Birding with Yeats: A Mother's Memoir (4 page)

I said, “Look, it’s a trail of treasure.” I pointed to a cluster of tiny yellow mushrooms followed by two giant white ones pushing their way up through the fallen pine needles.

“And look at these,” Yeats said, sweeping his arm past a long line of reddish-brown and slightly slimy mushrooms that led to a large cluster of perfect white toadstools covered in red nubbles.

We followed the mushrooms to the end of the forest and when we stepped out into the clear, Yeats stopped me with a hand gesture. He’d spotted a
merlin
, a small grey falcon. It was sitting at the top of a dead tree at the crest of the hill. We stood perfectly still and watched, afraid we would startle it.

I remember a scudding cloud covering the sun, the breeze picking up, and I heard Yeats sighing with pleasure next to me. Then I heard his sharp intake of breath when the bird left its perch and flew, circling, circling.

I didn’t know, of course, that Yeats’s early and insistent interest in birds would persist throughout his childhood and into his teens. I didn’t know that I’d be driving hundreds of kilometres to see migrating warblers in southern Ontario or planning a trip to Tofino on Vancouver Island to paddle with the eagles.

We never know what kinds of trips our children will take us on, but one thing I’ve learned over these twenty years is to trust my son’s instincts and to encourage his interests. I listened to him, he listened to me (mostly), and it wasn’t a stretch to say that birding helped us to maintain the closeness we’d had since he was a little boy.

TWO

WE MOVED INTO OUR
Riverdale house six weeks before Yeats was due. I was still officially the manager at Book City on Danforth Avenue, but for those last weeks I did my final round of buying from home. The publishers’ representatives came to visit me and we sat in the sparsely furnished living room, chatting about books and babies, and then I hauled the catalogues two blocks to the shop.

The house had a tiny backyard surrounded by big trees, full of squirrels and raccoons. Full of birds. We’d always had a bird feeder, except when we became temporarily frustrated by wily squirrels.

We called our kitchen window “Cat TV” because we’d also always had a cat. Cat TV was where we (and the cat) sat to watch birds and squirrels and, sometimes, other cats. It was a good introduction to Toronto backyard birds: black-capped chickadees, blue jays,
house sparrows
and house finches,
white-breasted nuthatches
,
northern cardinals
, dark-eyed juncos. I grappled with the morality of having an outdoor cat because cats are hunters, but modern life is full of such contradictions and although I couldn’t justify this one I also couldn’t seem to rectify it. Pippin would have killed me if I didn’t let him outside. It’s a complicated world we live in and I allowed myself some comfort in the knowledge that our cat actually spent most of his life sound asleep on the third floor of the house.

I bought the house with money I had inherited from my father. It was semi-detached and one hundred years old. We didn’t have much stuff when we moved in, which meant we had extra room for the children to play in, and over the years we created a warm, welcoming environment. A friend once said to me, “Your house is so serene. I always feel relaxed when I’m here.” She looked around. “How do you do it?” She wasn’t there when all the kids were! I’d grown up in a very quiet household and I remember visiting friends in their homes and envying them the busy ruckus and racket of older brothers or singing fathers. Now I had both of those worlds — a ruckus when all the children were with us (although Ben didn’t do too much singing at any time), and quiet when it was just the three of us. I’d never lived in the same place for more than six years, and that was when I was a child. I moved into the house in Riverdale with the hope that we’d stay put and it would be as stable an environment as I could make it for the family. I was tired of moving and I was going to be a stay-at-home mom.

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
20
07
, 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 are 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.