I share all my book reviews with my Mom. I guess it’s sort of like presenting a report card. And when readers tell me how they feel about Dining with Death or La Mort au menu I send those touching notes to Mom too. She likes them. And I like sharing them. I’m adding this note today from a reader in Winnipeg because it reads like a love letter to her Mom. Thanks Pooker.
Pooker in Winnipeg writes:
When I was twelve years old I said to my mother in a fit of pique, which was common in those days and I don’t know how my mother put up with me and thank goodness my own daughters were never as belligerent, but so help me I said, “I’ll kill myself before I ever get to be as *old* as you!”
My mother was thirty.
On my thirtieth birthday my mother said, “Still with us I see.” And we laughed.
But on that milestone day for me, me at 30 and my mother at 48, we had a talk about aging. My mother told me that despite the passage of years, despite the fact that when she looked in the mirror she saw wrinkles and gray hair, despite the fact that she was a little wiser and maybe a bit more confident, inside she was the same person she was when she was eighteen, she still thought in the same way, still felt the same way and that who we really are never gets old.
Now, I have thought about that conversation from time to time and always concluded my mother was right, but I mention it now because as I was reading *Dining with Death* clearly, I had forgotten it and it took a while for it to come back to me.
The author had told me, before I had even received the book, that I was in for a “raunchy” feast, so I should have been prepared. But frankly I was taken aback by the pot smoking (heck pot growing!), dildo wielding, breast baring senior citizens she seemed to expect me to accept as believable.
Ridiculous!
Or was it? It got me thinking. What exactly did I expect? Blue haired grannies contentedly knitting mittens for the needy and whose biggest concern was how they were going to navigate their walkers through Winnipeg’s snow covered sidewalks down to the Rexall to pick up some denture cream and another blue rinse before the kids and grandkids came over to eat the one Cornish game hen they’d timed to come out of the oven at 5:00 to feed us all? That *is* what I was expecting! How odd that at 54 I had these notions.
How had the lessons my mother taught me been forgotten?
And then I remembered a time when my mother had clearly forgotten them too.
She would have been the age that I am now and she and my father together with their respective siblings were “dealing with” their own very elderly parents with their seemingly outrageous and demanding needs and behaviours. I remember their conversations about “what are we going to do about Nana?”
Among other things, Nana on my dad’s side had taken to stripping on public beaches. Nana on my mom’s side was flirting with strange men (even going so far as to move in with one) and swearing a blue streak. They (my parents and aunts and uncles) were shocked and of the view that something needed to be done, that clearly they (the Nanas) couldn’t be left on their own. I, on the other hand, was not shocked at all and would say, “Go Nana!” which would net me conspiratorial winks from the Nanas and admonishing frowns from the parental units.
I think that I had forgotten my mother’s lessons because I am now in the same place as my mother was when she forgot. I am now “Carol” to my partner’s eighty-five year old mother and she is driving me crazy. The only thing I think keeps me from crawling under my desk is the fact that my own children aren’t contributing to my lunacy. Thanks kids!
My main criticism of this book is that there are a lot of characters and I did have trouble keeping them straight, who was who and who was related to whom or who was friends with whom and what was going on with each of them. I am a lazy reader, so was sometimes lost as I never go back to sort things out. Still, by the end of the book, I had managed to rein them all in and was delighted to have met them all.
Another criticism was the extensive use of humour. I understand the author’s intention in using humour to laugh at death so to speak, but I thought that it was sometimes overdone so that it seemed that her characters were indifferent or less affected than they should be by things I would expect to cause real sorrow and pain. I knew they were pained but as a reader I didn’t feel their pain and I wanted to.
Those two criticisms aside, this was a great read. While it has been some time since I finished reading it, it has stayed in my mind and I find myself going back to the questions, what do we do about Nana, what do we all do about all the Nanas, and what about when I am Nana?
As a Winnipegger, I appreciated all the local references. I’ve flipped pancakes with Lloyd Axworthy and it’s true, you’d think he’d be taller!
I’m not sure yet how I will release this book to new readers. I may “launch” this Canadian author into the wild as she herself has challenged or perhaps I will release for gypsymom’s Canada Day challenge or perhaps even a bookring. But you can be sure there’ll be 5 cents in Canadian Tire money at page 219.
Thank you Kathleen for this wonderful gift. It has got me thinking and I hope there will be many more who will think and question and be inspired because of your book.
For now this is my 13th book read for John Mutford’s Canadian Book Challenge. Yay!