on the maternal side

When I first got to know my mother she was a thirty-two-year-old infant.

Not stupid, mind you, just uninformed. Like me when no one had told me what was really going on under Niagara, or like how I didn’t know I would live to be a hundred-and-four and find myself lecturing you young imbeciles.

She was a swimmer but her cold-water training in a failed bid to be the first to cross Lake Ontario was still decades away. Her high-school class of boys wiped out in the boys “war” of the 1940s for reasons best known to the handlers so there weren’t many men and almost past her prime she would marry my much younger father. If you need a “was” in front of “wiped” to make that last fragment a sentence, here’s one: was. But I prefer it as is without the was.

As I said, she was a baby. Not even a babe-in-arms at this point in 1922, if any. We shed the model on June 10, 1922, a hundred and four odd years ago. I’ve never been born but for the armed guards at borders I’ll play along.

I didn’t learn these basic facts of how old I am body-wise till I common-law’d with a Niagara night nurse and her de-clawed cat a few years back. How did I not know the basics until then? The same way you morons still don’t know. Not knowing the basic facts of life with babies and Tartaria—these uninformed aspects of our lives mirror each other. Both demand a sort of weaning. If mammary serves, I have a PhD in seventeenth-century American history and literature (David Ker Thor…Princeton English Department 1997) so sit down and take your talkin-to. Memory. Why, what’d I say?

I’m just going to tell you the basic truths of my life and you can go off and embellish them on your own. Or pretend I’m just joking, like how I admitted I was born with a silver spoon in my mouth and that’s why Ma had the C-section. [I think I’ve mentioned to Aunt Edith’s reader before that Aunt Edith shouldn’t really be listening to these alternative histories. Covering 104 years in five minutes is asking too much.] If you think I’m “just” doing metaphor here, you be you, as they say: dress up the tale with your own set of preconceptions to match your mental decor.

It all happened just like I’m saying here.

Ma at the time I got to know her was a baby who was about to triple in size. This post-historic meet-up with Ma is the central organizing principle of my mis-remembered Toronto. Damn am I ever a good writer. And who wasn’t actively mis-remembering even as they put their English-built boots on the ground in that bizarro place? 1922, if that’s even a real date. Folks in those days sending yer-not-gunna-believe-this letters back to the mother country and the censors laughing and saying that’s true and throwing the letters overboard.

Ma and me. The two of us [were] camped out in an Eaton’s model. Or maybe Sears. Anyway, she was an Irish girl, a basic pleasure model as they say in Bladerunner, and she made good money posing for one of the Tartarian quasi-mafia mongers that had sprung up at the turn of the century in N’Am [North America] with vast stockpiles of high-end Tartarian tat and no one to sell it to. My takeaway with having a model in the gene pool used to be that if I’d have been a girl I’d have been hot. But I grew up. Up’s best, considering the options. Up I grew. Six-four anyway, at least by the time I was in my fifties.

Ma and me, camped out in an Eaton’s model. 1922. Just the facts, m’am. Just the m’am facts.

With all that loot, half of it the sort of stuff they couldn’t even understand let alone design, the mongeria needed some hot [Irish] babes to encourage buyers. And what buyers? Also: what buyers! A decade or two into this unholy antiquamongering there were still whole castles piled up with stuff the feds didn’t have time to sequester, and there were buyers galore and they all needed to be, I don’t know, educated I guess. I mean just imagine.

A swarm of immigrants trudging around outrageously mis-named and broken castle cities in mud up to their hocks. The cities, the people, the horses. Hocks. You clean the mud out of the basements and more seeps in. In this particular city, behold the rich migrating towards the higher stuff above most of the mud, up along St. Clair where Casa Loma still is. Supposedly my dad’s dad was friends with the “builder” of that, lol. That modern tool Michael Ondaatje [spelling? not gonna ask the robot] getting good cash towards the end of the last century writing In the Skin of a Lion or something as if modern Torontonians knew how to build a bridge over the Don or a castle on the water used to get drinking water. There’s always going to be cash for writing false histories. Don’t get me started. The only part of that book that’s true is the fiction. Don’t—I said this—don’t get me started.

“Toronto.” Like that’s a real name.

The feds arranged some fires and were able to knock some of the domes off but everything still looked effulgent in 1922, even with the wholesale defenestration. For a while, no windows just meant more light could come in. Cue the Leonard Cohen singing about David dancing naked before the Lord and how the hallelujah light comes in. But some douche eventually invented plywood and some other douche discovered you could make cheap bricks from the mud in the Don Valley and the city would close in on itself. Still, when Ma was a girl in her forties the ancient streetcars were still running wherever the tracks could be cleared of mud.

1922!

The people: dirty socks and clean top-hats and a survivor’s eye for the future.

The buildings: schematizing the same principle. For bathos, mud. For sublimity, upper levels with an inexplicable beauty. Incarnation done as spoof. Enlightenment is getting your windows knocked out and you remember who I Am. I’m not in my hundreds, I Am eternal. So take that, Abraham, you weirdo. Before Abraham: I Am. The am-rhyme of Jesus and Sam I-Am. The city sort of acting incarnation out. 1920s Toronto, here with 1920s spelled correctly without the apostrophe. 1920s Toronto as a basic diagram of eternity squished into the mud. As, not was. Learn a bit of writing technique—it’ll do you lot a bit of good.

And through this whole shitshow here’s Ma and me in the incarnatory tub feeling the vibe. Undulate! That winter of ‘21 [if any] it was the three of us all pressed in together. I’m talking about the maternal side here. Two ladies and a Dave. Dave vibratory. Like that. That’s how innocence works. I couldn’t touch the model, but I could feel her.

In my forties or fifties—junior high anyway—I was to become a bell ringer at the Fay School in Southborough Massachusetts. I’ll just throw that in here as a bonus fact for any Tartarian bell folks out there.

Toronto!

Man? The model’s man had a high-value model lady in those days (hubba hubba) and he was posing as an architect pretending to not be retrofitting the castles with fake pedigrees. His specialty in cahoots with one of the mobs was designating some of the castles as “schools” and doing drawings of them to pretend he’d designed them. Hey, don’t judge till you’ve walked a dirty Toronto mile in his wet socks.

Here’s me growing up in Massachusetts as American as Apple product but somehow destiny would yank me—yanks are comin’!—back to this place in my nineties and my son in his…I don’t…fifties or something would go to high school at Toronto’s Northern, a heavily stone-arched structure with the stripped antiquatech towers of antiquity and I’d tell him on the teletype machine just this winter that I found an ancient castle in Sarnia last fall, a castle posing as a bank posing as a coffee place and he never talked to me again. He prefers the maternal side, where his mother doesn’t plague him with such notions.

Will that hold you lot for now?

—dave

The author currently lives in the northern “British” part of Columbia at latitude 54.

Picture topside shows me when I had just turned 104. I was pretending to jump into Niagara Falls with a barrel. There was a strong wind coming upward from the Tartarian tunnels and the aqua-vortex and I actually needed to hold the barrel with one hand. If you just look at my shadow it’s kind’v funny.

Below, my grandfather’s Toronto diary from 1926. Men as scribes for the maternal scene.