Recently I’ve been reading letters written 60 years ago by my grandfather, Gerard Brender à Brandis (1881-1973), to his son Wim, my father, and my mother, Madzy.  They are in Dutch, and his handwriting is difficult.  We have 55 such letters, spanning the last twenty years of his life.

I barely knew him.  My parents and two brothers and I emigrated from the Netherlands in 1947, when I was not quite nine years old, leaving him and the rest of the extended family behind.  On later visits to the Netherlands we sat in his and his wife’s (my step-grandmother’s) sitting room or occasionally went out for dinner.  There was a pancake house nearby that we all loved.  As I remember him, he was always wearing a three-piece suit, with his hair neatly slicked down and his shoes polished.

The letters are a revelation.  He was a diligent and chatty letter-writer.  He writes about their dogs, their social life and travels, his gardening (for which I’m sure he was not wearing the three-piece suit and the polished shoes) – about family and financial matters, books, and public affairs.  He can be amusing and self-deprecating and shyly pleased at what he is still able to do in his eighties.  He gets angry about current affairs and about a new car that is giving him trouble.  He gets absorbed in botanical details relating to his plants, outdoor and indoor.  Seeing these sides of him shows me how completely we were strangers to each other – which in turn raises questions about emigration that I don’t want to wrestle with right now.

Over the two decades there must have been far more letters than just these 55 because quite frequently he starts by saying that his son’s letter reached him only a day or two earlier.  My father was also a good correspondent, and letters were a vital lifeline in immigrant families at that time.  Many of the ones from my grandfather that we have are marked “bewaren” (“keep”) in my father’s handwriting, indicating that he had some reason for wanting to keep these specific ones.

Naturally I reflect on the decline of letter-writing in our times – it’s a commonplace lament but it’s a situation that not many people are trying to remedy.  I enjoy writing letters – I used to write quite a few – and I frequently write e-mails that formerly would have taken the form of letters to be mailed.  Thinking about this, I realize that my letter-writing impulse has been going into the writing of journals, on the computer and by hand.  The impulse is the same, though my journals may never be read by anyone else.  At least my grandfather knew that his letters would be read by Wim and Madzy, though he could not have imagined me sitting here – the same age, roughly, as he was when he was writing them, making notes on my laptop and working on a short biography of him.  I hope that he would have been pleased to see me reading with absorption, using a magnifying glass to try to decipher some little scribble, going to the Internet to check on some historical allusion or botanical name – above all, paying attention.

Some years ago I wrote a chapbook titled At This Point: a word-suite in six movements.  It  was originally written as a talk to be given during a program in which a cellist friend of mine performed three of Bach’s suites for solo cello.  The talk was so well received that we published it as a chapbook.

Part of At This Point was about my friend’s specific cello, an instrument which had a biography, having been made in about 1850 in Paris.  When I began mulling, however, I suddenly saw that evening’s event as the “point” that brought together the origins and evolution of music, of musical instruments, and of musical performance.  I thought – and wrote – about the life of a professional musician.  The particular event for which I wrote the talk led me to reflect on Bach’s life and world – everything that went into his composing of this music.

That vision of an immensely complicated interweaving came back to me a day or two ago when I was about to heat a chicken pot pie for my supper.  I glanced down the list of ingredients, and I suddenly saw it: farmers growing the ingredients and, behind them, other farmers growing the seeds and the chickens’ feed.  Organizations supplying farm products and equipment.  Crops being harvested, stored, processed, shipped.  Cooks shaping the pies.

Besides the farmers and the cooks, there were innumerable people at all stages: truck drivers, computer operators, building and vehicle maintenance staff, warehouse workers.  There were fingers on keyboards, hands packing boxes – people supporting themselves and their families and their communities.  People liking their work, hating it, worrying about their ailing grandmothers.

All to produce my supper.

From the sublime to the ridiculous, perhaps, but it’s how our world – and my mind – work.

“I write this sitting in the kitchen sink.”  It’s the opening of a novel titled I Capture the Castle, by Dodie Smith, that was published in 1948 and, a few years later, found its way to me in Terrace, BC.  I was fourteen or fifteen years old.  While the story helped me to formulate unhelpful ideas about romance and other aspects of adulthood, what I found most compelling was the idea of writing about one’s own life.  The narrator, Cassandra, who is seventeen at the beginning, writes a diary about herself and her family.

“I write this sitting in the kitchen sink.  That is, my feet are in it; the rest of me is on the draining-board, which I have padded with our dog’s blanket and the tea-cosy.  I can’t say that I am really comfortable, and there is a depressing smell of carbolic soap, but this is the only part of the kitchen where there is any daylight left.”

I knew about diary-writing before that: when I was a child during the Second World War in the Netherlands, my mother had used her diary as an emotional refuge from the awfulness of the war.  In Terrace after the war she used five-year diary books and would sometimes mention incidents from previous years: a big snowstorm or the birth of goat triplets.  All the same, my sudden immersion in Cassandra’s story – a first-person narrative, using a loose diary format – was a revelation; it was the first time I read someone else’s diary, or at least a “pretend” diary.

A couple of years later I began writing one myself, and seventy years later I’m still doing it.

One of the things that Cassandra’s story alerted me to was the importance of the kind of “book” in which a diary could be written.  She moves from a “six-penny book” to a “shilling book” to a “two-guinea book.”  I began with a small 6-ring notebook but immediately found it too limited and not conducive to “spreading out” so my next “book” was a coil-backed scribbler, and I’ve mostly used scribblers ever since.

It was one of innumerable experience and encounters that contributed to my becoming a writer.

One summer afternoon some years ago I was standing on my front porch for a reflective moment.  My porch is low, just two steps up from the path, with a juniper bush close against both path and porch.  

My eye was caught by movement and, looking down, and I saw a black squirrel backing out from under the bush onto the path, pulling what turned out to be another squirrel, badly hurt, its hind quarters and tail crushed.  The helper squirrel was holding the hurt squirrel's shoulders, sometimes backing out and pulling, sometimes sitting astride the hurt squirrel and tugging.  The hurt squirrel was doing what it could to drag itself along.  It even tried to climb the bottom step towards me but, unable to manage, it hung there, draped over the edge of the step.

Several other squirrels came running.  

I phoned the SPCA, then went out onto the porch again.  One of the “well” squirrels (presumably the same one) was still fussing over the hurt one, but after a moment it moved a couple of feet away.  It looked straight at me and made a few moaning little noises.  I told it that I was doing what I could, and then it and the other “well” squirrels trotted away down the path.  I watched the hurt one until the SPCA man came.

I recognized the hurt squirrel; it was distinctive because it had lost half its tail, and it had been around for months. 

I was struck by the fact that when the “well” squirrel handed its friend over to me it was not afraid of me.  It sat perfectly still, looking at me, and we had eye contact for several seconds.  It and I seemed to be collaborating on looking after the hurt one.  The well squirrel was certainly not hiding its hurt friend from me – it had even, apparently, helped it to come out into the open where I could see it and do something.

When I told my brother Gerard about it, he remarked on the compassion of animals for each other.  He said that when one of his bantams was dying, another would always come and sit with it.