A brief note about bad haircuts

I was at my mom’s place the other night. I wanted to find a picture of her for my next post, so we pulled out the old photo albums. We were in hysterics as we looked through them. When I got home though, I was somewhat depressed. My life has really just been a series of bad haircuts. A mullet (even my mother, who will say just about anything looks nice, commented on how unflattering it was). A un-shaggedelic shag cut. Zestless afro. Hair that should have come with a CAUTION: WIDE LOAD warning. And a style my father dubbed “the helicopter landing pad”. When I told my coworker mm about this today, she suggested that I do a photo-post on my lifetime of bad haircuts. While this is an undoubtedly brilliant idea, I’m not sure I’m ready to loose my terrifying tresses on the world...

Uncle Bob and Aunt Joan

Uncle Bob and Aunt Joan were the hippies of the family. I don't actually know why I think of them as hippies, since there's no evidence that they spent their days getting high or that they subscribed to the doctrine of free love. But they had long hair and wore bellbottoms and seemed carefree, and that was enough to make them stand out from the rest of the family. And since it was the sixties, it also meant they must be hippies. They had five kids, and every Easter we would make the trek a little west of Toronto for an outdoor Easter egg hunt on Sunday morning. That tradition was abruptly abandonned when I was in my early teens. Aunt Joan, while travelling on the Trans-Siberian Railway, had met an English banker. The story I know has her running off to England with him, without ever returning home. I don't know if that's true, but it probably is. It's hard to imagine a mother abandonning her children, but it's even harder to imagine her confronting them with her decision and saying goodbye. The story I know also has Uncle Bob going bald overnight. I'm not sure if that's an apocryphal tale, but I'm sure his wife's manner of leaving was sufficiently apocalyptic for him that it's not implausible. And it makes for a good story.

I didn't see my uncle or cousins again for many years. Then about five years ago, my uncle was diagnosed with cancer. I hadn't known this, but he and his son (my cousin John) had been living in the same town as me. I went to see Uncle Bob in the hospital. His bones were straining against his skin, and I felt like I was conversing with a skeleton. He was quite cheerful though and remained optimistic for a while, even after he had been moved from the hospital to a room at the back of John's house and was receiving hospice care. Then one day I heard him say, almost in passing, that although he had hoped for a different outcome, he wasn't ever going to leave that room. I looked at the cans of Ensure -- the last meals of the terminally ill -- then out the window, at the snow and trees and sky. I tried to imagine what it would be like to know you were never going to go outside again. Death brings an infinity of sorrows, and the sorrows of infinity.

I often wonder if Uncle Bob tried to contact Aunt Joan when he realized he was about to die. Her leaving must have been the great tragedy of his life, and my relentlessly romantic side yearns for a dénouement of understanding and forgiveness and closure.

A short while after Uncle Bob died, the cousins invited my mother and I to dinner at a local restaurant. I learned then that Aunt Joan and her English banker have a summer house in Southern Ontario, close to the various towns where her children live. She had, after many years, tried to re-establish contact with at least some of them. I don't know all the details, but I did hear a couple of my cousins speaking of her with some disdain. In the end, it sounded like Aunt Joan's children had abandonned her as well.

Too short stories

Back in the good old days when men were men and people with disabilities were institutionalized, my mother had a cousin named Bill. Today Bill would be labelled as having Down syndrome, but back then he was mongoloid. My mother doesn't remember Bill ever walking. He was carried everywhere: to the dining room table, to the backyard, to the bathroom, to his bedroom. “Did he have some other condition?” She doesn't know. Maybe there was some physical cause for his not walking, or maybe he was always regarded as an infant who couldn't do anything for himself. Bill was put into an institution when he was quite young. My mother can't remember what age he was when that happened. His family lived in Thunder Bay, in Northern Ontario. The institution was somewhere in Southeastern Ontario, which is about 1500 kilometers from Thunder Bay. I imagine Bill's parents didn't visit him very often. Bill died when he was 21. When I asked my mother what he died of, she told me that she doesn't know.

Bill's story can only be told as flash nonfiction. A lot of our family stories are like that. Sometimes I'm the one to blame: I assumed there wasn't a story. For example, my father's mother's main purpose in life seemed to be to keep my diabetic grandfather, who she called “father”, from eating any sweets. She seemed as bland as the biscuits she tried to pass off as dessert. Long after she died I learned that my grandmother's real father was exiled from Ireland by his family. He was an embarrassment to them because he drank too much. (As an aside, my coworker Maureen wondered how much you have to drink for it to be considered excessive in Ireland.) I searched the internet and found the name of my grandmother's father (Guilford Moffet Dudley), his wife (Eveleen A. Dudley), and my grandmother (Madeline Mary Constance Dudley) on the 1891-1943 Boston Passenger Lists. I'm not sure when they left Ireland, but it must have been shortly after 1900. That was the year my grandmother was born in Dublin, and she came to Canada when she was a baby. (As another aside, my great grandfather is a direct descendent of Lord Guilford Dudley, who married Lady Jane Grey. That unfortunate couple was forced to take up residence in one of the least desirable living spaces in England, the Tower of London. Although I don't know much of their story, I do know that it didn't end happily.) At some point after my grandmother arrived in North America her father disappeared, and nobody from our family knows the rest of his story. It might have been interesting to have asked my grandmother how she felt about her bastard of a father walking out on her and her mother, although perhaps I would have phrased the question to appear more objective. After my grandfather died I went to visit my grandmother, who by that time was in a nursing home. I hadn't seen her for some years. At first I thought that I had walked into the wrong room, and that the person in there was someone's male relative. I checked at the desk. It was my grandmother. She used to have long hair that she wore in a thick braid wrapped around her head, or at least that is how I remember it. This person was bald, the facial features Mr. Magooish. She slept through my visit. I left a picture of myself on the table beside the bed, but it probably didn't mean anything to her. She had dementia and I don't think she recognized anyone anymore.

Sometimes the reason for the too short family story is that the family itself has imposed a word limit. This was the case with my father's paternal grandfather. He married his nurse and left everything to her. The family posthumously shunned him, even refusing to allow him to be buried in the family plot. End of story.

When I watch Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer, which I do every Christmas, I always get kind of teary when Rudolph lands on the Island of Misfit Toys (I've usually had lots of Christmas cheer by that point, which may account for my easy slide into maudlinness). In the world of happy endings – or better yet, in utopia where there are no endings – I like to think that every story has an appreciative audience somewhere. It would be sad if those stories languished on an island somewhere, unheard.