Birding with Yeats: A Mother's Memoir Read online

  I had the quiet house to myself during the day, with Ben off to work and Yeats off to school. I took a studio art course for the first time in my life, which was fun but made me realize why I’d never gravitated in that direction. My talent was very limited. I joined a writing group, The Moving Pen, where I did belong. I was home for Yeats when he came back from school, when he was sick, when he needed me. I volunteered in the school library when Yeats was in elementary school and went on all the field trips. It was how I was raised and how Ben was raised, too, and it felt right to us, as difficult as it sometimes was for me to be home alone with a small child.

  We tried various activities: gymnastics, swimming, skating, art classes, music. Yeats refused to consider joining a team sport even though most of his friends played hockey or soccer. I found this amusing since the only sport I ever played in school was tennis, which is hardly a team sport. The only activity Yeats wanted to do for more than one season was art, although he had to continue with swimming since we had a cottage on an island. Most of my friends’ children were enrolled in something every day, or nearly every day. They had a healthy balance of sports, music, and art, but they had almost no time to themselves. Yeats had lots of time to play and to read books, something our entire family valued.

  I felt some societal pressure to make Yeats engage in more activities but he stubbornly refused. Mom said, “Remember your brother? He refused to go to day camp when he was little. You and Laurie went merrily onto the school bus every morning, but I’d have to carry Greg out there. He’d be kicking and screaming and he’d thrust his arms and legs out and push them against the door jams of the bus. After a few days of that, I gave up and he stayed home.” Given the chance, Yeats would have done the same.

  The other thing that Yeats would have been happy to foreswear was school itself. Yeats went to Withrow Public School and then to Earl Grey for Grades 7 and 8, and now he was preparing for high school, which he dreaded. The lessons were relatively easy for him — that wasn’t the issue. His problem, from his very first day, was that school took up too much time, time that could have been spent doing whatever it was he really wanted to do. I asked other mothers if it was the same with their kids. It turned out that most of my friends’ children went quite willingly to school. Most of the girls loved school.

  Kindergarten had been okay since it was only in the morning and we spent the rest of the day together, going to Riverdale Farm, visiting friends or Nanny, or just hanging out. But once he started Grade 1 and had homework on top of school, he began to rebel. Every morning it was the same thing.

  “Why do I have to go to school?”

  “To learn things. You’re learning to read. You’re learning French (all the kids were enrolled in French Immersion, at least in the early years). You’re learning math.”

  “I can learn those things at home. You can teach me.”

  “You’re also making friends. Everyone needs friends.”

  “I don’t have any friends.”

  “Yes, you do. It’s time to go. You’re going to be late.”

  He struggled and argued and kicked up a fuss. He railed against the system. Homework was especially awful and he was sure to take two hours to do twenty minutes’ worth of math, dropping his pencil fifty times on the kitchen floor. I would yell at him and tear at my hair. I threatened to take away his homework, which made him finish it right away. By the time he was in Grade 4 I realized that as much as Yeats hated the homework, he wanted to do a good job. It was important to him to do it well, but the cost was huge. The ongoing struggle that we experienced with homework mirrored a more general debate that was raging throughout the school system. No one seemed to be in agreement, pedagogically, as to whether homework was a good or bad thing for children. (From my own experience with Yeats, I would say bad.)

  By the time Yeats finished Grade 8, he was sick of school and especially of homework. He said, “High school’s going to be so hard, Mom. I won’t be able to do it. They’re going to expect way too much of us, and I’m going to have hours of homework every night and no time for anything else.”

  “Who told you this?” I asked. “You’re a smart boy, Yeats. You’ll be able to do the work, just as you always have.”

  “But the homework!”

  “Does Danielle have reams of homework that she can’t do? Did Rupert? No. Look at Danielle. She has lots of time for dance lessons and hanging out with her friends.”

  “Hmph. I just know it’s going to be bad. I hate homework.”

  Over the summer, he slowly worked himself into a state. Nothing I said could convince him he was going to be fine.

  IN THE FALL OF 2007, Yeats started high school. He chose to go to Jarvis Collegiate, from which Rupert had already graduated. Rupert decided not to go directly to university, but to work with Ben at Nicholas Hoare Books. Titus had graduated from high school years before and was doing an apprenticeship with a carpenter. Danielle was going into her final year at Jarvis, but other than her and some of her friends, Yeats knew no one at the school. He said that was partly why he chose it: to have a fresh start and meet some new people.

  Sometime during the first weeks of September, Yeats came home from school elated. He wouldn’t tell me about his day, just that it was “okay.” I figured I’d find out sooner or later why he was so happy and by the end of the week, I had the story. It was Ben who told me.

  He said, “I heard it from Danielle. She told me that she took Yeats to the first meeting of something called Art Beat.”

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “It’s the poetry club. It meets once a week after school and puts out a magazine called Art Beat a couple of times a year. They also put together a coffee house at the end of the year, for students and teachers to entertain one another.”

  “Danielle’s joining the poetry club?” That surprised me. Poetry really wasn’t Danielle’s thing.

  “No. She just took Yeats to the first meeting.”

  Danielle had taken her baby brother by the hand and led him to where he belonged, making it easy for Yeats to find a place for himself in high school. Her generosity made me weepy with gratitude. Danielle simply shrugged and said, “That’s okay. It was nothing, really.”

  But it was something, because it made the transition to high school so much easier for her brother. It reminded me of the spring of 1997, when I’d made an appointment for us to visit Withrow, where Yeats would be starting junior kindergarten that September. He didn’t want to go, so we hung out in the playground for a while. When he calmed down, I said, “Let’s just go in and say hi to the teacher. Maybe you can play with the sand toys.”

  He looked at me and started to cry.

  “I’m not leaving you here. We’re just visiting.”

  “But you’ll be leaving me here later, when I’m in kindergarten!” He began to wail.

  We were late for our appointment and I was starting to feel exasperated, so I scooped him up and hauled him through the kindergarten entrance. I set him down and looked to my left, towards the Grade 1 lunchroom. Danielle was sitting at a table with some other girls. She saw us and waved. I said to Yeats, who was still crying, “Look! There’s Danielle!” He looked up and his face made that transformation that only children are capable of — from utter despair to overwhelming joy in one split second. I silently blessed my stepdaughter. Yeats’s love and trust of his sister was complete. Danielle has always been his number one star.

  So the transition to high school went more smoothly than we’d anticipated, and for that I had Danielle partly to thank. But as time went on, as much as Yeats enjoyed Art Beat and a few of his classes, the old homework beast began to raise its ugly head. Some kids procrastinated by watching movies or playing video games or going on their social media. Of his own choosing, Yeats didn’t partake of those activities, and we didn’t have a television. Instead, he came downstairs and ranted and raved at me. It was exhausting and crazy-making and half the time, I’d shut his words out. There ar
e only so many times a person can answer the question, “Why do we have to do homework?”

  AT THE SAME TIME Yeats began high school, we opened Ben McNally Books on Bay Street in downtown Toronto. Ben had spent the last fourteen years managing Nicholas Hoare Books and was more than ready to have his own shop, be his own boss. He wanted a place spacious enough for book launches and stunning enough to one day be called “the most beautiful bookstore in Canada.” It was Ben’s dream shop, full of wooden bookshelves with artistic detailing, an open space with high ceilings and ornate chandeliers, but also quiet little spaces where a person could feel alone with the books.

  Bay Street was the heart of Toronto’s financial district and our store was just north of the cluster of the city’s tallest towers. We were blocks away from the headquarters of all the major banks — the black buildings of the TD Centre, the golden towers of RBC gleaming like giant jewels in the sun — as well as hundreds of law firms, advertising agencies, and real estate offices. Just north of us were Toronto City Hall and Old City Hall, full of judges, civil servants, and bureaucrats, all, we hoped, looking for good books to read.

  We spent a busy year designing and building the store until its grand opening in September, 2007. From January of that year, Ben had run an office from our basement at home. But he also spent hours in the store space, which was in an old downtown building that was once a bank. He met with the designer, the banker, the book publishers. He dealt with the problems with the ventilation and the plumbing. He met with the cabinetmaker who customized the gorgeous bookcases for us. He acquired his first-ever credit card — a sign of the apocalypse, according to one of Ben’s oldest friends.

  One day Ben came home and said, “I’m thinking of getting a cell phone.” I stared at him. My mouth must have been hanging open because he said, “What? All these people need to get in touch with me all the time. Sometimes it’s an emergency; I need to make a lot of decisions.”

  I said, “A cell phone? Is this Ben McNally?”

  He blinked at me a couple of times and then laughed. “You’re right. I’m not getting a cell phone.”

  The fact that Ben was even contemplating having a cell phone told me that big changes were afoot. Every so often he joked about getting a television, especially to watch the World Cup, but I knew he was just kidding around. The cell phone had sounded real, though. I remember thinking, From this point on, our lives will be different.

  Ben asked me to help with the buying, but to do that I needed to work in the store to have a sense of the customers. I’d spent the past fourteen years at home with Yeats, and now I was dipping my toe back into the wider culture. I decided to work two days a week to start.

  I’d begun my bookselling career in December, 1986. I was hired as a temporary clerk over the Christmas season in a tiny old Classics store on Bloor Street. I remember standing behind the cash register on my first day, looking over the shop and feeling a profound sense of belonging: This is what I’m meant to be doing. When that job ended after Christmas, I applied for a position at Book City on Yonge Street. Ben hired me, which was how we met, and he was my boss. So I guess we’d had some practice in these roles, however long ago it was.

  Eventually, I became manager at the Book City on the Danforth. When I left to have the baby a customer said to me, “Don’t quit work and jeopardize your career. Don’t lose yourself.” I guess that had happened to her, but my wage at Book City would have covered daycare and not much else, so I didn’t even consider staying. Now that I was contemplating working again, the bookseller inside me was hopping with anticipation. I really did belong in a bookstore.

  In the months leading up to the grand opening, I sometimes resented the near-constant companionship at home (which is crazy to think about now, when Ben works double shifts all week long and I almost never see him). I was used to having the house to myself and found sharing it with Ben an adjustment. Not that he was a disagreeable companion; just that he was there. I was reminded of my Uncle Dick who, on his first day of retirement, came downstairs to find a brown paper bag on the kitchen counter.

  “What’s this?” he asked my aunt.

  “Your lunch,” she said. “You’re not hanging around the house all day.”

  By the summer, Ben had hired some staff, including Rupert and Danielle. We now had a basement office at the shop, which was fixed with desks and lots of metal shelving. The kids, along with a full-time employee, Lisa, started creating title cards on the computer system and receiving boxes of books. They had to unpack the boxes to make sure all the books were there, match the orders to the invoices, and pack the books up again until we could place them on the shelves upstairs. Upstairs was still under construction.

  Over the Labour Day weekend, we engaged the help of family and friends to stock the shelves of the brand-new bookstore. It was very exciting for everyone. People picked their sections: our friend Mary chose to shelve kids’ books; June and Johanna covered the biographies; Sarah and Fiona did hardcover fiction. Yeats and his friends started with the humour section and moved on to travel. Everywhere people were opening boxes, moving shelves around, and standing back to look at their handiwork. By the end of the weekend, we were exhausted but glowing with satisfaction. We were ready for business.

  THAT FIRST FALL WE had two big parties in the store on back-to-back nights. We wanted to celebrate the grand opening of the shop with everyone we knew and we wanted to show our publishing friends that the store would be a good space for their parties. Eventually, we’d have not only book launches in the store, but weddings, showers, retirement parties, a play, even my mother’s eightieth birthday party. The space began to take on a patina of worn charm.

  But in the early days everything was new and shiny. People walked in and gawked at the beautiful chandeliers and bookcases, and every time I was there a customer would say something like, “This is a real sanctuary on Bay Street.” “Bay Street” is synonymous with material wealth and success, but also with the rat race and with stress, something the shop’s ambiance seemed to counteract. We had the feeling right, we had the book selection right, and now we just needed about a thousand more regular customers to make it a viable operation.

  To that end, Ben started accepting every bookselling opportunity, be it holding an event in the store or hauling boxes of books to sell around town. We agreed to sell books for Random House at Word on the Street, the annual outdoor book festival that took place at Queen’s Park at the end of September. This was where Yeats had his first taste of bookselling, and he loved it. He came with us to set up, piling books on the tables in the hopes of watching those stacks slowly shrink over the course of the day. He stayed all day without complaint and I remember thinking that it was in the blood, this bookselling, this willingness to stand around all day and talk about practically nothing but books.

  Rupert worked in the store full-time for the first four years. Titus helped out at events for a while and then worked full-time in the store for about a year while he was between careers. Danielle worked in the store during the summers when she was home from university, and Yeats worked as many outside events as Ben would give him. It was a family business, and it didn’t take long before publicists and editors got used to seeing us everywhere.

  But it was a big change for the family. Ben was working long hours and it was a whole new schedule for me. I said that if I didn’t work in the shop, I’d never see my husband. I said it as if it was a joke, but it was true.

  “And how is that?” people asked. “How is it having your husband as your boss?”

  “I compartmentalize,” I said. “He’s my boss at work and I’m the boss at home.”

  The truth was a bit more complicated, however. I tried not to step on Ben’s toes but sometimes I just couldn’t help but stick my nose into the running of the store. One of my pet peeves was the lighting. The ceiling was so high in the shop that we needed a 15-foot ladder to change the bulbs. The building maintenance guys did this for us but only when they ha
d the time, since it wasn’t really in their job description. Sometimes fifteen or more light bulbs would be out around the shop and it drove me crazy. It was dark in the corners and a lot of our customers were older than me. If I was having trouble seeing things, they sure would be. Would you buy a book you couldn’t see?

  I got on Ben’s case about the bulbs. I asked him every time I was in if he’d called Scott. He reminded me that Scott couldn’t just come; he had to wait until there were two of them with nothing else to do. Someone had to hold the ladder. Then another couple of bulbs went out and I nearly lost my mind. I had to bite my tongue or risk having Ben lose his temper. Would he really do that? When was the last time he really lost his temper at me? I couldn’t remember, but I didn’t want to risk it.

  The light bulbs were just one example. Staffing was another. We had four full-time staff in the beginning: Rupert, Lisa, Rachna, and Simone. Over the years we lost Lisa and Rachna, and then Rupert. Ben didn’t replace any of them. Business wasn’t as busy as we would have liked, but there were times when we needed more staff in the shop. By the time we had consistently hectic days, we were chronically short-staffed. Ben was often the only person there in the morning, which meant he couldn’t catch up on his administrative business. The way he saw it, though, he was saving money on wages.

  I wasn’t the boss. I tried not to interfere, but sometimes I walked a fine line. If he was in a good mood while I was razzing him, Ben would cock an eyebrow at me and say, “Really?” If he was pissed off for some reason, or just exhausted, he’d say, “Yes, dear.” That was my cue to shut up. He never used the word “dear” as an endearment.

  If Ben was particularly annoyed about something, a shipping or billing problem for example, I’d say to Simone, “Don’t worry. I’ll make sure we fool around tonight and he’ll be better tomorrow.” She’d groan and say, “Too much information.” Or we’d wait until Ben was in the office downstairs and we’d go on a clearing spree behind the cash. (Ben never threw anything out.) Simone and I developed all kinds of eye signals and facial expressions to help one another get through Ben’s moods. Actually, Ben wasn’t really a moody man, but he was full of colourful expressions and sudden bursts of disapproval and frustration. During those fourteen years at home, I hadn’t seen much of this side of him, so I told myself I’d have to find a way to navigate around his humours.