"Ashes to Ashes

Dust to Dust..."

my grandma used to say: "Ashes to Ashes, Dust to Dust...there's someone comin or goin under your bed so you'd best get in there and vacuum!"

Funny ashes memories have been swirling around in my head the last couple of days as a direct result of a conversation I had with my boss on Friday night. (and the retelling of these stories with Kim this morning over brunch)

My boss' father is passing away. He's doing so with all the dignity that his ex-wife and daughter can provide for him and in his moments of lucidity they have had those deep meaningful conversations that seem to happen prior to death ...but likely should have happened all their lives (but I digress)

In our conversation after work on Friday she mentioned that they'd had a conversation about cremation and that was the way that he wanted to be "handled" after his death. Speaking of this prompted her to tell me a story about her uncle who came to Canada from the UK during the war for a visit and passed away while here. The Canadian branch of the family had the uncle cremated and sent the uncle's ashes back to the UK for burial.

As they were sending the package along with a letter during a time when the UK was rationing they also sent some staples like flour and sugar and coffee along as well. Two unfortunate things happened during the transport of that box to the UK. The first being that the letter was somehow separated from the box and arrived several weeks after the package. And sadly both the package of flour and the package of ashes broke open mingling the two. When the package arrived at it's UK destination the recipients weren't aware that the uncle's remains were included in that package and as flour wasn't bleached in those days and it all looked the same - so they celebrated by baking a cake.

It was only weeks later when the letter arrived that the cake baker was heard to say - "I wondered what was wrong with that flour...I couldn't get that cake to rise at all!"

When I was a child my family moved fairly often from community to community to facilitate my fadder's career as an Ontario Provincial Police Officer. The first and most traumatic of those moves for me, was from Perth On, where I'd spent the first 9 years of my life and my bother and blister were born, to Kenora On...one of the most westerly communities in Ontario.

Not only was I traumatized by the move (no matter how often the VOD insisted that it was "an adventure") but when we arrived in Kenora the government house that we were to move into wasn't finished so our stuff went into storage and we spent what was to be 3 mths, but quickly turned into 6 and then 9 mths in a rented, furnished home of an elderly scion of the community who had gone away for the winter.

This house was diametrically the opposite to what a young woman of 9 was interested in. It was dark, and antique and filled to the brim with things we shouldn't or couldn't touch as the VOD was desperate to leave the house in some semblance of condition when we moved out and while she had her hands full with me, she also had 2 toddlers running about and getting into everything as toddlers will.

I began to act out. I hated the neighbourhood, the school, the people just everything and so began my career as a hellion. My fadder's position in the OPP at the time was that of Traffic Safety Coordinator for all of NWOn (which is a fairly big yet fairly sparsely populated chunk of Canada) and as a result he was gone lots so it fell to the VOD to "control me". Which brings me to my second ashes story.

During/after one particularly diabolical spate betwixt us the VOD (in an act of pure desperation) sent myself, a dust cloth and the vacuum cleaner into the large, dark, formal and formidable dining room with the admonition that I was not to make a peep or come out until every square inch of that room was spotless. And she'd know if I'd not done it because she had a white glove!

So in I went, muttering and dusting and muttering and vacuuming and just plain muttering about the horrible lack of fairness in my life etc etc etc.

About half way through the clean-a-thon I had a discussion with myself about whether or not I could get away with not actually dusting inside any of the 3 massive, filled to the brim, china cabinets in the room but decided in the end that I'd best be cleaning them as well, as after all...the VOD did have that white glove.

Dusting the first 2 cabinets went by with virtually no concern, save for chipping one china teacup, but I turned it around facing the other direction and was fairly certain that the VOD would never notice. The 3rd cabinet however proved to be a different story.

The "stuff" in the third cabinet was different in that it was "collectibles" as opposed to actual eating paraphernalia and upon examination I was disgusted to find that it housed a whole shelf of little ginger jar type collectibles full of what looked like dirt.

I was disgusted because in my 9 yr old, oh so hard done by mind, I was sure that that this was likely a test set out by the tyrannical VOD to prove that I never did as I was told. So just to prove to her that I was smarter than she, I knocked the "dirt" out of every single one of those little jars and cleaned them thoroughly, and then just to prove my point, I re-vacuumed the room thereby completely removing any sign of the dirt in the first place.

Some hour to an hour and a half after she'd sent me in to the dinning room and round about the time that I was just finishing up the 2nd vacuuming of the room, the VOD came in and relented as to how she may have been a little too hard on me and that I could stand down and go out to play as she'd finish the dining room.

I was so pleased at this turn of the tides that I announced she wouldn't have to do anything as I'd thoroughly done it all myself...further I explained that I'd even been so thorough as to clean all the dirt outta all them little jars just to prove "I was on to her" I pronounced, ever so smugly.

The VOD gawped like a fish. "Wh...what little jars?" she asked nervously, her eye's darting around the room to land on the curio cabinet full of collectibles. "Yup - them one's" I announced. 'that whole middle shelf there!"

The VOD was aghast...I'd knocked out, dusted, and vacuumed up the remains of our landlady's whole family!

My third ashes story involves the VOD and the blister....who when informed that the VOD wishes to be cremated announced that she would be "taking the VOD's ashes and depositing a half teaspoon of her into every pepper shaker in every Royal Canadian Legion in Canada." Being as my parents met and married in the Canadian Navy she was quite sure that everyone would find that acceptable. The VOD, in an effort to not hurt the blister's feelings has as yet not told the blister that it isn't so I'm unsure as to what will really happen when the time comes!

My fourth and final ashes story happened years later as an adult.

The VOD's only sister lost her husband about 30 years ago. At the time she couldn't afford to come all the way to Merritt BC for the funeral but she and her sister stayed in touch via the phone and letters so the VOD knew that Billy had been cremated and Auntie El (who's a joker like the VOD) would put the "urn" of Billy's ashes in his favorite chair to watch Monday night football (just like nothing had changed).

18 years ago (a year before the VOD moved to the Island, and 8 years before I did) she and I went on a driving tour and did all of western Canada. When we arrived in Merritt of course Auntie El would have nothing but that we'd stay at her house. I'd balked as the whole family were serious smokers (and hell will freeze over before they open a door or a window) but in the end it was arranged that the VOD would stay in the spare room and I'd sleep in the rec room in the basement (where they thought for some reason that the smoke wouldn't bother me)

I had a crappy night and as a result was up early the following day. As Auntie El was a late sleeper, I, ever so quietly, snuck out of the house and made it to the local Tim Horton's and got coffee and bagels for the VOD and myself. I snuck back in and headed to the VOD's bed in the spare room. In those days the VOD was not yet wearing hearing aids so she really truly couldn't hear you unless she could see you. Upon my entry to the room she began to fumble around on the bookshelf headboard of the bed looking for her glasses. Once, twice, three times before she found them and got them on she banged her arthritic fingers on a wooden box on the shelf in the middle of the headboard. She muttered "what the hell is that?" whilst perching the glasses on her nose.

I leaned forward and read the brass plaque. I was uncle Billy. I howled and again the VOD was aghast and for the rest of her life Auntie El liked to tell people that "her sister had slept with her husband....she waited till he was dead, of course, but sleep with him she did!"