While I live, I remember

These are the last words of the film, "The Beaches of Agnes," (Les plages d'Agnes) by Agnes Varda. What are we but memories and mirrors? she asks. This film maker who documents life - her life and the lives of those around her - makes this a kind of revue of her life and her work, and the work of her late husband, Jacques Demy, also a filmmaker, of the French "new wave". Even though I've only seen one of her films, Vagabond, I found it an interesting retrospective of European cinema and art, from WW2 forward. She also spends time, during the late 60s and into the 70s, in America, on the West coast. In real life she was the unassuming watcher, and she brings that reality to life in her art - in film and in photographs.


My Uncle Peter (Penner), my Mom's oldest brother, died today. He was in his eighties. I found out when we got home, after I'd seen the movie. Uncle Pete and Aunt Marie were favourites of ours. Whenever we'd travel out to Ontario, those summers back-in-the-day when Dad would take two or three weeks away from the store in Winkler, we'd end up at their place. (Now, I can hardly imagine what kind of angst Dad must have lived with, leaving that store (details, details, the devil's in the details - even in a Christian bookstore) in the hands of the staff that we had working there back then - whew! A leap of faith if ever there was one.) But Dad wanted to go back to visit family - even though Mom really was more comfortable at home - so we made the trek back to Port Rowan, etc. every summer, from 1972 into the 1980s.

For most of those summers we'd stay nights at Pete and Marie's. We'd sleep in the basement of their reasonably large bi-level, with a kind of daylight basement. (You could walk outside, through a screendoor, from the level where we slept.) Pete and Marie's place was just about a mile from Grandpa and Grandma's place - you'd travel down a kind of medelienja to it - which was also a mile or so from the farm that Dad owned for 27 years.

Every time we went back it was a reminder of where we were from. It was like returning to Canaan or something. Pete and Marie's place was mostly a strawberry farm, although he had other crops too. And he kept things neat. The place really seemed to run well. My cousins Elizabeth, Peter John, Lyndie, and Barbie were also cool. In a few ways. They were just different from the other cousins, more confident, more set, more joyful. Now I see it as them somehow reflecting Uncle Pete's difference.

Uncle Pete never went to church. The rest of my Mom's family were devout, as was my Dad. But Uncle Pete had given it up a long time ago. Something had happened way back that turned him right off of it. Still I don't think my Dad had us stay there because he was trying to "win" him back or anything. I'm pretty sure it was because of early on in Dad's life in Ontario (he was in his late twenties and the war was over), and Uncle Pete was there to help get him started with his farm, when, I'm assuming, others weren't. This was important to Dad. He mentioned it a few times. And since he's a devout, church-going man, I think it might have bothered him that the relative who did not go to church was the first to stand up and help him get his farm going.

I have memories, but I can't find stories right now. There were the rows of strawberries to be picked, the gravel drive that surrounded the house and sloped down from the front to the back, the dirt lane that led to Grandpa's place, that cavernous L-shaped metal machine shed - was there a motorbike, a go-kart, a garden tractor in there that we drove? And Uncle Pete's eyes. His grin. His "well if that's what you want to do, then you ought to just go on and do it" sense of life.

Uncle Pete seemed not to need people. I now he did. I'm guessing he was, deliberately, a lonesome man. He did things his way, and he was happy with that, for better or worse. These could all be my own fantasies and pretensions by now, but these memories are real to me. Uncle Pete was that guy who wouldn't take any shit, who would let you know if you screwed up, who'd tell you why you screwed up, and how you shouldn't do it again. But he was also that man who would be the first one around to help you fix it - to help you stand up again and keep on going. No strings attached. He was a man wary of people who attached conditions to love and loyalty. I suspect that's why he stopped going to church.

He was a solid man. For what it's worth I wish Aunt Marie, Elizabeth, Peter John, Lyndie, and Barbie my condolences and well wishes and at this time.