| Drama, Poems, Essays |
M Y
|
by
------ ---- (Misener) Schuyler
These pages are the youthful, rural Ontario memories of [name removed to forestall fraud--GS] my mother, who was born on her father's mixed farm at Tyrrel, southeast of Waterford, Ontario, in 1914. She was the middle child of seven, all girls but the second oldest. Their father was Harvey Misener, a farmer of Loyalist stock and, apparently, German ancestry. I remember him as a short, stooped man with short, white hair, a sharp nose, and dark, old-fashioned three-piece suits that seemed to date from the 1930s. He probably had osteoporosis. He wore straw hats. He died about 1963.
His wife, my mother's mother, was Elizabeth Andrews, apparently called Lizzy. As a child I remember her being ill (heart condition?) and lying on an adjustable metal bed in the farmhouse smaller dining room. She died about 1956.
Mom married my father [name removed to forestall fraudsters] in August 1941. They had three children: my brother Larry, born 1945; myself, born 1949; and our sister Janice, born 1956. Mom was stricken with ovarian cancer in late 1986, and died in August 1989.
In her last year or so of life she wrote out some of her memories of her youth, desiring that her family, especially her granddaughters -- my brother Larry's three girls, Kelly, Jennifer, and Carolyn -- would have something to remember her by. On her deathbed she made me promise I would type out these memories, the story of her life, as she called it, and publish them. Here they are.
Mother was about five feet four, and weighed about one hundred and thirty-eight pounds while she was in good health. She had arthritis, especially in her hands, and dark brown hair the colour of her children's; it was going gray, so she tinted it. She had a big nose with a small brown wart or bump on the left side near the curl. She had another small bump on her face on the right side near her chin; at one time it had had hairs, which she had removed through electrolysis.
Mom was a hard-working Protestant Christian woman who looked suspiciously at Roman Catholics; she thought of them as gullible, priest-ridden idol worshippers. When she had been training to be a nurse in the 1930s at a Catholic hospital, St. Joseph's, in Hamilton, Ontario, she, a Protestant, had been pressured to attend Mass. A nun had thrown her over a sink in a fit of pique. Since my mother was determined to be a nurse, she had to endure it. From then on I think she hated nuns. She used to tell me how mean they had been to her.
Mother thought like a nurse trained in the 30s. To see a woman like my mother in action, see the nurse, Garp's mother, as played by Glenn Close in the film of The World According To Garp. That's my mother exactly. For my mother the most important thing in life was probably hygiene -- followed closely by proper nutrition using all of the Food Groups in the Canada Food Rules (published, I think, by the Canadian Ministry of Health to improve Canadian diets). She believed it was her duty to keep her family fed and clean, and her children raised in a deeply Protestant faith. Everything else would take care of itself.
She was always working hard for her family. When we lived on the family orchard south of Paris, Ontario, she canned, cleaned, pitted cherries, washed clothes, ironed, and baked pies. She was not a great cook; she tended to overcook everything. But she did make fantastic apple and lemon meringue pie; I especially enjoyed her apple crisp. Otherwise her cooking was of a blandness.
Her house was always spotless and orderly. She was very proud of this, as she was of her mother and her mother's cleanliness, orderliness, and life of hard work for her family.
When we lived south of Paris Mom was a stalwart supporter of the Women's Missionary Society and other women's church groups.
When we moved to Milton, Ontario Mom also worked as a cashier in our Canadian Tire store. As she had been in the country in Paris, in Milton too she was active in church women's groups and in changing flowers at the local hospital. These groups were always holding bazaars or catering for weddings, and she was always there working hard and bearing a sharp eye for those who weren't pulling their weight or who behaved foolishly; if there was one thing my mother couldn't abide, it was "foolishness".
She didn't care for alcohol, either. She hated to smell it on people's breath. Our house was Dry. Completely. This was probably the effect of the Methodist strain in the United Church of Canada, to which we belonged until several years after we moved to Milton.
Why did we switch to the Presbyterian church? This was because of liberal tendencies in the United, which were coming to the fore in the 1960s. My mother abhorred these developments. Mom thought of herself as a fundamentalist Protestant; her particular denomination was less important than its adherence to the Bible. She didn't believe in evolution; it is fair to say she never understood it, nor natural selection either. I think she did not believe in the whole geological picture of the earth's history worked out since Cuvier and Hutton; I don't know whether she believed that dinosaurs had lived. She said that scientists were always disagreeing with one another; she took this as justifying her disbelief in science that seemed to disagree with the Bible. She admired the Reverend Billy Graham. Her favorite term of approval was "So-and-so is a real Christian." Like her sisters, she customarily spoke in euphemisms like "the dickens" and (my favorite) "holy doodle". She couldn't tell a story without getting twisted up in the pronouns so that the listener couldn't figure out what had happened to whom.
My mother was ignorant about a good many things, but she believed in the Bible, and for her that was enough.
In her youth she had had some attraction to poetry of the rhyming kind, so this was something we had in common. But for the most part aesthetic matters had had to go on the shelf in her life; she believed in the sovereignty of practicality. She believed in saving money "for a rainy day"; she had been a teenager in the Great Depression, and knew the value of a dollar. She also hated waste. She often reminded her children how badly off people had been in the Depression, and warned us it might return.
Take her for all in all, she was a hardworking Protestant woman who took care of her family and wanted to be remembered as such.
So now I will let her speak for herself.
Mom wrote out her Story of My Life in an old faded blue notebook my sister had not used. It says on the cover "Science Project Book" and bears a lion crest. Beneath, my sister's name is crossed out and my Mom's is substituted.
About half the book is written on. In that half there are a few empty pages, as if Mom had intended to come book and write more.
The last half of the book is empty.
In addition, there is a kind of note pad inserted where the blue notebook stops, consisting of 32 pages. Only the first three are written on. They are clearly intended to follow on after the preceding material in the blue notebook. The first page of the pad seems to be the first draft of the last page of the blue notebook.
I have left the arrangement of the pages as it seems obvious my mother intended. I have also, for the most part, merely transcribed the writings exactly as my mother wrote them, with her light punctuation, run-on sentences, and heavy capitalization. I think they give a sense of my mother as she talked and thought.
In a few places I have added or subtracted commas to make things a little clearer. I have occasionally guessed what a word is in my mother's usually clear writing. And I have interpolated a few notes in square brackets into the text, to clarify a few points.
My earliest recollection is of waking up one hot, sticky night in "the old house". This house was built by my grandfather when he and my grandmother were first married and was on the north west corner of my father's farm [several miles south of Waterford, Ontario, near Renton -- Grant]. This night I was sleeping with my oldest sister Evelyn in what they called a 'cot bed' which I believe folded up and was in the upstairs hall of the house. The roof was slanted.
My father decided to build a large brick house to the east of this house. At this time I was 2 1/2 years old [i.e, late 1916] and their 6th child Orpha was to arrive by March of the next year.
One day I went with my grandmother over to see them digging out the cellar for the new house. I remember wearing a pink sunbonnet. As I was my grandmother's pet she always took me with her. We watched them digging out the basement with a small scraper and a team of horses; one horse we called 'Old Dick'.
The day we moved to the new house I remember asking my father if I could ride on the wagon of furniture but he said he was afraid I might fall off and get hurt. Evelyn said she stayed out of school that day. Also Dad had to refuse the 3 older children such a privilege.
Just before we moved in someone took me over to the new house to see the bathroom which was a novelty and one of the first in the community. I looked down a gaping stovepipe hole and we were warned by my Dad not to fall down the hole. Evelyn had also asked her school friends to see the new bathroom.
The day we moved my Uncle Henry (we called him Hen) came over to watch us move. [Mom often spoke of Uncle Hen and his family as if they were thieves and good-for-nothings. -- Grant] My mother said he was very jealous of our new home and he cried because he felt he didn't have as nice a home. Our house was very large with 6 bedrooms, a central upstairs hall and bathroom, large dining room, a bedroom, large kitchen, a washroom, and a pantry.
One morning I was awakened to be told I had my fifth new sister Adah. I was 5 yrs. old then and disinterested. I arose, then lay down on a wooden chest in the bedroom clothes cupboard. My mother said that she painted the kitchen floor of the new house and the next morning my sister was born. The family had first moved into the new house a day or two before.
When we were children, my father's relatives felt that [their] summer should be spent on our farm so my mother had all this extra work beside the farm work.
One relative, Uncle Dave, my grandmother's brother, lived with his son Bert LaBarre in Montreal West so during the summer months he spent 2 or 3 wks. of holidays with us. He arrived by train at Waterford in very hot weather one time. He insisted on hoeing my mother's large garden although it was too much for his age. In the night he started shouting "Hallel[lujah?] etc." at the top of his voice, wandering about and waking everyone. It frightened us children very much so my father and mother tried to reason with him but he was too strong and agitated for them. Finally they were able to push him in the bathroom and locked the door. He collapsed and the neighbours a mile away said they heard the disturbance and wondered what was going on.
In the morning they [Mom's parents, presumably] called a Dr. and he concluded that Uncle Dave was suffering from uremic poisoning. He was semi-conscious for awhile, then recovered and went home to Montreal. Uncle Dave was of the Salvation Army faith and when he would be holidaying with us he would suddenly stand up and in a loud voice shout, 'Hallelujah'. This annoyed my grandmother very much and she would tell him to pipe down. When my father took him to church he embarrassed my father by loudly proclaiming 'Amen' all through the sermon. He often told me he wanted me to be a Salvation lass when I grew up which amused my brother Grant [Mom's older brother, the second oldest child -- after Evelyn -- whom she admired; I am named after him. --Grant]. Uncle Selah [?] was another summer visitor. He had married my grandmother's sister, Eleanor. He was a very jolly man and we loved him. He had been a custodian in a Detroit school and brought us pencils and erasers he had found at the school. Once he brought us a bat and softball and tried to play ball with us but he was so puffed out he didn't last long at ball. I realize now that he must have had a heart condition. We had many flies in our kitchen as our house was near the pigpen so Uncle Selah paid us a cent for each fly we killed. My mother would spray the kitchen, then we took fly chasers (made out of strips of paper nailed to broom handles) and chased the flies out of the house.
Aunt Lib (Grandma Misener's niece) and her grandson Gordon were other summer visitors. Sometimes Aunt Lib's daughter Grace LaBarre Campbell Kerr would also visit us and came several years after I left home as she lived to be in her 90s. Gordon Kerr was different--I don't know what his trouble was, but Grandma had to take him to the bathroom still when he was 9 yrs. old. Grant and I thought that hilarious.
One mischievous thing Grant and I did I recall. My father kept sheep and had one ram who would attack you if you were in his way. We had a strawstack in the barnyard protected from the cattle by a rail fence. Grant and I would get inside the rail fence then put Orpha and Adah (the little kids) on the outside of the fence and have them run around; then just as the ram was to attack the girls we would pull them up over the fence out of harms's way. It was exciting. Grant had a friend Craig who tought a lot of himself. One day as Craig was boasting of his accomplishments to Grant, he didn't notice that the ram was behind him and had Craig in his sights. The ram suddenly charged and lifted Craig out of his way. As I didn't particularly like Craig that gave me a chuckle for the day. We had many happy times playing in a large sandpile that had been left over from the building of the house; we played store, filling our medicine bottles with sand and water.
When I was 13 yrs. old and in my last year of elementary school, I had my tonsils out at Brantford Hospital. I heard the children in the ward crying for their mothers and decided then and there I would like to be a nurse; so from then on I prepared myself for my career. As I teenager I liked to get away by myself so hid in the outhouse near the old house and read a great deal. My father couldn't stand to see any one idle so if he found you idle he would invent a job so i disappeared a great deal.
The first movie I saw was when I tried my Grade 8 final examination at Simcoe High School. [Why would she be taking a Grade 8 exam at a high school?] I stayed with my Aunt Florence and she gave me the money to see 'Buddy Rogers' [a Hollywood leading man long married to Mary Pickford--Grant] in a First World War movie [almost undoubtedly the film Wings, 1926?--Grant].
[a blank numbered page follows, as if Mother intended to write more]
After elementary school Aunt Mary asked me to stay with her in Woodstock and attend Grade IX there. I looked after her son Bob Wilson who was 13 mths. old when I started High School and when he grew up he became a Dentist. I went by train to Woodstock and Uncle Arthur met me at the station. I had as luggage an older suitcase with so many clothes and books in it, the handle ripped off as I was walking to Aunt Mary's. I could only afford to go home occasionally so Evelyn and her boyfriend came to see me one Sun[day]. I got homesick at times. I won the prize for being top scholar in my classroom but the students weren't exceptional in that grade. The principal was a friend of Aunt Mary's. I became friends of a girl called Bobbie Mason who lived down the street with Dr. Stevens, and also became a friend of Dr. Steven's daughter. For doing housework Aunt Mary sometimes gave me money to got to the movies. Edna Stevens was an odd girl -- she would cry when the movie was funny and laugh when the movie was sad. My grade IX room was on the second floor of Woodstock High School and when the noon hour came and I was to go home for lunch Edna Stevens would grab my hand and pull me down the stairs and I was afraid I would break my neck. I don't know why she seemed to want to hurt me.
I wasn't asked to go back to Aunt mary's home for my second year of high school as Aunt Mary found her husband had another woman in his life and she was afraid he might take advantage of me.
In my second year of High School in Simcoe Grace [The next younger child in the family after Mom. Mom was the middle child of the seven. Aunt Grace became a teacher in Toronto, never married, and died in 1993. -- Grant] and I stayed with a divorced woman with 2 children. The woman evidently had very little funds given to her by her ex-husband so she would put one scuttle of coal at night in the heater so we could do our homework. I brought all the comforters I could find at home to that house trying to keep warm in bed as it was a very cold winter but never got warm. Often when we got up to prepare breakfast we would find water frozen on the floor. I got the 'flu just before Xmas and was very sick but I kept going to school though sick as I wanted to finish my Grade Xmas exams. Grace and I cooked our own meals often making cabbage soup to warm us up. Mother canned our own beef and sent us beef, eggs, hom-cured ham and home baked bread. In the spring Grace, being fed up with poverty and lack of heat asked Mrs. Clonse if we could stay with her. Mrs. Clonse said we were welcome to stay there if could cook our own meals as she was a semi-invalid from arthritis. Mr. Clonse was a traveller for Rundle's Liniment and salve and was away most of the week.
We stayed there until I finished Grade XII and quit school. We had many happy times there as Mrs. Clonse was jovial and had friends in in the evening to play cards. I am afraid I often neglected to do my homework as the ladies who visited Mrs. Clonse provided plenty of choice gossip about the town people.
While there we would prepare vegetables before we went to school in the morning and Mrs. Clonse would put them on to cook for the three of us. We would wash the dishes after dinner and then hurry back to school. I cleaned the house on Thurs. nights and then on Frid. night we took the radial (an electric car) to Bloomsburg and either walked home from there or if a bad night Dad met us. On Sun. night we often went to Simcoe with Roy Misener, Dad's cousin, who had a turquoise Pontiac sedan which we admired as Dad just had a black Model T. Roy's daughter Ruth worked for the Fall's Dept. Store in the office.
My grandmother lived at Renton so sometimes Grace and I went down to Grandma's with a young man who drove to school and we spent the night there. We really liked going there as Grandma was very jovial and knew how to relate to us. We often cut her lawn and trimmed her numerous hedges. Grandpa Andrews shortly before his death (when I was 13) had bought this house beside a railway track and the Renton store. Also I had a crush on a teenager who lived on the other side of the railway tracks in the village. [This is almost certainly a fellow named Jack Boyer whom my mother often mentioned she had had a crush on. As I recall, she said he lived a wild life, drank too much, and died young.] He was also in my class at Simcoe High School and often helped me with my Chemistry homework as I was weak in the Sciences. We were fond of each other but there was much competition as he was very popular with the girls, owning his own car when he got in the upper grades of High School. I wanted to go on to Grade XIII but my parents couldn't afford to send me longer and they felt I only needed Grade XIII to be a nurse. I was 17 at this time.
After quitting school I worked for 3 days selling and wrapping glassware when the first Woolworth store in Simcoe opened. As they paid lousy wages they laid all the country girls off after the opening rush was over, and employed only Simcoe girls. That was a terrible job for me - trying to wrap 'stemware specials' and other glasses on a tiny shelf that slid out. I'm sure that some of those glasses after being purchased were broken on the way home, as wrapping wasn't my thing.
[page and a half left blank]
My mother had seven children and much work as she helped in the milking and some farm work. My father also employed a hired man after my brother Grant left home and my grandmother lived with us, so there were eleven people to feed each day.
Mother was a Christian and I doubt if anyone ever lived a more exemplary life.
When we were small she rarely made church, as by the time she got us all ready for Sunday School it was too late for her to make church. As a small child I remember several of our family kneeling at the United Church communion rail and the adults taking communion.
When my sister Adah was a baby, my mother decided that those of the family who had not been christened would be christened the next Sun[day]. I was terrified as I was told several times as a child about my grandmother Misener, a Baptist, that she was baptized in a river. I had a fear I would be drowned if they ducked me in a river, and as a child of 5 I had no concept of what a christening was. We all got ready for church and started down the road in a fabulous horse drawn carriage. Just as we left home the neighbours' son frightened one of our horses and they ran away. My father couldn't get them under control for quite awhile and then my father was afraid to proceed to church and he realized we would be late for church. I felt that the Lord had saved me from a terrifying experience. I now realize that people don't understand what is going on in children's minds.
We always had an underprivileged family living across the road from us on the farm. They seemed to have a new baby nearly every year. As babies were usually born at home in those days my mother was always called upon to help the Doctor deliver the baby. As there was a continual turnover of families in this house my mother must have been almost a professional midwife. After delivery she washed and dressed the baby and fed it. She would say to me that the other children in the family had only a few crusts of bread to eat; I was to go next door and make a large pot of oatmeal for them. I was very sceptical of my ability as a cook but I did my best.
Once I recall just a few days after my mother had delivered a new baby she saw the mother leaving in a horse and buggy. She was very upset and told the woman she should still be in bed. The woman replied that her husband was in jail for drunkenness and she was going to bail him out. My mother gave her $5.00 and told her to be on her way and mother would look after the baby.
I remember one neighbour whose washing machine was broken down and she brought over her dirty washing to my mother's kitchen floor and sat there chatting while my mother did her washing. I had a hard time to keep from telling that woman that my mother wasn't her washwoman and couldn't understand my mother letting herself be put on. My mother was already washing for 10 people in our family.
[manuscript ends]
Last modified: 11:03 AM 12/1/2001