Those Sweet Indulgences of Imagination, and the Effervescence of Sentimental Delusion Along Life's Perilous Road

Birch Hollow Photo by Suzanne Currie

      I don't  know how close you have been to a superstitious person, but let me tell you from experience, that there were few days when the affliction affecting my mother Merle, didn't influence at least the part of a day. Merle had been a long-time bank employee, and she was a whiz at math, and had been employed for some of her banking time as a staff auditor, finding the mistakes of associate tellers. She could never understand why I was so bad at math, but part of this, of course, was the fact she lacked patience in the non-professional sense of teaching her child, and not in reporting a shortfall in the bank's daily tally. I didn't have patience, you might say, for her impatience, and we never had any real success as tutor and student.

     Merle may have carried the folklore and superstition gene into our family, from the old country ways of the Germanic and Dutch emigrants to North America from the 1600's, that made up what she called her Pennsylvania Dutch ancestry. She was wrong about this in part, because the Vandervoort kin settled in the geographical area of the present City of New York. The German mix around this same time, of course added some old world legend and lore, which Merle often referenced but only loosely. But many of her superstitions, developed presumably as a child, carried forth and probably intensified from a quite average farm family living in Trenton, Ontario, on the family acreage dating well back in regional history. In fact, Merle was an unknowing United Empire Loyalist, as Suzanne, my research partner discovered several years back while studying the Vandervoort connectedness.

      Point is, I grew up with a mother who had a full range of superstitions, some stranger than others, some more intense and complicated. I found out by breaking a mirror in the house with a tennis ball, and God forbid I should have sipped my tea without first skimming off the froth, called "money," because that denied me good fortune. She wouldn't walk under a ladder or let a black cat cross in front of her, or at her back, and at times that meant sprinting out of the way. She chastised me one day because I was playing around with her umbrella and I accidentally opened it up; it was not cool to open it in the house. If I tipped over a salt shaker, I had to shake it once over the left shoulder, and I was reprimanded many times about hurting a daddy longlegs spider, showing itself prior to a rain event, because that also heralded potential bad luck. I don't think she avoided stepping on cracks in the sidewalk, possibly because her mother had already passed away, and she wouldn't thusly have "broken her back." Merle confessed to me that she had both heard her late mother's and father's voices while she worked at her household chores, just before she died. She heard these voices just before each one passed away, and when the phone rang, a day later, she knew what the call was about. She also whispered to me, so that my father Ed, who didn't believe in paranormal anything or superstitions, that she had visits from both her father and mother, who stood at the bottom of her bed, on separate visits, also shortly after their respective demises. On these occasions, her mother sat on the end of the bed and smiled at her daughter, but never spoke. Her father just stood in the doorway of her room, with a peaceful look on his face. Stan Jackson was a huge man, and his figure would pretty much dominate a doorway. He didn't need to speak to let my mother know he was okay with the afterlife, and was with his wife Blanche and daughter Marjory who had died many years previous.

     As a side note here, my grandfather was an accomplished builder in Toronto, who even has a street named after him, because he had constructed most of the houses on the stretch of Jackson Avenue, north of Bloor in the Jane Street area, although I've never actually visited our namesake neighborhood. In the early going of the Great Depression, Stan was asked to construct a church building for a congregation that had outgrown its original premises. He did so, and it was on credit, which did put a strain on the family coffers, seeing as he had to front material costs, and pay his crew from personal funds. When the church was completed to the satisfaction of the Board of Directors, and the key to the building turned over to the Minister in charge, the stalling tactics for repayment began, which would eventually end up with the directorship refusing to pay anything at all. My grandfather was so upset by the failure to pay, which was never rectified, as the family accounts showed, up to the time of his death, he refused to have anything do with either attending church ever again, or making religion any sort of priority in his or his family's lives. So as a matter of curious irony, he was attending church regularly with his second wife, at his winter retreat in Florida, and following a Sunday morning service, Stanley collapsed coming down the outside stairs, and died of a heart attack, before the ambulance arrived, in the silhouette of cross and steeple at his back. Now as you might imagine, my mother took off with this news, and added it to her unwritten text of superstitions and folksy family stories that had roots in fact; somehow proving her point that bad luck needs its accessible charms and four leaf clovers when available.

     I grew up with the friendly, mostly sweet indulgences of imagination, and rather innocent delusions about life and its many mysteries, and it was her adherence to these often murky rules of engagement and deferral, that made me give some credence to what was unknown, but, yes, "the known unknown," to borrow from a recently deceased White House official, who used this references as related to war. Well, by relationship with my other wasn't on a war footing, and she never tried to sell me on joining her superstitious ilk. She just didn't like me offending any deities by either not taking off my hat in the house, or using the name "MacBeth" which is more of a theatre thing, but she hedged her bet anyway, by never uttering it, even if it was the subject of my homework that particular night. She wasn't off her rocker by any means, but her superstitions were real to her, and who was I to tell her they were ridiculous. It all gave me reason to explore these strange fictions, and it might explain to you, why I still wander along this mist-covered trail to nowhere in particular, but onward toward a destination where it would not be so out of the ordinary to encounter fairies in a moonlight revel, or hear the hooves of a mad stead carrying the headless horseman of Sleepy Hollow. Her family, it is worth noting, was established as new homesteaders, in New York State at the time the legendary "Sleepy Hollow," in the vicinity of the Haunted Hudson River, the favorite reckoning ground, that inspired author Washington Irving's famous characterizations, of his favorite phantoms, including the delicious tale of Rip Van Winkle. And, her family, were Dutch, as were the specters.

     As I am finishing up this post, this afternoon, I just now got this image in my old noggin, while looking to my right and seeing cupboards within arm's reach, and hearing the thunder rumbling overtop Birch Hollow.....sort of like the Dutchmen bowling in clouds to the fascination of the good Mr. Winkle. My mother was deathly frightened of thunder storms, and would always retreat to one of the closets in our apartment to ride it out. I never did find out why she was scared of even average, non threatening storms, but my father and I decided it was just her way of coping with the prevailing adverse weather, and it seemed harmless enough, giving her temporary peace of mind.

     Please join me for some more folksy stories upcoming.