Roger Albert

YOU TRUST EVERYONE

~ Roger JG Albert ~ 6 Comments

YOU TRUST EVERYONE

Driving in downtown Vancouver over the past few days reminded me of something I used to ask my students in a lecture I did about sociality and social integration. I used to ask them whom they trusted. They would invariably point to family or friends or jokingly say they trusted no one. But, of course, we trust all kinds of people implicitly and regularly all the time. Our trust is not restricted to our intimates. It’s tough though because although we consciously and unconsciously think of other people and their effects on us, we deny that they have any control over us. Most of us truly believe that we and we alone are responsible for our lives and actions.

Truth is, we’re so conditioned by the ideology of individualism that we hardly think in social terms at all, about other people and their profound effects on our lives. There was even the spectacle a few years ago of a British prime minister suggesting that there is no such thing as society at all, only individuals and individual action.

Well, we are connected in ways we hardly understand and virtually never attend to and one way we deny that is by labeling other people. We often label people pejoratively in a myriad of ways. We denigrate others and don’t have any sense of connection with them, in fact we are often repulsed by them. Yet every time we get into our cars and drive down a busy street or highway we trust all of them, even the repulsive ones, like they were family.

Just think of the number of people driving anywhere downtown on any given day and there is bound to be a wide variety of people you could think of. There may be commuters, delivery truck and taxi drivers, moms and dads driving their kids to school, police cars and ambulances, service vehicles of all kinds but there could also be murderers, rapists, criminals of all kinds, violent domestic offenders and of course there will be a motley collection of more or less unsavory characters like conservative politicians, bond traders, media hypers, regular bullies and just plain obnoxious people most of whom you would never choose to associate with in any way in any other circumstance. Not all these categories of people are mutually exclusive either. A mom driving her kids to school could be beating the crap out of her kids when they get home in the afternoon and the service van driver could very well be a rapist. We just don’t know. We still trust them.

We trust that if they’re coming at us in the oncoming lane at 60, 80 or 120 k/hour they will not wander into our lane and kill us. Even if we’re going in the same direction as they are, we trust that they won’t wander into our lane and force us onto the side of the road, maybe into an abutment or barrier. Either way we may very well die. Of course there are accidents, but they are unintentional or are supposed to be. We don’t usually ascribe accidents to malevolence. To ignorance and stupidity, yes, but not malevolence.

You may argue that you really don’t trust them. Well, of course you do. You may not like it, but you do. If you drive, you trust. You trust every other driver on the road. I know that’s a scary thought, but that’s the way it is. You trust murderers with your life.

Guillaume Leguerrier arrives in Canada, marries and has kids.

~ Roger JG Albert

A translation of Pages 27 and 28 – Victor Leguerrier’s book Les Leguerrier au Canada

 

The First

 

We do not know exactly when Guillaume Leguerrier arrived in Canada [more properly referred to as New France at this time]. In early 1748, we find him at St. François-de-Sales of “Ile Jesus”. [Ile Jesus translates literally as Jesus Island, but that does not seem an appropriate translation so we will stay with the French under this and similar circumstances] There he married a ‘Canadian’ woman, Marie-Louise Gariepy, in November, 1748. He had fifteen children among them Honoré, Charles and Jean-Baptiste. In 1780, he moved to Terrebonne where he was buried in 1792.

 

Charles established himself in Montréal. We find no trace of his lineage after the fourth generation.

 

Honoré had four children among them Eloi who settled in St. Augustin. Eloi had nineteen children among them Eloi (son), Joseph and Jules. The St. Augustin Leguerriers, and later of Clarence Creek, Alberta, of British Columbia and the Northwest Territories are all in this lineage.

 

Jean-Baptiste settled in SteThérèse-de-Blainville and had only one son, Léandre who had fourteen children including Joseph-Victor. This lineage includes most of the Leguerriers of Ste-Thérèse, of Fort Coulange and most of those in the Montréal and Hull regions.

 

In terms of the fifth generation of Leguerriers in Canada, there are those for whom we account here and by means of which we classify the descendants of subsequent generations, this in order to clarify the order.

 

The Honoré lineage –

Of Eloi (son):             Evariste, Georges and Rémi.

Of Jules:                     Euclide and Mastai.

 

The Jean-Baptiste lineage –

Of Joseph-Victor:      Adrien, Damien, Cyprien, Joseph-Benjamin, Maximilien and Emilieu. Malvina, Amanda, Clara and Emma.

 

In 1974, there are Leguerrier’s alive from the 5th to the 9th generations. Of the 5th generation, survivors include children of Eloi (son): Mélanie, Georges and Rémi, the children of Joseph: Anney and Jean-Gérard and of the children of Jules: Ernestine. The Leguerriers of the 9th generation are descendants of Adrien. [?]

 

An Honourable Family

 

Guillaume was an honest, respectable man, well respected. His fellow-citizens held him in high esteem. The Leguerrier family was among the elite of society. Guillaume’s three sons did him proud.

 

Charles established himself in Montréal and worked honestly. He was well known as a master woodworker. Honoré was a good son, a devoted parishioner and a model citizen. Jean-Baptiste became a captain in the militia of Ste-Thérèse and a warden of his parish. No one doubts that he was a natural leader in his society.

 

Eloi, an upright and humble man was elected by acclamation as a parish warden. Léandre was both churchwarden and militia captain. He was the driving force in the affairs of his parish and his village for numerous years.

 

Jean-Victor was churchwarden, mayor, county prefect, justice of the peace, popular mediator and school commissioner for the school in Ste-Thérèse. He was an advisor and confidant of a Québec prime minister.

 

A United Family

 

The Leguerrier were a united family. Guillaume’s three sons valued each other and helped each other out. Brothers and sisters got together for baptisms, weddings and funerals. Cousins of the 3rd generation became godparents for each others children. This friendship was not just a formality. It extended to real and financial assistance.

 

The Leguerrier of St-Augustin and of Ste-Thérèse, those of the 4th generation, visited each other frequently. When a death occurred in the family cousins were always there to offer their sympathies.

 

It was much the same for Eloi’s family, and those of Joseph and Jules. Mastai’s children got together every year for a sleigh ride and bean supper in Clarence Creek, Alberta.

 

 

[Alright, I can’t help myself, I have to editorialize here. So, Guillaume leaves France sometime before 1748, gets married to a local girl, moves to Terrebonne and lives happily until 1792. But why would he leave France in the first place and why would he choose New France as a destination? Well, this is a period of time in France and in all of Europe of rapid change. The year 1760 is usually noted as the year the industrial revolution really got off the ground in Europe, urbanization was the name of the game and the population exploded due to better sanitation and basic infrastructure. The French and English were often at war and the Seven Years War concluded with the Treaty of Paris in 1763. Guillaume would have arrived in Canada before the war started but after the Battle of the Plains of Abraham in 1759-60 most French citizens returned to France. Guillaume stayed probably in part because of his marriage, but he may have had business interests that would not have been affected by the change of rule. We know nothing about Guillaume’s financial circumstances when he arrived in New France, but he was not poor. He was able to buy land. We know nothing of this from Victor Leguerrier’s account of the early Leguerrier’s in Canada. Not only that, but how could Victor speak so glowingly of Guillaume’s honesty and high standing in the community on such scant information? Well, there are no records of Guillaume ever being arrested or involved in litigation of any kind. That speaks well of him. It would be so interesting though to know something about how he got on in the world outside of his family and parish? We’ll never know, I guess, but it’s fun to speculate.]

My father is my 8th cousin.

~ Roger JG Albert ~ 13 Comments

My father is my 8th cousin.

 

So, I’m not at all certain that it’s true that my father is also my 8th cousin, but it is entirely possible given my family history and the interrelationships between the Alberts, Michauds, Leguerriers and Gauchers over several generations. [1] There is clear evidence that the Michaud and Albert clans came over from the Poitou area of France together in the mid 17th century. On my mother’s side of the family, the Leguerrier side, it seems that Guillaume was the first to arrive in Canada. He arrived sometime just before 1748. My paternal grandparents Thomas Albert and Edna Michaud are 6th cousins so it seems the families that appear most predominantly in our family histories intermarried frequently enough.

 

Maybe as I get older I think more about my own death just because I’m getting closer to that time and time seems to be moving ever so fast. But I do glance away from my own belly button from time to time. I’m also fascinated with my family’s history, mostly as I try to imagine what my ancestors experienced as they lived out their lives. What would have possessed my ancestor Guillaume Leguerrier to leave his home in St. Léger, Normandy in the middle of the 18th Century?

 

I’m in the process of translating parts of Les Leguerrier au Canada by Victor Leguerrier in 1974. This is a massive study of the Leguerrier family in the New World. It needs to be updated, but it’s complete to the mid 1970s. What follows is a translation of pages 15 and 16 of that text:

Among the possible hypotheses on the origins of the Leguerriers, there is one that proposes that the Leguerrier were originally from Switzerland and that they ended up in the Channel Islands of Jersey and Guernsey fleeing from religious persecution. Some of the refugees ended up back on the continent, in Brittany. One Leguerrier, it is said, left the Channel Islands to settle in Wales, about one hundred and fifty kilometers to the southwest of London.

Certain contemporary [1974] Leguerriers in France report that oral tradition has it that the Leguerriers had lived in Brittany but that in the 15th Century some had come to live in Normandy. At that point they abandoned the Breton language to adopt French as their language. As to their name, they simply translated the Breton word for their family name into French, which ended up as “Leguerrier”.

The French origins of the Leguerriers in Canada are in St. Léger, Normandy, a tiny village situated at an altitude of 100 meters above sea level, at about 10 kilometers from Grandville and at about 18 kilometers to the north-east of Avranches in the Manche District. St. Léger is in the Coutances Diocese. The population is about 75 inhabitants [in 1974].

The ocean, about 7 kilometers away, is visible from St. Léger. Next to the church which is in the Norman architectural style there are a few stone houses, all occupied. Close by, in the south, at the base of a small hill flows the little Thar river that flows west towards the ocean where one can also find the partially restored ancient Lucerne Abbey.

The first and only Leguerrier to come to New France was Guillaume Leguerrier.

“Son of François Leguerrier and Anne Lebreton”, he was baptized on the 11th of January 1715 in the St. Léger Church by the Parish priest, Father M. Ainue. The godfather is listed as “Guillaume le Poupé and the godmother was Marguerite Lebreton, Ivan Lebreton’s daughter.” [I have no idea what the quotation marks mean here.]

Guillaume had brothers and sisters:

 

Louyie,           baptized on January 11th, 1702

Yvan,             baptized on May 7th, 1705

Andrée,          baptized on July 15th, 1708

Madeleine,    baptized on February 14th, 1720.

 

At that time there were other Leguerrier in St. Léger, as recorded in the parish registry:

  •  Nouelle Leguerrier was godmother at a baptism in 1704.
  • Catherine le Guerrier, wife of Claude Youffre, had her son Jean marry Jacqueline Pestour on September 30th, 1711.
  • Pierre Leguerrier, priest, attended the burial of a 7 or 8 year old child. A Claude Leguerrier assisted in this task. Pierre, the priest, signed the register   “leguerrier” and Claude, who has a nice handwriting, signed “le Guerrier.
  • Jacques le guerrier, sieur of the ‘her Pierre berbière’ (?) is present at a wedding on February 17th, 1718.
  • Julienne le toxa, wife of Jacques le guerrier, sieur of la her Pierre [whatever that means], is listed as godmother at the baptism as Julienne petoux, daughter of Jean petoux and Jeanne le terrier.
  • Françoise le guerrier, widow of Robert le petour, who had died the day before, was interred on November 22nd, 1719. She was about 70 years old.

There are currently Leguerrier in France who claim to be descendants of François, thus of Louyie or Ivan, Guillaume’s brothers. These Leguerrier claim that they are from St-Ursin, a tiny village close to St. Léger.

As Guillaume was making his way to North America, one of his brothers established himself in the neighbouring village. The descendants of this brother include Victor Leguerrier, grandfather to several Leguerrier currently living in France.

We note that there is another Victor Leguerrier living in Rennes, France. Finally there is a woman living in Switzerland who claims that her ancestors are from St. Léger.

[1] My sister, Claudette, has done a lot of snooping around the family tree and has published a number of calendars and booklets of family memories. distant cousins on my mother’s side, Victor Leguerrier, published a history of the Leguerrier family in Canada (1974), a very serious study of over 600 pages, and Marcel Lirette published Descendants of Antoine Micheau and Marie Train (date unknown- I remember getting my copy around 2005).

 

Rushing to print is often a mistake.

~ Roger JG Albert ~ 3 Comments

Rushing to print is often a mistake and I do believe I rushed to print with my last couple of posts. I think that was a mistake. Research can often turn up evidence from the past that makes a lie out of what we thought was true. Does this really matter? Maybe. Not certainly. It depends on what we want to depict, on what we want to understand and have understood.  I could write fiction, drawn from my imagination, enriched by my experience. How would that be different than what I am doing here? The ‘truth’ of fiction is in how believable it is, how sympathetic the characters are and how ‘realistic’ the scenes. In turning my gaze on my family, I enter a very different realm than I would occupy writing fiction. Of necessity, family histories are mostly fiction, the details of lives lived drowned in a sea of unrecorded continuity just as one tree can be made insignificant standing in a forest. Moments that stand out get into the history books.  Sometimes, they are recorded in a photograph.  More often not. When writing about family, the truth sometimes comes out slowly, not always in one go.  Even the ‘truth’ of a photograph, objective as it might seem, can be revealed more fully in all its complexity when the past, present and future of the depicted scene are entertained.

When I look at the picture I analyze in my last post, I am struck by the innocence of the scene, the mundane aspect of it.  The full impact and relevance of the scene cannot be appreciated at first glance. The scene is nothing outside of its living context. The people depicted in the photograph have no idea what awaits them in the near future, the death, panic and sorrow that they will suffer, as well as the love and sacrifice that will energize life and make it livable for them. What can I see in their faces? Nothing that belies their future. My mother would never have dreamed when this picture was taken that within 3 years she would be having a baby with the man standing next to her in this picture, a man married to the woman who stood just on the other side of him, both of whom had been her family’s close friends for years.

Now, I must make a correction to my previous post where I suggest that Yvonne died on June 22nd, 1945, because it was rumoured my father couldn’t afford a transfusion which would have saved Yvonne’s life. That may still be true, but I now know that my father had asked my mother and aunts to give blood to save his wife. Cecile donated blood sometime after midnight on June 22nd, but it was too little too late.   I learned this by looking through calendars my sister Claudette created for us over the years which contain pages from a diary my mother kept for a few years during the 1940s. It may be that my father had to find blood donors himself because he didn’t have the money to buy blood from the usual sources.  I find this difficult to believe because St. Mary’s was a Catholic hospital and I can’t imagine they would let someone die who couldn’t afford a blood transfusion, but no one lives who can set the record straight.  That makes the photo I introduce in my last post even more compelling to me because now, Cecile, my wonderful older aunt, standing on the far right in this picture, is also intimately involved in the final stages of the drama that was to unfold at St. Mary’s Hospital on June 22nd, 1945.  Death in childbirth was not as common in 1945 as it had been in previous generations but everyone knew that it was a dangerous time.  Yvonne was 29 years old, a mother of five daughters.  Such a tragedy.

It seems my mother and her family were very close to my father and his family for some time before they were married.  There was much socializing between the families starting in Alberta around Bonnyville and continuing in and around New Westminster in British Columbia.  My mother’s diary is full of references to visits to my father’s home in the years leading up to June, 1945.  She writes on Sunday, January 7th, 1945: “My day off [from work at St. Mary’s Hospital]. Went to Zenons for supper and a party.  Stayed until 3 AM.  Had lots of fun…”  On Sunday, March 11th, “I went to Zenons for supper then to a card party. I won $1.50 first prize womens. Zenon won $10.00 door prize…had lunch at Fraser Café with Albert and Gill, Mrs. Lagrange and Zenons.” The close familiarity between the Alberts and Leguerriers is evident in the photograph and it waits patiently, silent in the background to give added meaning to the scene for those who wish to know. The events to unfold in the following few months can only be understood in light of the tight bonds that existed in the community of ‘ex pats’ from Alberta now living in British Columbia.

A photograph can hide as much as it shows.  It can give us the impression of time stopped for an instant, frozen in a way that allows us to return to contemplate the moment, to relive the essence of a snapshot, lingering and maybe meditating on it.  It’s an illusion, of course, but that doesn’t prevent us from taking pictures, from trying to momentarily pause the clock. But clocks are stubborn things.  They stop for no one.

I have another photograph.  This one was probably taken on June 25th, 1945, the day of Yvonne’s funeral. She was buried along with her son, Roger, in St. Peter’s Catholic Cemetery in New Westminster.  It shows my father kneeling before Yvonne’s grave which is covered in flowers, his five daughters by his side.  The same day, my father asked my mother to quit her job at St. Mary’s Hospital, come work for him and look after the girls.

I have an old photograph.

~ Roger JG Albert ~ 3 Comments

I have an old photograph. I don’t know who took it and I’m not sure exactly when it was taken, but it must have been sometime in 1944 because in the picture my father is holding in his arms my step-sister, Denise, who was born on January 10th, 1943. In the photograph she appears to be a year old or so, which would mean the photo would have been taken sometime in mid 1944. Given that my father’s first wife, Yvonne, died on June 22nd, 1945, it stands to reason that the photo was taken sometime in 1944. It doesn’t look like Yvonne was pregnant at the time with Roger, but she may have been.

There is no obvious way to tell where the photo was taken, but the ground is dry and there’s no snow. I’m guessing it was taken somewhere in or close to New Westminster, British Columbia. Actually everyone in the photo is dressed for a nice, warmish spring day, and they’re all standing in front of my father’s 1929 Ford Model T.

In the photo, my father’s first wife, Yvonne, is farthest on the left. She is standing just behind my step-sister, Lucille, who at that time was two years old or so and she has her hands resting on Lucille’s shoulders. Next to her on her right is my father and he, as I said, is holding Denise. Standing next to him is my mother, Lucienne Leguerrier at the time. Next to her is Rémi Leguerrier who married my father’s older sister, Isabelle, and farthest on the right is my aunt, Cécile, mother’s older sister. Uncle Rémi, standing between them, has his arms around the shoulders of my mother and my aunt. He’s smiling too. The children are not smiling, neither is Yvonne although she may have been suffering from morning sickness and that might explain why.

Who could know when this picture was taken that my father’s first wife would be dead within the year and my mother, Lucienne Leguerrier would be his new wife within two years. So, here we have my father flanked by his wives. Never would he have guessed at that moment, smiling for the camera, holding his youngest daughter, that Yvonne would be gone and that he would be scrambling to find a way to look after his five daughters while still going to work. The picture tells nothing of the sorrow to come.

As it turns out, my father and Yvonne had over the years since moving to British Columbia in 1936 made friends with the nuns who ran St. Mary’s hospital in New Westminster where all their children would be born. Apparently my mother had worked there for a time and it was they who suggested, after Yvonne died, that my father ask my mother to come help look after the children while he went to work in local sawmills. That wasn’t a stretch, because the Albert family knew the Leguerrier clan when everyone was still living in the vicinity of Bonnyville, Alberta a few years before. So, my father knew my mother’s family before a number of them migrated to BC during the Depression looking for work. My father was resourceful and capable of doing various kinds of mill-related work so he was able to find employment. My mother too.

When Yvonne died, my father asked my mother if she would help and she agreed that she would. Months later, actually it wasn’t too many months later, my father had my grandfather and grandmother come to New Westminster to look after the children because my mother had returned to Alberta unexpectedly it seemed. It turns out that she had returned to Alberta anticipating that my father would join her shortly so they could be married in Alberta at Fort Kent and both return to New Westminster as husband and wife.

Now my step-sisters had a new mom. My mother was only twelve years older than my oldest step-sister, Hélène. That caused minor friction to start with because when Yvonne died my father had told Hélène that she would now have to be mommy to the four younger ones. Now, she was being displaced as mother of the family but that animosity soon dissipated because my mother had lived with them for a few months already giving time for attachments to grow between them.

I cannot imagine that my father was not steeped in pain and sorrow during that whole time, but he had no other choice but to carry on.  Sorrow must give way to children and their needs.

I know where I was conceived.

~ Roger JG Albert ~ 4 Comments

I know where I was conceived. It was in a small rickety, squeaky bed in a small room at the end of a small corridor, door on the right. I’m quite convinced all nine of my younger brothers and sisters were also conceived there although I can’t be absolutely certain. I’m not at all sure of where my older siblings were conceived. They are my father’s children but not my mother’s. They shared this house with the rest of us but the details are not important for now. The small room where I was conceived was also the room where the baby of the family slept. There was always a baby in the family as I was growing up.

 

The house containing this small room was also small, and it was always full of children. It no longer exists. The small room and the small house are gone now, torn down and replaced by a large brown duplex not so many years ago. No one driving by on the inconspicuous street on which it fronts would ever know that the house in which I grew up had ever existed. Yet there was life there, lots of life. There still is life on that same place, in the brown duplex, but the people living there now would have no idea of the life that preceded them in that very location years before, just as I have no idea of the life that goes on in that duplex now. We share the experience of a place those duplex dwellers and I, not that they are aware of that. Why would they be?

 

January 29th, 2015, marked the 69th anniversary of my parents’ wedding day. My father has been dead since April, 2007 but my mother lives on in body if not in mind. She no longer recognizes the faces nor the voices of any of her family members and every moment of her life now is disconnected from her past and even from the very moment preceding it. She spends most of her days in a state of catatonia, as a result of years of dementia, she cannot feed herself and three years ago she was beaten up by another resident of the home in which she lives, but that’s mostly forgotten now.

 

In days gone by, when I was born, say, there was much life in my mother. She was a young, beautiful, strong twenty-one year old woman, twelve years younger than my father. In her time, she bore ten children, five daughters and four sons. I’m the oldest of my mother’s children but the sixth oldest of my father’s. He had five daughters from a previous marriage before his wife died in 1946 in childbirth bearing her sixth child, a son they were to call Roger. He shares a coffin with his mother.

…to be continued sometime.

We Need To End The Stigma Around Mental Illness VIDEO

~ Roger JG Albert ~ 3 Comments

We Need To End The Stigma Around Mental Illness VIDEO.

Way to go, Rick Mercer!  I’ve been dogged by depression my whole life, but that hasn’t immobilized me and I think I get along quite well most of the time.  It does make daily activities a challenge at times and it is a constant struggle. The top administrator at St. Joseph’s hospital in Comox told me a few days ago that anxiety and depression are the leading reasons for hospitalization.  We often think of illness as a quality of the individual.  We think of it as idiosyncratic.  We acknowledge that environmental degradation can cause illness, but we seldom think that illness can have social roots.  There is a lot of evidence to suggest that much illness is social in origin, ‘mental’ illness particularly so.  We drive each other crazy all the time and the anxiety caused by uncertainty over mundane aspects of our lives combined with the certainty of death is a killer.  I think that the incidence of mental illness, distress and anxiety is highly underreported.  After all, no one wants to be labelled mentally ill.  That label carries with it profound consequences as the video shows.  Who wants to face the rejection and opprobrium that comes with a diagnosis of mental illness?

Roger

 

 

Mental Illness, Homelessness, Drug Addiction: Do These Sound Like Crimes? | BillMoyers.com

~ Roger JG Albert

Mental Illness, Homelessness, Drug Addiction: Do These Sound Like Crimes? | BillMoyers.com.

Bill Moyers gets it right.  We call it ‘mental’ illness when people display erratic, unusual or abnormal behaviour but most of us don’t believe it’s ‘really’ an illness and our governments act accordingly.  No.  Most of us believe, in our heart of hearts, that mental illness is really a moral failing and if people just got their shit together they would be fine.  Would we tell that to a cancer patient?  Well, yes we would, and we do.  (If you hadn’t smoked, you wouldn’t have lung cancer, so there!) What’s really sick here?  I think our social values are, that’s what.

 

No, You’re Not Entitled To Your Opinion | IFLScience

~ Roger JG Albert

No, You’re Not Entitled To Your Opinion | IFLScience.

I quite like this piece. I used to tell my students at the start of every term that they did not have a right to their own opinions in my classes.  In fact I told them that I had no time for their opinions at all.  Now, why would I say such a nasty thing?  Because ‘ordinary’ opinion, not based on evidence, as in the case of taste and preference in colour, is not the same as scientific opinion, which is based on evidence and argument.  Until one has ‘done’ science, one has no right to an opinion in a science class.

A lesson in humility

~ Roger JG Albert ~ 3 Comments

I’m not usually big on humility.  I figure life gives us plenty of opportunities to feel humble without actually cultivating that quality of mind.  I’ve often been humbled in the past when confronted by situations out of my control, when all I could do was stand by helplessly and observe the unfolding of sometimes very unpleasant events.  For me, feelings of humility are more often than not brought on by situations where I am helpless, prevented from acting in one way or another or immobilized by a physical condition.  One great example in my past of being immobilized, and humbled by it, was when I had a disk removed in my lumbar region many years ago.  I had had an ‘accident’ in a lumber mill and was left close to immobilized with a severe injury to my back.  I was off work for a year because of it.  As an active, eager young man, being subjected to the immobility brought on by my back surgery and lots of time in bed was humbling to say the least.  My vulnerability as a person and as a man was plain to see.  I was definitely humbled by it.  Lying in my bed for days on end, I was in no position to exercise hubris of any kind.  It was hard not to feel diminished by the situation.  Over the years I’ve had other similar experiences.  

In 2002 I was diagnosed with kidney cell cancer and had my left kidney removed in a complex, delicate surgical procedure that left me with a 36 centimetre scar running around my left ribcage, front to back and chronic pain ever since.  We had just bought an acre of property which needed a great deal of work and here I was unable to do anything physical.  Carolyn was left to do all the work that needed to be done around the place and look after me too.  That was humbling and sometimes humiliating.  Of course I had no intention of getting cancer.  I have no idea how I got cancer.  It could have come from poor personal dietary decisions or who knows what.  So, I couldn’t be blamed for my immobility.  Still, being a conscious, sentient male of the species unable to move a great deal was humbling anyways.  Getting cancer and being immobilized by it highlighted in no uncertain terms my animal vulnerability.  

A few days ago, while working on a building project at home I had occasion again to feel my animal vulnerability, this time more acutely than in the past.  I’m 67 years old but in quite good physical condition.  Carolyn and I walk the dog on average 45 kilometres a week.  We average around 10 minutes per kilometre.  That’s a pretty good pace.  Along with that we regularly exercise in our little gym at home and with a trainer.  I’m pretty fit.  I’m able to do things.  I can lift heavy rocks for landscaping projects and work long hours in the shop or on various construction jobs.  That all came to an end last Thursday evening when I slipped on a loose board and crashed to the ground landing on another board in the process right on the exact location of my 2002 cancer surgery and the chronic pain its given me ever since.  Off to the emergency ward we went.  After a couple of hours of investigation, the hospital staff determined that I had not broken any ribs and that I should just go home and let it heal.  Well, that’s easier said than done.  I don’t have a lot of pain until I move, then the pain level shoots up to a 10 or higher.  I really can’t do much.  I can sit and type this as long as I keep my arms as still as possible but every once in a while without warning I get overwhelmed with a paroxysm of pain that threatens to leave me groaning and writhing uncontrollably on the floor.  Carolyn is required to do most of what I used to do for myself.  Thankfully, my family is here to help too.  My daughters and granddaughters have been great and my son-in-law is pitching in to move our deck building project along.  Still, I feel helpless and stupid for my carelessness.  It’s humbling to say the least to be immobilized and incapable of looking after myself and contributing to the many projects we have going to keep our home running smoothly.  I’ve always been careful around my shop tools and on the various construction projects we’ve undertaken around here…and, although I’ve injured myself now and again because of lack of care and attention, this last little bit of carelessness is costing me dearly.  It’s taken away my mobility, the very condition that we define as life.  I hope it doesn’t last too long.  Even though I’m of an ‘advanced’ age, I heal quite quickly so I have my fingers crossed that I’ll regain most of my mobility in the next few days.  Right now, I don’t particularly feel that way, but I must remain optimistic and maybe I’ll be able to get some decent painkillers when I see my family doctor next week.  I hate being humbled.