family history – Performance Zen

The call came this morning.

It really wasn’t unexpected. Whenever I get one of those rare calls from my mother, I half expected the reason was to tell me that he had passed. It’s that aching feeling of tension that the ringing phone was going to tell me that he was gone.

My grandfather and I were from very different worlds. He spent too much of his life underground. His knees, shoulders, hearing all showed that.

His world was experienced through the muscles, the bones. His world was wrenched from the earth, shaped by his hands, pulled from the grime of machines.

It was a world of men, a world that is as incomprehensible to me as mine was to him.

I knew he was a ladies man. You know the one: Dashing, attractive with a strong temper and a brooding, unpredictable temperament. The man of mystery that all ladies ask about.

He was faithful to one woman, my grandmother, until the day she died. Their relationship was a war between personalities, that explosive combination of friction and passion that made it one of the strongest bonds I have ever seen.
He mourned her until the day he died. Whenever I visited, the discussion eventually drifted around to his Nettie. That distant look came over his failing blue eyes, the panorama of memory clearly playing on his face.

My grandfather and I shared one thing: The powerful mood swings that were fueled by the same catastrophic failure of our brains to handle the world in a reasonable way.

I found peace through medication. Grandpa started with the numbing power of rye to help take the edge of his mental anguish. And when he was forced to make a choice between the drink and his life, he chose his life and left the drink behind.

He took the restless energy that drove him to drink and channeled it into the furniture he restored.

People from far and wide brought him pieces that were lost, beaten, destroyed. In his hands, their inner beauty was exposed.

Each piece of furniture was a piece of his life that he was atoning for. A mistake that he was trying to repair. A memory he was sharing. Those memories are scattered now, among family, friends, strangers. And with each memory shared, he ensured that he would live on.

His best gift to me was to help me realize that the mistakes of youth can be restored, repaired, but memory reminds us that they can never be undone.

I miss you grandpa. Travel in peace.

William A. Kinnear – 1919-2009.

It’s the places that you go when you’re a child that stay with you for your whole life.
My grandparents lived their entire lives in the Crowsnest Pass. This narrow, sometimes forgotten section of the Rockies emptied itself of its coal to feed the engines of Canada and the world for more than a hundred years.

My grandfathers, and my great-grandfathers, all gave their lives to the dirty work of ripping this black gold from the bowels of the earth. Their bodies showed the scars of a life lived in darkness, straining to pull themselves through another day.

When it got to much, they drank. They fought. They dreamed. Some escaped, some took their own lives, many just survived.

The Alberta side of the Pass — no one who has spent any time in the area ever uses “Crowsnest Pass” — is slowly dying. The generation who mined underground is dying away. The next generation, and the one after them, has taken to tearing the tops off mountains in BC.

Or they just left, like my parents did. They empty carcasses of a life abandoned for economics are still there.

I was back there this summer for the first time since 1999. It has come a long way, but their is an aura, a feeling that the end is near. All the money from Calgary can’t save them. The old, independent life, the hardened bitterness, the brutal economics of coal that bred a people that accepted all into the brotherhood of the black gold, is gone.

There was a bluff outside the Pass community of Coleman, full of what the locals called “black diamonds”. I’m not sure if it was jet (made from extra compression on some of the coal deposits), or obsidian (from the volcanic activity that dominated the area in previous epochs). Sometimes, if the light was right, you could see the light reflecting off the pieces showing through the bluff.

Then, about 15 years ago, in order to straighten the highway and let more huge trailer trucks roar through Coleman on their way to the rest of the world, the bluff was blown away.

Sometimes, in the rush of time, the memories in our blood get blown away, each individual event glistening in the sun one last time, before being scooped up and swept away.

Tag: family history

On the persistence of family – William A Kinnear

Crowsnest Pass: Memories in my blood