Coming Ashore

Catherine Gildiner

Description

Picking up her story in the late '60s at age 21, Cathy Gildiner whisks the reader through five years and three countries, beginning as a poetry student at Oxford and extending to London's swinging Carnaby Street, the mountains of Wales and a posh country estate. Cathy later returns to Cleveland, Ohio, which was still reeling from the Hough Ghetto Riots. In 1970, Cathy moves to Canada, where she rooms with members of the FLQ (Quebec separatists) and then with one of the biggest drug dealers in Canada. Along the way, she falls in love with the man who is now her husband.

Sujets

• Philosophie et théologie
• Memoir

Informations

• Publié par: Ecw Press
• Date de parution: 20 novembre 2014
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781770906334
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

coming ashore
catherine gildiner

ecw press


To Michael


All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better. What if they are a little coarse, and you may get your coat soiled or torn? What if you do fail, and get fairly rolled in the dirt once or twice? Up again, you shall never be so afraid of a tumble.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson


AUTHOR'S NOTE

Thirteen years have passed since I wrote my first memoir, Too Close to the Falls, which covered my life from the age of four to thirteen. I grew up in the small town of Lewiston, New York, in the Eisenhower conformist years of the 1950s. I was the only child of older parents and was, as my mother said, “not the child theyexpected.” At age of two I began climbing trees, and by age three I was going solo to the general store and doing imitations of Ed Sullivan for money.
Fortunately in 1948, the year I was born, there were no psychological labels for such singular and on occasion wild behaviour, so I was simply called “busy, bossy and Irish.” By the time I was four, my mother appealed to the pediatrician for help, saying that I was “born eccentric.” He said I needed to work full-time. Thus, before I went to kindergarten, I began my job in my father’s drugstore in Niagara Falls, working from 5:30 in the morning until 10:00 in the evening. I worked with a black delivery car driver named Roy. He drove and I read the map, and together we delivered drugs throughout the Niagara Frontier. It was a wonderful and secure childhood. After all, when you deliver narcotics, people are happy to see you. No one had more fun than Roy and me as we trudged through the snow, dining in taverns and delivering our prescriptions to the rich and poor alike, since illness does not discriminate.
The second volume of my memoirs, After the Falls , covers the 1960s. It begins after my life took an abrupt turn at the age of thirteen. Roy left and the drugstore in Niagara Falls was sold because urban planner Robert Moses rerouted traffic out of the downtown core and the inner city died a quick death. My family moved to a Buffalo suburb where I would never again know everyone in town, nor would they know me. Our lives were rerouted again when I was fifteen, when my father was diagnosed with a brain tumour.
While my family was falling apart, the ’60s were in full swing and America was also undergoing its own struggles. I was enmeshed in what was then called “heavy” political activity, and eventually the FBI investigated me for my role in “the movement” and my possible (but unfounded) involvement in a murder. Fortunately, I managed to procure a place at Oxford, which not only got me out of Ohio, but also out of the country.
This volume, Coming Ashore , focuses on the late ’60s and early ’70s, chronicling my journey through three countries and from age twenty to twenty-seven. It saddens me to say that this is my last volume because as time goes on, other people enter my life and through no choice of their own get pulled into the narrative. (In this volume, I have used pseudonyms for most of the characters; however, for those who will eventually become my family, and I theirs, I have used their real names.) It is one thing to give an account of my own life in the subjective terms that a memoir necessitates, but it is quite another to describe the thoughts and feelings of those who travel with me. I feel I can only report on or interpret my own journey.
Memory is such a tricky phenomenon that I want to take responsibility only for myself. I’ve accepted that memory is not reality. It does not give an accurate picture of the past, for no one can do that; every memory gets shifted through our unconscious needs. After running family therapy sessions for twenty-five years in my career as a psychologist, I learned that family members do not share memories ; they share events . They have all taken the shards of the past and put them together into either a slightly skewed or drastically different picture. They see and interpret them through their own lens of need. When I did court work as a psychologist, it was interesting to me that people with drastically different interpretations or memories of the same event could all pass a lie-detector test. We all believe our own realities. As Walter Lippmann said, “We are all captives of the picture in our head — our belief that the world we have experienced is the world that really exists.”
I will miss writing my memoirs. I have thoroughly enjoyed sharing my stories with you. I have thousands of letters and emails from readers telling me how much they liked the books. What was more important to me, however, was that so many people said that they shared my experiences, from thinking that the TV was talking to me at age four, to getting expelled from school, to beating up a bully and then paying the price. I was amazed by how many readers also swung on vines over a river. When I admitted to having been a poor judge of character, I received hundreds of letters reminding me that at least I got involved in social change and tried to make a difference. I will miss your support, and thanks for sharing your feelings. I guess we all think that the way we interpret the world is weird, or that we have made mistakes that no one else could ever have made, yet your comments have helped me to see that no matter what I have done or thought, I was never alone.
Catherine McClure Gildiner
January 2014


coming ashore


Part 1
England

CHAPTER 1
hoisting the sails
When we get out of the glass bottle of our ego and when we escape like the squirrels in the cage of our personality and get into the forest again, we shall shiver with cold and fright. But things will happen to us so that we don’t know ourselves. Cool, unlying life will rush in.
— D.H. Lawrence
You can get into a bad situation and have no idea how you got there. I’d done it many times, and I was barely out of my teenage years. One second you can think you’re helping humanity and the next you have to get out of the country.
I’d been kicked out of grade schools, arrested at age thirteen, caused a three-alarm fire — all the normal things for an American girl. However, when the FBI turned up on my doorstep, flashing their identity cards and letting me know I was implicated in insurrection, drugs and murder, I realized this episode had trumped my other escapades by a long shot.
The FBI coming knocking was just the last in a series of several shocks. The civil rights organization I had been in for years no longer wanted white people in the rank and file, so I was summarily kicked out. Laurie, the black poet I had been involved with, turned out to be married with children. Splits, our mutual friend in the movement, turned out to be a drug dealer and was killed behind a building at the University of Buffalo in what remained an unsolved crime.
On Thanksgiving weekend in 1968, I was home visiting from Ohio University when the two agents arrived at my home in Buffalo, New York. Fortunately my mother was at a master bridge lesson, and my father, who was in his sixth year of a brain tumour, thought that the FBI men were selling Hoover vacuums.
One FBI agent, who had a red flushed face, a houndstooth jacket and must have bathed in English Leather, carried legal-size boxes, which he plopped onto the kitchen table, then began leafing through their contents. Each letter I’d written to the poet was individually wrapped and sealed in a plastic cover. There were also mementos of our time together that Laurie must have kept such as playbills, which were carefully inscribed with the date and notes like cool spring evening — magical . I saw the beer coasters on which I’d written rhyming couplets when we were in bars. There was the tiny felt zebra I’d bought him when I was eighteen — I’d written interracial dating on its tag. I was surprised he’d saved it all.
Each of these bags contained a cherished memory for me. There was a pile of bagged, broken dreams on my table. I looked at them bewildered. I wanted to light them as kindling and have a bonfire in honour of my spectacular bad judgment. The profoundly sad part of it was I never saw the bad side of him so I couldn’t use it to hate him. All I could do was sit down beside the mountain of delusion in my kitchen and watch the FBI set up a recording machine that would chronicle my idiocy on a kelly-green record for posterity.
The perspiring FBI man said in a befuddled tone, “All these letters are about books or poems or details of voters’ registration. Did you have any idea what these guys were up to?” The FBI sidekick had a good line that pretty well summed up my life to date: “You can either see the best in everyone or else you can miss the elephant in the room.” I hoped for the former but suspected it was the latter.
When I told Leora, my best friend since junior high school, that the FBI had just turned up on my doorstep, she suggested that I get out of town, pointing out that when there are murders and drugs there are trials. I wouldn’t be leaving much behind: I was an English major along with thousands of the other hapless hayseeds planted at Ohio University and longing to be harvested. I had no idea how I’d become marooned in the breadbasket of America surrounded by people who had the linguistic parlance of Gomer Pyle. Leora reminded me that in my political zeal, or more likely my years of attachment to the wrong male, I had turned down a great opportunity. The previous year I had been offered a spot at Oxford. I wonder how many women turn down stellar offers for a man? Probably more than there are hayseeds in Ohio.
This Oxford opportunity was, appropriately for the ’60s, drug related. I had too many essays to write in too short a time, so I did something I’d never done before — I bought a green