The name of Gratitude

When it snows, time seems to slow down. The air becomes muffled and if you stand still enough, even your own exhaled breath becomes a being with a soul and a place in this world.

It’s all I could think about when I found out.

Snow.

I was thinking about snow and how that very feeling of walking out into a fresh snow was how I felt at that moment when I heard my father had died.

I found out three weeks after it happened, it took them that long to find me. Anyone who knew me in my twenties would be amazed to see the composure with which I took the news now in my thirties. I didn’t cry or stand up out of my chair and pace with anger. No, I was composed. I was relieved, and still, and composed. My own breath felt like a companion sitting with me in amiable silence.

So when the money came and my reaction volcanic and brimming with acidity overflowed onto my kitchen table, I decided I needed to do something good with it.

For over two decades that man had not so much as called to wish me a happy birthday, let alone supported me in any other way. The kindness of others is not diminished in my eyes. It was all that kept me going in those early days. It fed me, clothed me, put gas in my car.

Then here comes my father’s money. He suddenly remembers me in his last days and leaves me $20,000? Now when I am successful and thriving? The days when I ate stale oyster crackers for dinner rolled through my mind as I remembered how he deemed me beneath his money then. The irony was making me sick as if I stood on shaky ground.

The little black notebook in my hands however felt solid and familiar and dependable. The righthand corner where the cardboard underneath peeked out from the fake black leather covering, was worn down from all the times I had picked nervously at it while going over my chequebook. The inside however was pristinely filled out with the names, addresses and phone numbers of those friends and strangers to whom I owed most of the meals I ate in my twenties, and the current success of my business.

These people earned the right to receive my gratitude. I kept track all the help I had acceted, always intending to pay back what I took. A karmic promise to myself.

Gillian Caroll was at the top of the first page written in slightly shaking handwriting. I remember I cried when she bought me dinner to go along with the paper cup of cold coffee I had been nursing from the free sample table at the grocery store. Her compassionate eyes didn’t ask me questions as I scarfed down the warm meal. She talked about her granddaughters and the sweater she was knitting. I remembered how much I appreciated her appreciating my need for taciturnity.

“Hello?” A small, tired voice answered the phone “Who is this?”

“Hi, this is Cecelia Brown I am calling to talk to Gillian? Is she home perhaps?”

A few seconds of silence.

“Gillian, uh, Gillian passed away two months ago. This is her son, I, uh moved into her house when she got sick. Which is why I’m answering this number.”

I found myself picking at the worn corner of the notebook like so many times before. “Oh um, I’m so sorry to hear that. She seemed like a wonderful woman.”

“She was. Did you know her?”

“Well not really, I mean, she bought me dinner once when I didn’t really have much to my name. I have always been grateful to her. I was just calling to…well to thank her”

“Yeah.” He paused, and I heard a sniff. “That sounds like her.”

My throat began to get smaller and I felt a sudden pang. “Well I’ll let you go. Again, I’m sorry about your mom.”

“Thank you, take care.”

We hung up and my heart sank. She was gone. Gone before I could pay her back. A sense of incompleteness inflated somewhere near my stomach.

The second name on the page of my notebook drew my eye like a magnet, I needed to move on before I let this feeling overwhelm me.

“Hello?”

“Yes Hello is this Angela?”

“No I’m sorry this is her old phone.”

“Oh ok, who am I speaking with?”

“Her ex husband.”

“Oh, uh, I’m sorry…do you have a way I could get in touch with Angela?”

Dial tone.

Whatever had happened between Angela and her husband I hoped she was doing well.

The next 5 numbers in the book were disconnected, then one answering machine.

My Black notebook which now rested forlornly in my lap fell onto the floor as I stretched. I picked it up and flipped over to the next page.

Dana Love.

The lady from the church down the street from my first apartment. She helped me in more ways than one and more times than once. She is the reason casseroles give me a warm and fuzzy feeling and Sunday morning church organ music makes me feel less alone.

I dialled her number with revving anticipation.

After three rings my heart started to sink. Dana wasn’t going to answer, she may have passed away, or moved away, or given her phone to someone else and-

“Hello?”

My heart skipped.

“Dana? Is this Dana?”

“Yes it is…you sound familiar, who’s calling?”

“It’s Cecelia, Brown, from-”

“Cecelia Brown! Baby girl I have missed you all these years where have you been? I know you moved but you stopped coming to church too.”

I laughed feeling lighter already “Dana you know I don’t believe in God.”

I could practically hear her eyebrows raise in disapproval. “If you kept coming to church maybe God would get you eventually.”

I laughed again, and then spoke before she could start up about God again. I asked her how she’d been, if she’d ever finally gotten that surgery on her knee, or bought a piano to practice on. She asked about my art and my business and how long I had been living in my new house.

Our conversation meandered for a while before a contented lull gave me the opportunity to bring up what drove me to call in the first place.

“Listen Dana, I’m calling for a reason actually. I have something I want to talk to you about.”

“Alright honey go ahead, I’m listening.”

“Back when I lived on Green street, you know, I didn’t have much. I barely had anything in fact. You remember how I used to eat sitting on the floor with a cardboard box for a table.”

Dana Laughed. I continued.

“In those days you were like a miracle to me. You brought me your delicious tater-tot casseroles and took me to church on Sundays so I wouldn’t feel so alone. You invited me for Christmas dinner with you and your sisters and remember that time you took me to see the showing of Seven Brides for Seven Brothers at the cheap theatre after I got my purse stolen…”

“These were such sweet times for me.” Dana’s voice was wistful and calm. It brought back soothing memories of being held in her motherly arms, with no thought in my head except knowing that Dana wanted me there.

“Dana I want to pay you back. For all those times you were there for me, for the way you cared for me when I had nothing to give. I think you deserve to be rewarded. You see my uh, my father passed away and for some crazy reason actually left me some money, twenty thousand dollars, which is, well crazy like I said and-”

Dana interrupted me with a “shhh shhh shhhhh”

I trailed off in the wake of her somnolent shushing.

“Oh honey,” I could tell she was shaking her gentle head “don’t do that to me. Don’t make me small enough that you think I want to be payed back.”

My confusion must have been audible despite my silence. She went on.

“I loved you because you were someone who needed love. Oh little girl, love can’t be repaid as if it were a bill. Love is alive. It flows like a mountain stream, always new, always flowing from person to person. Don’t try to make the stream flow backwards.”

I sat on my side of the phone trying to come up with something to say. Her words struck me in a place in my heart that was seldom touched, but I still had questions.

“But I just want to do something for you, since you were always there for me.”

“So come see me baby girl, come spend time with me. Do something new and let the water flow. Don’t think like I’m a debt you want to clear. Your head is telling you to pay me what you owe me but baby girl, what I gave you was a gift. You don’t pay for gifts”

There was nothing I could say to that. The urge arose in me to thank her profusely but something held me back. Instead I just quietly whispered into the phone.

“I love you Dana.”

“I love you too Cecelia. I love you too. Come see me this week won’t you?”

I laughed through welling tears in my throat.

“Yeah I will.”

I thought about the conversation with Dana for five days now. I couldn’t remember a time when my heart had felt so light. As though my spine had straightened, relieved of the heaviness I’d been hanging around my shoulders all these years. The idea that I was living on borrowed love was like a twisted vine snaking it’s way through the chambers of my heart. For the first time I saw it for what it was. A lie.

My idea to pay back the people in my little black notebook would have seemed innocent, even altruistic on the surface, but deep within I saw now that it was nothing more than a way for me to feel deserving of the love I received. Now I understood that was never the point. It was never whether I deserved it or not. I was loved simply because people wanted to love me.

My feet quickened as I walked into the grocery store to buy flowers for Dana. I was on my way to see her like I’d promised.

I walked. All the way in the back of the grocery store, past the cereal aisle, and the aisle with the packs of ramen noodles. I walked to where the flowers were kept, next to the free sample table, and there stood a woman. Two small children slumped in the shopping cart next to her. She was collecting three cheese and cracker samples.

I watched her give her two children one sample each, and then split the third one between the two of them. Her sunken eyes met mine and told me of her hunger and shame.

Without a second thought I pulled out my chequebook.

“Excuse me ma’am, who could I make out this cheque to? I want to give you a gift, for you and your children”

I saw the hesitation in her eyes, but the desire to feed her babies was stronger than the urge to refuse humility,

“Jennifer Gaines.” She gazed at the children with cracker crumbs dusted over their shirts.

I wrote on the cheque, twenty thousand dollars. Twenty thousand dollars each saying “You are loved simply because you are.”

I didn’t look back after I handed her the cheque, my steps led me past the flowers, past the checkout, and outside into a flurry of freshly falling snow.

I lifted my face, breathed out one cold, hushed breath, and wrote Jessica’s name in my small black notebook with the worn down corner.