AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY STARTED
La Guardia, Isla de Margarita, Venezuela, Tuesday, March 06, 2007

I am including some photographs of the house where we are currently living in the village of La Guardia on Isla de Margarita, Venezuela. Basically we are house-sitting and one of my projects has been to do some gardening in the enclosed patio at the back of the house where we spend nearly all of our waking hours.

An autobiography started

My younger brother, Kenneth, is a genealogist - by trade, so to speak (he was until recently the Executive Director of the Ontario Genealogical Society www.ogs.ca). While he was here in Venezuela for a visit recently he asked me to set down key dates in my life for incorporation into the family history that he is preparing. No problem! Should be easy, I reckoned. That initial barebones outline is turning into almost a full-scale autobiography. It hasn’t exactly taken over my life but I can see how it could. I should have recalled my rule about jigsaw puzzles: Don’t even start! I get obsessive about them and wind up staying up late at night to complete them. This could be something similar.

But I have to admit it is interesting. Like the other writing I do, you first have to decide who your readership is. Start with at least them in mind. I decided I was writing for my three teenage kids (well, one of them just turned twenty) and perhaps their children too. Including my future grandchildren, who would not likely read the text for another thirty to fifty years, made me realise that they certainly would not likely understand a lot of the terms, expressions and assumptions about, say, our daily life as children, what our houses looked like, about school discipline or school generally. When a friend read my journal about Vilisar’s cruise to Alaska in 2002, he had a million questions. He had no idea what a GPS is or whether at sea you simply somehow park for the night. How do you cook on the boat? What about toilet arrangements? What do you do with your time on long voyages?

A few years back, my genealogical brother developed an oral history project that tied into his family history project. Perhaps it was meant as a prelude to that task. Some ten years ago he taped a long series of interviews with my mother. She described the parsonages where she had been raised during the 1920’s and 30’s in Southeastern and Southern Ontario, for example, including everything from the kitchens, sleeping arrangements, laundry facilities, outhouses, horses, sleighs and buggies, etc. I can still remember some of the things myself from my own early childhood: horse-drawn wagons, etc. But my children have probably never even seen, let alone used, an outhouse. My kids were all born at the end of the 1980s or beginning of the 1990s (is it possible for anyone who is or is nearly an adult today to have been born in the 1980s? That was just yesterday, for Pete’s sake!), i.e., just as CDs were coming in. So, they had no idea what those LPs were that still lined the shelves in our apartment. “Dad! Where did you get these giant CDs?” You see what I mean? So I decided to give the autobiography somewhat of an oral history twist as well. Looked at another way, my grandparents were born in the 1880s and ‘90s and I was fascinated as a child to learn how they lived and what they did back then.

There are some natural divisions to the autobiography, of course. For example, family background and pre-school life; public schools (KG to VIII and including the various houses where we lived in); high school years; university; army service; post-graduate studies; professional life; loves and marriages; living in Germany and England, etc. etc. Nearly everybody would have the same breakdown, I suppose, unless you were part of some cataclysmic historical event like the Holocaust or World War II. If you start including descriptions of the houses where you lived, the schools you went to, the people you knew, your autobiography will be larger than the Complete Oxford History of the Western World. The problem is therefore by no means what to put in. The question is what to leave out?

I have also already made some interesting discoveries. First, when Kenneth visited me here, I was able to question him about our family roots. I thought I had a pretty good idea about this and, in a sort of general way, I guess I did. Most of our antecedents seem to have come from Scotland, England and Ulster following the Napoleonic Wars, say, from 1815 up until the 1840s or 1850s. But I had everything knickers-atwist. Yes, Prince Edward Island and New Brunswick, yes, Perthshire and Appleby figure in the salad. But of course I had nearly all the details wrong. This was my first discovery. Since I could hardly keep this sorted out in my head and since Kenneth was getting back to work on the family history, I decided to postpone doing any research on that part of the story for the moment at least.

I therefore started writing about the parts that are my own memories. I soon discovered that my most acute memories are of the years between when I was just about to start kindergarten at age five to about the time I entered high school at fourteen. Before that, my memories are sporadic and perhaps also informed by stories I heard from others or even old photographs. And after puberty the contours of events and the colours in my memories are also much less intense. I am not sure why this should be. It is just an initial observation.

A third discovery has to do with age and leisure. I searched the web for information about my old schools. I checked into the website of McMaster University, one of my undergraduate institutions (I attended Southwestern University for a year in Georgetown, Texas, and, several years later, did a year at the University of Toronto as an undergrad prior to attending King’s College in London to undertake a Master’s degree). I joined the McMaster Alumni Association (“We have you as a lost alumni,” they wrote back to me!) and searched their lists for people I had known in those years. The discovery is that you actually have time to look for them now.

Furthermore, they too are in the same age bracket as you and may have been doing some research themselves. I googled a few names and came up with an old friend whom I had known at the village school in Queenston, Ontario, at high school in Niagara Falls and Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario, and, finally, at McMaster. He had been researching his own family and had written up his memories of his childhood in the village and beyond. I last actually talked to Robin at college. I went off to the Army, he became a high-school teacher and then a university professor in British Columbia and Philadelphia and now lives, retired, with his partner in Mexico. There was a contact-email address and I wrote to him, somewhat tentatively, out of the blue, wondering if he might be piqued that I had let the contact wither. But no, I got a lovely reply back and we are now corresponding. He has all his old school and university yearbooks so can look stuff up as well. If I even still have them, mine are in crates and boxes in a friend’s attic in Germany.

Pretty good for a couple of weeks of work, don’t you think? I have only a most rudimentary idea of where my ancestors came from and who they were; my memories are much clearer of my public-school years than either before or after; and not only do I have time and perspective to write about “my life” now, there is also a potential readership (though they might not actually have been born yet), others are also investigating their family backgrounds and, very important, it is possible to re-establish contact to old friends.

On this latter point, some friends and even relatives have disappeared off the radar screen altogether while others, although they will have been giving off only faint blips, can easily be brought back into focus. In our so-called “productive years” we are busy with studies and careers, with raising families (and splitting them up). Now, with retirement or semi-retirement, we not only have the perspective to attempt a collection of our thoughts and some sort of summing up, we also have the time to reactivate friendships and even develop them more intensely. I realised when my younger brother visited me for five weeks in January that I had never actually ever spent any time alone with him. He is three years younger and I have an elder brother who is not even one year older than I am. Consequently, my strongest relationships and experiences growing up were with the older sibling. We were basically the same age and treated as such. But Kenneth and I also share a great deal of memories about family life, frequently, let it be said, with quite differing viewpoints and emphases. It was great to exchange these in a relaxed atmosphere.

Lew Mills was an Episcopal priest and a psychotherapist, our interim priest at the Church of Christ the King in Frankfurt and also, together with his wife, Joy, the priest who married Kathleen and me. His sermons were always down to earth and practical. I remember him saying one Sunday, “There are three important things (his sermons always had lists of threes): 1.) You are not going to be here forever; 2.) Sort out your relationships with the people who are important to you; and 3.) Start enjoying your life.” That seems like a good approach to mental health. My little autobiography might fit into this somehow.