2017: Things in Perspective (an autobiographical ramble)

I ended the last two years off with book reviews, looking back a what I had read—from the great to the grating. It’s becoming a tradition. This year, however, I’m breaking genre. I’m going to wander more casually through a few of the books I read this year as a way of reflecting on the year more generally. 2017 was a tough one, I won’t lie. But travelling to the centre of the earth with Professor Lidenbrock or to Venus with Elwin Ransom, road-tripping across the Midwest with Sal Hiddle or hiding out in the Metropolitan Museum of Art with Claudia and Jamie Kincaid—these things somehow made the heartache and the chaos easier to bear, at times mirroring back and illuminating things going on in the real world. And so, I present to you: a year in review in book reviews.

The first book I read this year was Dany Laferrière’s The World is Moving Around Me. I didn’t know it at the time, but this reminiscence of the Haitian earthquake was a fitting way to ring in the year. In our house, 2017 was like an earthquake. We trembled. Sometimes we collapsed. We experienced debilitating sickness, hopelessness and death. Like Laferrière, however, when we took the trouble to look past the gloom we were surprised by the beauty and goodness always gleaming out from the crevices. The night after the quake levelled Port-au-Prince, Laferrière recalls noticing flowers: “I walked through the garden, amazed to see that the most fragile flowers were still hanging from their stems. The earthquake attacked what was hard, solid, and what could resist it. The concrete fell. The flowers survived.” Here lies the central theme of 2017 for me: even when life falls apart, beautiful things remain. It was a year of extremes. Of profound sadness and profound joy, and of joy in the midst of sadness. Of flowers sprouting from the ruins.

Canada celebrated the 150th anniversary of its confederation this year, and the festivities were inescapable. But the year of celebration was marred by the loss of two pillars of the pantheon of Canadian pop culture: Stuart McLean and Gord Downie. When McLean passed away in February, I was halfway through reading one of his Vinyl Cafe collections. Few writers (and fewer broadcasters) have been as adept as McLean when it comes to blending the hilarious with the heartbreaking. Take “Be-Bop-A-Lula,” in which Dave experiences a wine and Beatles LP induced reversion to his youth. He dances in his kitchen. He flirts with a coworker. The metamorphosis is complete when his cheek sprouts a pimple—which Dave promptly mistakes for skin cancer, setting him into a bout of abject panic over his own mortality. He ends up making a spectacle of himself in the local drugstore when he gets his arm trapped in a blood pressure machine. Who besides Stuart McLean could spin such a yarn? Reading it days after McLean died of melanoma, I don’t suppose I read anything more tragic this year. I also don’t think I laughed harder at anything.

And the Lord knows I needed a laugh. When McLean died on 15 February my wife had been ill and in crippling pain for fifty days. She couldn’t work, could hardly sleep or eat. She had been to the ER multiple times, seen our doctor repeatedly and spoken to two specialists, and no one could identify the monster. This was something we had never contemplated, much less experienced. Prospects looked grim. We were honestly convinced she was never going to recover. We prayed desperately for a miracle. When my PhD admission came in the mail I almost turned it down, thinking I would be home taking care of her. It was incontestably the bleakest period of our lives. Yet, bad as it was, it is almost impossible to be unwaveringly miserable when you live with a one-and-a-half-year-old. All the more when that one-and-a-half-year-old happens to be JJ Robertshaw. I was recently looking through the photos on my phone from the bleak period, and this is what I found:

Yes. That’s JJ using the box from a Vinyl Cafe boxset as a hat. That’s what he does. He takes a sad situation and makes it into something funny. I honestly don’t know how we would have made it through the Bleakness without this ridiculous little goofball. As it happened, on our fourth trip to the ER we found a nurse practitioner who immediately recognized the Monster. He set us up with a specialist and put her on the right medicine. She started feeling better shortly after. The Monster was at bay.

In March the snow melted and the world began to thaw. She went back to work, and JJ and I resumed our daily walks in the forest. Things were looking brighter. We had a new lease on life. I reread Out of the Silent Planet and felt like Elwin Ransom, basking in the purest sunlight, experiencing a “progressive lightening and exultation of heart.” I reread The Half-Blood Prince and felt like Harry hopped up on Felix Felicis, or after the big Quidditch win when he finally kisses Ginny. I gambolled through Brian Jay Jones’s biography of Jim Henson and Cary Elwes’s memoirs of the production of The Princess Bride—looking forward more and more to rewatching the films of my childhood, introducing Kermit and Piggy, Buttercup and Westley, to JJ.

And it would only be JJ. We were thrilled to be on the other side of the Reign of the Monster, but we weren’t unchanged. The thing had been traumatic. It had wreaked havoc on her body. One thing was certain: we wouldn’t be having any more children. She’d been through enough. And, anyway, what if the Monster returned? 

It did. April brought a relapse. It was Bleakness, the sequel. This, now, was truly the lowest point of our lives. If it could happen again out of nowhere, how can we ever be sure we’re free of it? I reread Perelandra and felt like Elwin Ransom. Overwhelmed. Facing off against a foe that is maddeningly beyond comprehension. The fate of a world on my shoulders. I reread The Deathly Hallows and wallowed with Harry and Hermione in their hopelessness after Ron splits. No idea what to do next. The fate of the world on my shoulders. Never in a million years would I have considered running away from the Monster, ditching my family. But if I had, the Boy Who Lived would have had a thing or two to say to me; when Lupin makes to abandon his pregnant wife and join the gang on their adventure, Harry calls him a coward and sends him packing.

I had many anxious and sleepless nights during the Bleakness. I’m prone to bouts of insomnia in stressful times, and sometimes in I get into torturous mental cycles where my problems confuse themselves with those of the fictional characters I’m reading about. It keeps me in a nightmarish half-sleep the whole night. It’s not fun to experience, but it is kind of funny to think about afterwards. In April, I spent an entire night confusing Remus Lupin’s situation with my own. I kept having to remind myself that I wasn’t a werewolf, that my wife wasn’t a shapeshifter, and that she most definitely was not pregnant. 

Except she was. We eventually realized that the old Monster was piggybacking on her classically severe morning sickness. I hate to admit it, but we weren’t exactly ecstatic to learn we were expecting. Babies were the furthest thing from our minds at the time. We were in shock. When her kindly uncle Edwin passed away we didn’t think things could get much bleaker. 

By May, things started to turn around again. We got a handle on the morning sickness and the Monster was put back in check. We started to come to terms with the unexpected tiny person. Momentary pangs of a complicated joy slowly transformed into a more generalized excitement. We found out we were expecting a boy and fell to daydreaming about two brothers growing up together. I ploughed through numerous classic of children’s literature, continually building up a robust literary infrastructure to share with the boys. Among much else, I read The Secret Garden and White Fang. Like Mary Lennox and Colin Craven, we were cultivating new life and being rejuvenated in the process. The Monster was White Fang, a savage beast being domesticated, slowly, and with great care.

Summer passed like that. Laughs with JJ, the joys of my sister’s wedding and a reunion with our sister-in-law, cautiously looking forward and trying not to look back. In September, JJ and I both began a new chapter: he went to daycare and I started my PhD. From that point, both my life and my reading were too hectic to present as anything like a straightforward narrative. I did have the opportunity to read classics like Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s Silencing the Past (a brilliant work of historical theory that looks at power and the production of historical narratives, and the importance of what gets left out, drawing many of its illustrative examples from the Haitian Revolution), and Edward Said’s Culture and Imperialism (also an excellent book, and a must-read for anyone interested in postcolonial history), and spent some time perusing Eltis and Richardson’s Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade. The coursework was exhausting, but I was constantly struck with an almost giddy awareness that, as a funded grad student, I’m basically getting paid to read books.

I worked frantically to get all my papers done before the child arrived (and was mostly successful). Finally, on 23 November, the world welcomed Wesley Andrew Edwin Robertshaw. Our own Wes. Joy of joys. The Dread Pirate Robertshaw.  Somehow we pulled it off. We kept the Monster at bay even as this little munchkin crept into the world. In retrospect, all the troubles of 2017 were worth it to get to meet this tiny, stinky, loud, hungry, beautiful creature. JJ and Kippy (our purebred mutt) graciously welcomed him home, and we settled into the madness of the newborn phase.

But the rollercoaster ride of 2017 wasn’t over yet. Exactly three weeks after Wesley’s birth, his oldest great-grandparent, my wife’s grandfather Earl Norman Plato, a man sincerely loved by all, passed away at the age of eighty-six. He followed his brother and best friend uncle Edwin by eight months. He and Wes just barely crossed paths in this world. The loss of Grandpa Plato was devastating. He was a pillar of his family, of his community, a writer, a historian, a lover of nature who passed that love on to his children and grandchildren, a gifted painter, a spinner of yarns, a man of faith. I can think of no better commemoration than this excerpt from E. B. White’s timeless novel Charlotte’s Web: “Wilbur never forgot Charlotte. Although he loved her children and grandchildren dearly, none of the new spiders ever quite took her place in his heart. She was in a class by herself. It is not often that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writer. Charlotte was both.” Yet Charlotte’s magnum opus was not anything she wrote—propitious as her words may have been for Wilbur’s fate. Her magnum opus was her egg sack. Her children. The same must be said of Earl. His magnum opus was his children and grandchildren, and now great-grandchildren. His best characteristics and passions are discernible in each of them, and I consider it an honour to be part of their family. They reflect the same luminosity that constantly poured from Earl—the love of nature, the thirst for learning, the concern for others. He was a man who you knew truly cared about you, took an interest in your life, and whom you wanted to make proud. I, for one, partly attribute my own career path to the influence of Earl Plato. At one point in my life I was on a crash course straight for law school, until at a family gathering Earl sat me down and said “Matt, you need to be a historian. Travel the world. Write history.” And so I did. I’m working on it anyway.

And so 2017 ended as it had started. Tearfully. Yet the mountainous surges of sadness served to frame moments of absolute joy. Even the sting of this most recent loss was softened by Earl’s three youngest great-grandchildren, all born since September, as well as by the unplanned and unexpected presence of my wife’s dear brother and sister-in-law over the holidays. For us, in any case, Grandpa Plato’s passions and compassions will live on in the way we raise our kids. In nature walks on Sunday afternoons, in the art and literature we create and enjoy, in our faith and in our family dynamics. And, we hope, the unbreakable brotherly bond of Edwin Kenneth and Earl Norman Plato will be reflected in the relationship between Jack James Norman and Wesley Andrew Edwin Robertshaw. 

So here’s to 2017: the earthquake, the rollercoaster. I’d say it was stranger than fiction, but, as noted, I read some pretty strange fiction. It was interesting, to say the least. Maybe as strange as fiction. And, Lord, may 2018 be a little bit boring.