Grandma Fornes

 

GRANDMA FORNES (copyright)

 

September 2, 1999:  To begin this journal, I may have to go back to a bit of history. A journal of a life should start with the day you're born and end with your death, I guess. But this one starts in the middle of my life, so I'll try to catch you up on what I've been through 'til now. So you know where I'm coming from. I've got to think about that for a bit, but I'll be back.

September 3, 1999: The only surprising thing about the plaque on Grandma Fornes wall—just above the dining table in the little room off the kitchen—was that it had the word Hell in it. I had the motto memorized before I started school; I was a good reader but hadn't yet been introduced to figurative language so the Hell in the plaque was a literal place, in this case at the end of a paved road.

            Paved roads were good, gravel roads were noisy and the car would slide around sometimes so that Grandma Fornes would crank the wheel sharply, utter an “Oh, dear” under her breath—as close to cursing that she ever came, I think—and lean into the steering wheel in a manner that wasn't figurative.

            Grandma Fornes became a born-again Christian when I was eight. I didn't quite know what that meant until I was twelve or so; I had thought that bornigan was one word, one of those strange, long words that grown-ups use to talk about subjects like pregnant and penis, etc. I didn't have a penis, though, until I was thirteen, but I did have a weewee. I got a penis in Health Class in Grade 7, when I learned that only girls had vaginas. I was extremely envious, although for all I knew, a vagina had to be something like a penis, only better, obviously, considering the fuss Miss Tobald made about it.

            In Grade 8, they showed us pictures and I changed my mind. “Penises are far more interesting than vaginas,” I said to Howard Cousins, trying to make conversation with the coolest guy in Junior High. Sometimes I just open my mouth and crap comes out.

            “Grow up, squirt,” he said. “you don't have a clue.”

            As if he did.

            It's true, though. Growing up with a Grandma leaves you without a lot of important information. I had no clue about a whole bunch of stuff until I got to junior high, although I did know how to do cross-stitch and had done a pretty good tea towel with a dog and a cat in a friendly pose one winter when the evenings were long and boring. Come to think of it, most evenings—summer and winter—were boring living as I did in a house with two Grandmas and me.

            “Why,” you may ask, “were you living with a Grandma, let alone two?”

            Well the reason was one of those things I didn't learn the significance of until much later. In High School, the guys would have said that my dad—who is unknown—knocked up my mom—who was probably a slut anyway and deserved it—and the long and the short was that she had a baby—me—when she should have been in Grade 11 and her mother—Grandma Fornes—took me in so she could finish her High School—which she never did—and the rest is history.

            I may try to find my mom someday; not now, for sure.

            Anyway, you shouldn't have asked if you didn't need to know. 

September 4, 1999: My name is Michael Fornes. I am 19 years old and I've decided to write this journal because my English 101 prof suggested to the class that journaling is a good way to hone writing skills.

            First, some promised but necessary background.

            Henry Hudson High School was true Hell—as well as being located on a paved street. I started my Grade 9 year there with good intentions; I would make Grandma Fornes proud of me. And even in Grade 9, I got top marks in everything but Phys Ed, which I considered an abomination-of-a-course. We dribbled basketballs, soccer balls (from foot to foot), worked out with medicine balls and climbing walls and usually ended with a volleyball game in which I can safely say I never did one thing the whole year to assist any team I happened to be on in acquiring one single point. The Phys Ed teacher—Mr. McDermott, a cranky, red-faced coach—introduced me to the word inept. I looked it up: it's an adjective for people who can't dig, pass, set or spike a volleyball. The preferred noun form is ineptitude, not ineptness like Mr. McDermott apparently thought when he said, frequently, “I've never seen so much ineptness in my life!” Not just to me, but to all those of us who were too fat, too clumsy or too disinterested to master game skills.

            Phys Ed isn't a required course in college, thank God.

             I just realized that you might well be wondering why I call her “Grandma Fornes,” since the bastard son of a teenager and an unknown father would logically have only one grandmother. My biological grandmother, Grandma Fornes, had a sister Edith who had lived with her since her husband—my apparent great uncle—was killed in a farm accident.

            I can't remember when it started, but I always called my great aunt, “Grandma Edith.”

            Grandma Edith never had any children. Grandma Fornes only had the one, my mother Laura Fornes whose father, my grandfather Fornes, “was killed while on peacekeeping duty in Cyprus.” (That's the official story; there's no possibility of “Grandpa Fornes” having been in Cyprus at the time given by Grandma Fornes, but I have never had the heart to contradict her and have unsuccessfully Googled and Yahooed every possible avenue of information on peacekeeping in Cyprus to try to prove her right.)

            My family tree has routinely had most of its few branches lopped off, apparently.

            Somewhere out there is my mother, who may or may not be raising half-brothers and half-sisters for me. More likely, she's long since disappeared down some sinkhole like East Hastings in Vancouver or the Tenderloin in San Francisco. I've read about those places; “white trash” tends to end up there. If that's where Laura Fornes got to, I may be the only living branch on our tree. 

September 6, 1999:  I've never been born-again, although it wasn't for lack of trying on the part of my two Grandmas. I went to church on Sunday mornings—dutifully, I never caught on to what was going on exactly. I attribute this to the fact that my two Grandmas weren't born-again until I was in Grade 3, and so it was a bit like walking in on the middle of a movie. I never picked up enough of the plot line to let me appreciate the punch line, which, I gathered, was an eternity in Heaven, a place of endless bliss, or Hell, it's opposite in every way.

            Grandma Edith is (was) pretty up front about her conviction that I am a lost soul. She cajoled and pleaded with me several times, mostly when Grandma Fornes was out shopping or decorating the church, begged me to get down on my knees and repeat after her the Sinners' Prayer from the Gideon New Testament I got in Grade Six. I found the suggestion embarrassing in the extreme and said, “I'll think about that . . . later.”

            “Later may be too late,” she'd say. “You could get hit by a car on your way to school.”

            I unpacked my suitcases in the residence a few days ago and found she'd slipped a brand new King James Bible into the overnight case. I like it. It has a nice heft to it, thin pages, a nice font and in the front, a place for my family tree, a feature likely redundant to my needs. For there to be a family tree, I believe it's required that there first be a family. 

September 7, 1999:  If you haven't guessed it by now, I'm fat. I have always been fat. And as Shakespeare said—Grade 12, Hamlet—people might well end up being known by their flaws, not their strengths.

            I haven't decided yet whether it's a strength or a flaw, but I routinely take the opposing position on just about everything—just ask Grandma Fornes. I wrote an essay as my assignment-of-choice to disprove Hamlet's theory (see paragraph above) by pointing out that in Canada, a drunken reprobate like John A. MacDonald was elevated to the status of a George Washington despite his being the worst possible Prime Minister for the time unless you happened to be a white, English, Protestant Ontarian entrepreneur. Mr. Scoles—my English teacher—and Miss Clansen—my Social Studies teacher—got together and decided my essay was “absurd,” and obviously plagiarized, and gave me 24 hours to do a new assignment. I opened my mouth to defend myself, then changed my mind because I had, in fact, copied the words the worst possible Prime Minister for the time unless you happened to be a white, English, Protestant Ontarian entrepreneur, from a Macleans article in which the columnist was actually quoting someone else.

            Knocking off a new assignment in 24 hours wasn't a big deal. Hours and hours of keyboarding practice while most kids were out shooting hoops has meant that I can type faster than I can talk—or walk. In 45 minutes, I cobbled together an analysis of Hamlet's reason for contemplating suicide in his To be, or not to be soliloquy. I confined myself to words of three syllables or less to make sure I wasn't charged with plagiarism . . . again. Mr. Scoles gave me a “B” and added a note: I hope this has been a learning experience for you, Michael. 

September 8, 1999: It was a learning experience. And there have been many. The first time a circle forms around you in elementary school and the taunt, “fatty, fatty 8 by 8, can't get through the garden gate,” is chanted at you in chorus, you know you've had a real learning experience. The lesson is this: the borders of normal are strict; fall outside them and you're on your own.

            My roommate is Jake MacDonald. He moved in after me, four days late for the start of classes, in fact. I was working on this journal when he dragged in a trunk and three suitcases yesterday. His mouth said, “Hi, I'm Jake,” but his eyes held a comment with which I was already totally familiar: “Shit! They've put me in with a boring fat guy!” I've hardly seen him since; his suitcase is on the bed, clothing scattered about and the rest of his luggage still unopened.

            I envy the guys with enough money to rent their own place off-campus.           

September 9, 1999:  Our room is in two halves, mirror images of each other. We each have a single bed, a desk with three three-foot shelves above and an internet connection, a three-foot closet, a chest of four drawers and a shoe rack. My first order of business was to unpack everything into it's place. My clothes went into the closet with all the hangers' hooks pointing the same way (in case of fire), shirts, jackets and pants separated for easy access. Grandma Fornes had packed two boxes of books for me; she chose my favourites from among the books she'd read to me to help me get to sleep, many of them novels I didn't fully understand but which left me with indelible images: Captain Ahab pursuing the leviathan Moby Dick across a stormy sea, Lorna Doone falling at her wedding with a bullet from the hated Carver Doone in her back, Jean Valjean breaking a window to steal a loaf of bread for his starving family.

            Grandma Fornes was a good reader; her voice rose and fell in a rhythm I can still hear when I lie back at night and relive the ascent up the stairs to the garret where Raskalnikov will murder the pawnbroker woman. High school teachers were exasperated to learn that the offerings they put before me were often familiar to me already. Although Grandma Fornes hadn't read Catcher in the Rye to me, it was one of the forbidden fruits I picked and ate after Grade 6 when I got my first all-my-own library card. 

            I've got all the classics lined up on the top two shelves: six feet of great literature.

            I wish I could say that Grandma Fornes had had a classical education before she married, and that her life was a Greek tragedy of lost hopes, but the fact is that the books she read to me gained entrance to our household accidentally; they were left behind in the attic by a former occupant and Grandma Fornes hauled them out when she needed something to read to me to get me to sleep before midnight. I think she fell in love with the novels by chance as she read to me.  I think it's no small feat to absorb the wisdom of the ages for the first time when you're in your fifties. There's a word for that: Grandma Fornes was an autodidact like Leonardo da Vinci or Herman Melville. I pride myself on being an autodidact as well; I credit Grandma Fornes for that. 

September 11, 1999: This is beginning to look like a novel. It couldn't be, though, because its too much like real life, where events of  consequence seldom happen. For a story to be a story—my English teacher in Grade 12 said—it has to have a complication of significance which is resolved in the end. (That's for a short story; a novel can have multiple complications of significance—he said.) So now this is a journal which I will continue to write until, well, I don't know 'til when. Journals have rules too. Especially if you write them to be read by someone other than yourself; that's how a journal is different from a diary.

            Jake MacDonald moved out. I don't know why, but I have my suspicions. I'm glad he's gone; I would be overjoyed if no one else moved in. I'd get the shared-room price for a single which makes a difference of $93.00 a month. To be a story with a complication of significance, Jake would have had to murder me in my sleep because I'm fat, like the protagonist in The Telltale Heart by Edgar Allen Poe who kills his housemate because he's cross-eyed and he (the protagonist) can't stand to look at him, or be looked at by him—I can't remember which right now.

            See what I mean about the difference between a story and a journal? In a journal, people move out without saying anything; in novels, a whole lot of emotional fuss is made, dark secrets come to light and the universe groans. And then, of course, the protagonist begins a new and better life and lives happily ever after. At least they did in the one or two Christian novels Grandma Fornes read to me before I told her I didn't want to hear any more of those happy-ending tales.

            “Why not?” she asked. “Don't you want things to end happily?”

            “In our lives, yes,” I said, “but not in stories. It's too fake.”

            She stared at me for a while. “I don't understand you,” she said.

            Once Grandma Edith got mad at me and called me a snot-nosed little brat, and I guess I was, although how “snot-nosed” is the right adjective for what I was confused me. I always looked up the big words in the books Grandma Fornes read to me and then I'd use them on Grandma Edith to irritate her more than she already was. Once I told her to quit her ubiquitous complaining when she told me for the hundredth time to hang up my wet towel properly so it would dry. Grandma Fornes waded in at about the same point at which Grandma Edith slapped my face.

            “Don't be so impertinent,” she said. “Show Grandma Edith some respect.”

            I looked up impertinent, but I couldn't figure out why pertinent with the prefix im, which would make it not pertinent, could possibly apply to what I'd said.

            This entry is long; I was home for the weekend and now it's Sunday evening and the dorm is quiet and I can't think of anything to do but write.

            I'm sad. Grandma Edith is headed for an unhappy ending. I snapped at her when she did the “hang up your towel properly” thing with me over my scuffed shoes and Grandma Fornes called me into her bedroom and told me that Grandma Edith—her older sister—has Alzheimer’s.

            I know what Alzheimer’s is but when I got back to the dorm, I looked it up online and read a long description, including the fact that there is no known cure. Grandma Edith's mind will deteriorate beginning with her memory functions until she doesn't recognize anyone, is in a nursing home and unable to do anything much for herself. “Death by a decade or two of mental strangulation,” I read on a website about a new, revolutionary treatment that “could be coming soon.”

            This weekend didn't have a happy ending.

September 12, 1999:  A bad thing happened in History class today. Some would say it was nowhere near being a significant complication, but sometimes an insignificant complication feels, well, really significant. My History 101 prof, Dr. Busenitz, asked a question. He said, “Our Charter of Rights and Freedoms tries to protect people from discrimination on the grounds of gender, age, religion, etc. Who would you add to the list if you were asked?”

            “Unattractive people,” someone offered and Dr. Busenitz nodded.

            “Jocks!”

            “People with acne!”

            “Amputees!”

            “Jocks with amputations and acne!” said someone else to general laughter.

            And then the girl beside me said, “Obese people,” and she looked at me, turned crimson and said, “Oh damn, I'm so sorry!” More laughter.

            Then the bad thing happened. I turned away, let my hurt show. I should have winked and said something like, “That's OK. I've got a mirror.” I didn't. I blew it.

            It wasn't the stuff of fiction, but it sure felt significant. Big stuff grows from little seeds. Grandma Fornes told me a thousand times about the war that was lost because a cavalryman lost his horse which had lost its shoe because it, in turn, had lost a nail. “Pay attention to the nails or you may lose the war,” she would say.

            Janice Eaton (the girl) was probably a nail-episode. 

September 14, 1999:  And now, a confession. On September 1, I resolved to diet until I'd made it down to 100 Kg. I had visions of what I'd look like, visions including girls in swimsuits lounging on beaches and me telling a very funny joke and them laughing uncontrollably. I even remember the joke: “I wondered why a baseball looks bigger the closer it gets, and then it hit me!” That joke is hilarious: it's wonderfully ironic—verbally, that is.

            After the episode in History class I made straight for the cafeteria and bought and ate three pieces of apple pie with ice cream. The girl at the counter looked me over and handed me the pies on a tray without a verbal comment. I didn't care.

            I knew what she was thinking. I generally know what people are thinking.

September 20, 1999:  It's been almost a week since I wrote in here. The rule is that you write something every day or so, whether you feel like it or not. Rules are obviously made to be broken, otherwise they wouldn't exist. If the general rule was that everyone must love his neighbour, there'd be no need for a rule about bullying. This possibly makes sense . . .. 

September 23, 1999:  Janice Eaton sent me an email yesterday. She's obviously feeling very guilty and wants to get that particular albatross off her neck. Don't know how she got my address. “Michael,” she wrote. “I'm really sorry for what I said. I didn't mean to hurt you.” I wrote back: “I hope you're not losing sleep over it; I only moved to another desk because I couldn't see the board.”

            Actually, if they put in a little room with closed-circuit TV so I could watch the lectures from there, I'd pay good money for that. It should probably have room for two: one for me and one for the Jamaican girl with the frizzy hair and the funny name—Precious Gem—whose been in Canada long enough to know that 99% of us are narrow-minded, ignorant ass-holes. I'm no different; a Canadian who's highly prejudiced against thin, blond, narrow-minded, ignorant ass-holes! (Hope Grandma Fornes never gets to read this.)

            Grandma Fornes phoned me last night. Grandma Edith “wandered” a few days ago, they found her two kilometres from home carrying an empty grocery bag. She said she was just going shopping. Grandma Fornes said she wasn't sure she could take care of Grandma Edith much longer, especially if she started to wander out the door to who knows where. I said, “Maybe she was actually going shopping.” “No,” Grandma Fornes said, “there's no shopping down by the lagoon.”

            Grandma Fornes has taken care of me since I was a baby. Considering my size, she probably took care of me too well, let me eat way too much but that's another story. Now she phoned me to tell me that she needs help. A page is being turned. Before we hung up, she said: “We need to pray for Grandma Edith.”

September 25, 1999:  Holy cow! Only three months and six days until my computer blows up! They call it Y2K—it stands for Year Two Thousand—and they're telling us that most computer systems have the capability of keeping a calendar built into them, but only until 1999 since they only used the last two digits of the year when setting them up and so “00” might just as well be understood by the computer to be the birth-of-Jesus date as the one that follows 1999! Hilarious! Didn't they imagine that life would possibly go on after 1999?

            Power stations will shut down, airplanes will crash, all our bank accounts will be wiped out, anything that has information stored on a silicon chip will “cease to function.” Grandma Fornes gave me cash to buy this laptop computer for “educational purposes”; she was petrified of anything done on or by computers after learning in church that there's pornography available to anyone who owns one of these. Mine is an IBM Thinkpad; I bought it second hand and had enough money left over to buy an ink-jet printer. I'll take my notes in class on it for three months and six days yet; then I'll buy a notebook and a pen. Har, har!

            I checked out the porn and it's there all right. Naked women cavorting for the camera didn't need to be good actresses to catch my attention . . .. Wow! Grandma Fornes would be horrified. She'd throw my laptop on the floor and stomp on it! Mostly, they want you to give them your credit card number so for $9.95 you can see the real stuff. The last thing Grandma Fornes would give me is a credit card, although she did get me a duplicate debit card in case I need cash suddenly. I've got strict orders to phone her before I ever use it.

            What do I want with cash anyway? A piece of pie from the cafe across the street? (Only three times so far; the cafeteria food isn't great, but it's buffet . . . eat all you want.) Maybe I could take Janice Eaton to a movie. She's feeling guilty and might just go out with me.

            Not bloody likely. 

October 1, 1999:  Grandma Edith is dead; dead and buried. The funeral was yesterday. The pastor said, “Now she's not wandering into the countryside over rocks and badger holes. Now there's no danger of her drowning in the lagoon. Now she's walking on streets of gold, dressed all in white, one with the angels.”

            She looked peaceful and contented in her coffin; serene would probably be a good word.

            Grandma Fornes was sad. I was sad and at one point, when everyone scattered dirt on the coffin, I sobbed like a baby. I couldn't help myself.

            Grandma Edith's obituary was short; I helped Grandma Fornes write it and there just wasn't that much to tell. Born, did some gardening, farming and stuff, lost a husband, got old and died. 

***

 February 10, 2000:  That’s as far as I got with my journal project. I handed it in and a professor’s assistant scrawled across the bottom of the last page: Good, expressive writing. Needs an ending to tie it together. B+

            I complained about the B+; they don’t backtrack on marks. Volleyball referees don’t reverse their calls either. Guess it wouldn’t work out; you’d be dealing with nothing but complaints all the time. Anyway, I didn’t feel like continuing the journal; I knew it was an A. Anyway, what would be the point? A fat, first-year, B+ college dropout would have to commit a Columbine for his life to be even vaguely interesting on paper.

            I could have aced my first semester exams but I didn’t write them. I had what’s called a mental breakdown and Grandma Fornes brought me home from the hospital. She blamed herself for letting me go off to the city before I was ready. I’m OK with that assessment, (I mean the part about not being ready, which I obviously wasn’t) except that nothing is her fault, not mine, nor poor dead Grandma Edith’s, nor my biological accidental mother who should have had an abortion probably.

            I blame it all on Y2K, Janice Eaton, Jake Whatsisname, Dr. Busenitz . . . actually, everyone who’s not me and Grandma Fornes.

            Yesterday, (when I said pretty much the above) she said right out: “ENOUGH IS ENOUGH!” She stopped “to collect herself,” as they say in the novels. “I’m not gonna live forever, Michael, and I’m not leaving a helpless . . . a helpless baby behind . . . defenceless . . ..”

            Then she laid out the plan for the rest of my life: 1500 calories, 3 km. walking, 30 minutes on the weight machine every other day, Read the “Word of God” for 30 minutes every morning. “What if I cheat?” I said.

            “You won’t,” she said. “I’m gonna order the StarPhoenix and every morning, you’ll walk to the PetroCan to pick it up. It’s exactly one and a half kilometres one way.”

            “And what if . . . ?”

            “I’ll need the paper by seven-thirty. Nothing opens before eight. Charlie always drops the papers off on the front step at PetroCan. There’ll be no chocolate bars for sale that early.”

            Everybody has a person, I’ve read. Only one. In my case, Grandma Fornes. I don’t have the heart to tell her what I know to be true.

            It won’t work. It can’t work.

           At least, it never has.