Mrs GMJ Has Friends In for Tea
March 2019. She begins the story of her life: ‘In the early day 1907 my parents had a farm,’ and moves through memorable and major events in just 23 pages. The approach, matter-of-fact, the last few sentences bringing us up to the present. ‘As for myself, I have a small nursing home. I still have a lot of paintings in my home. I still read “Tea Cups”. People come from other countries to see my Work. They also like the books I have written and published. On Sundays I have helped play the music for the Anglican Church, during the past thirty years. I shall probably continue on.’ (I have left out some details.)
There is something about this last part of the book In the Early Days. Something about the summing up of a life in just a few sentences. A kind of poignancy that attaches to the word ‘still’. As if, after a full eventful life, these are the remnants, the other bits cut away. Disappeared. And with these tiny markers Mrs GMJ reminds us once more who she is. I have to say it’s upon reading her words here that I begin to feel something for her. An affection born from a sense of her humanness.
Something I’d not picked up on earlier is her ability to read tea leaves…or cups, as she puts it. If this is a practice she’s still engaged in, when did it begin and what were the circumstances? Perhaps it’s something she gravitated to quite naturally as she seems to have been particularly gifted in the accuracy of her dreams. The actor most often playing the part of Mrs GMJ comments: ‘I went for a reading a number of years ago. Mrs G told me my present relationship would fall apart and what do you know? It did.’ A friend whom I’ve signed up as an extra can’t say one way or another: ‘She got my tea cup mixed up with someone else’s and became quite flustered. At some point she recovered and continued on as if nothing had happened, but I can’t remember anything of what she said.’ I would love to have been party to these small occasions but by now, the lady is gone and I must content myself with participating on stage. Yes, it’s come to that. Actors are most unreliable these days and I’ve stepped up to take the empty chair. I’m sure I will get better in time but as you can see, I’ve forgotten to remove the tag from my Value Village hat prior to coming on stage.
I wonder about Mrs G’s style of writing. This matter-of-factness. I look up a definition. There are quite a number of adjectives, many pointing to an absence. Unemotional. Unsentimental. Unvarnished. And that’s exactly how she writes. I recall my surprise when she follows a three-paragraph account of her time in Saskatoon with ‘On October 8th of that year I married a man that had a ranch or homestead in the Cariboo. That marriage lasted 42 years.’ There is no earlier mention of the man, no hint of romance. No glimpse into how a young Miss G felt about this prospect. I look back to see if I’ve missed something. Apparently not, this sort of detail unimportant, unnecessary. (More ‘un’ words.) This seems curious to me. This minimalistic approach, her account engaging with just the one stream. The actual. Active. External. A bit left-brain, don’t you think? Without that other stream, it’s all so inadequate. But of course. Inadequacy is built into the definition. It’s intentional. Or more likely, the default. The standard treatment.
If you think of this factual and minimalistic approach simply as a way of keeping track in an effective and efficient manner, it makes sense. A journal is not necessarily the place to go on about feelings. Especially one written with the public in mind. And sometimes, it’s just the facts we want. The action. There’s a kind of truth there. A tidiness.
As for Mrs GMJ, well, she’s a busy woman attending to both practical and aesthetic concerns. She has enough on her plate and I doubt she’d even contemplate another kind of narrative. Still, I can’t help but think there is a bit of seepage from time to time and I’m prepared to let it go at that.