The upward loop

 Looking at family histories

It’s a source of pride to me that I can bake a batch of ginger molasses cookies, put them all in the oven, and have the mess cleaned up in about an hour. This recipe, clipped from The Globe and Mail years ago, makes the best cookies. They are always moist and perfectly spiced and they bake beautifully. They are best in the first minutes after they come out of the oven, when they are still soft and gooey. My great-grandma’s chocolate chip cookies used to be my go-to whenever I baked, but I found going out to buy the chocolate chips an unappetizing hassle. I’ve even forgotten the exact time they take to bake. I like to bake on a whim and hustle together the recipe. I’m in it for the satisfaction of having it done and for the pleasuring of seeing other people enjoy what I’ve made. Before parties or events, I am always considering: can I spare an hour? But everyone knows about the recipe now! It’s my signature, my tic that is charming at first but may prove tiresome. That’s the joy, too. Having a groove, a plan that always works, is comforting. So much of what I do is a new endeavour. Reading and writing and connecting with people cannot be done well in the space of an hour and is never rehearsed to a whim.  

When I bake around Christmas time, I think about my grandma and my aunt. My aunt, one of many, always sends my family a tin of assorted cookies. Shortbread, peanut butter, plain ol’ sugar, little cookies with jam in them, cookies dipped in chocolate, and my mainstay: ginger molasses. I make the ginger molasses cookie better; it must be the recipe. But I’ve always waited on this tin, produced yearly for me and for the other offshoot branches of my family. All these instructions, maybe memorized by now, are followed by my aunt again and again. It must take a day of baking, at least. I never say “thank you” for this gift and if I did, I would not be thankful enough. My aunt was a librarian before retiring, a thankless, but necessary labour. My grandma is closer to my family on Christmas. Even as she reaches her 90s, she manages to bring a tray of date cake, butter tarts, and who-knows-what-else to our house. Last winter, I didn’t speak with my grandma much. I remember her striking me a terribly distant glance at a Christmas party. I think I was trying to say “thank you” for something. I’m trying to show more care this year, but age divides us. Still, I check in as much as I feel space between us.  

I never met my great-grandmother. I have heard amazing things about her: she was a columnist in a paper and a weird, misremembered fragment of recollection tells me she was born with a tail. Her chocolate chip cookie recipe is collected in a box of flashcards, now stuffed with newspaper clippings and printed pages of food websites, which have gone greasy and yellow from use. My grandma and her mother put these together over the years and passed them down to my mom, to me. My grandma survived the Great Depression, the Dust Bowl, and the Salvation Army. She saw the land go up in the wind and the horses set free, and ate huge amounts of salt cod from Newfoundland, which she still can’t stand to this day. She can’t stand much now, not lactose nor too much salt. Such is age. The only recipe in that box my mom is really wedded to is snickerdoodle. It is a cookie made without egg, coming from a time when eggs could not be wasted on a whim. It is dry and weightless and does not keep well at all. My mom loves it. She does not reach for it often, but she still reaches. My grandma must have learned it from my great-grandmother.  

I remember one Christmas where grandma recalled the gift that she and her brother made for the woman who, at least sometimes, fed them snickerdoodle. It is a simple string of words full of sweet sentiment, which is fabulously dustbowl. The two children made a new wooden spoon for their mom. They carved it themselves, snuck outside when she wouldn’t notice, and hid it in the snow before coming back for bed. The way she told it, you could just see their little hands at work and the joy which they imagined appearing on their mother’s face on Christmas day. This piece makes the family history fit together so nicely. You can see the kitchen tools and the recipes, coming down through time, uniting these moments, and taking us from Saskatchewan to Toronto, from poverty to prosperity in a tumultuous century. But I distrust the sentiment at work in family history. I see it over and over. I was at a slam poetry show and heard a wonderfully constructed poem about a camera, a pastime passed from an Albertan grandfather, to father, to son. It was tragic, cyclical, and satisfying. The frame of this lens was a flashpoint for generational connection seen through the gaze of child looking back. The poet’s voice wavered as he described his aging family member. Again, age distances, but the connection we crave is still possible in these fetishes of familial unity. But whose hands made that digital camera? Whose land was blown out by the winds of the Dust Bowl and who was photographed for these memories to take shape? Here, the story has no answers. These questions are beside the point.  

My great or great-great-grandfather, so I’m told, was a brick layer. There is some mark of his hand in Toronto, but I’m not sure where. My grandfather was a commercial baker and a pilot in the Second World War. My father played the clarinet at the Royal Conservatory and told me not to get into the arts. It is a fine old building, that Royal Conservatory, all those old beautiful red bricks. And this is the shape of a white, middle-class family history. The loop leads us back to home but spirals upwards. We have exited the Old World, the history which resolves into a stable pattern of farming, dying, and farming, to enter the New, our forward struggle. Some people have gotten farther than my family, probably because they didn’t have to clear the stumbling block of farming the land on this side of the sea.  

Now I am left to try and make sense of this knot and make use of these tidy stories. I know I am thinking these things, writing them here because my future is more unclear than that of my parents. I am promised the same thing as them: upward movement—but this is not a guaranteed deal. I don’t know if I’ll have the same mobility as my parents. I don’t know what kind of future I’m to inherit. This is what makes me more likely to see my family stories for what they are: fetishes of middle-class settler identity. They don’t make for comfortable hand-me-downs. 

The sentiment of my stories disguises ignorance, but knowledge alone is no solution for the terrors of history. I’m left with a choice which is no choice at all. Choosing whether to believe in a myth or not will only change the degree of discomfort I feel in occupying this strange position of injustice. I can never fully extricate myself from the spiderweb of violence that is settler colonialism, but I can try to scrape together some value from my family history. I did not survive the Dust Bowl or the World Wars. But I bake cookies. I take after remarkable women whom nobody has appreciated enough. This, I think, should satisfy me, no matter my inheritance.