Stepping back in time

My son stood over my shoulder while I was typing this, and asked what I was writing. "Is that a book report?" he asked. Of a sort, I replied. 

"You're writing a book report because you want to?!" He spoke with disbelief.

Dear son, maybe someday you'll read books you want to talk about, too. 

*******

The library on base is a step back in time – not just because it shelves histories, but in the use of the card catalog, the date stamp, the way they manually check out books by signing your name on a card.

It also has a nice collection of classics in heavy duty binding left over from the 1960s – and before.  The materialistic bibliophile in me loves the heavy paper stock that is imprinted by the type, the musty smells, the indestructible covers, the black and white illustrations.  Gotta love the substance in these books too. Just finished two – one that I read in high school: Goodbye, Mr. Chips by James Hilton, and one I just saw mention of somewhere: Mrs. Mike by Benedict and Nancy Freedman.

Both of these books would send someone who deplores the reek of sentimentality running. Goodbye, Mr. Chips makes a lot of lists of classics, but I hadn’t heard of Mrs. Mike, and maybe I dreamed about reading a review of it because I can't find it now. (It is here!) But sometimes sentimental is what you’re in the mood for: a good story about good people told cheerfully. No Oprah Book Club melodrama. Just happy tales that both happen to hit on a similar theme: that suffering is not something to be avoided, but something that makes you who you are.

I won’t rehash Mr. Chips, since the story is familiar. When I initially read it, it fueled my desire to experience British boarding school – the kind of desire that I suppose is now initiated by Harry Potter books.  But I remembered little about Mr. Chips the man, and what a good sort he was, despite being a bit mundane.  He recognizes that the kind of greatness he can achieve, a minimal kind but something nonetheless, requires faithfulness in the little things: having students over for tea, eating with the faculty, doing your job as well as possible, even if not in a flashy way.

All with a good sense of humor.

Although his life is quiet, Mr. Chips is not without his tragedy: the loss of his wife and child.  Perhaps if Mrs. Chipping had lived, Mr. C might have been an even better man. But even in the brief time she shared with Mr. C and the academy, she changed him, and some of the other faculty.  Her death could have derailed him. The death of all his students in the wars could have demoralized him.  The attempt of a young headmaster to fire him could have doused his spirit. But he perseveres in being the kind of man he is, nothing more, nothing less.  And he is loved for it.  (Which is similar theme #2: people have more effect on your life than you realize even if you only meet them briefly.)

While many people apparently believed the imagined Mr. Chipping was a real person, Mrs. Mike, Katherine Mary Flannigan, actually was a real girl, even though I initially thought she was pure fiction.  I googled the book to see where I came across the reference (and didn’t find it), but I found a few testimonies about how beloved this book was by women of a certain age. Apparently, it has had a resurgence of interest with the advent of internet recommendations, and has had a reprinting.

Maybe the book isn’t first class literature, but I will add my name to its list of fans.  The story is episodic, like a Little House book for grownups, or a teenaged Caddie Woodlawn set in Canada. But the effect is that all the episodes add up to make you feel like you’ve been in northern Canada yourself. I think I could begin to understand Cree.  I had to sit in the car an extra fifteen minutes after soccer practice yesterday to finish it. And then I wanted to go back and reread the best parts. 

Initially, I thought that Mrs. Mike – Kathy - was too obvious and too chipper.  She’s a spunky Irish lass sent to her uncle in Canada to recover from pleurisy. She meets a handsome Mountie named Mike Flannigan, and falls in love with him while pretending to disdain his flirtations.  Within weeks they are married, surprisingly quickly considering she’s only sixteen. And right after their wedding they head up to the uncivilized north to Mike’s station.  It happens so fast, you almost forget to think how unlikely that should be.

But as impetuous as her decision to marry and follow Mike Flannigan is, Kathy is steadfast in her love.  If initially, she is all cheer and good humor at the beauty she sees all around, she begins to notice the ugliness: mad women sent away, dead men in the snow, Indian women called “klooches”  beaten and berated.  Her husband Mike is a realist, and where she sees injustice, he sees why the women stay around.  He intuits honesty and dishonesty in the people who come to him to arbitrate their disputes.  He doesn’t fear doing his duty, whether it be pulling a tooth, fighting a fire, or sawing off a leg.

As Kathy grows into adulthood, her innocent idealism fades away, and she becomes more interesting. The struggles she experiences and witnesses become more poignant, and Kathy becomes more dimensional.  She meets another white woman whose children keep dying.  Kathy calls her “a mother of sorrows.” But the woman remains unbroken.  

Kathy also realizes that the Native women are not all abused.  She takes in a young girl from the mission orphanage, and promises the nuns that she will keep the girl safe from a young halfbreed, Jonathan, who is in love with her.  The young man is the son of a rebellious father, and he has run-ins with the law. But as Kathy and Mike learn about his background and his character, they realize he values honor and dignity, especially after he takes the blame for a murder that a mad woman committed, rather than put her in trouble and defend himself.  Eventually, Kathy understands why her young friend, Mamanowatum, or “Oh-Be-Joyful,” is in love with the young man, and she allows them the freedom of belonging to each other.

Kathy suffers her own tragedies, and even at one point leaves Mike.  So although the book starts out with the two of them so happily married and so perfectly suited to each other, and it seems that it will simply recount their adventures, it does take a dark turn.  Sorrow drives the two of them apart, and Kathy goes back to her mother.  But she realizes she doesn’t fit in city life anymore.  The insignificance of some of the arguments she witnesses between her mother’s boarders amaze her. Their pettiness seems pale beside the disease and destruction she has experiences. She realizes she has grown to love the north, and has become a different person, one who can’t run away from her sorrows, and so she returns.

The book ends on a hopeful note, of course. Jonathan reappears at the end of the book, bringing the sorrowful news that Mamanowatum has died.  He brings their baby to Kathy and Mike to raise. The mother had named the baby Kathy, after her “almost-sister,” even though they hadn’t seen each other for 8 years.  Kathy welcomes the baby, but mourns her friend, especially since her other friend has also just died.  She contemplates how their lives have intersected, even when they weren’t in communication. “You could see that events were like the people they happened to. Oh-Be-Joyful’s life had always had that intense emotion and pathetic grasping after happiness that my mother said was characteristic of those ‘who are not long for this world.’ Perhaps on another day I would laugh at this and consider it superstition, but this day, watching Oh-Be-Joyful’s baby in Mike’s arms, I saw the pattern too. . . . Oh-Be-Joyful had cared for and loved my children, and now it was I who was to care for and lover hers. Mike was right: the pattern of a life isn’t a straight line; it crosses and recrosses, drawing in and tying together other lives, as I do when I gather in the ends of my thread to make a knot.”    

Kathy realizes that even though she has suffered much, she has also had great joy, even if just for a little while. And the remembering of those pleasures, especially of her lost children, brings more pleasure than pain.

To be honest, maybe the reason I loved this book is that it is so easy to identify with Kathy: marry young and idealistic, take off on an adventure, meet with hardship, but recognize the heavier suffering that so many others have, meet people you grow to love, lose them, feel like throwing in the towel, but finally realize that all these experiences are fitting into a pattern that is more amazing than can be predicted, even if the book is predictable like the happy ending we all hope for.