Home Free (20 page)

Spring

I
'VE COME THROUGH MONTREAL by train. Things have finally settled down on the health front, and I'm going up to our summer cabin to get some concentrated work done. Brian will drive the car and catch up with me on the weekend. It's been a while since I've visited the city, and I'm curious to see Casey's new place.

The apartment is back in Mile End, a few blocks from where he used to live on Jeanne-Mance. A neighbourhood full of beautiful girls on bicycles. He's sharing with two women his age with messy bedrooms who have painted the kitchen a great shade of red. It's only a sublet, but that might change.

His new room is long and spacious, with blond wood floors and tall windows that open wide and have no screens. He demonstrates, standing on the ledge.

“Montrealers don't worry about suicide,” he says merrily.

I haven't seen him since Christmas. He's been following a post-breakup health and sanity program—swimming, biking, working on various job proposals. He's got a contract doing some archiving for a film company downtown. It's heavy on the data-processing but leaves him lots of freedom.

He looks good, clear-eyed. New jeans, too, I notice, for the office. He has some money in the bank now and has bought a bottle of wine for my arrival,which we open.

A tour of his room: the main feature is an organized cockpit of turntable, amplifier, recording stuff, beside a clean desk. His headphones hang neatly from a nail in the wall.

“The whole thing about work, I've figured out, is appearances,” he says. “When the job has no actual content, which mine currently doesn't, all that matters is that you look busy and dress appropriately.”

Before I left Toronto, I had resorted to a diagnostic tool I don't often use these days. I consulted the I Ching. Very 1971 of me, I realize. And yes, it's a military-minded text with antique views on gender, but I've always found something useful in the readings. They tend to throw a fresh light on whatever is uppermost in my mind, regardless of what question I ask. Usually my question is “What's going on here?”

I tossed the coins six times and arrived at the 48th hexagram, The Well, with two “moving” lines. It's always good to get moving lines, because they offer more specific commentary and indicate change.

The reading described a situation where a communal well was under construction but couldn't be used until the town around it became more organized and the well was properly cared for. I read the text for the first moving line:

The well is cleaned, but no one drinks from it.

This is my heart's sorrow,
For one might draw from it.

If the king were clear-minded,
Good fortune might be enjoyed in common.

Then the second moving line:

True, if a well is being lined with stone, it cannot be used while
the work is going on. But the work is not in vain; the result is
that the water stays clear.

In life also there are times when a man must put himself in
order. During such a time he can do nothing for others, but his
work is nonetheless valuable, because by enhancing his powers
and abilities through inner development, he can accomplish all
the more later on.

I sit down at his desk and look out the window, through the rain that is falling, at the grey stone apartments across the street and the spring garbage on the wet lawns. The curl of the black balconies down to the street, like diagrams of DNA. Montreal is so Montreal. Ten frames of a movie and you can recognize that it was shot here. Long ago Montreal imagined itself as bigger, more urban, more ambitious, and the mood lingers on. One block over is Saint-Urbain, Mordecai Richler's turf. All the fireworks of Brian's twenties took place here, a few streets away. It's a city that asks to be written about, that makes you feel as if you're in a story.

Casey calls up some of his music files on the computer and plays me some of the tunes he has been recording.

“They're mostly quiet ones because I have to record them at night when there are people around. I'll burn you a CD to take up to the cottage,” he says, pointing out the tall, handy stack of blanks. He starts scrolling through his list, choosing recent songs of his own. “I'm trying to sort out some of the more bitter ones,”he jokes.

He plays one, a spooky late-night blues called “Blessing in Disguise.” About the bad taking you into the vicinity of something new and good.

“Check this out,” he says, switching to some whirling Turkish numbers with an ululating female vocal. He turns and gives me one of his wide, blazing smiles as we both listen to the woman sing, riding the crazy waves of the music like someone on a Jet Ski.

It is raining hard outside, but we put on our jackets and walk a few blocks over to find somewhere to eat. People are in the streets despite the weather. On the corner is an Indonesian restaurant with white tablecloths, its windows rectangles of warmth and light in the rain. We step inside.

Not My Job

I
HAVE DONE IT AGAIN, overstepping my boundaries as a “helpful” mother to my job-hunting son. All with the best of intentions of course.

The problem with an arts degree—one of them, that is—is that unless you want to be an academic or a museum curator, you end up looking for work in a swampy field called “communications.” These job descriptions are often written in something like Esperanto, a highly evolved form of gibberish that obscures the true nature of the job. “Office management” could mean six hours of photocopying a day and “excellent interpersonal skills” can be work-speak for “receptionist babe with a nice smile.”

Until recently Casey had spurned this end of the work spectrum, preferring to live the non-cubicle life. Then he began applying for more professional positions.

Sometimes I'd troll through the jobsite listings myself, an unwise activity that can lead to “forwarding.” These sites can also be slightly addictive, like taking online house tours. But it cheered me up to be able to contemplate careers other than freelance writing. I was sure that I could “participate in designing both print and digital design strategies” for someone. It wasn't too late, perhaps, for me to become a professional cake decorator.

One day he sent us the descriptions for a couple jobs he had applied for that sounded promising. Both were well-paying positions requiring years of experience in their respective fields. Neither was out of his league in terms of his skills (“communication” and writing) or strengths (working with people, managing projects). But in the past decade the etiquette of applying for a job has ramped up to a level where every detail matters, no matter how picayune. Did he know this?

Only 24 hours earlier, when I was bugging him about a barista gig he didn't even want, he had asked me to lay off with the job advice. But I couldn't restrain myself; I didn't want him to waste his time collecting no's.During my stints as a magazine editor, I've been on the receiving end of pitches, queries, and cover letters. I knew how quickly one misspelling can land someone on the rejection pile.

So I sent him an email with a few carefully chosen suggestions regarding the art of résumés and cover letters.

This did not go over well.

He did not require redundant professional advice, he informed me, and indeed he found it “fundamentally insulting.” Everything I advised him on, he already knew, thank you very much. He had already talked to a career counsellor at McGill. He understood cover letters. Yes, he tailored his CV to each different position. THIS IS NOT YOUR JOB, he emailed in caps. And if I wanted him to continue to take my advice seriously, I should consider not giving it unless asked for.

Gulp.

I phoned him, apologized, and said I would try harder on the not-meddling front. The air was cleared. But I knew my impulse to “help”would swing back again. I tend to be meddling and entrepreneurial with most of my friends, so it's difficult to censor this impulse with my own son.

This is the stress of motherhood at the twenty-something, middle-management you are confronted with a problem (your son is looking for a job) without having any agency or power in the situation (you are no longer the boss). Much of the necessary un-mothering that goes on with grown-up kids falls into this category, where the main challenge is to shut up and go along with other people's decisions, good or bad. Breathing exercises also help.

And it's not the case that I always leap in unbidden; our son does ask for guidance from us at times, or at least a sympathetic ear. When things get discouraging on the job-hunting front—hard to avoid, given the current unemployment rates among the young, which are twice as high as adult figures—my natural response is: how can we fix this? What practical advice can I offer? I want the world to make use of all the things he has to offer. Instead, my advice can come across as a lack of faith in his abilities to make his own way.

Doing stuff for him as a child always came easily: the costume-making, hamster-feeding, chauffeuring parts. Being that kind of mother felt like a holiday from other responsibilities. But this category of help is tougher:
not
doing things for him. Mothers of grown kids must learn new tricks of the lip-zipping sort. Empathetic listening, responding in short sentences, preferably while making a large vat of bean soup. “That must be tough” is okay, and “We'll keep our fingers crossed” is too. “You might think about a haircut before that interview”is not acceptable.

Then I would remind myself that my son was only a year out of school and still learning the ropes. “Putting on his game face,” as he said. I've been officially employed for perhaps a total of five years out of the past 40 so I am hardly in a position to tutor him in the ways of the “real world.” But I still have to remind myself that my urge to edit, to make sure that all the commas and dashes are in place, should not be transferred to my son, his haircuts, or his life.

And when I was in my twenties, as I recall, I committed some professional faux pas that still give me pain.

I was freelancing for the
Toronto Star
, writing entertainment listings (but with a Proustian flair, I thought). I had worked myself into a froth of indignation about the fact that my editors had failed to offer me a column of my own in the newspaper. The thing reporters work decades to earn normally. Hadn't they noticed the wit and nuance of my listings for fall fairs and outdoor concerts? How long did they expect me to toil in these menial assignments?

But I didn't have the nerve to speak to my editor or to do something professional, such as submitting a column on spec. Instead, I wrote a chippy little note about how my talents were far better suited to a column and how could this be redressed? Then, even more bizarrely, I tucked this note into the open purse of my editor, on her desk.

We never spoke of it. I never brought it up, and neither did she because she was a kind woman. Luckily, she didn't fire me.

It was also at the
Star
that I spent a few months pinch-hitting for the book editor, who was on leave. I enjoyed the work but it came with a windowless office under fluorescent lights. Unacceptable! I was an outdoorsy girl and simply couldn't function without daylight, even though I should have been grateful I wasn't out there toiling in the newsroom with everyone else. When it came time to hire a new book editor, they gave me the courtesy of an interview.

I breezed in and began kibitzing with the interviewing editor. “Just two things,” I said,“there's no way I can work in a windowless office, and I wouldn't consider any salary under. . . .”And I named a ridiculous figure, I think it might have been $18,000 a year. This was 1975, remember. An arts position. The lips of the editor across from me twitched as he suppressed a smile. “Well, the salary starts at $24,000,” he said.

I was also fired from one of my first jobs, as an editorial assistant for a small publishing house. I thought I was doing fine,writing long, intensely articulate letters of rejection to the authors in the slush pile. But there were money issues and some office politics; the easiest resolution was to eliminate my job. The editor who hired me was kind about breaking the news. Unfortunately, I was inexperienced in being fired and I didn't know that when this takes place you are
not supposed to show up
the next morning. I thought it would show character to work the following day to wrap up the projects on my desk.

I was sitting there dutifully typing when the editor came into the small office we shared.

“What are you doing here?” he said, possibly worried that I might never leave. No. It was just that I didn't understand the etiquette of being fired.

Being hired has its unwritten rules too. Which my son has figured out. At 27 he is more job savvy than I ever was.

In studies of workplace satisfaction, the bottom line isn't the size of the salary or the amount of responsibility you wield. It's the sense of agency and being able to measure your impact on a project. When the job at hand is motherhood and the project is “assisting” your son as he looks for employment, sometimes the best strategy is the most unsatisfying one—to lay down tools.

Or enlist his father. Boys want more guidance from their fathers anyway. And way less from their mind-reading mothers.

The Other Shoe

“
Sometimes I think our whole family should just shut up.
”

      – Casey Johnson

O
UR SON and a friend, Adrienne,were on their way to spend a few days with us at the cottage. It was mid-August, and the days were getting shorter. After dark, when they were late to arrive, I headed down the gravel road to the sweet spot where I can usually get cellphone reception. I was going to call him to make sure all was well.

The “cottage”is a small cabin in the Laurentians we've been renting for the past 10 years. There's no one else on the crescent-shaped lake except for us and the owners of the property, Anne and Arne, who live down the road with their two kids, Sara and Daniel. The lake sits on top of a hill, once volcanic, and backs onto miles of forest reserve land. Over the years the owners have become friends, and during his Montreal years Casey would spend the odd restorative weekend with them, chopping wood and hanging out with a family who do stuff without writing about it.