Finding Again the World by John Metcalf

Author:John Metcalf
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Biblioasis
Published: 2018-10-04T19:17:27+00:00

THE YEARS IN EXILE

Although it is comfortable, I do not like this chair. I do not like its aluminum and plastic. The aluminum corrodes, leaving a roughness on the arms and legs like white rust or fungus. I liked the chairs stacked in the summer house when I was ten, deckchairs made of striped canvas and wood. But I am an old man; I am allowed to be crotchety.

By the side of my chair in the border are some blue and white petunias. They remind me, though the shade is different, of my youngest grandson’s blue and white running shoes, Adidas I believe he calls them. They are one of this year’s fads. He wears them to classes at the so-called college he attends. But I must not get excited.

It is one of her days. The voice of the vacuum cleaner is heard in the land. But I should not complain. I have my room, my personal things, the few books I still care to have about me. Before moving here, life was becoming difficult; the long hill up to the shopping centre for supplies I neither wished to cook nor eat, sheets, the silence broken only by the hum and shudder of the fridge.

Strange that this daughter of my first marriage, a child of whom I saw so little, should be the one who urged this home upon me. Or not so strange perhaps. I am old enough to know that we do not know what needs compel us.

The cartons were mentioned again this morning, those in my room and those in the basement. She calls them “clutter,” and perhaps she is right. The papers are promised to Queen’s University but I cannot bring myself to sort through years of manuscript and letters from dead friends. Much of the order of things I couldn’t remember and it is a task which smacks too much of some finality.

I am supposed to be resting today, for this evening a man is coming to interview me for some literary journal or review. Or was it a thesis? I forget. They come quite often, young men with tape recorders and notebooks. They talk of my novels and stories, ascribe influences I have never read, read criticism to me. I nod and comment if I understand them. I am not an intellectual; I am not even particularly intelligent. I am content to sit in my aluminum chair and stare at the weeping-willow tree in the next-door garden.

I have lived in Canada for sixty-one years covered now with honours yet in my reveries the last half century fades, the books, the marriages, the children, and the friends. I find myself dwelling more and more on my childhood years in England, the years when I was nine and ten. My mind is full of pictures.

My sleeplessness, the insistence of the pictures, are familiar signs. Were I younger, I would be making notes and outlines, drinking midnight coffee. But I will not write again. I am

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