Abstract Expressionist Clyfford Still preferred vertical compositions over horizontal. He believed verticality was an expression of being alive. He once commented on his home of the Canadian Prairies: “When there were snowstorms, you either stood up and lived or laid down and died.”
I am nine years old. My dad has been teaching me how to analyze art. He teaches me to look at line, shape, colour. I am wrapping my mind around words like composition and direction. I practice these skills on every piece of art I find in my line of sight.
I am at my grandparents’ house. I call them Baba and Papa. I am standing on their striped, polyester couch, staring at a painting that hangs on their wall. I see wispy wheat and thin clouds dragged across a pale blue sky. A single tree stands just off of center. A focal point.
“We picked that up from a Value Village.” Baba has been watching me from the kitchen as she peels carrots. “I can’t stand the tree.”
“Why?” I ask.
“Why would any good farmer leave a tree in the middle of their field?”
I bring my eyes close to the painting to look at the brushstrokes of the brown tree. They run vertically. “Why did you get it then?”
“Papa wanted it.”
“If I didn’t know it was January, I would think the sap was about to run.” My dad is standing with his eyes closed, face pointed towards the blue sky, inhaling, sniffing like a dog. He pauses and I know he is thinking about his own father and the sap they turned to thick brown sugar, and I smile. I turn to observe the property and I notice a heap of scrap metal, wooden beams and plexiglass.
Papa and Baba enjoying homemade maple syrup
“I just know that the second I throw it away I’ll find myself looking for it. ‘Where’s that little bugger?’ I’ll ask myself,” my grandfather would have said about the pile of scraps. This time, I don’t smile. Growing up in a family of dreamers I’ve learned by now that leftover ideas, tossed into the wish pile like a penny in a fountain, will always remain there. When you wish on a dandelion the seeds land exactly where they’re supposed to. Unlike a dandelion seed, these dreams are too heavy, the wind can’t take them far. So, the pile of discarded dreams lays on the driveway. Growing, heaping over, until the dreams become your reality and reality becomes a dream.
Dad examines the materials, and I see Papa peeking through his eyes. What dreams could this wood inspire? This metal? This imprint left behind by a missing horseshoe?
Horses.
His dad stayed in the cart with the horses when they left behind another home, dreaming the next would be better.
“They’re our friends too.” Papa said, referring to the way his father described the animals.
They had spent every cent to pay for six tickets. Unable to afford a seventh, Papa’s father decided to stay in the train cars with the horses.
He spent each evening in their rickety barn feeding, grooming and talking with the horses, whispering chewed up stories of the Old Country he refused to talk about, not even to his wife.
Although I believed that Papa’s father saw animals as his friends, I believe even more that in the enclosed and stale animal cars of the train he didn’t have to watch another attempt at safety, another world he called Home, slip through his fingers.
In a video on a tape cassette, you can find me holding a microphone. I am eight years old, standing next to Papa who sits on his workbench. My dad and I had filled the background with pictures of the Canadian Prairies and toy horses. I pick at blue sparkles on my shirt and ask Papa, “Are you really a cowboy?” Even from a distance and through the screen, you can see the twinkle in his eyes.
At Papa’s funeral, I refused to look at the body laying the casket. Everyone talked about how it did not look like him. I knew that would be the case. I have him in my dreams, anyway. In my dreams he can stand up.
Dad was chosen to read the eulogy. In a voice I had never heard before, something guttural and thick, he tells the story of Papa’s life.
He had piercing blue eyes and loved his sharp tongued, quick-witted wife for over sixty years. Papa loved animals, denim shirts, rum and cokes, and reading books. He lost his father when he was young and had to learn how to show affection to his own kids. My aunts and uncles say they felt Papa’s love in knowing what he sacrificed for them. He worked hard. He never stopped working.
Towards the end, Papa would wake up with his feet on an ice rink. In his dreams he was skating. Even when his legs had stopped working, in his dreams they carried him like a bullet, like a prairie falcon, on the ice like they used to when he played hockey for De La Salle College or free skated at Little Switzerland ice rink in Scarborough. “It’s like they forget they don’t work,” he told me with a chuckle. “Funny things, these feet of mine.” In the mornings, he took a step, a glide, until he fell. But for a moment, he was on the rink of his youth.
On my cellphone, there is a recording of the last time I interviewed Papa. I was 17 and he was 86. Instead of cowboys and his childhood, this time I asked him about what he still dreamt of doing.
“Where would you go, if you could go anywhere in the world?”
He points up.
“Heaven?”
“No, outer space.”
Dad, are you dreaming about your father’s ears again?
Papa’s ears got bigger as he got older. “All men’s do,” Dad says hopefully. He wants big ears too. Bigger ears can hear more of the world, absorb more vibrations; they provide more space for churning thoughts in the mind. Dad wants big ears because he wants to be as wise as his father was.
My sister told a story at Papa’s funeral. “One day I had a temper tantrum at Baba and Papa’s. I was crying and fussing, and Baba was yelling at me to stop,” There is a weak chuckle in the pews. “She flew out of the screen door as I cried face down on the carpet. When she returned, she had Papa close behind her. I was scared. Papa had never been mad at me before.” I hear my dad cough. My sister continues. “He picked me up and carried me to the couch. He held me as I cried and kicked until I fell asleep on his chest. The two of us slept until Baba woke us up for dinner. That was the best nap I have ever had.”
Baba had taken a picture of the two of them sleeping. They are laying down on the striped, polyester couch. You can see my sister’s mop of white-blonde hair tucked under Papa’s chin. He holds her tight in his meaty hand. Her nose is scrunched, his mouth parted slightly.
For all of these years I have been dreaming of a Prairie tree. Papa was a better farmer than that; he would have never left a tree standing in the middle of his field. When Papa learned how to cut down his tree, he lay down on the ground with it. Laying down is not always an acceptance of defeat. I wish my grandfather would have recognized this sooner.
Now, when I think of him, I see him holding my little sister. He recognized the same restlessness in her. He knew the remedy. I seek solace in imagining Papa resting in the shade of an Ontario forest. He is lying down, far away from the Prairies. This, I can dream about.
