It used to be called Don's Foodland. Don and his family emigrated from China, I think. Edmontonians, or at least this Edmontonian, were vague on the details of Asian geography and immigration in the 1960s and 70s. Don and his family attended Grandma's church. She took it upon herself to welcome and help them. She helped keep their accounts. She gave parents and kids a tiered course of ad hoc English lessons through many years. They were all good friends. Do I remember that Grandma would mention Don et al. every once in a while? Do I now realize that she wanted to share this part of her life, or invite us into it? Do I remember that we just didn't take her up on that, or follow through in any way, even though we should have?
We were just reviewing the layout of the grandparents' house. Here's that picture again:
They had a basement. There was reasonably large, very well laid out and ordered work space there. An array of tools were suspended on a wall over the work bench. I don't remember being in the house when Grandpa worked down there, but he definitely worked down there. He started out as a labourer, and then he managed to start a business. It was a furnace and air conditioning business, though the latter part of that makes you wonder a bit, this being Edmonton and all.
Grandpa did well for himself, and for his family. I now understand him to have been a careful, skillful craftsman. He obviously taught his son something of his useful ways, since later Dad occasionally took on projects—playhouses in back yards, the finishing of our entire Riverbend basement (Brother Scott went on to build himself an entire house!)—that require you to be quite a bit more than a dummy. Which is more or less what I am, at least in this respect.
Around that corner in the basement there was a very nice little area for gathering. There were books on the shelves with attractive bindings and evocative titles. A lot of those books later ended up in various grandchildren's book shelves, almost always sent on by Grandma.
Near the books on the shelves there was a dart board. Grandma and Grandpa's house was not the most recreational of places, so the kids would hustle down there to to play whatever game we could. Did we ever understand or try to apply the actual rules or procedure of a game of darts? Mostly we did two things. We tried for bullseyes, and we tried to make the darts stick in the bindings of the books. Such shenanigans would definitely annoy me if I were a grandparent. I would think them to be the behaviour of hooligans, and even a bibliographical crime. Grandma and Grandpa never said a thing about any of that.
This downstairs family area had a number of pleasant places to sit and talk and read. There were attractive old pieces of furniture, some inherited from Great Grandma Hill, and others acquired by Grandma and Grandpa through the course of years. When Mum and I got married in 1988, Grandma Duncan urged a number of these pieces upon us. These include the perfectly configured wooden chair now in my office at work, and the attractive shaded lamp that looks over its shoulder.
When Mum and I got married in 1988, Grandma Duncan bought us our first big three cushion couch—chesterfield, we would have called it then—as a wedding present. It was most of the furniture in our first living room, there in Edmonton's Old Strathcona area. We took it with us to California. Caitlin, famously, tumbled off its arm into the basket (that held, among other things, a couple of Grandma's afghans) when Drew came home from the hospital. We took it to Utah when we moved. It was in the first Springville duplex, and the second one too. We took it to our present house—I just Freudian-typed "our pleasant house"—where it played host to innumerable naps, nappy-changes, nursings, readings, lessons, lectures and other loving interactions.
We took careful care of this couch, but we also had six kids. One of whom was Matt. After a generation it was worn out. We bought a new couch, which has never meant a single thing to me. We took Grandma's chesterfield out back with the intention of disposing of it. We put it down, parallel to the carport, right under the north-south oriented panel that Sarah later painted and Emily Swenson hit her head on that one time.
I couldn't quite bear to part with it. So we left it there for three years. In the spring and summer I'd go out with who ever was still little to sit and chat and enjoy the evening. I'd nap, and read. I read Tinker, Tailor, Soldier Spy, Captains Courageous, Crime and Punishment and The Count of Monte Cristo on that couch out there.
This long story concludes as I record that Grandma Duncan, who you recall was most loved by her parents, was named Mercedes. Great Grandma named her that because she so loved Alexander Dumas' book, and that gracious character in particular. Grandma didn't mind her name, I think, though she didn't love it either. It is a little known, maybe a little remembered fact that Grandpa Duncan used to call her "Mike." Again, maybe there's something of a youthful, ardent tenderness in that little nickname, something we didn't see or know as we, with the heedless narcissism of childhood, interacted with the two of them in later years.
And after and in the midst and because of all that we named our second daughter, whom we also love so well, Mercedes.
