World War II : Philip Service Cassidy (1863-1930)

I’ve been working for some time [as part of my work-in-progress, the genealogy book: see my piece around his daughter, my great-grandmother, here] to research the details of my second great grandfather, Philip Service Cassidy, including why he moved from Grenville, Ontario into the American Dakotas, where he married a local girl, and they had the first four of their eventual mound of children. They moved back to Carleton County after a while and had at least eight more children. Philip later signed up to fight in the Second World War, a war record I couldn’t quite figure out how to read.

Thanks to an assist from Marjorie Stintzi, I’m able to discern that the birthdate he offers when registering to join the 156^th Overseas Battalion Canadian Expedition Force, having previously served as part of the Kemptville-local 56^th Lisgar Rifles, is actually false. Apparently he was beyond the age for enlisting, claiming his birthdate as May 6, 1871 in Richmond, Ontario, which would have put him at forty-five years old instead of fifty-three. I knew there would have been an age minimum, but hadn’t realized a maximum, and I hear from multiple people that they knew of relatives pretending to be younger than they were. He apparently suffered a hernia while moving boxes later that same year, refused surgery, and was found at the medical examination to be overage, which even Stintzi suggests might have allowed him a way out.

What becomes frustrating: various sources on Ancestry and otherwise replicate Philip’s deception, instead of what the 1901 census offers as his birthdate: May 9, 1863. Ten years earlier, a further census lists his birthday as “about 1865,” but the 1881 census returns to the correct year, if nothing else, which puts him precisely at fifty-three during that 1916 paperwork. Apparently his reward for fudging his age was a truss, as he sent home to Kemptville. Completely unable to find a birth record or notice for him, I actually can’t find a death notice or obituary for him, either. He died somewhere either in British Columbia or Saskatchewan in 1930, having moved out that way, most likely, to live with one of his grown, married daughters. His story an enigma I’ve yet to fully discern.

 

the genealogy book : (a new work-in-progress,

Nearly a year ago, I started a substack for the sake of prompting a particular writing project, and have just started posting from the most recent work-in-progress, "the genealogy book," the first two of which are now available here and here. Since my teens, I've been the self-designated genealogist for my family, and spent years working through a variety of archives to piece together innumerable threads of genealogy. Through this, I've been fully aware that I was adopted, and had other threads as well, but I've only been learning them over the past few years, and am now pushing further to explore those threads, and what that potentially means, through a non-fiction project. If I self-identified so heavily through one set of threads, only to be presented with a whole slew of alternate threads, how does that fit in with my consideration of self? What does it all mean?

Through the substack, I'm aiming to post weekly, with every third or fourth post for paid subscribers only (I mean, I have to give some incentive to sign up with money). The substack originally started to prompt my non-fiction "Lecture for an Empty Room," a book-length essay on literature, small press, community and responsibility, so there's a bunch of pieces on there for that. The weekly prompt I originally gave myself for posting sections on this blog of the manuscript-in-progress that eventually became my pandemic-era memoir, essays in the face of uncertainties (Mansfield Press, 2022), worked out pretty well, after all. As well, I was posting fragments of a forty-ish page essay I had worked on, "A river runs through it: a writing diary," composed during the months that Denver poet Julie Carr and I were actively working on our collaborative poetry call-and-response. Other threads via the substack include a two-part essay on above/ground press, a variety of self-contained short stories, and the sprinklings of a journal project from 2019-2020 around genealogical discovery, Christine's health and my father's illness and eventual death, "the blue year." I've also been posting self-contained essays on fiction writers as part of an ongoing series titled "reading in the margins: a writing diary," with some new pieces forthcoming, hopefully, on Lucy Maud Montgomery, John Lavery and  Dany Laferrière, among others. Since starting, I've tried to treat the substack as a kind of weekly column, and the trickling of support from such has been helpful, although the big push is really to get me writing further and deeper into these ongoing prose explorations. Why not sign up? Who knows what might come next? And I'm completely fine with folk signing up gratis; the working-class farm lad in me always thinks that lack of finances should never be a hurdle to engaging with literature, after all.

Adams (birth) Family Gathering, 2023

Christine, our young ladies and I recently attended an extended weekend family gathering of "cousins," etcetera, via my birth mother's family (you can see wee Aoife in the background of this picture, upon my shoulders), which was enormously fun. It was the first I'd met most of them, having previously interacted with birth mother a couple of times, as well as three of her six siblings. It was absolutely lovely! Apparently there are around twenty cousins, with twelve in attendance at this event (myself included). I spent two full days in the company of a variety of relatives, some of whom I'd been interacting with here and there via social media, and none save one cousin and birth mother's siblings who even knew I existed, prior to three years ago.

Julie, myself + birth mother, Elsie

It was odd to be in a grouping of anyone who looked like me, let alone so many. I am deeply grateful to my cousin Julie and her husband John, who hosted the weekend at their old stone house just outside Moscow, Ontario (north-ish of Napanee/Kingston). And only the third (and fourth) time I'd seen birth mother in person! And only the second time she'd seen our young ladies! So the opportunity to connect (and ask questions/gather stories) was invaluable.

It was a surreal experience, as one might imagine, but I attempted to be in the moment as much as possible, and not overthink the whole thing. Cousins! So many cousins! (although perhaps it would be nice to get some social gatherings happening via the rest of my ongoing family as well? it has been years since we've done something like that).

Adams: descended from Dr. Samuel Adams, UEL (which means, also, that Ottawa writer Miller (formerly Sylvia) Adams, who ran The TREE Reading Series before I did, and was even a neighbour during the early 1990s, is a distant relative, which is pretty cool).

Oh, and you caught the t-shirt I made for the event, yes? I had to make an entrance, after all.

retreat report : home,

I was calling it such, but it was more complicated than that (as things so often are). Ridiculously early on Saturday, July 2^nd, Christine and her mother took our young ladies through two flights to Winnipeg, leaving directly that morning from mother-in-law’s Ottawa residence, Christine and the girls having left ours the evening prior (that seemed more efficient, they decided). Christine’s 94-year-old Oma lives in Winnipeg, as do mother-in-law’s two sisters, none of whom had met Aoife yet, and had only met Rose once before, when we made a similar trip with baby Rose. They spent four days running around Winnipeg visiting various friends and family, and even managed a trip to the Winnipeg Zoo (which always reminds me of the poem by Robert Kroetsch), as well as various other excursions (all safely masked, of course). I received multiple daily updates.

All of this left me solo at home (with our dear boy, Lemonade the cat, naturally) from Friday evening until late Tuesday afternoon, which I’d planned to spend returning back with full force into working on that novel I started back in summer 2020 (as well as watching various television things that Christine hates); remember that? I don’t even think I’d looked at the novel since last fall, having focused instead on reviews and reviews and poems and poems and poems. I’d spent the month-plus prior to their first Covid-era jaunt pushing myself to complete and post as many reviews as possible for the blog, thinking I could carve a path of a couple of weeks to simply work on prose without distraction (beyond, say, our wee ridiculous children, of course). Was such a thing possible?

A home-based retreat. Well, retreat doesn’t presume going away. Retreat means to step away, as I’m sure you know. To withdraw. I didn’t need to head to Banff or Sage Hill. Just a few days at the pub would have been more than enough, honestly.

Of course, once they left, it sparked my simultaneous and inevitable plans to deep-clean the house, and put together multiple above/ground press mailings, folding and stapling as much material as possible. Does this all count as writing? And my first evening solo was spent in Kanata at my brother Darren’s house, celebrating his mother’s (my birth mother’s) birthday (this was only the second time I’d seen her in person). It was a grand evening, that.

I did manage two different writing-related outings of pub afternoons, pushing to return to the space of the thinking of the novel, including one at my favourite, The Carleton Tavern. I also spent an outdoor patio hour at the most god-awful sportsbar closer to home (for the sake of time I didn’t wish to travel further) which made do, I suppose, but geez. Once Christine and the young ladies were home, I did manage a second afternoon at The Carleton, eventually pushing at least two further drafts through the process. Might this be the year I finally manage to complete this and start sending it out?

If I can get enough drafts furthered, I might even post another excerpt (there are a few earlier excerpts posted here and here and here and here), but I’m not quite there yet.

And beyond that, might I ever return to that novel I started on New Year’s Eve 2007, “Don Quixote”? I still consider that project in-progress, despite not having looked at it in years. I’ll get there, someday. Once this project is out of the way, perhaps I can even try.

two days ago, we buried my father,

Some sixteen months after he died [see my obituary for him here], we set his cremated remains in the ground, just there with my mother. At the moment, at least, I don't have too much else to say about that.

today is my fifty-first birthday,

My second annual lockdown birthday. My second annual no-party birthday. When might we hold parties again? My entire fifties-to-date trapped in lockdown. Does that suggest that I might still be, somehow, in my forties? Does lockdown simply skip over age? I might move immediately from forty-nine to fifty-three, or whatever. Most else is on hold, why not that?

For the first time, this is a birthday I’m not feeling great about; I usually have a great big birthday party, having hosted my own since the late 1990s (who has time to wait for someone else to organize it? see also: forty-nine, forty-eight, etc), so this one doesn’t have the same excitement or run-up that other birthdays have had, although I have already received a lovely card from birth mother, and mother-in-law gifted a subscription to The Paris Review, which is pretty cool. Every couple of years I pick up a copy, more for the interviews than anything else (the Robert Haas one, where he speaks of his partner’s work being more interesting than his was pretty entertaining). A few days ago, mother in law even assisted with some fact-checking for a short story I’d been working on; I had a character in Winnipeg as a late teen, and, realizing this character of similar vintage to mother in law, who also lived in Winnipeg during that same period, I had a couple of facts I needed verifying: would this character have been in Assiniboine Park? etc. She did catch a couple of things, such as the fact that The Forks hadn’t market stalls until 1989, which didn’t work at all for the story, and Central Park made more sense for the folk I was writing, so I had to shift those references. I suppose my telling her that the story, once done, I’d sent off to The Paris Review (I was clearly feeling ambitious that day), prompted her to ask Christine if a subscription would be a good idea. I would say that it was.

Over the years, this birthday post has evolved into a kind of annual assessment of the months since the prior one, and what does one say about the year we’ve had? All in the same storm, but not in the same boat. Not by a long shot, I know. A year ago yesterday was my first meeting with birth mother. On May 1^st, my father died, some fifteen months after his original ALS diagnosis. Joe Blades, RM Vaughan and Michael Dennis. In December, I had both my cataract surgeries, some nine months delayed (making me unable to drive for at least five months). The weeks and the months leading up to those surgeries far more blind than I’d wished to think about, banging about the house, or covering one eye to even read my computer screen. Now, able to set aside the glasses I’ve been wearing since thirty-three. I have super eyes.

Super eyes, and the bones of the homestead, which my sister now owns, rented out to new tenant. Our Alta Vista house now holding what once sat on the farm, including family bible, boxes of paper and photo archive, and the piano, previously moved from my great-grandparents house in Kemptville, Ontario to the homestead in 1976, so I could begin to take lessons. Items shift their context in new spaces, and become something more, something else. My late mother’s teacup.

And yesterday, seeing a Toronto Star (blocked by paywall, of course) article float by on my social media: apparently I’m a day younger than email?

A year in lockdown. And my birthday poem for this year appears today, I’ve been told, in the second issue of the rejuvenated online mouse eggs. Fifty-one: I am feeling a low amount of enthusiasm. Do you remember the cake Christine ordered for me last year? And then the CBC Radio interview I did a couple of days ago, complaining about the Ontario government pushing school boards to confirm students turned into this article, in which I am quoted.

I saw my pal Stephen Brockwell last weekend; we went for a walk. He took me into the woods for some reason. I don’t think I’d seen him since, what, October? Bits of summer and fall, when he would come by for socially-distant backyard visits (one of the benefits of our having a yard). Otherwise, our winter has been very quiet. Where is everyone? What is happening?

Although some twelve hundred letters written and sent since lock-down began. I’m still receiving a five or six percent letter-response rate, which might be for the best, given the potential of being overwhelmed. I’m struck by the number of responses I receive that include the admission that they haven’t actually written a letter in, what, years? And now I’m in regular correspondence with more than a couple of folk that I’m used to seeing in person, as well as others that I hadn’t been much in touch with prior to this. We seek out our connections in whatever ways that we can, I suppose.

On Friday afternoon we dropped our wee monsters off at mother in law’s for an overnight, where we collected them last night, as part of dinner; they did a sleepover there the prior Saturday, also, their first non-us in-person interactions in four long months.

I know we’re lucky in so many ways, that Christine’s work is flexible enough to allow her to work from home, especially given she’s high risk, and the wee monsters were already fairly close, but this year might have brought them far closer (which also include the inevitable conflicts between them, most of which have been manageable). We’ve two small people in a house with a fenced-in yard, and the young ladies do get along rather well. Even were Christine not high risk, the idea of sending our wee children into in-person school with masks and social distancing I would have thought too much; they’re too little to have to suffer that kind of stress, let alone any potential infection they could have brought home. We take turns lifeguarding the young ladies in their e-learnings, while both pretending we’re working full-time (which we mostly are, actually).

My prior year has been, predominantly, just putting my head down and pushing through as much work as possible (not my first time in doing such, really; and I’ve the advantage of working from home now for some thirty years). Last spring I pushed through what became my manuscript of pandemic essays, “essays in the face of uncertainties,” deciding that if I was to be distracted from work due to crisis, why not make crisis the work? And I had already, pre-covid, put a poetry manuscript, “Book of Magazine Verse,” to bed, as well as my collection of short stories, “On Beauty.” Since I had to finish off my pandemic essays (after three months, the subject matter of the project had begun to exhaust), I ended up poking at numerous short stories, but also started a new novel in July, which furthers a couple of threads from the short story manuscript (which itself furthers some threads from one of my previous novels). Admittedly, I got distracted away from the novel last fall, but have been slowly closing off another poetry manuscript from pre-covid times, as well as poking at the beginnings of what follows “Book of Magazine Verse”—a manuscript titled “the book of sentences”—and another handful of short stories. I think I’ve had enough of my own small or medium-sized crises over the years that I’ve learned to simply push through the difficulties through work, as a strange combination of process and distraction, so I’ve been able to get a great deal of work done through all of this. Blame my Protestant work-ethic, I suppose. My stubbornness.

Mother in law has returned to our bubble temporarily, and for the first time since mid-December, having left brother in law’s bubble (he and his family are moving to the UK soonish, so she’s been focusing on them; which I get, but it still left us solo for a long stretch of weeks). Last Saturday, it was good for Christine and I to have a nice quiet dinner, and an evening in the living room just hanging out talking, without any teevee or child or whatever distraction. I don’t even know the last time that happened! Do I even wish to attempt to figure that out?