Inland Navigation by the Stars. Anne Coleman

      Anne Coleman

      Inland Navigation by the Stars

      A Memoir

      BPS Books

       For those in my generation who can identify with what I describe here, and for all my multitudinous descendants, those of my blood and bone, and those many other younger people I have loved.

      Contents

      Prologue

      Part I — Barely Aware of the World

      Chapter 1

      Chapter 2

      Chapter 3

      Chapter 4

      Chapter 5

      Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

       Chapter 12

       Chapter 13

       Chapter 14

       Chapter 15

       Part II — Starting Over

       Chapter 16

       Chapter 17

       Chapter 18

       Chapter 19

       Chapter 20

       Chapter 21

       Chapter 22

       Chapter 23

       Chapter 24

       Chapter 25

       Chapter 26

       Chapter 27

       Chapter 28

       Part III — How Beauty Makes Things Possible

       Chapter 29

       Chapter 30

       Chapter 31

       Chapter 32

       Chapter 33

       Chapter 34

       Chapter 35

       Chapter 36

       Chapter 37

       Chapter 38

       Chapter 39

       Chapter 40

       Epilogue

       Acknowledgements

       Copyright

       Prologue

      A few years ago I had an experience whereby, for the few weeks that it lasted, my nose was pressed right up against the coalface of my mortality. It was frightening but less so than I would have imagined and it was useful. It showed me that I needed to try to see my life as a finite thing.

      My life began, and my life will end. It will end either soon, or, if I am unlucky, very soon. I was given this life (by God? … by the universe?) and now I need, first, just to take it and hold it in my lap. And then I must lift it up in my hands and study it. It was a gift to me as an unformed thing, a lump of soft clay, mine to fashion into something worthy. So let me look: what is it that I have made?

      Across my more than eighty years, I will resurrect past scenes, sift them. I will try to see past and behind them to what else was there. Imagination will be involved but I will harken for the ring of truth. I will hope by the end for an epiphany, to see in a clear light the path I have travelled, with all its curves and tunnels, dead-end side trails and long straight stretches. I will thus “have it,” my life. And the people who have joined me along the way for short periods or long, I will have them too. I know I have judged harshly sometimes; I have been mistaken about other people, and about myself, and justified the self I was at the time. I have clarifying to do, and forgiveness to ask.

      Our family is full of storytellers and readers and as a literature teacher for my whole adult life I naturally see my life in chapters as a novel, with interwoven plots and repeating motifs. I am its central character of course, but I am also the (supposedly) omniscient narrator: I have a double role. I am both heroine and interpreter. If this story of me is to be a worthwhile one, and ring true, the central character cannot be understood as a static figure but should evolve, rise to challenges, or — sometimes, inevitably — fail to. As the plots unfold, the reliability of this central character may be at times questionable. But we will hope for the insightfulness of the interpreter/reader to sort things out, ultimately. But will all this be possible? Can this tale have an arc, as any good novel ought to? That should mean that somewhere close to the end there will be the sense of an arrival. But do lives anymore have destinations? Does anyone now feel as certain as Christian does at the end of The Pilgrim’s Progress when he enters the Celestial City?

      I first called this memoir Really and Truly. The title hints at doubt. Why both words? I needed the over-emphasis to warn my reader. I will be as truthful as I can. That is all I can promise. The title I have eventually chosen, Inland Navigation by the Stars, evokes the sense I want more precisely. I am on a quest: I will find bright sparks of truth but often they will be surrounded by darkness. Clouds may slip over them. I will see them; then I won’t. I will do my best.

      So what really happened and who was it that it happened to?

Part I

       1

      In my family I always felt myself to be different. I’m sure most young people think this but I was different at least within my family. I wanted independence in a way my siblings did not. I deliberately stepped aside from the paths my sisters took and would not follow the rules of the day for a girl. This was easier for me than it was for them: our family was more affluent by the time I was of high school age. Somehow our father was able more or less to put behind him his chagrin at the loss of the earlier Coleman family stature, a loss occasioned by his strange and mysteriously irresponsible father. But there was always something a little contradictory in his attitude about social class: he hated snobbery at the same time that he held certain quite fierce prejudices himself.

      At any rate my brother went to Upper Canada College in Toronto, and then Bishop’s College School in Quebec, and I went briefly to King’s Hall in the Eastern Townships of Quebec and then Havergal, a girls’ school in Toronto, which meant that from grade eight on I had the blessing of wearing a school uniform. I thereby avoided the morning terrors Ruth and Carol had experienced at public high schools: the distress of having impossibly curly hair; the endless worry about clothes; and the daily contention with the complicated games involving boys, and, equally exacting, other girls — or the pretending not to mind being unable to play them or not being invited to play. And with no boys on the scene I could wait until I was ready to deal with boyfriends. In our summers at North Hatley in Quebec I had friends who were boys and I had my odd “dream love” for Mr. MacLennan there as well. Dream in the sense that while our unlikely and private friendship was real, I projected onto him a combination of Heathcliff, Mr. Rochester, Prince Andrei and Laurence Olivier as Hamlet. He was a novelist, perhaps the best known in Canada at the time, and we spent time together, talking, going for drives. While I loved him in my day-dreaming way I never was