Stories of a life part five Ron Scollon first draft May 2008
This file continues with more stories. ‘Part five’ doesn’t have any meaning except that it consists of stories 51 through 58. We’re in the process of moving so there might not be any more stories in the near future. Maybe this is all there are. Five parts is a good number. The last of these (Timetable) gives chronologies.
Blue Flame or Tidal Wave?
There’s no telling where the end is of these stories of life. I write as I think of things and when I have the time and energy to write. I started eight weeks ago when I wrote 1939 and First Week. Now here I am on the Matanuska headed north to Haines, the same ferry, and I’m sitting in the same seat in the cafeteria where I was when I started to write and started to try to understand what it means when they say you have cancer. The biggest part of that was trying to understand what it means to say you are living a life. What is this life? What is this cancer?
That was right at the beginning of March and now it’s the end of April, 2008. As we go north the sunrise is earlier. Right now the sky is mauve with dawn – that’s a color I’ve learned to name just recently – and my clock says it’s about 4:30 am. Now everybody seems to want to know why I get up so early. Is it the cancer? Well, that’s not too likely since I’ve been getting up very early to write now for some years. I think I started to get up and do things early, quiet things, when Rachel was an infant. We worked out pretty quickly after she was born that both of us could not be paying attention to her 24 hours a day, so we started trading off on our sleeping schedules. Suzie was tied to Rachel’s breast-feeding schedule. I wasn’t, so I started to get up early when Rachel first got up. It seems I could read or drink tea or write and she wouldn’t make a sound, even when she had started to walk around on her own. She just did things quietly by herself. That’s until Suzie woke up and then cry, fuss, glee, joy, ‘Mama, mama, mama!’ So now for thirty-four years my quiet hours have started with dawn and the singing of the early birds. So, no, it’s not the cancer waking me up early; actually it’s the writing.
I was going to keep these stories to myself. I was thinking they’d be good for Ben to read if he felt like it some years from now because it’s not likely that I’ll know him as an adult. That’s not to do with this particular illness; it’s just that I was 38 years old when Tommy was born and Tommy was 31 years old when Ben was born. Just simple probabilities having to do with the bell curve of lifespans at this stage of history. At just about any earlier time in human history I would have been an elder at 38, maybe already a grandfather. Now we just sort of keep going on and on like that battery bunny.
So I started to write. But first Rachel and Suzie knew what I was up to – a writer has a hard time keeping his work under a cover when there are people so close by. They wanted to see what I was doing. And then, of course, Tommy and Christie too. And my sisters and their daughters. And Pat Mahoney who’d become a good friend again after 50 years of not seeing each other or having any idea what the other was up to. So quite a few people have seen what I’ve been doing here. And a lot of them have been asking questions: They all boil down to asking, ‘What does it all mean?’