Musings – Resisting Exile

29Dec 2021 by Linda Bayley

Three ways of looking at a grilled cheese sandwich

Musings

1. Toy box I am three years old and sitting on my toy box against the wall where the kitchen becomes the living room. I am eating a grilled cheese sandwich. The air is golden but also filled with the sound of my parents arguing. I am sitting placidly, eating my sandwich. They are yelling. I remember this, but it's possible that none of it is true. I am supposed to have told my mother at one point that the separation was her fault, because she was the one who yelled. I don't remember saying that, but it's possible that I did. The toy box has holes drilled into the back, each the size of a silver dollar. My father drilled these holes in case I get into the box…

14Dec 2021 by Linda Bayley

Speaking Ill

Musings

"Cherished grandfather of 14 grandchildren and 10 great grandchildren," says the old man's obituary. You read the obituaries every day: not every single one, not all the way through, but this one has caught your eye. You scroll through the comments. "My condolences," say the mourners. "He will be missed." Standard stuff, nothing new here, something you might have written yourself, if only you'd known the fellow. But at the bottom: "He was not Cherished by his grand children, nor his great grand children. Not from me or mine anyway." What? The comment is signed by someone with the old man's last name. A grandchild, you guess. Someone not named directly in the obituary. The old man's life has been measured and tallied and this guy wants a recount. 'Too…

24Oct 2021 by Linda Bayley

Communion

Musings

When my Gramma was dying in a palliative care facility in Paris, Ontario, she asked me to take communion with her. I gave it a great deal of thought, and then declined. I could have done it. I was baptized and confirmed in the Anglican Church, which means that as far as the Church was concerned, there would have been no problem with me taking the bread and wine. The problem was with me. At that point, I had long since stopped going to church, despite having two excellent godmothers who have never stopped trying to encourage my faith. I stopped when I realized that I could get through an entire church service, saying all the right words at all the right times, without ever once cracking open the prayer…

04Mar 2021 by Linda Bayley

Grace

Love, Musings

January 30, 2001 - JournalGrace tells me that when I was little I pulled a button clean off her muskrat-collared coat. She says we were out for a walk, and I kept tugging on her sleeve. I wanted to know, she says, what was I going to call her if she married my Grampa?I don't remember this incident. I'm not even sure when she came on the scene. First, there was Granny. After Granny died, quiet. And then there was Grace.I wasn't invited to the wedding. I don't know if any of the grandchildren were. To my childish logic, this was a rejection. I think that must be when I vowed she would never be my grandmother. Childish logic, indeed. I'm ashamed of that logic now, of course. It's the…

25Feb 2021 by Linda Bayley

Monolith, continued

Musings

In a post last year, I talked about why I'm writing about my father as much as I am. He was looming so large in my thoughts that I couldn't not write about him. At the time, I mostly just wanted to knock my experience with him down into bite-sized chunks that I could digest more easily. It's also possible that I wanted to knock the man himself down a few notches, prove to him that he wasn't the great man he thought he was. The first motivation is fair. The second is not, and needs to be addressed. I've mentioned elsewhere that I have my father's permission to write anything about him that I need to. At the time of that conversation, and during much of the telling of…

20Feb 2021 by Linda Bayley

The Stories

Action, Musings

When the mother of one of my uncles died, about twenty years ago, he told me that he’d discovered that she’d put little tags on most of the furniture to tell each piece’s story: where it had come from, who it had belonged to, when it had been acquired. “I mean, who cares?” he said to me. “It’s just stuff.” Well, his mother cared, for one. I would have cared, too. “Stuff” carries stories with it, and I always love to hear them. I remember this conversation especially well because my own Gramma’s funeral had been just a few days earlier, and I had been through her apartment with my father and my cousins, and I’d had a list of the things I wanted to take home with me. None…

05Feb 2021 by Linda Bayley

Safety

Musings

Content warning: this is an essay about bullying. Some violence is described, but not graphically. I walked past your old place on Drinkwater the other day. I stopped for a moment and looked up at the doorway where you and I used to stand watching thunderstorms, huddled together under the sheltering archway. We counted alligators between the lightning and the thunder. We counted Mississippis. Standing there with you, with your arm around me, I knew I was safe. That was one of our first doorways. Our last doorway was different. Behind that last doorway, you were a target: you had forgotten what safe was like. You insisted that you weren't a victim, so I told you to stop acting like one. But you couldn't. It’s hard to picture you as…

18Jan 2021 by Linda Bayley

False Dichotomies

Musings, Self-Esteem

Once upon a time, there was a girl who was a bowling champion. Actually, she was pretty awesome at just about everything she did: she was a champion, in general. But it started at the bowling alley. I remember the beginning. One Saturday morning when I was eight or so, my mother brought me to a tiny downtown bowling alley: Quilles Ste-Anne. The place was tiny, six lanes and five-pin only, and hard to find, built as it was in the basement of a building that sat in the middle of a parking lot behind a church. I don’t remember who handed me my first bowling ball. I do remember being taught to hold it between my spread legs and lob it down the lane with both hands. Which was,…

01Jan 2021 by Linda Bayley

Worse than FOMO

Musings

A few days ago I opened and read our Christmas cards from 2018. I wish that were a typo. It's not. I also opened and read the cards sent to us in 2019. It’s not like the cards were lost. I knew exactly where they were: on the dining room table. Or, as it is affectionately known, the Bermuda Dining Table. They were all together in a plastic box from one of the many times where I tried to organize all the papers piled up there. I set them aside to read all at once, and then... what? Walked away? Forgot? I don’t know. When I finally went through the box, I was shocked to see just how long the cards had been sitting there. The shock was one thing.…

09Sep 2020 by Linda Bayley

Hand-me-down

Love, Musings

When I was a teenager, my Dad would hand-write lectures to me and pass them over to me before I got out of his car, back at my mother’s house. He would insist that I read them then and there; I couldn’t get out of the car until I did. He had to make sure that I received his wisdom. They were infuriating. They actually had the word LECTURE written across the top of each one, along with the sequence number. He really, truly, expected me to benefit from each one, and to save them, and to one day publish them all in a book. Naturally, I shredded each one into tiny bits as soon as I got inside, angry, futile tears falling onto my hands as they worked. I…