Dear Life

on.
    This is an Anglican church. In the United Church that Uncle Jasper is used to, the members of the choir enter through a door behind the pulpit, and settle themselves before the minister appears, so that they can look out at the congregation in a comfortable here-we-are-all-together sort of way. Then comes the minister, a signal that things can get started. But in the Anglican church the choir members come up the aisle from the back of the church, singing and making a serious but anonymous show of themselves. They lift their eyes from their books only to gaze ahead at the altar and they appear slightly transformed, removed from their everyday identities and not quite aware of their relatives or neighbors or anybody else in the congregation.
    They are coming up the aisle now, singing “The Old Rugged Cross,” just like everybody else—Uncle Jasper must have talked to them before things started. Possibly he made it out to be a favorite of the deceased.
    The problem is one of space and bodies. With the choir in the aisle, there is no way for Uncle Jasper to get back to our pew. He is stranded.
    There is one thing to be done and done quickly, so he does it. The choir has not yet reached the very front pew, so he squeezes in there. The people standing with him aresurprised but they make room for him. That is, they make what room they can. By chance, they are heavy people and he is a broad, though lean, man.
    I will cherish the Old Rugged Cross
    Till my trophies at last I lay down
.
    I will cling to the Old Rugged Cross
    And exchange it someday for a crown
.
    That is what my uncle sings, as heartily as he can in the space he’s been given. He cannot turn to face the altar but has to face outward into the profiles of the moving choir. He can’t help looking a little trapped there. Everything has gone okay but, just the same, not quite as he imagined it. Even after the singing is over, he stays in that spot, sitting squeezed in as tightly as he can be with those people. Perhaps he thinks it would be anticlimactic now to get up and walk back down the aisle to join us.
    Aunt Dawn has not participated in the singing, because she never found the right place in the hymnbook. It seems that she could not just trail along, the way I did.
    Or perhaps she caught the shadow of disappointment on Uncle Jasper’s face before he was even aware of it himself.
    Or perhaps she realized that, for the first time, she didn’t care. For the life of her, couldn’t care.
    “Let us pray,” says the minister.

PRIDE
    S OME people get everything wrong. How can I explain? I mean, there are those who can have everything against them—three strikes, twenty strikes, for that matter—and they turn out fine. Make mistakes early on—dirty their pants in grade two, for instance—and then live out their lives in a town like ours where nothing is forgotten (any town, that is, any town is a place like that) and they manage, they prove themselves hearty and jovial, claiming and meaning that they would not for the world want to live in any place but this.
    With other people, it’s different. They don’t move away but you wish they had. For their own sake, you could say. Whatever hole they started digging for themselves when they were young—not by any means as obvious as the dirtypants either—they keep right on at it, digging away, even exaggerating if there is a chance that it might not be noticed.
    Things have changed, of course. There are counsellors at the ready. Kindness and understanding. Life is harder for some, we’re told. Not their fault, even if the blows are purely imaginary. Felt just as keenly by the recipient, or the non-recipient, as the case may be.
    But good use can be made of everything, if you are willing.
    Oneida didn’t go to school with the rest of us, anyway. I mean that nothing could have happened there, to set her up for life. She went to a girls’ school, a private school, that I can’t remember the name of, if I ever knew it. Even in the summers she was not around much. I believe the family had a place on Lake Simcoe. They had lots of money—so much, in fact, that they weren’t in a category with anybody else in town, even the well-to-do ones.
    Oneida was an unusual name—it still is—and it did not catch on here. Indian, I found out later. Likely her mother’s choice. The mother died when she, Oneida, was in her teens. Her father, I believe, called her Ida.
    I had all the papers once, heaps of papers for