Aunty Joyce... and John Grisham

My brain went to: "I can’t WAIT to dig into this tonight!" My heart went someplace different altogether.

Kathleen gave me two presents on father’s day: a box of one of my favourite craft beers (a standard can’t-go-wrong Alex-pleaser) and, wrapped in tissue paper, a surprise: the latest book by John Grisham (a famous legal-thriller novelist, if you didn’t know the name). I didn’t know he’d written a new one, and I was THRILLED because I’ve read every other book he wrote. What a gift! Holding it in my hand and sliding a palm across its cover, two things happened at once.

My brain went to: I can’t WAIT to dig into this tonight!

My heart went someplace different altogether.

⎈

Up until about ten years ago, I was a non-fiction book lover. I wanted to LEARN stuff when I read. I just couldn’t see the point of wasting my limited time with novels. I did not discount their value or people’s love for them, or even mine—as a kid I loved novels, and had certainly enjoyed many in adulthood. But the trouble was… I felt there was an endless buffet of things I wanted to learn about this real world we live in, and only one lifespan within which to do it. I simply didn’t want to waste a single moment not learning something real, interesting, and ideally useful.

To string together how I went from that person to the man delighted to hold the new John Grisham novel in my hand, I need to step back and tell a story.

⎈

Aunty Joyce has, to put it mildly, been a very special person in my life. Being my mom’s sister, Joyce was actually my full-time mom for the first few months of my life while my own mom finished her degree. (Long story, for another time). And throughout my childhood Aunty Joyce was an oasis for me on both calm days, and in all storms. I only have to picture her face, and I smile. Every time. Time spent with her, and staying at her place for the weekend with my older cousins (a semi-frequent occurrence) was, in hindsight, one of the most important ‘medicines’ in my young life. I believe I’d have turned out very differently without her.

Aunty Joyce lived in town, right next the train tracks. The train came through a few times a day, as I recall, and at such a predictable rhythm that I suspected she and her family had ceased to even hear it. (Though I’d be surprised if they weren’t always able to tell if they were late for something without checking their watches—their bodies no doubt thoroughly synced with the train schedule.)

Decades later, and fifteen hundred kilometres away, I don’t live beside train tracks. But there are some moments in my neighbourhood, when the fog is thick and the weather just so, that I’ll be in my house and suddenly hear the train whistle from downtown—the whistle having crossed an unlikely trestle of fog-drops into my kitchen. In less than the space of a heartbeat, I’m at my Aunty Joyce’s.

⎈

When I was about seven, after years of my father’s reluctance and my mother’s prodding him, I got my first pet. A kitten. When trying to decide what to name her, my mom suggested I think about things I loved.

So I named the cat ‘Aunty Joyce’. True story.

It got shortened to ‘kitty’ at some forgotten time later, but not before one of my extended family’s favourite memories took place. It happened like this…

Sunday mornings growing up, we went to church—a United Church in town—Mom and her two sisters (Joyce and Esther), their mother (Grammie Pearl) and of course the combined gaggle of kids. My cousins were wonderful. Most of the time. I suspect we all had our ‘moments’.

Anyway, I never liked church—most kids don’t, but I didn’t grow up to like it either—but I DID like getting the chance to sit beside Aunty Joyce on Sundays after not seeing her all week. A silver lining. And that’s how it happened that before the service began one morning, as other families were funnelling into the church and, in hushed tones, taking their seats, I was bursting to share my piece of news from the day before. I turned to the two entire pews-full of my extended family, and in my best seven-year-old whisper (ie - really loud and the whole church could hear), announced: AUNTY JOYCE FELL IN THE TOILET!!!!

I’d meant my cat, of course, not the elegant woman sitting beside me.

I was too young to remember, but if I heard the story right years later, the place erupted in laughter. Seeing as it was a small town, and everyone in church knew each other, it entertains me now thinking about my family members knowing exactly what had just happened, and everybody else within earshot wondering how such a thing could happen. 😆

⎈

Of course years would pass. A lot of them. Life would move on. Aunty Joyce (my aunt, not the cat) passed a couple of years ago, and I don’t have any recent pictures of her to show you. Though she mightn’t want me to share them with you anyway and would haunt me for it, as she had a physical condition—essential tremor—that I always found to be extra-elegant (a mystique, in a Katharine Hepburn way), but had, by her later years, taken a tremendous toll on her body. Her health was such that I had to carry her out of a situation or two, and at five feet tall—I’m guessing—and less than a hundred pounds, she was like a willow branch in my arms.

So no recent pictures, but this older one is my favourite picture of her anyway. In 2001. She came to visit Kathleen and me in Ireland, and to meet our new son Jesse. (She also brought 15 people with her, and what a time we had, but that is also a story for another time.)

Anyhow, I keep trying to get back to the John Grisham book, but stories keep interrupting me.

Joyce was a voracious reader. Two or three books a week was nothing for this woman, at least in retirement. She liked books of all types, so long as they were in her hands and open.

This was a trait passed down from her mom, my Grammie Pearl, who infected her descendants with a love of books. Pearl was the sort of woman who went back to night-school in her seventies… to study… ECONOMICS. Why? She wanted to know how the world worked. (Which as a teenager impressed and intrigued the hell out of me, and would leave me curious about ‘how the world worked’ ever since. Amongst other journeys Grammie sparked, it would later lead me to devour the books of Jason Hickel—economic anthropologist—which gave me a far clearer (and unsettling) understanding of how capitalism works, and why it’s different than what my Big Dream Program clients and I do with our small businesses - trading our services for meaningful livelihood.)

Oh my god, I’m TRYING to get back around to John Grisham, and keep getting onto side-tracks. Stay with me here, I’ll bring this back around. Promise.

⎈

Aunty Joyce eventually ended up in a senior’s apartment, and because I lived far away, I could only get home a time or two a year. I didn’t call her nearly as often as I should have, or even wanted to (I feel disappointed about that. I wish I’d done better—for both of us.) But when we did talk, it was always the same: I left with my chest full of sunshine and warmth.

The trouble with me, always, was… being an extreme introvert (who is only recently finding some much appreciated comfort in social situations), phone calls and visits—with anyone, even people I love dearly—had always been hard for me. In part it’s because my nervous system goes haywire in a way I have very little control over, and also because conversation is kind of forced in a set-up like that.

In the case of calling or visiting Aunty Joyce, I’d be fine for the first while, but then run out of things to ask her, or her me. Once we got through all the family-catch-up (‘how’s so-and-so, and what’s so-and-so doing now’) I wouldn’t know how to keep the conversation going.

Until…

Grisham.

(See, I told you I’d tie this all together 🤣)

I was home from Ireland for a visit and sitting with Aunty Joyce in her apartment. After we got through the family news, we got talking about books. She told me how much she had been enjoying reading John Grisham—holding up the book sitting beside her on the couch to illustrate. She thought I should try one.

Of course I was polite and no doubt asked her some questions about it. I would’ve been happy SHE liked him—no judgement there—but… I wasn’t as interested in reading the guy myself as I might have let on. There was the matter that I was only reading non-fiction at the time, which she’d have understood, but what I felt more uncomfortable sharing with her—and didn’t—was that I had also come to the conclusion (miraculously, without ever having read one of his books) that this Grisham fella was kinda… superficial. Nowhere near as superficial as a harlequin romance (I suspected—I’ve not read one), but on the same spectrum. In my mindset at the time, that would have thrown up ‘waste of time’ flags. I was of the generation, and more specifically a sub-culture of that generation, where anything ‘top 40’ was probably shit.

Our conversation no doubt took many roads after that, and when it was time for me to head out, she reached into her pile of books, and passed me a John Grisham book. A loaner. Take that with you, and see what you think.

I took it with me.

I said to Kathleen later that day… “I have no interest in reading this, but I’d feel bad the next time I talk to her if I didn’t.”

But then I saw another angle, a little more positive. If I read it, it would give me more to talk about with Aunty Joyce, and that I’d really like.

That’s how it came to be that, with perhaps a beer on a coaster beside me, or maybe a tea—can’t remember but both pair well with books—I opened the Grisham book and sat back.

And that’s when the great transition in my reading life happened. 🤣

I fucking LOVED the book. LOVED. IT. LOVEDDDDDD IT. And called Aunty Joyce to tell her so. I’d figured I was going to have to fake my enthusiasm. I did NOT, and it filled a conversation VERY nicely.

She was pleased.

This one book, and my conversation with her afterwards, broke my addiction to reading having to be about learning facts. Reading could be an experience in and of itself, and immediately ushered in a great new richness to my life—in a way I’d let myself become impoverished. In fact, even aside from the enjoyment of a reading adventure being more than worthwhile on its own, I would later wonder if I’ve learned more about the real world, and about myself and humanity, through novels more than from anything else.

⎈

With the dam breached, I never stopped. Ten years later, ninety percent of what I’ve read since has been fiction. And to this day, my favourites have been detective, or spy-type novels. I’ve worked my way through many authors, from Agatha Christie to John Le Carré, and my current love John Sandford. I get them ALL from the local library. Once I find an author I like, I tend to work my way through everything they ever wrote, night after night. I LOVE it. When I’m nearing the end of one, I’ll hop on the Guelph public library website and reserve the next one so it’s ready and waiting for me. And because Kathleen goes through twice as many books as I do, it is an almost-weekly occurrence for her to bustle in the front door, home from work—via the library, with several books under one arm, and groceries under the other.

But back to Aunty Joyce… after that first Grisham book, I ended up reading every book Grisham ever published (at least until the new one just before father’s day a few weeks ago—Kathleen’s gift that started this story 😆).

Aunty Joyce and I compared notes on many of them over the years. We loved most of them, and were suitably upset if one ended in a way we hoped it wouldn’t. The whole connection we had over it was magic.

When she had to move into a senior’s facility, there was only enough space in her room for a few dozen books, versus the hundreds she’d had before. Oddly enough, this new setup didn’t seem to faze her, or she never complained to me about it at any rate (her kids who helped her move may say differently). I think it was fine with her SO LONG as there was always a steady stream of new ones coming in. And at two or three per week, that’s quite a stream.

And that’s why…

Every time I was about to go back to my hometown for a visit, and would of course be seeing Aunty Joyce, I would visit my local charity shop and stock up on an armload of Grishams, and anything else I knew she liked. It didn’t seem to matter to her if she’d read it before or hadn’t—she was happy reading a book a few times. I usually arrived to her room with a hug, first, and a stack of books. (I wasn’t the only one, incidentally. Her family and friends did the same. Such is the community effort required to keep such a woman supplied.)

And she would always send me off with a book before I left.

⎈

There came a time when Aunty Joyce couldn’t read anymore.

I was sitting on the couch in my living room, in the early hours by myself, computer open in front of me to the message. Aunty Joyce had passed on. As the hole was just beginning to form its horrible shape in my world… in less than the space of a heartbeat, I felt Aunty Joyce sitting in the armchair beside me.

It stopped the hole in its tracks. First time in my life such a thing happened. No words, no visual, no fear. But I knew she was there. Or at least that’s how I felt it.

And somehow… what she communicated to me in that moment was… sunshine and warmth. And that she’s ok. And then she left.

May she have access to all the books she wants now, and the eyes to read them.

I love fiction to this day. Can’t do without it.

And thank you, Aunty Joyce, for everything.

A

PS - This father’s day book, and his whole Camino Island series, takes place on a fictional island in Florida. But in fact… John Grisham shared in an interview that it’s loosely based on Amelia Island. Which is where Aunty Joyce spent many winters. I don’t know how the Universe works, but I appreciate it.