March 18, Pioneer

Here is the questionnaire you have to answer before you visit with your doctor: on a scale from 0 to 10, let us know about your pain, appetite, sleep, mood, drowsiness, fatigue, nausea, etc. It used to be a photocopied form we filled casually with a blunt pencil. The nurse would take it just as casually and put it in your chart. Then she would ask her questions again, and take some quick notes.

I who, in spite of the evidence, thought never to have come close yet to this pain of 10, "worst possible that you can imagine", settled often for a 5 or a 6 in the early days, and now will pick a 3. On the other hand, where mood is concerned, and satisfaction with life in general - or what is called in the medical jargon "quality of life" -, I would give myself a 2 in what I call the early days. 2 out of modesty, since, happy to be alive, I would have put down a perfect 0, were it not for my internal censorship.

Yesterday we arrived at the cancer centre in Kingston and had to wait in the loveliest waiting room of the new building, which feels more like a theatre hall than a hospital, and looks out on the lake. We had to fill the same form, this time directly on the computer. Obtained the printout and, to our surprise, found out that the data, for the last 4 visits, had been compiled on this one sheet. Therefore, you could tell, by the numbers, how I "progressed" within the year that passed, and from visit to visit, 4 in all. While most rubrics looked unremarkable - the pain somewhat the same, just marginally better, which is the case, same with sleep and appetite -, under the rubric of mood the difference was striking. Colin made the first comment since of course he knew what that was going to let loose. I protested and brought to bear my best philosophical argumentation. Of course a year ago I was happy to have prevailed over the tumor with radiation only, happy to be able to come home, happy to take up life again, even if in a new form. One year later, though, the isolation which so much contributed to my recovery has become difficult to bear, and the fatigue, which, in the beginning, was the promise that, through sleep, I was going to heal, now is the most difficult part of my convalescence. Now, that I am able to read at all, I protest not to be able to do that for more than half an hour without having to sleep immediately after. The same is true for writing. Or for any other activity that I may undertake. Those conditions of slowness, which I so welcomed fifteen months ago, have come to put my patience to a real test.

That this may make sense for Colin is one thing. But then, here comes the nurse, she who remembers what I was and looked like then. That end of november feels, for her, like three, rather than two years ago. She goes straight to the mood rubric which was, I confess, impossible to miss. These values are expressed in columns and this particular column, unlike others, went from barely a line to quite a square.

She took another look at me and wondered, for a moment it seemed like I had a stiff neck. Colin reassured her, that was not the case, but rather, our lovely new dog Bentley who is young, strong and playful, and not used to the leash. Which makes walks real tugs of war. The iPhone came out with the proof. Earlier, at the pain clinic, during our morning appointment, we had had to answer the question whether, since our last visit, there had been some, little or no improvement, with some, little or no thing to show for it. Even if initially we thought, "no improvement with nothing to show", I reconsidered and advocated for "some improvement with something to show", since, had there been no improvement, there would be no Bentley. Of course, these questionnaires do not have Bentley rubrics, only numbers.

When my favorite doctor - we share a similar temperament - came in, I tried to remind him that these are just numbers. That I had been a working woman all my life and that ceasing to be that kind of  person could not come easy. That I would have preferred never to have had to work, but since that had not been the case, I found myself now forced to mourn the loss of something I always wanted to loose.

Because, indeed, I always wandered, what would it feel like, to be an artist who did not have to work for a living? I may be, right now, quite close to this position, except for the pioneer quality of my present circumstances, which I did not expect to go together with the other. A convalescent pioneer who tries to do some writing and painting, and even a bit of music, and has to, once in a while, rate on a scale from 0 to 10 the quality of her pioneering experience.

As you may know, I have been a pioneer before, and so very proud of it too. But that is another long story. Nonetheless, I remember looking aghast at some of my schoolmates who, on the special days - like the first of May - when we were supposed to wear our red triangular scarfs, white shirts and black pleated skirts, came to school with a crumpled tie, stained and torn at the corners, hanging whichever way around their sorry thin necks. How did they not wake up early in the morning and iron that tie, that shirt, carefully washed, by necessity by hand, the night before? By their mother of course, or grandmother, whom they would have pestered at length, insisting on the importance of looking good in this outfit? Dirty tie had nothing to do with poverty, for sure, and I did not really have the concept in those days, not only because we were all poor, but because my own grandmother made her living out of laundering other poor people's belongings.

Well, you will say, what does that kind of pioneering have to do with the pioneer you are now, opening every day, through the snow in winter, through the clouds of mosquitoes and deer flies in summer, your trail, to the back of a property the Canadian government did not give you for free to clear and cultivate? Opening which does not even presuppose that you wear a red tie, although tying something around your neck to protect it is always a good idea?

Somehow, upon first laying eyes on those questionnaires, at the doctor's, the thing that came to mind were the students' evaluations, the bane of each and all teachers, except for those precious few, who are always superbly admired by their students. Not having been among them, I can reckon that one of the freedoms I have acquired, in my life as a convalescent, is that of not having to be given a mark for my work performance. But wait! I still have to, I have in fact to give myself a mark, for how I do, in comparison to how I did. And when it comes to mood, or the well being of the spirit, if we should use such an obsolete term, it appears that the task is all mine. What seemed a 0 is now an 8 where 0 stands for perfection. We rely here on a system which definitely believes in progress. And I am afraid, if 0 came at a time when things were pretty bad from a medical point of view, what chance does one have, to improve on that? If being a pioneer was such a delight under the communist regime, how am I going to compare the pioneering I am practicing now, and expect it to win?

Am I trying to tell you that there is no improving upon the original experience, no matter how difficult the conditions might appear to have been then, to the objective eye? Possibly.

March 8, Women's Day

I had forgotten all about it. By 1996, more than 16 years after I had left my country, this kind of holiday had been replaced by others, meaningful in a very different way.

The approaching publication of my first book was an event of extraordinary proportions for the one who had been working on this, originally doctoral thesis, since 1984. I know it sounds unbearable and it is.

People outside the university often think that university jobs are easy. They count the number of hours one is expected to teach every week, they look at summers which appear to be work free, and wonder how such jobs are still possible nowadays, when business people work so hard, with so little security, etc. In fact, the reason I do not like to remember very often how I got that first position is precisely because, when I count the years it took, to put together a curriculum vitae likely be taken into consideration, I shiver. Of course, when one is young, life seems never-ending. It helped, that I liked to read and write. But spend twelve years on a book that nobody, including myself, remembers any longer? A book whose main virtue proved to be, to put me in a position wherefrom I could do the same a second time?

Of course not everybody takes this long. There are, fortunately, people who think fast, write fast, and get things through with ease and successfully. Of course.

That 8 March 1996 was the last of many days I had spent on the phone with the man who was doing the editing of my book. (We did not have email in those days.) This book had been read and proofread many times before, but he did not quite trust those. He was a better editor anyhow.  I too must have sounded somewhat untrustworthy. He had never seen me, I was neither in Montreal, nor from Montreal. He kept sending me back to my text, kept saying, as others were to do after him, that this is not "how you say it in French". The book contained an awful lot of quotations, that is, translations from German, from Spanish, God knows where else, and it certainly sounded very little French-like. It could not have. At some point, the editor himself, embarrassed by his lack of patience with a job he was paid to do, but of which he thought little, excused himself by saying that he regretted to have to do this to me on women's day. Obviously, being a québécois, he had a political conscience. That did not stop him from being rough with my work, with my general contention that I had written something worth publishing, but well, since I had been awarded the necessary grant, he had to do his job. It did not mean that he would do it nicely, of course not. Do it, and in the process spook me away from coming back another time.

From the depths of my embarrassment, I remembered those 8th of March days. I remembered the endless hours children spent making gifts for teachers and mothers. The festive, perfumed feel of it all, the fact that back home, March meant the arrival of spring already, with small delicious bouquets of snowdrops and violets to prove it.

Meanwhile here, when I had reason to rejoice in my accomplishment, it somehow felt riddled with difficulty and closer to rejection than joy.

A few weeks later I drove to Montreal from London, where I lived, to pick up the copies of the book to which I was entitled. I found my editor at the publishing house, in the midst of boxes piled up to the ceiling. All those books now published, which were probably never going to be bought, in spite of having been so thoroughly edited and proofread. I got my box from this very polite man, who in my presence had become almost pleasant. Nothing in him betrayed the grumpy phone demeanour. He had the appearance of the 70s intellectual, long if thinning unkempt hair, complexion fatigued by one too many nights spent drinking and maybe writing. Nothing so boring and thesis-infused like what I had produced. A master of his native tongue, without a doubt.

We had an uneasy lunch in an empty bar and I took off in a rush, impatient to take a closer look at my precious book, which I could not have done in his presence. Stopped on the side of the road, took one of them out, it smelled so good, so fresh, so perfect. I looked at the back cover, the one known to matter to the first time author, the only place where any mention of who she is may be made, if at all. Maybe there was also a small picture of me? I do not remember. But I don't think so. This was a serious, academic press, where they do not indulge in portrait narcissism. My attention on the spot arrested by the typo I could not not notice even before reading. Not a big deal at all, simply a word repeated twice, nothing horrible. The small preposition de. Yet to me, at that time, this was a disaster. After weeks of having had to listen to how poor my written language was, that typo, left to fester in such a noticeable place, loudly spoke about how this chap had not done his job properly. He was very good at telling one what they had done wrong, but not so good at doing things right himself.

As you can see, many years have gone by, yet I still cannot forget that de. It took the shine off the publication of my first book. It should not have done so. In time I learned to rationally submit to the difference between what is important and what is not, and a typo certainly is not. It remains a fact that for years after, that typo came back. Every time I had to subject myself to comments concerning my writing, coming from people who invariably thought they could do better than I did. In a way, that typo on the back cover bio, brought a certain perspective to the act of writing and publishing. Writing was a form of giving, followed by a silence. That silence is sometimes marked by a typo, let us call it an X, the acte manqué by which my poor editor had manifested his disapproval and revolt.

I am tempted to say, let us imagine, on this Women's Day, that the best way to fill that silence would be, instead of the X, the wordless fragrance of a small bouquet of snowdrops, for the dark-haired, of violets, for the blond, and the grey. Let us all go back to our cheerful, communist spring.