By the time I'd turned four I was capable observing Canterbury for what it was.The trouble is,what it was when we were there seemed to be vastly different that what I assumed it was when we were not there.I think I was aware of this,at a certain level even at a very young age,though I could hardly have voiced that idea at the time.
The best way to explain this is to think of town as that atom,or particle,which behaves differently when it's being observed,because of the observation.Canterbury was putting on a show for us,I believe,maybe not telling lies about itself,but spinning it's own story for us.Kind of like that Farside cartoon with the cows standing around on the hillside,smoking,drinking,playing pool,until one of the cows shouts"car",and they all return to being cows.
When my mother left town,she ventured out into a world very different from her hometown.In those days she did not need to go a great distance to find that sort of world.She did so for her own reasons,which she did not necessarily make really clear to me.I'm not certain she made those reasons clear to anyone.But it seems fair to think that her motivation would have had a lot to do with making a better life for herself,and,by 1965,for her children as well.
Most people I've ever talked to seem to think the grass is greener in some other place.Not all of those people continue to think that way,but nearly everyone goes through a phase of that kind of thought.So the question becomes,how why,exactly did my mother leave Canterbury? And,how completely did she leave? Were there things she was not willing to have her family know about growing up there? The most likely answer to this last question would seem to be yes.
There is another side to these questions too,as there always is.How did the people left behind regard my mother? Canterbury was where her parents and siblings lived,and though everyone in her family left,to a certain extent,none ended up farther from home than my mother did when she ended up in Moncton.So,did her family view her moving with favor? Did her decision to move involve some form of sibling rivalry,or split with her parents? Did it involve some otherwise compelling event? The answers to those questions are not really clear in my mind,and never have been.
Still,there seemed to be a lot of showmanship going on whenever we visited.Certainly there were a lot of things that remained unspoken in the presence of children,but there were a lot of things going on there that were not really evident to all.Knowing of them is not really necessary,nor is it possible,but it tells a story,however obscure about all the people who came out of Canterbury,and my grandparents house in particular.
I believe there are untold stories because I've been able to see reflections of them.I believe Dead Creek to have held secrets,perhaps dark ones.I believe that because of having been around Canterbury,having caught a thousand nuances of it's people.They are very telling in a way,even if they do not tell what.
Defense mechanisms.My mother,I believe chose to maintain an innocence that she could not possibly have had.She chose to regard not just evil things,but most anything she found unpleasant as though it did not exist,did not work in our lives. I've seen her do that thousands of times,even before I recognized it for what it was.Living that way,I'm certain created a tremendous burden for my mother,but she lived the strategy out more or less successfully until she left this world.Her mantra was"if you can't say something nice,don't say anything at all." She said that so many times and tried to live it out so deliberately,that it must have been learned at her mother's knee.But I've come to see it as a defense mechanism.
Where could such a mantra have come from? My mothers mother would spend her days,at least the ones I witnessed,in constant activity,never sitting still,and providing a running commentary of anything she saw happening.If a car came up the street she would say who it was if she knew.If she did not,she would soon be on the phone asking about who it could be. And I know with certainty that she did this when we were not there as well,so habituated was the habit,like the singing of a familiar bird, She had an obvious concern about such things,yet she never,as far as I could tell criticized anyone,or felt any real discomfort about the presence of the unknown.At least if she did,she never said so.
My mothers father spent long hours in a kitchen chair,right next to a side window of his house,with a better view of the street than my grandmother could have had while flitting about the house.And he offered little in the way of explaining anything he saw.He was largely a silent and solitary man,keeping his own council.He would spend the day lighting and re-lighting his pipe,smoking and re-smoking it,reading detective magazines,or westerns,speaking only when spoken to and sometimes not even then. His wife would say so much that she was often not saying anything of any substance at all.And,most often,he said nothing. He would rise early and light the stove,and once it was lit,all was done that needed to be done in his day,and he settled in for the long hours.
I've come to know my mother,and the way she adapted to her world, as being something that made sense if you knew what Canterbury was like.I would have to say she was a stoic,very adaptable.She was born and came of age in a hard land,one that you would expect to give rise to stoicism because such a quality would be advantageous there.Being adaptable,though,is not always the very best of things.It can leave you settling for much less than you are capable of.In the end,I could surmise that my mother had ideas,not openly stated ones,but ideas nonetheless about leaving some part of her past behind.I truth though,I don't think that it ever entered her mind to leave and never come back.She had a lot of respect for her family and her roots,but she did not always convey much of sense of personal history to us.For that I would need to watch Canterbury very closely,and think long and hard about it for many years.
So this small village,a few miles from the Saint John River,in western New Brunswick and not far from the Maine border became a living thing too.All things that stand,stand in the shadow of other things.
By the time I'd turned four I was capable observing Canterbury for what it was.The trouble is,what it was when we were there seemed to be vastly different that what I assumed it was when we were not there.I think I was aware of this,at a certain level even at a very young age,though I could hardly have voiced that idea at the time.
The best way to explain this is to think of town as that atom,or particle,which behaves differently when it's being observed,because of the observation.Canterbury was putting on a show for us,I believe,maybe not telling lies about itself,but spinning it's own story for us.Kind of like that Farside cartoon with the cows standing around on the hillside,smoking,drinking,playing pool,until one of the cows shouts"car",and they all return to being cows.
When my mother left town,she ventured out into a world very different from her hometown.In those days she did not need to go a great distance to find that sort of world.She did so for her own reasons,which she did not necessarily make really clear to me.I'm not certain she made those reasons clear to anyone.But it seems fair to think that her motivation would have had a lot to do with making a better life for herself,and,by 1965,for her children as well.
Most people I've ever talked to seem to think the grass is greener in some other place.Not all of those people continue to think that way,but nearly everyone goes through a phase of that kind of thought.So the question becomes,how why,exactly did my mother leave Canterbury? And,how completely did she leave? Were there things she was not willing to have her family know about growing up there? The most likely answer to this last question would seem to be yes.
There is another side to these questions too,as there always is.How did the people left behind regard my mother? Canterbury was where her parents and siblings lived,and though everyone in her family left,to a certain extent,none ended up farther from home than my mother did when she ended up in Moncton.So,did her family view her moving with favor? Did her decision to move involve some form of sibling rivalry,or split with her parents? Did it involve some otherwise compelling event? The answers to those questions are not really clear in my mind,and never have been.
Still,there seemed to be a lot of showmanship going on whenever we visited.Certainly there were a lot of things that remained unspoken in the presence of children,but there were a lot of things going on there that were not really evident to all.Knowing of them is not really necessary,nor is it possible,but it tells a story,however obscure about all the people who came out of Canterbury,and my grandparents house in particular.
I believe there are untold stories because I've been able to see reflections of them.I believe Dead Creek to have held secrets,perhaps dark ones.I believe that because of having been around Canterbury,having caught a thousand nuances of it's people.They are very telling in a way,even if they do not tell what.
Defense mechanisms.My mother,I believe chose to maintain an innocence that she could not possibly have had.She chose to regard not just evil things,but most anything she found unpleasant as though it did not exist,did not work in our lives. I've seen her do that thousands of times,even before I recognized it for what it was.Living that way,I'm certain created a tremendous burden for my mother,but she lived the strategy out more or less successfully until she left this world.Her mantra was"if you can't say something nice,don't say anything at all." She said that so many times and tried to live it out so deliberately,that it must have been learned at her mother's knee.But I've come to see it as a defense mechanism.
Where could such a mantra have come from? My mothers mother would spend her days,at least the ones I witnessed,in constant activity,never sitting still,and providing a running commentary of anything she saw happening.If a car came up the street she would say who it was if she knew.If she did not,she would soon be on the phone asking about who it could be. And I know with certainty that she did this when we were not there as well,so habituated was the habit,like the singing of a familiar bird, She had an obvious concern about such things,yet she never,as far as I could tell criticized anyone,or felt any real discomfort about the presence of the unknown.At least if she did,she never said so.
My mothers father spent long hours in a kitchen chair,right next to a side window of his house,with a better view of the street than my grandmother could have had while flitting about the house.And he offered little in the way of explaining anything he saw.He was largely a silent and solitary man,keeping his own council.He would spend the day lighting and re-lighting his pipe,smoking and re-smoking it,reading detective magazines,or westerns,speaking only when spoken to and sometimes not even then. His wife would say so much that she was often not saying anything of any substance at all.And,most often,he said nothing. He would rise early and light the stove,and once it was lit,all was done that needed to be done in his day,and he settled in for the long hours.
I've come to know my mother,and the way she adapted to her world, as being something that made sense if you knew what Canterbury was like.I would have to say she was a stoic,very adaptable.She was born and came of age in a hard land,one that you would expect to give rise to stoicism because such a quality would be advantageous there.Being adaptable,though,is not always the very best of things.It can leave you settling for much less than you are capable of.In the end,I could surmise that my mother had ideas,not openly stated ones,but ideas nonetheless about leaving some part of her past behind.I truth though,I don't think that it ever entered her mind to leave and never come back.She had a lot of respect for her family and her roots,but she did not always convey much of sense of personal history to us.For that I would need to watch Canterbury very closely,and think long and hard about it for many years.
So this small village,a few miles from the Saint John River,in western New Brunswick and not far from the Maine border became a living thing too.All things that stand,stand in the shadow of other things.
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