She was the watcher
of her mother’s short-term memory. And
while she was watching it, the mother was attempting to learn Sir Isaac
Pitman’s Shorthand.
At that time the
youth were getting high and/or contemplating overthrowing the establishment or
the powers-that-be. But she was, first
of all, unaware unconsciously of her mother’s condition. Then she was aware, painfully consciously, of
her mother’s condition.
Then the songsters
sang songs mocking the dupes who live in houses made of something called “ticky
tacky”. Then she was in one of those
houses. Then she was getting up to go to
work. At 5:30
a.m. she would join her father in the kitchen. He had prepared tea and Sunny Boy Cereal
porridge. They would breakfast and chat
before she left for her 7:00 a.m shift
at “business school”, and he went to his work as a janitor at the downtown
department store.
In those days,
“business school” did not mean Harvard or an MBA. In those days it meant a place where young women
were trained in the trade-skill of keeping the daily work life of those MBA’s
organized. Pretend that the MBA is able
to think, theorize and hustle. The
trained woman does the work.
Business school was
manual typing, filing, reading, writing, bookkeeping, learning how to be a
valet (receptionist, seamstress of buttons, shopper for wive’s gifts, server of
tea and coffee, good listener, waterer of plants, greeter of loud fat guys with
cigars, compiler of documents, letter writer, dialer of phone calls, rememberer
of numbers and taker of dictation). It
was a trade-skill because they made them master manual touch-typing before they
allowed them access to the sophisticated electric “IBM” typewriter. All this is true.
Dictation was taken
down with the wonderful and intriguingly simple and elegant tool of Pitman
Shorthand, the gloriously phonetic, invention of the linguist and
Swedenborgian, Sir Isaac Pitman. Then,
she was small, while the giants of the past, the men of renown, such as Sir
Pitman, were big. Then, how terrible was
her mother’s condition within which the mother also attempted to learn Sir
Isaac Pitman’s shorthand.
Her mother was
suffering a dark and deep depression.
She would come home from work and shut herself into her bedroom. The daughter formed an image called “My
Mother’s Bedroom Door” because that is where her mother went at the end of each
day into a black and limitless void. People can’t survive in a deep, dark
depression.
Then, what was the
solution to this passive rebellion?
Then, why of course, it was Electro Convulsive Therapy! Buzz the bejesus out of the frontal lobes to
forget the worries of today and yesterday
and glide through with dreams of walking in a garden in the past, not
keeping up to your mother, who is gone, never to return.
Her mother’s doctor
had the cure, that is, ECT at the psychiatric ward at the top solarium floor of
Royal Inland
Hospital in Kamloops,
BC, Canada. That’s where the mother started her working
life, learning nursing work in the 1930’s.
That’s where she ended it in the 1960’s, sitting in a bed with her short
term memory erased.
The shift at the secretary
school was 7:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. so
the daughter was free to visit her mother at the solarium in the
afternoon. She could even take her
mother out for a painfully slow walk, which is another story.
Presumably her mother never really gave up
because, when she heard her daughter wax on about the elegant simplicity of Sir
Isaac Pitman’s shorthand, she had a flicker of inspiration and decided to try
it too. If she could no longer work as a
hard-labouring nurse, which, in those pre-union days, meant nurses did
everything; make beds, serve up meds, massage, dress, clean up, serve meals,
all of it, she could perhaps learn shorthand, typing, filing and combine that
with her knowledge of medicine to work in something less physically demanding,
such as medical records.
Every day the mother
would learn her shorthand lesson. This
required rote learning as well as insight and understanding. Every evening, Dr. Shrink Mengele would zap
her lobes electrically to produce the desired accepting state of stasis. The downside of stopping someone from
habitual worrying with electric currents to the frontal lobes, is stopping all
remembering that requires the kind of short term repetitiveness used to learn
something like Sir Isaac Pitman’s shorthand.
So her mother would say to her, each afternoon, “I am so stupid. I can’t remember any of the shorthand I
learned yesterday!” Dr. Shrink Mengele’s
compassion did not extend to letting her know about the short term memory
erasing side effects of “ECT”. The
daughter was dutiful to the extent that it went right over her head. It was one of those things when a person
says, a day later, “Oh, why didn’t I think of that?”
Proud activists
dismissed and pooh-poohed such things.
They didn’t have time to be depressed!
They were busy with truly important things like proletarian revolution
and/or smashing the state. They didn’t
need to learn a skill that could help allay the tedium of daily survival. They could afford to wear fatigues and carry
a Dream Automatic and maybe even get so far as to praise the Leader Addicted To
Heroin. Smash, instead, the state! Overthrow, instead, the bourgeoisie! Prepare, instead, for proletarian revolution!
Go to San Francisco with flowers in
your hair!
At least one of them
had the decency to quote Captain Bligh, “We are civilized people!” Above all, don’t tell your friends your
parents are crazy!
