Writing Myself Out

This is another entry for my Christmas journal, in response to the Dec. 6 prompt — tell “a tale of two Christmases”.

On Dec. 22, 1989, my parents got a shocking phone call: my father’s father, my Grandpa Pauls, was dead. He was 83 years old, but the most part in fine health, aside from some heart trouble. That evening, he was driving himself home from an optometry appointment in Saskatoon, approximately half an hour away from his home in Rosthern, Saskatchewan. At that appointment, Grandpa was given some eye drops, which may have affected his vision when he was on the road. It was about 6 p.m., and dark, when he came upon an accident that had just occured — two cars had smashed into each other, and one of them was sprawled across the road. There were no lights, and the police had not arrived yet. My dad says it appears that Grandpa never saw the car sprawled across the road, and ran directly into it. The impact sent his car bouncing backwards into the ditch, where it stopped. The hood was smashed in, but not much else; so either he had already slowed down after seeing the car late, or he wasn’t travelling that fast. He was still sitting in his car when the police arrived, and when the officer asked him if he was hurt, Grandpa said he thought he was okay. The officer told him to stay in the car until the ambulance arrived. By the time the ambulance actually arrived, though, he was already unconscious, and although they took him into the hospital in Saskatoon, he never regained consciousness. They concluded that he died of shock, which resulted from the accident, rather than from injuries sustained in the accident.

I was 16, but I remember very little of the actual events that followed, other than that while the adults dealt with the unexpected arrangements, my younger brother and I went in my cousin’s boyfriend’s car to see “Back to the Future 2”, which was then playing in the theatres, and that we had to cancel our family’s tickets to the annual Christmas play at the Globe Theatre in Regina, which was “Winnie the Pooh” that year. It sounds so self-centered in retrospect, for those to be the details I remember. I don’t remember the actual funeral, just the photo of my grandpa in his coffin, and I wonder now what it was like for my dad and his sister Rosemary (my auntie Rosie), or for their mother – in her 96 years, my Grandma Pauls never learned to drive, and she had already lost her youngest son, Alvin, to a collision with a drunk driver when he was just 22.

Now, Grandpa Pauls was for many years the choir director at his community church. I also like to sing, and, in fact, the word “Carmen” means “song” and is used in Latin liturgical situations – the “Carmen Christi” is “a hymn to Christ”.

In 1998, I was in the La Ronge community choir for our church’s Christmas cantata. I don’t recall if I was assigned a choir robe or just picked the one that fit me, but I believe it was after the service that I happened to notice the label inside this robe that had been loaned to our church that year. In clear block printing, the label read “JOHN A. PAULS” – my grandfather’s name.

My Grandpa labeled EVERYTHING, from his bookshelves to his clothes, often with Dymo tape. He was also a small man, about my height – 5’3″, maybe 5’4”. The robes had been donated by his church to the Rosthern Junior College (where he had served as a teacher and as principal), and then when someone from La Ronge with a Rosthern connection needed choir robes, that was where they came from.

Like the flamboyant woman after whom Bizet’s opera is named, I am a bit of a gypsy – and so was my grandfather, who emigrated from Russia, alone, at the age of 20. Nearly 70 years later, I was the first person in our family to see that country. I have his nose and his height, a bit of his leadership skills and his compassion for others, and his passion for photography (no family Christmas gathering would have been complete without a slideshow of family photos – the scent of slide film and the click and hum of the projector are burned into my subconscious) and for writing (I know of both poetry and a personal memoir). He was my Chinese checkers partner, a fellow lover of books, and, I believe, a kindred spirit.

Merry Christmas, Grandpa –- I bet the choir concerts are amazing up there.

Joy to the world, the Lord is come!
Let earth receive her King;
Let every heart prepare Him room,
And Heaven and nature sing,
And Heaven and nature sing,
And Heaven, and Heaven, and nature sing.