Emergence of an état de faits

It was like one of those times when you suddenly realise that something you had subliminally anticipated actually occurs. That’s the way it was with Eunice and me that day; it was as if what came about was just one notch below palpable, expected yet just short of noticeable.

Not that it was anything particularly remarkable or even noteworthy in and of itself. It was just something that came about gently, on its own, the way events have a way of coming about in life.

That’s it: it was like when something happens and you suddenly get the feeling that two seemingly disparate ends of a story meet up and just meld together, completing a circle that only when seen in retrospect seemed destined to be completed. A logical, or more accurately predictable, emergence of an état de faits. 

Eunice was born and lived her formative years in England, the daughter of a successful businessman who hired students and a myriad of young people in his company. From the beginning, Eunice was destined for a life of mitigated sacrifice and the rewards promised by dedication and valour. She married a dashing young English doctor—a finer cut of a man was rarely to be seen.

He actively served in the trench theatre of his generation’s war, then eventually led his young bride overseas to Canada, to his new practice and to the decades of her new nationality, strung in sequence like pearls of time onto either end of a century.

Ah, to the colonies! Mahogany end tables, bone china, and cracking oil canvases of red-suited hunting expeditions replete with quarter horses, diminutive beagles, and those awkwardly curled French horns, the use of which still leaves neophytes wondering silently, all in tow.

Then a lifetime of mothering and homemaking intertwined with needlecraft and gifted brush strokes guided along by warm summer travels. Yet it was a life punctuated by grief such that only a select few are ever called on to endure.

All of it had taken its toll on her, but none of it in the currency she now holds especially dear; Eunice is brilliant. 

The shawl of decades edging her shoulders towards a cosy paraphrase, now she keenly whets her senses on word games, quizzes and glances out the picture window that the seniors’ home has substituted for the rock garden she tended just up the street weeks ago.

But the emergence that occurred has nothing to do with any of that. It has to do with meeting someone on that cold day in March, a day in which one could actually feel the cruelty of the Townships’ cold as it bit scrunched faces and sliced fingers cowering in vain in their gloves.

It was here that she met someone her own age, someone –here in the foothills of a still foreign land– who had something quite unique in common with her. It was as if she held one end of the string of time in the grasp of her breath while her new acquaintance held the other in the revelation of her identity.

This new acquaintance was a woman who, at this stage of her life, had seen just about all her colours run dry and now needed help navigating the residence. She too had travelled far and away and recognised that home would have to take on a distinctly different connotation from here on in. But what was really astounding was that Eunice had, in all probability, already met this woman as a teenager eons ago, back home in her father’s business where she had been employed as a student all those years ago.

You’d think that this would be the proverbial tying of the two ends of the strand of a lifetime, that sudden emergence of a realisation to which I referred earlier. It very well may be an emergence of sorts, but I believe that it was more the setting upon which another, more personal kind of emergence was about to take form.

It was while sitting there in Eunice’s living room, listening to her recount this remarkable coincidence, because that is really all that it was in fact, a coincidence, that I realised how I had always found it easy to listen to her talk.

I mean, I look back at the snippets that she had shared with me over the years and realise that even collectively they couldn’t amount to even a pencil sketch of who Eunice really is or has been all these years. But what I do know is that the mental Polaroids, silent 8mm home movie segments, and black & white images she has conjured up for me over time are all crystal clear because of the definition she gave their context—and without doubt because of how easy she had been to listen to.

And then it happened. This is the part about emergence that I’ve been waiting to tell you about. Out of seemingly nowhere she turned to me, quite in mid-sentence and said it.  “You know, I have always found you easy to talk to.”

It was as if the cup of tea which graced the very tips of her fingers –poised there in mid air the way it does with ladies, seemingly without thought– as if that cup of tea had revealed to her that it was time she shared something she had felt for some time but had never put into words.

I felt a breeze waft right through me as if I wasn’t even in the room. I could sense that I was experiencing the emergence of both our realisations simultaneously blended into one single emotion. It was friendship that at that very instant settled down between us on the couch...

Philip A. Godin