Home Free by Marni Jackson

Author:Marni Jackson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ebook, book
ISBN: 9780887626166
Publisher: Thomas Allen Publishers
Published: 2010-10-12T04:00:00+00:00

The Degree

CONVOCATION at McGill takes place under white tents, on the green lawns of the downtown campus, at the end of May. The weather can still be raw, which it was the weekend we attended. But after six years of ambivalence about university and a great deal of hard work Casey had earned his degree in history, and I thought it was something worth celebrating. Even if no one else in the family did.

Brian had spent the last few weeks in France, reporting from the Cannes Film Festival; he had just arrived back, jet-lagged and exhausted. In any case, ritual gatherings and convocations hold little appeal for him. He had skipped his own graduation, in fact. As for Casey,when I phoned him earlier to talk about plans, he wasn’t sure he wanted to go to the ceremony, or indeed what the point of it was.

Was I going to have to use a forklift to get everyone mobilized— and for what? Once again, I felt like I was singlehandedly trying to create a “family moment” in a vacuum. The train ride to Montreal with my semi-comatose husband was not very festive. There was no “Remember when he was in Miss Archer’s class and made that clever bridge out of toothpicks?”

But our ragged clan did assemble, on an overcast day with a cold wind that shivered the blossoms on the trees. As soon as we arrived in Montreal, Brian came down with a fever and a sore throat. He closed the curtains in our lovely hotel room and crawled under the covers. Casey and I had dinner in a restaurant down the street. The next day Brian announced that he was too sick to attend the ceremonies. “Being sick never kept you from showing up for band gigs,” I reminded him meanly. This father-and-son dismissal of social ritual (as I primly thought of it) was wearing thin. It also made me feel like the boring CEO of the family, trying to wrangle everyone into the stockholders’meeting.

But fine, I said, you stay in bed. No, I insist. I’ll go sit through the entire alphabet by myself. From under the covers, Brian replied that he’d try to show up later.

Casey Burke Marley Johnson. (Yes, that Bob Marley. No wonder he didn’t want to go to dental college.) I calculated that the Js would arrive roughly in the middle of several hours spent sitting on hard folding chairs in an unheated tent, watching polished young people, many going on to post-grad work in lucrative fields of study, cross the stage in their book-shaped caps and Oxonian robes.

I reached the campus in good time, I thought, only to discover that more diligent families had staked out their seats near the stage hours earlier. I found an empty chair toward the back and reserved it with my coat. Then I went behind the tent and followed the long serpentine line of grads until I spotted Casey, in his bachelor robe with the white fur around the hood (the “arts” fur) and a tasselled cap perched on his springy hair.

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