By Maria Meindl 

Daily-ness

Space

Mona’s stuff takes up so much space. 

I need so many supplies, so many paper clips and file folders and photographic sleeves. I am always asking for more. The people who work in the library are modest, understated. Everything about Mona – and by extension, about me – seems “too much.” Her saccharine prose embarrasses me, her extravagant punctuation, and all that stuff. There are photographs by the hundreds, overexposed, underexposed, double exposed. Who are all these children?  I’ve never seen them before.

And so many cats, squirrels, racoons, and views of the back porch in every kind of weather. There are empty picture frames, dried-out wads of gum, open jars of Vaseline. There are chains of Christmas lights, broken glasses, sea-shells, half-eaten lollipops, ripped stockings. There are old TV guides, bills (never paid) ads for psychics and astrologers, fundraising materials for a home for retired donkeys to which Mona evidently donated money in the 1960s. Papers are shoved into envelopes, rolled, crumpled, folded, in no order at all. And things are stuck together with Band-aids, masking tape and duct tape, layers and layers of it. Valuable papers emerge from the boxes in irredeemable clumps. I close my eyes, sometimes, and toss a bunch of them in the recycling bin. “Sorry, Mona, I just can’t,” I say aloud. 

At one point, I find an album of valuable correspondence with an empty colostomy bag adhering to the back. After consultation with a librarian, I am sent to see the conservator, who examines the whole album, picks at the bag’s adhesive with his fingernail, and at length says gravely: “I think we’ll just leave that.” It is then I realize that the little round stickers Mona used for years to put things up on her walls and seal letters were, in fact, supplies for the colostomy she had in 1974. It was a very expensive way of sticking things together, given that the stickers cost nearly a hundred dollars a box, and Mona could barely pay her rent. 

Isolated in my little carrel I am ashamed of my need to talk to someone … anyone. I make transparent excuses for trips to the reference desk and linger there long after my questions have been answered. In the washroom, I burst into confessions with women I have never met. One particularly sympathetic librarian seems to meet me in front of the sink at the same time, every Friday afternoon. I wonder if I’m unconsciously choosing her coffee breaks to relieve my bladder, or whether she makes for the washroom whenever she sees me go in. 

I dream that when I get to the library one day there are pictures of me all over the walls. I run around – terribly embarrassed – pulling them down, until I realize that the head librarian is the one responsible for displaying them in the first place. That in fact, the staff here enjoy my flamboyance. Asleep, I revel in their attention like a child at a birthday party. Awake, I continue to be ashamed.

I want to know what to keep, what to throw away. I want to know how to do it. Sometimes, the burden of decision forces me out of my little room. “What should I do with this?” I ask. And the reference librarian looks away as if I have asked for instructions on how to perform the most intimate of tasks. “I’m sure you’ll figure it out,” she says. One day in the hallway, a librarian approaches me breathlessly, hands clasped in front of her chest: “I just wanted to tell you that this is your collection,” she says. “You’re taking a meaningless pile of papers and creating a collection from them. When people a hundred years from now want to know who Mona Gould was, they’re going to find what you have made. Don’t rush. Enjoy it. Take your time.”

Time

I have none. The sorting adds days and days of work to a schedule which was already packed with finishing my degree, looking after my mother, trying to run a business. The years go by: 1999, 2000, 2001. Still the collection is not finished.

I have a friend I have known since we were teenagers. She has moved to China. We email each other daily about family and lovers, writing, work, angst. And about our skin rashes and headaches, our new clothes, our recipes, our leaky sinks and packed schedules and empty bank accounts. Kathryn and I don’t often see each other, when we live in the same city, but at this distance, we become willingly attentive to reports of each other’s daily routines.

Words come to me in the bus, in the shower, while washing dishes or taking out the garbage or trying to work. Valiant little hunks of narrative which I plan to send to Kathryn by email each night: “Tonight I’ll do my laundry. There’s a tea stain in that white turtleneck I just bought. I’m so mad; I never get anything new and of course, that one had to get stained. I put soda water on it right away so I hope the stain will come out.” 

When I left home for university, Mona used to beg me, in letters: “Tell me your daily-ness.” And she writes her daily-ness in notes to her friends. They write back. There are hundreds of these letters, which she has saved as carefully – sometimes more carefully – than the most valuable archives. My sorting at the library is all done in a context of literary merit. These “daily-ness” letters do not have literary merit, nor are their writers, writers. I feel a guilty for cherishing them, poring over them when other things should take more of my time. But they seem like poetry to me. I lose whole afternoons in reading them.

Sunday

Darling;

I somehow seem to be with you today in my mind, a clear indication I should get down to this increasingly arduous task. Once I start I seem to ramble on – but I do an awful lot of pencil sharpening first – breakfast, dishes (mostly yesterday’s) garbage, bed making, etc. etc. etc.

This is just really to reassure you that I really am quite recovered from my recent dentistry and my mouth is pretty much back to normal.

My neighbour G– … came in about 5:30 last night for a glass of sherry and we decided to have a game of scrabble. She put me down by 75 points – had all the Qs and Xs and I had all the Us and Is. I kept having to put things back so I could hope for better luck but it continued to evade me. She puts me properly to shame I can tell you!

…

I make out your letters beautifully with my magnifier – it’s your curlicues that sometimes conflict. Please keep writing. Do I understand you’re writing an autobiography – you should. Cheers!

Lovingly, Marty.

1/12/92

Dear Mona,

…

Hope you are all over your flu by now.

I am well but Lori is back and cleaned my house up Wednesday and Friday so it sparkles again. She took a Christmas vacation so my house hadn’t been cleaned since Thanksgiving.

Talked with Doug [junior] on the phone this afternoon and they are all well. The children found out what snow looks like. They never had any in Palo Alto. Quite a change to move to Wisconsin in December.

Love, Doug

I liked your poem.

Hi Mona –

The Jay’s beat Kansas City 1-0 it’s 2 A.M. & raining!!!

Love, Dora 

In these boxes, there’s a whole lifetime’s effort to preserve daily-ness. To wrest some kind of narrative from the inarticulate crush of Things. I love that these letters were written twenty, thirty, sometimes fifty years ago. I love that Mona has more than fifty years of correspondence from some people, filled with nothing but quotidian details.

My letters to Kathryn are paper-less. And they get to her instantly, across thousands of miles. Sometimes I’m sitting in front of the computer at ten a.m. and get a reply right away. It’s light here, dark there. I suggest that Kathryn collect her notes in a book. She asks me to print them up and store them for her. Offended, I refuse. I don’t have time. And I am doing enough sorting. 

Sorting

It’s like writing. Like editing. Sitting with all this paraphernalia, sifting it, piling it, reading it over again and again until you can feel the structure emerge, the skeleton beneath the skin. And, like writing and editing, it’s painful. There is so much activity in the mind while the body must remain still. My attention dulls, wanders off, and has to be wrenched forcibly back again. I sink into depression from pure lack of oxygen.

Friday is my library day. Each week, I take the elevator down to the second basement to pick up a library cart full of Mona’s papers. The cart bears the cardboard box I am currently sorting, along with a stack of partially completed files. I take the cart upstairs to “my” carrel and close the door. From the box, I start taking out papers. I form rough piles on the table. Prose: typed. Poetry: typed. Poetry: holographic. Holographic notes and prose. Then there are Print Appearances, Business Correspondence, Personal Correspondence, Radio Scripts, Photographs. Before long, the piles are overlapping. Sometimes, pure impatience causes me to grab a huge handful, more than I know what to do with. Sometimes I sit with a single page in my hand, unable to make the simple decision of where to set it down. 

Focus eludes me. My attention skitters this way and that. I put something on a pile and instantly forget where I’ve put it. I can’t remember which pile is which. The room itself seems to come alive, in a mischievous and none-too-friendly way. If I notice a theme – say, correspondence with neighbours – I begin a file on the top of the cart. Any attempt to put these files in order seems fruitless, so I reconcile myself to remembering approximately where in the stack each file was, and leafing through the stack time and time again until I find the right one. Sometimes, I think of all the boxes that remain in the basement and I feel so overwhelmed I lose my place. Then I have to put the day’s papers back in the box and start again. And this is just the first stage of the process. Eventually, it all needs to be put in chronological order. I try not to think about that.

As I go, I make rough notes of everything. I try to type them up in the form of a table on Friday evenings, but most of the time, I don’t get the chance. Most of the pages are in my scrawling handwriting. Sometimes, I forget to take a pen or pencil and have to scrounge one off the tables or borrow one from a weary librarian. It is both stultifyingly dull, and impossibly difficult, at once.

So many things have to be done over and over again. I get a package of the plastic envelopes called “sleeves” to put pictures in. I put all the long pictures into short sleeves, leaving them perilously sticking out at one end. Then I discover there are longer sleeves to be had. And so I have to transfer the photos into the longer ones. But I have marked names on the short sleeves in pen, and so must cross off my labels, leaving a mess of scribbling. The ink on the sleeves smudges my hands. In the process, the sleeves themselves become dirty. They are crunchy with little flecks of dust.

Dust

At the end of each day I ceremoniously gather a little pile of dust and cat hair from the counter in the study carrel with a wet paper towel, sweep it onto my hand and throw it in the garbage. The dust sat in Mona’s various apartments and went into the boxes when she moved, settled on top of other dust from other apartments and travelled with her to her next place. The dust is, is fact, flecks of Mona’s skin. Molecules of Mona surround me in the study carrel. Her familiar perfume is on my hands when I leave the place. Sometimes, I find one of Mona’s white hairs. Sometimes, I find one of my own white hairs.

•  Maria Meindl’s essays, poetry and fiction have appeared in numerous journals including The Literary Review of Canada, Descant, Musicworks and Queen Street Quarterly. She has made two series for CBC Radio’s Ideas: Parent Care (2003), and Remembering Polio (2007). Maria is one of the organizers of Draft, a quarterly reading series now in its fourth season which features new and unpublished work by established and emerging writers. A Feldenkrais practitioner, she teaches movement and writing classes in the east end of Toronto. The excerpt is from her biography of her grandmother, the poet and broadcaster Mona McTavish Gould (1908-1999).