A Photo Album, with Commentary
Salt and Cinnamon
Burial Plot
Chess Game
Dying and Killing
Christmas Time: But First, a Funeral
A Wedding
January 2008: Blue Skies
Drowning
A Postscript
The Closet
End Note
ONCE UPON A TIME, we were an ideal family. There were six of us: an industrious mother with a quick smile; a serious, hard-working father; twin girls; two younger boys, one—me—an infant. There were no health problems in this family, not a disability or cognitive delay reared its head, no troubling or unruly behaviours in the children were noted, and the parents had no debilitating vices or unattractive quirks. There was a tiny mortgage on the small home my father built by himself in a pleasant neighbourhood, there were mountains and rivers without end for the kids to roam through, and not a drop of non-British blood in our ancestry was admitted to—not that we cared who our ancestors were.
We were the kind of family that Canada’s armed forces had just fought the Nazis and the Japanese to preserve, God Save the King. Now the war was ending, and the world, despite its convulsions, seemed as bright and filled with hope as at any point in human history. Penicillin had recently arrived to save us from bacteria, DDT would save us from disease-spreading crop-eating bugs; people like us knew nothing about the Holocaust, Hitler would be dead in a few weeks, Uncle Joe was still our friend, officially, anyway. The atomic bomb was still a few months in the future and we had no notion that the Cold War and the Communist Menace were being cooked up in the minds of American politicians and their military planners. An end to 30 years of misery and killing and maybe a beneficent World Government was what ordinary people could see on the horizon in April 1945.
It was a good time to be alive, and my parents knew it. There had been no war deaths in our extended family this time, and my father had the same secure job that had kept him from conscription. The photographs taken of us at the time show us clear-eyed, confident, and attractive: father in a business suit, mother in a comfortably fashionable housedress, and the four children dressed in clothes my mother had made herself. Each one of us gazes at the camera as if the world was someday going to belong to us. Picture-perfect; ideal.
But ideal, like picture-perfect, can be a long way from perfection. Even the picture, examined more closely, reveals some flaws. We are posed on the whitewashed porch of the white clapboard house my father had just built. The porch, if you look, needs several more coats of whitewash, and you can’t see that the house behind us is cold in winter because the sawdust that fills its walls for insulation is already settling. The part of the world we inhabit has a few flaws, too: a small dirty frontier town called Prince George, B.C., set at the confluence of the blue Nechako and muddy Fraser rivers, and surrounded by limitless forests of pine and spruce trees at the then-northern limit of settled Canada. We are isolated from our extended families and most of the amenities bigger cities offered in those days. The northern winters are very cold and snow-filled, the roads uncertain most of the year—or non-existent—and food, although plentiful enough, is sharply limited in variety due to the transport distances.
To my parents, Hartley Fawcett and Rita Surry, these less-than-perfect things are acceptable trade-offs for the freedoms they gain by living on the frontier. My father is free of his destiny, that of a subsistence grain farmer, and my mother is free of her own troubled family. They can look to the future, which they believe will be perfect. My father, always an optimist, believes that Prince George will be populated with a million people by the twenty-first century, and he has nearly a million plans to get his share of the wealth all that growth and progress is going to bring. My mother likes the town, too, but for different reasons. “I knew from the first moment,” she will tell me years later, “that this would be a safe place to raise my children.”
This is as good a place as any to warn you that this book is a memoir, and that, even though I wasn’t a particularly loyal or attentive son to my parents, I have a familial as well as authorial stake in it. I’m very much aware of what the incendiary American cultural critic David Shields recently wrote: “We remember what suits us, and there’s almost no limit to what we can forget. Only those who keep faithful diaries will know what they were doing at this time, on this day, a year ago. The rest of us recall only the most intense moments, and even these tend to have been mythologized by repetition into well-wrought chapters in the story of our lives. To this extent, memoirs really can claim to be modern novels, all the way down to the presence of an unreliable narrator.”
It happens that I have a fairly odd sort of memory, insofar as I seem to go quite far out of my way to not remember the intense moments that families tend to mythologize. What I do have recall on, and with an unsettling degree of clarity, are the moments of physical slapstick that are part of everyone’s life, and usually a suppressed part. I inherited both my mother’s bullshit detector, which was the most extraordinary piece of equipment life conferred on her, and my father’s inability to suffer fools quietly even when I’m the fool. I also have, thanks to modern digital photography, an unusually large collection of family photographs, along with a trick that has helped me to penetrate their surfaces: I enlarge them to 8 1/2 x 11, which lets me peruse them at a level of detail not previously available. You saw one small result a moment ago when I pointed out the poor whitewash job on the steps in the 1945 family portrait. And at the risk of seeming immodest, I am a skilled researcher, and an obsessive amateur detective. Finally, I am hyper-aware of the dangers of what I’m doing, and not, in the normal course of things, prone to getting washed overboard by sentimentality.
What I’m trying to figure out here, as the title of the book suggests, is what human happiness is about, and what it tells us. I’m examining it through the lens of the happiness my parents felt at being in the world. I want to discover what specific cultural or personal tools they used to build and maintain it, and where that tool box went. Because the tool box has vanished, and what makes human beings happy has changed.
When Hartley Fawcett and Rita Surry were young, happiness was a noble pursuit, one that, in their minds, led without ambivalence to “the Good Life.” But somewhere in the last half century, “the Good Life” has lost its definite article. Today, one can only lead a good life, and that has become an ideological, censorious, and antihumanist term, one that can be experienced only individually. Not sure what I’m talking about?
Try to imagine a group of people gathering on a contemporary North American or European civic space to celebrate the joys and achievements of humanity. First of all, it isn’t going to happen. If it did, it would draw a hostile counter-demonstration: animal rights activists who’d argue that we’re mistreating every other species; environmentalists, most of whom see human beings as a terrible scourge on everything else on the planet, would join in, followed by anti-racists