Birding with Yeats: A Mother's Memoir Read online

  It was cold in the wind but I was wearing a lot of clothes. I made a list of the layers in my head as I tried not to freeze: wool socks, boots, long underwear top and bottom, jeans, turtleneck, fleece, long down jacket referred to by my family as the “sleeping bag coat,” hat, gloves, scarf. Yeats was wearing only sweatpants and his hoodie over a T-shirt, and running shoes on his feet. He put his arms through the sleeves of his down jacket but wouldn’t zip it up until partway through the day when he finally started to feel the cold.

  I said, “Why don’t you do up your jacket? Where are your gloves? Do you want a hat?” I had an extra, inoffensive, hat in my backpack.

  “I’m fine, Mom,” he said, scowling a bit. The scowl was a warning not to push, which made me push just a little.

  “But it’s so cold. Aren’t you freezing?”

  “No. If I get cold I’ll do up my jacket.”

  He turned his back on me and scanned the water for more ducks. He scanned the sky for geese. I took the hint and shut up. I made a conscious effort to lose my maternal irritation. Does a mother ever stop wanting her children to do things her way? Unlikely. But all we can do is hope that something has rubbed off over the years.

  Mostly we walked without speaking, only piping up when one of us spotted something. It was our companionable silence, what I came to expect on these birding trips. Sometimes, in social situations, I found myself doing the same thing — watching rather than participating — and I wondered if it made some people uncomfortable. Probably it made them think I was a numbskull, with nothing to say. Oh, well.

  We left the open lake and walked north along a road and past the Island School.

  “See, this is it,” I said. “You’ve even been here.”

  “I didn’t know it was a regular school, too. I thought it was only a science school.” He looked around. “It looks different at this time of year. We played a big game of Predator and Prey in a wood. I saw my first owl then. It was a great horned. I don’t know where we were.”

  We looked for the spot but couldn’t find it. We considered going down a road marked with a sign that said NO TRESPASSING, but decided not to. We walked a bit farther, east now, and saw a lot of wintering passerines: chickadees, cardinals, white-breasted nuthatches, house sparrows. It was sheltered there, so we sat on a bench and had a snack. A crow flew over, then another.

  We walked again and eventually came to Centreville, the summer amusement park on Centre Island. It was closed and deserted except for some animals in a farm across a small canal: a couple of donkeys, some sheep, and two large birds half-obscured by fencing. Yeats frowned and we walked down a pier that jutted into the canal.

  “What are they?” I whispered. “Some kind of goose?”

  “I don’t know. They’re a weird shape. It’s hard to tell because of the fence.”

  “Maybe they’re an accidental.”

  “Maybe.” I heard both doubt and anticipation in this one word. Seeing an accidental is extremely exciting for a birder. You feel like climbing a rooftop and shouting it out, but first you have to be very sure.

  A huge flock of mallards was swimming under a small bridge in the farm’s canal. Their quacking was distracting me and I looked among them for other species.

  Yeats started to laugh. He lowered his binoculars and said, “Look through your binoculars, Mom,” but I didn’t need to because one of the mystery birds had hopped onto the fence and I could see clearly that it was a peacock. I laughed too and caught Yeats’s eye. His face was filled with glee at being caught out like that, the joke of it.

  As we watched the peacock, a Cooper’s hawk swooped in on the mallards, trying to grab one. The ducks made an enormous racket and then fell dead silent as they huddled together, squished like sardines under the bridge. The hawk tried again. We couldn’t believe our luck to witness a hunt. We stood as still as statues, barely breathing. The hawk failed again on its third attempt, and we watched as it flew over the island and out over the inner harbour.

  We walked the main road back to Ward’s Island, the canal on our left. A bridge connected the road with more island houses, a different neighbourhood from the one we saw straight off the ferry.

  “Do you want to cross over and walk down there?” I asked.

  Yeats had a strange look on his face, one I couldn’t read. I didn’t think he was tired or in a hurry to get back to the city. This birdwatching trip had been relaxed, despite the cold, and I felt, once again, that these little expeditions close to home brought clarity to everyday life, in the way a holiday did. But a day spent birding on the Toronto Islands (or at Ashbridges Bay or High Park or Sunnybrook Park), cost next to nothing and took almost no preparation. We were refreshed precisely because we had stepped so easily outside our routine.

  “Mom, this is the bridge!” His animation turned to frustration when it was obvious I didn’t know what he was talking about.

  “Which bridge?”

  “The bridge. The one on the cover of High Winds White Sky, the Bruce Cockburn album. Let’s see if we can find the exact angle of the photograph.”

  “When’s the album from? The landscape may have changed. Different trees and so on.”

  “1971. Yeah, nearly forty years. But I think we can still find the spot it was taken from. It won’t be that different.” Yeats was really focused, striding ahead with purpose. He loved that album.

  “Is that your favourite album of all time?” I asked as we crossed the bridge and looked back at it, assessing angles.

  “Who knows? Sometimes. It is when it’s cold at the cottage and I make a fire and listen to it all wrapped up in my quilt, alone in the living room. Then it’s my favourite.”

  I knew that scene. I’d walked past him into the kitchen to make coffee many times. He’d have pulled up a chair in front of the fireplace, ignoring me as I slipped past with freezing feet. Bruce would be singing of wind in the trees and birds gliding and of life beginning. It was a cottage sound for me, too.

  We found the spot and felt immensely satisfied, as though we’d solved an age-old puzzle. Then we strolled back to the dock in silence. The day of birding had come to a meaningful close and we didn’t need to talk about it.

  On the ferry back to the city we saw a pair of mute swans fly past. In the distance some people were flying too, on their ice boats: catamarans on blades. People were playing hockey on the lake near the island shore and although I imagined I could hear the sounds of their sticks and skates on the ice, the ferry engine drowned them out. The ice opened for the ferry and closed behind it again. The cold wind chafed my face and I pulled my hat down further, covering my eyes with my sunglasses. I didn’t want to sit in the cabin, so by the time we reached the mainland my brain was frozen along with my cheeks.

  We left the ferry and I patted my pockets for my glasses and couldn’t find them. A bit panicked, I said to Yeats, “I have to go back on the boat to find my sunglasses.”

  He laughed and said, “You’re wearing them!”

  I reached up, touched them, and laughed too, feeling very silly and suddenly much older. I knew he’d be teasing me about this one for years to come.

  OUR THREE OLDEST KIDS, along with Danielle’s friend Madison, went to Cuba for the 2009 Reading Week. At twenty-eight, it was Titus’s first time at the ocean and he came back rejuvenated, expansive. I reminded him that when we took the rest of the family to Florida when they were youngsters, he didn’t want to go. He didn’t remember it that way; he thought we just didn’t take him. But I remembered Titus, at sixteen or seventeen, declining our invitation. I didn’t blame him at the time, thinking he’d be bored stiff playing in the sand and going to the Mote Marine Laboratory to pet stingrays. He was sure, though, that we had never asked him, so I apologized. I was mortified that he may have lived all this time with resentment or rejection or anger, and I was reminded of one of my father’s favourite expressions: “Whoever said life was going to be fair?” Parenting, I thought to myself for the thousandth time, is not
for the faint of heart.

  Once the kids were back, we planned a birthday party for Ben. He was turning sixty in March, and we decided to celebrate at the house. I found an image of a psychedelic peace sign and used it as the background for a groovy e-mail invitation, which I sent out to sixty people. Ben always wore a peace sign pin on the lapel of his jacket — it was one of his trademarks. Almost everyone could come to the party, so I ordered an enormous round cake, which Yeats and I carried in its box to the basement.

  During the party, Danielle helped me light the candles, the sixty of them arranged in the shape of a peace sign. When we turned out the lights, the table was lit by this fiery symbol of peace, and everyone fell silent as Ben tried to blow them out. He couldn’t possibly do it in one go, so those of us who were gathered nearest to him helped.

  Ben looked great at sixty. He said to me, “How do you feel being married to an old man?” He wasn’t that much older than me — eleven years — but he joked that as long as I stuck with him, I’d always look good. I was planning on sticking with him anyway.

  Still, all throughout that winter and into the spring I wasn’t feeling so good. I was having trouble sleeping, sometimes lying awake for hours in the middle of the night, listening to the wind in the trees or to my thoughts going round and round. I blamed it on hormones. I was losing my mind along with my menses and all I wanted, half the time, was to be alone. Ben went to work and Yeats to school. I was blessedly alone in the house for a few hours (grocery shopping, laundry, and other household chores notwithstanding), so I sat on the couch with my book. The cat jumped onto my lap and demanded attention. He purred and looked at me with limpid eyes and I couldn’t resist. I was a sucker for someone to look after, but I also felt myself getting sick of it.

  One night I had a dream that I was embarking on a trip and I needed to strap everything I was taking onto my body. I was tremendously encumbered; I was hunched over with the weight of the stuff. I looked in a mirror and saw that I had two huge stuffed animals slung over my shoulders. I pulled them off and felt so much lighter. Of course, the meaning was clear: I was carrying around something from an earlier part of my life that I no longer needed; once I saw what it was and let it go, I’d feel better. Perhaps the meaning also had to do with supporting other people in my life, the fact that I carried around an outsized idea of responsibility towards Ben and Yeats, and even my step-children, whom I worried about without expressing it. Perhaps it was time to re-examine the expectations I had for myself in all these relationships and learn to let go a bit.

  The really funny part was this: the next morning, Yeats and I left the house together and found a giant teddy bear sitting on a neighbour’s garbage can. The bear looked brand new, and we heard the garbage truck on the next street over.

  Yeats said, “We can’t leave it here for landfill. Look at it — it’s so cute. Let’s take it home and give it to Noah.” Noah is my youngest nephew.

  I thought about my dream and said, “Do you think he really needs it?”

  Yeats looked at me and said, “We can put it straight into the trunk of the car. It doesn’t need to come into the house.”

  He knew me well. I sighed and popped open the trunk and in went the enormous bear that someone had probably won at the midway at the CNE.

  I marvelled at the energy that moved us all. I marvelled at a universe that showed me an excess of stuffed animals in a dream and then presented me with a giant one free for the taking three hours later. I knew I should have resisted that bear, but the whole thing amused me so much that I couldn’t.

  Later that week I decided I needed to get rid of some stuff. We all had so much stuff. I sorted through closets and drawers and made a triage. It felt so good. I decided I wanted to dispose of some of my journals, take them to the cottage and have some kind of ritual burning. These were my morning pages, years of them, and I was tired of wondering why I kept them. Did I want someone to read them when I was gone? By then there could be a whole house full of them. Did I want to burden someone with that task? I decided I would take a bag of thirty or so journals to the cottage and burn them, in twos and threes, over the course of several weekends. Yeats was dismayed at first, but he couldn’t dissuade me. They were mine, after all.

  SIX

  WE WERE IN MUSKOKA the first weekend of October, 2009. Yeats was in Grade 11. Fall colours were coming on, crisp air. My brother’s family and my mom were also up north, but they were over at the new cottage. Ben, Yeats, and I breakfasted together around the big round wooden table, watching red squirrels chase each other, listening to blue jays calling.

  Yeats was upset and restless because David Dewees, his Grade 10 English teacher and Danielle’s Grade 12 Classics teacher, had been accused, in the press at least, of inappropriately touching an eleven-year-old boy at a summer camp. The story had broken when the police came to the school that past Thursday. Mr. Dewees had been suspended from the Toronto District School Board until further notice and was staying at his parents’ house. He was Yeats’s favourite teacher and beloved at Jarvis because of his infectious enthusiasm for the subjects he taught, for books, and for people. He was young and could relate to the kids. He had suggested that Yeats read A Prayer for Owen Meany, which he had, over the summer. It blew his mind. In September Yeats went in to see Mr. Dewees to thank him and to ask for more book recommendations. Mr. Dewees told him to come back and he’d give him a list of more great novels to read. Then this happened.

  Yeats said, “He can’t be guilty of this. None of us believe it. It just isn’t true. He isn’t like that at all.”

  Ben said, “Maybe it’s been wrongly reported. Maybe the charges are wrong. Maybe it isn’t abuse, but enticement or something like that.”

  I nodded, but Yeats gave him a disgusted look.

  “Even that couldn’t be true. What does that even mean? I’m sure he’s innocent and the newspapers just want to sell more copies so they say anything they want.” Yeats paced in the kitchen for a while then came to sit back down. He said, “We’re going to make a video for him. A whole bunch of us. We’re going to let him know we think he’s innocent and how much we’re on his side. We want him to know that.”

  “When will you do this?” I asked.

  “Monday at school. First thing. Then we’ll send it to him. He won’t be at school.”

  The phone rang and I picked it up. It was Danielle calling from university, four weeks into her second year. The sound of her voice when she said, “Hi Lynn, how are you?” made me think she’d called because things weren’t going well for her. That she needed to talk about school. But what she had to tell me took my breath away. I sat down on the living room couch and put my head on the coffee table. I was bent right over, the phone to my ear, listening to my lovely stepdaughter tell me how Mr. Dewees killed himself.

  She said, “He jumped in front of a train, at High Park station. He snuck out of his parents’ house and walked over there.” Her voice was tight and controlled and full of sadness. “It was yesterday. We can’t believe it. He is . . . was . . . such a great guy. We all loved him.” A crack in her voice.

  “What about you? Are you okay? Are you going to come home?” I said.

  “I’m okay. I’m here with Madison. We’ll both come home for the funeral. Tell Yeats that.” Madison had been Danielle’s closest friend since Grade 2 and they were rooming together at university. They supported one another through all of life’s trials and I was glad to hear they were together and would be home to support Yeats, too.

  But now I had to pass on this piece of dreadful information to Ben and Yeats. They could tell, of course, that something awful had happened and both looked at me expectantly when I said goodbye to Danielle.

  “What?” Yeats said.

  I closed my eyes and took a breath.

  “That was Danielle. Mr. Dewees killed himself. Yesterday. He jumped in front of a subway.” We later learned that he’d lain down on the track and waited for a train to run him over. Such ang
uished deliberation.

  Ben said, “Oh God.”

  Yeats stared at me. I put my head on my arms on the table and cried. Not sobs, just quiet tears in a steady stream. I looked up as Yeats pushed back his chair and left the table.

  “Yeats?”

  He waved his hand at me as he left the room, pushed open the screen door, and walked out into the forest.

  THE REST OF THE weekend passed in a dream. I broke the news to my family and then tried to commiserate with Yeats, but he didn’t want to talk. He spent nearly every waking hour in the forest.

  We drove back home to Toronto, and Yeats and his friends, and Danielle and hers, went to the funeral. They said the church was packed, standing-room only, and everyone was crying.

  David Dewees had taught the enriched English class for kids who wanted an extra challenge. His particular strength was in making the class exciting, in ramping up the kids’ love of reading and writing. Yeats said his classes were never boring — high praise from a teenaged boy who hated school. For one of their projects, Mr. Dewees had them each read a book of their choice, an adult novel. Yeats read Life of Pi by Yann Martel. Instead of writing an essay on their book, the class pushed all the desks aside, brought in juice and snacks, and they had a “cocktail party.” The idea was to spend the period going around and chatting about the books they’d read. Mr. Dewees circulated among them, listening and asking questions and generally being enthusiastic. His enthusiasm was contagious, a gift to his students.

  Our kids were steaming mad at the press, and questions flew around the dinner table and all over their social media about the lack of justice in the reporting of Mr. Dewees’s case. There were countries in the world where the press was allowed to report a name and an arrest, but no details and certainly no speculation before a trial. Why was our media permitted to prematurely blacken someone’s reputation like this? The consensus among Mr. Dewees’s friends was that, guilty or innocent, he wouldn’t have survived the stigma, that he was anguished by the publicity and the thought that he might never be allowed to teach again.