Excerpt: Birthday

~~~

After they leave, Jake yawns, feeling the effect of so much fresh air, and goes up to his room early. Peter is absorbed with a birthday book. I sit in the kitchen, where the stove fire is making feeble snaps, slowly dying. I can see my reflection in the window as I phone my brother in Rhode Island. He's a professional guitarist. He and his wife, a mandolinist, have produced many CDs. Like Peter with his exhibitions, they make me feel inadequate. I'm the one member of the family who has produced nothing. Nothing to show, thus a failure.

"Hi, Mark."

"Hey!"

I tell him about the good day we've just had. He responds, a yearning note in his voice. He loves our northern farm. We perceive each other's lives with a degree of romance.

"I feel..." It's hard. We don't talk about feelings. We've been taught to keep them to ourselves.

Lately childhood memories spin in my mind. I want to make them come alive, like objects stored in boxes: take them out, dust them off, put them to use. Who were they, really, those remote, remembered people: grandparents, great-aunts, teachers? The gigantic parents of infancy? I pull memories towards me, dim as faded sketches.

"Do you remember the time Mum told us that Dad had been in a car accident? It was a freezing cold night in winter. You and I were in the living room. I can see the black, frosted windowpanes. She was terrified."

"No," he says. He's a kind person and doesn't like to disagree. But that is not how it was. "He wasn't in an accident. He was just late."

"But I was terrified. I cried and cried. I had a recurrent dream, for years, that he was killed."

"Really."

We exchange other stories. He explores his memories hesitantly, like a person speaking in a foreign language.

Can he explain a memory of fire sirens in the night? The tattooed man in the guest-room bed? He's surprised by my questions. Memory has not yet haunted him, even though he's older than I am. He's so busy, engaged in life. Their children are younger than Jake. He doesn't seem to know what it's like to be approaching change, to feel stopped or paused.

"This is what I really want to know."

"Okay, what."

"Why do you play the guitar?"

He's silent. He is not self-analytical.

"Is it because you need to practise for performances?"

"No," he says instantly. He sounds shocked. "Not at all. I hear music in my head, constantly. I go around all day with music in my head. I play because I have to. I have to. If I can't sleep, I get up and go down to the living room. I put on that lamp with the pink shade. It makes a low, soft light. I make tea. Sometimes I sit for hours playing quietly. So I won't wake the family."

"What do you play?"

"Anything. Something we're working on. Something I'm making up."

When he plays, his face is remote with concentration. His mouth is taut, stern, but his eyes are compassionate.

After we say goodbye, I sit in the chair by the stove. His guitar is his voice. Music is not what he does: it is who he is.

~~~

November 16, 1994: P's birthday yesterday. A good day. I need to find clarity inside myself. I need to stop allowing other people, or circumstances, to set my agenda. I must not care about what people think -- either of me or of what I do. I need to find the strength to do what I want to do. I am in the habit of smothering myself, hiding, as if who I am is somehow shameful. I thought, after talking to my brother last night: I don't have to write. No one is making me. No one cares. And this was an enormous relief to me. Then, this morning, when I came to my desk I felt open, receptive, as if life, words, could pour through me. I wrote because I had to -- because I wanted to.

From the hardcover edition.

Page 2 of 2

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Excerpted from Edge Seasons: A Midlife Year by Beth Powning. Copyright 2005 by Beth Powning. Excerpted by permission of Knopf Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.