share your story - Miss Morley's Parrot

One of the defining moments of my life—frightening to me since I was only seven—occurred as I stood on a dock in the Coal Harbour waterfront of Vancouver, B.C. on February 28, 1950. It was west coast winter weather, foggy with a chill in the air. Our family had arrived in Vancouver only a day earlier after emigrating from the Netherlands, landing in Halifax and crossing 4000 miles of the country by train, and now here I stood, seven years old, on a waterfront dock in a completely strange city. In order for you to understand the import of what happened on that dock, however, I need to go back to my life before our family immigrated.

I was born in The Hague in 1942, the middle year of World War II, and my very earliest memory, as I have described it in a short story, is of the War. I was playing with wooden blocks on our living room floor when all at once I heard the staccato beat of marching boots on the cobblestone street outside, and when I ran to the window and pushed aside the white gauze curtains I saw soldiers, German soldiers, in the street below, coming right toward me. I peered from just above the window sill watching the soldiers march closer and closer until they were right below me in the street with their hard faces beneath rakish helmets, their rifles with bayonets pointing upwards, their boots pounding on the cobblestones, the thunderous clack clack clack ricocheting between the high brick buildings in the narrow street then echoing in my ears like a snare drum and I dropped beneath the window sill in fright but still I heard the boots, as if I were in a bad dream with a train hurtling toward me without my being able to move, the train shrieking by at the last minute, the vibration pounding through my whole body until the metal rhythm had receded. Finally I rose. The soldiers were gone.

That is my earliest memory; I could not have been more than two and a half. My other early memories of the War are also characterized by fear—fear when the air raid sirens blew, starting low and rising in pitch and volume so that it seemed to drill right through me and I thought the world might end and my mother would close the heavy brown velour curtains of our living room windows to shield even as little as the light of candles or oil lamps from enemy airplanes. Fear when we learned that German soldiers were in the street below and my father would dash to the bathroom upstairs and wriggle into a shallow secret compartment the size of a coffin under the bathroom’s linoleum floor and my mother prepared herself to tell the lie that her husband was away even though any soldier stepping into the living room would have known a man lived in the house from the lingering odor of the Dutch cigarettes my father smoked.

The imprint the War left on me above all as a child proved to be an important lesson for me later as a writer, namely the realization that we live in a moral universe in which evil is very, very real and not at all as I later saw it portrayed in north American comic books or Saturday morning television cartoons. I was always surprised, every time I read Flannery O’Connor’s story “A Good Man Is Hard To Find,” by June Star’s sassiness towards the psychopathic killer known as The Misfit: when she is asked by her grandmother what she would do if The Misfit caught her, June Star says, “I’d smack his face.” When her family ends up meeting the serial killer, June Star proves to be as cheeky towards the psychopath as she had boasted, nevertheless she along with the other members of her family is led off into the woods to be shot. Then I noticed what had seemed an insignificant detail: at the opening of the story June Star lies on the floor “reading the funny papers” (my italics), and I realized: that’s it. June Star’s idea of evil has been shaped by comic books. My World War II experience impressed on me that evil is no comic book caricature but a concrete reality—evil was the Nazi soldiers on our street, who made my father rush upstairs to hide in the secret compartment. Evil, I learned later, was cattle cars and the gas ovens of Auschwitz and Dachau and Treblinka.

My father taught me that evil in whatever form (its name and shape are legion) is not to be passively tolerated but must be opposed, possibly at great price. What this obligation means for me as a writer is a complex question, for fiction is to be fiction and not polemic, which is why some writers have come to believe that fiction should not be burdened by any moral obligation whatsoever. My own experience, however, is that an awareness of the reality of evil and the necessity of resisting it place upon the writer an important moral imperative which forces the writer to face the inevitable question of just what constitutes evil, and how one answers that question is partly what determines one’s measure as a writer—it’s what makes Nathaniel Hawthorne a greater short story writer for my money than Edgar Allan Poe, William Faulkner a greater novelist than Ernest Hemingway, Mordecai Richler a greater satirist than Robertson Davies. This question also impresses upon me the importance of avoiding moralistic plots in my writing, and to focus instead on what Chaim Potok refers to as “core-core culture confrontation,” conflicts that are the result of one culture with its attendant values rubbing up against another.

Let me describe the culture into which I was born, and what growing up in it has meant for me as a writer. My father owned a dairy products store on the Hague’s Appelstraat, a twenty minute walk away from the North Sea, and on summer days after the War ended I carried my shovel and pail and trekked through the sand dunes pocked with war-time cement bunkers and down to the beach where my mother held a towel in front of me while I shimmied into my black one-piece bathing suit with straps which came over my shoulders. I built sand castles and dug moats in the wet beach flats and occasionally ventured into the frigid waters of the North Sea whose shocking salt taste, when a wave snuck up on me and I swallowed a mouthful, I still remember today. My father would not be at the beach with us for he would be in the store selling milk and eggs and bulbous balls of Edam and Gouda cheese which sat ceremoniously in rows on wooden shelves after my father had taken them from their rectangular wooden boxes, and my brothers and sister and I would chew the wax the cheese came wrapped in and pretend it was chewing gum. Eggs came to the store in flats from the farm and when my father discovered a cracked egg he would not discard it but would lean back his head and tip the raw egg into his mouth and swallow it whole—we had just come through the Hunger Winter of ‘44 when people ate tulip bulbs, and we’d learned not to waste food.

We were Gereformeerd (Reformed), which meant that twice each Sunday we walked to church where people paid a sum of money annually to reserve a seat, and five minutes before the service began a little red light went on and people who stood in the back could take any of the unoccupied seats, then during prayers the men would rise and the women and children remain seated and I would settle in for a three-point, 40-minute sermon delivered by Dominee Smelik who wore a long black toga, and on Sunday evenings when I’d become old enough to go I would lean my head and gradually fall asleep against the satiny fox fur stole of my mother’s coat while my father sat apart from us in a front pew reserved for the church elders and the fox’s snout on my mother’s shoulder grinned ferociously inches above my ears. We sang the intricate long-note, short-note rhythms of the sixteenth century Genevan Psalms of Maître Pierre and Louis Bourgeois which have been so loved by Dutch Reformed people, the result, 350 years later, of John Calvin’s decree that Reformation churches sing the Psalms. While other churches have sung the Psalms, I ask myself what there was about them that caused the Dutch people to take to them so powerfully—what precisely is it that Jews and Dutch Calvinists have in common? Is it the gritty piety and fervor of the Psalms? That they are the music of a worshiping community? By way of contrast, think of the sentimentality and individualism that mark the words and melodies of so many nineteenth century American fundamentalist hymns. In any case, my earliest encounters with Dutch language and poetry and spirituality find their confluence in these Genevan Psalms.

We were Gereformeerd, and therefore “people of the Book,” a reality I experienced during my childhood in the Old Testament stories my father read at the supper table every day. On the one hand these stories were historical-redemptive stories of the faith, but they were also what fairy tales are to children, for they contain the same enchantment and magic and witchcraft and bloodthirstiness and undercurrent of sexuality that fairy tales have. A donkey speaks; an axe floats on water; an evil king visits a witch’s hovel in the night in order to speak to the spirit of a dead prophet; a painted wicked queen is thrown from a castle tower so that her blood spatters against the stone wall and the horses’ hooves; a king stands on his palace roof spying on a beautiful naked woman, has sex with her, then arranges her husband’s murder. Thus I was read to by my father every day, and my strongest memories of intimacy with him were the moments when he read these powerful Old Testament stories. My earliest childhood experience of the power of poetry and narrative, then, trace back directly to my Reformed community’s tradition of singing Psalms and reading Old Testament stories. Music, literature, and worship were inextricably intertwined.

My parents did not come from the pietist stream of the Reformed Church that dated back to the Afscheiding (Secession) of 1834 when more than 120 churches seceded from the National Reformed Church in the Netherlands; our family came from the late nineteenth century Doleantie led by Abraham Kuyper, a tradition which asserts the relevance of the gospel for all of life, including the arts, as Kuyper stressed in his Stone Lectures delivered at Princeton University in 1898. My father, who never went to university, owned a bookcase filled with works by theologians and philosophers in the Dutch neo-Calvinist tradition: Kuyper and Ridderbos and Bavinck and Van Riessen and Zuidema. The import of all this constituted another lesson that was impressed upon me and was to be a salient one in my becoming a writer, namely that the Reformed tradition, as Alan Wolfe points out in an October, 2000 Atlantic Monthly article, is one of vigorous intellectual and scholarly pursuit and is not antithetical to culture—indeed, it demands cultural engagement. This realization freed me from the notion so rampant in North American evangelicalism that fiction must be legitimized by presenting “spiritual” subject matter or by portraying an idealized reality. Browse in the fiction section of any Christian bookstore if you have a strong constitution, and you’ll see what I mean.

Since we were Gereformeerd I also attended a Christian school, where our second grade teacher was a large woman named Juffrouw Diepersloot (whom I remember, since I was about that height, as having been endowed with an unusually generous posterior), and as I look at the black and white photograph of that class now I see myself sitting third from the right in the front row, wearing short pants and smiling a toothy, self-conscious smile the way children can when being photographed, while Juffrouw Diepersloot, wearing a dark dress with a white collar, her grey hair pulled back in a bun, looms from the middle of the photo like a female deity, dwarfing the 43 students surrounding her. Deep in my memory I have a vague recollection of several of the boys in the photograph, most of whom stare impassively at the camera, while many of the girls, their Dutch blond hair sporting large ribbons, smile shyly. One of the girls has the tragic dark eyes and haunting beauty of a young Anne Frank.

My father, who could not stomach the government bureaucracy and black market practices prevalent in Holland after World War II, decided with my mother that we would emigrate. They considered places such as Guyana and South Africa, but settled on Canada, specifically Vancouver, primarily because our denomination had a fieldman there, and also because my parents were informed that the climate on the west coast was similar to that of Holland. I don’t know whether they were aware of the amount of rain that Vancouver is annually blessed with, and, if they knew, whether they were propelled by Calvinist masochism—in any case, we packed our belongings in a huge wooden crate, took whatever money we were allowed to take out of the country, which wasn’t much (some Dutch immigrants were known to find resourceful places to stash it, such as in the bellows of their pump organ) and left Hoek van Holland mid-February, 1950. We were to take a ship to London, England, travel by train to Liverpool, and there board The Empress of Canada for Halifax. I recall the embraces and tears on the pier at Hoek van Holland, and the slow, momentous movement of the ship away from the dock as we stood at the railing returning the waving of white handkerchiefs that grew smaller and smaller till we could no longer see them, nor the people waving them, until finally the pier itself disappeared. With it disappeared the only world I had known.

In Liverpool we were among 624 passengers who boarded The Empress of Canada, a Canadian Pacific ship built in 1928. 600 feet long, 20,000 gross tons, with two smoke stacks, she had been converted to a troopship in 1939, then drydocked and refitted for passenger service in 1947. The printed booklet containing the passenger list for our voyage included instructions on how to play shuffleboard, deck tennis, bullboard, and quoits, and promised “many an hour of sunny travel.” This journey was mid-February across the Atlantic, however, and the abstract of log for the voyage recorded by Captain J.P. Dobson tells another story. It indicates we left Liverpool at 4:33 p.m. on February 15, and already next day ran into “rough sea” and “heavy swell” and winds measuring 7 on the Beaufort scale, which in maritime navigation is defined as “moderate gale” (9 is strong gale, 11 hurricane). Subsequent entries in the captain’s log refer to “heavy confused swell,” “cloudy and showery” weather, and “rough following sea.” Let me tell you what all this means. It means we ran to the ship’s railing and barfed our brains out—so sick, as some Dutch immigrants have said, they could not even pray. I recall that the wood-paneled walls of our cabin swung back and forth like a lantern in a windstorm and that the stench of vomit hung everywhere. Seven days later, on Tuesday February 21, we ran to the railing once more, this time because someone had sighted land on the horizon: the thin-as-a-pencil-line coast of Nova Scotia.

A day later we boarded a C.P.R. train and rolled through the Maritimes, Quebec, and southern Ontario; during a three-hour stop at Union Station in Toronto my mother had my brothers and me get a haircut so that we could make a good impression on arrival, then on we traveled across the snow-covered prairies, the train’s windows blackened by coal soot, the doors between the railroad cars crusted with ice. In western Alberta the train took on an extra locomotive to help us climb the Rocky Mountains, then it was down the other side to a hissing, clouds-of-steam halt in Vancouver.

We were housed in the grimy heart of the city in a large room with high, green walls in a stone building known as the Immigration Home, whose basement contained jail cells holding AWOL merchant seamen, one of whom, a Korean, slipped money through the cell bars so my older brothers and I could buy him cigarettes. On the street I smelled the stench of inner city grime and morning bacon and eggs coming from shabby restaurants and saw pigeons bobbing on the sidewalk and electric trolley cars and more Oriental people than I had ever seen, but what I did not see was anyone wearing the knee-length woolen plus-fours and argyle socks my mother had bought for my brothers and me in Holland. We may have been immigrants just off the boat, but we were not stupid—we refused to wear the plus-fours.

Now this is what I was coming to when I began: a day or so after we arrived, I recall standing alone on that wooden dock on the Vancouver waterfront. Grey water sloshed against the creosoted pilings while a west coast winter fog prevented me from seeing the omnipresent seagulls but whose sharp mewing I could hear—and what struck me suddenly like a blow to the solar plexus was the realization that if someone were to step into my little cocoon of fog at that moment and start speaking to me, I had no language anymore. I would not understand a word that person said and I would be mute, unable to speak. It was as if everything I had experienced, everything I had known, everything I might have wanted to tell someone, had been taken from me. I felt alien and alone. Even today, more than fifty years later, I experience the same feeling of loss when I read or hear the Dutch language used beautifully, particularly in Dutch poetry or Dutch humor, and I feel a keen sense of regret that I do not know my first language better, as if it were a child I have had to give up for adoption and no longer know, and with whom I now may make only occasional formal visits.

Twenty-six years after we immigrated, something my mother said to me helped me to understand the significance of that moment when I stood in my Dutch knickers on that wooden dock in the fog. I asked her what one thing, all these years later, she regretted most about immigrating. What I expected her to say was close relatives we never saw again, or having had to give up our store in the Hague, or amenities she’d had to do without in order to send us children to Christian day schools and then to university. What my mother said, however, took me by surprise. “The one thing I regret most,” she said, “is that I don’t have my own language anymore so that I can’t play with language.”

After my mother said these words I realized that the import of what I felt on that dock in my seven-year-old, naive and inchoate way, and which I would only later begin to understand, is what we have all come to know, namely that language is knowledge, language is culture, language is identity—or, as Margaret Atwood points out in The Handmaid’s Tale, that to be deprived of language is to be powerless. Immigrants know this sense of powerlessness. Language, as my mother implied, contains the subtle nuances upon which not only all humor, but all meaning, is based. As a writer I understood then another important lesson, namely that what my mother and father had bequeathed to me was not only a Dutch Reformed tradition of Psalms and Old Testament stories, but also a passionate interest in language, the vehicle of poetry and narrative, all of which coalesced in my becoming a writer. My mother, a first generation immigrant who had had no schooling beyond grade six, never really developed the facility with English to enable her to express her sense of wit, while I, second-generation, would learn a new language that became the medium for me to tell the story of the Dutch-Canadian immigrant experience. But if language is indeed knowledge and culture and identity, then relinquishing my Dutch language for English meant that I would have to acquire new knowledge, confront a new culture, and forge a new identity.

Linguists say that by the time a child is seven, he or she has already learned 90 percent of adult language forms. That meant that I virtually had to begin all over to learn my new language. I recall my first awkward moments in school when I tried to understand Miss Thomson’s instructions, asking a student beside me, “What must we do?”—a literal translation of the Dutch “Wat moeten we doen?” And I learned new English words, which Miss Thomson made me repeat parrotlike: sidewalk; bicycle; potato.

In an experience similar to mine, linguist Lucy Fazio describes her first experience in a Canadian classroom after immigrating:

. . .I had no understanding of the unfamiliar words that kept tumbling out of the teacher’s mouth. The result of this submersion into a new country, culture, and language was confusion, feelings of alienation, and worst of all, fear. I was most fearful of losing my voice. I sat there day in and day out but I could not speak. At times a panic would overtake me and I would convince myself that now, for sure, I had lost my faculty of speech. I would have to check. So I began to make guttural noises and semi-coughing sounds that would reassure me at least temporarily that I did still have my voice.

While many immigrants experience difficulty and occasional ridicule learning a new language, many of the same immigrants will also tell you that some of the funniest humor among them stems from verbal play between the two languages: literal translations of idiomatic expressions, malapropisms, Dutch pronunciations of English words, and so on. An interesting example occurred in church not long after we’d immigrated. All Dutch Reformed churches in Canada continued the tradition of Psalm-singing, and one particular Sunday morning, as we were singing a metrical version of Psalm 103, which contains the lines, “For well he knows our weakness and our frailty;/ He knows that we are dust, he knows our frame,” one of my brothers, in full innocence (and with quite unwitting perception, I might add) sang, “For well he knows our weakness and our frailty;/ He knows that we are Dutch, he knows our frame.” I recall the moment when an immigrant minister conducted one of his first services in English and was reading the liturgical form for baptism and came to the phrase “since baptism is a seal and an indubitable testimony that we have an eternal covenant with God”; he stumbled over the word “indubitable” four or five or times. Like a horse in an equestrian event balking before a fence, he just could not get the word out. Finally he gave up, snuck around the fence, and kept reading.

An important adjustment immigrants often face in a new country is a change of name, for one of a person’s most personal possessions is his or her name. In Biblical Jewish culture, one’s name was one’s identity—therefore a new identity demanded a new name: witness Abram, Sarai, Jacob, Saul. When Moses asks God for his name at the burning bush, God answers, “I AM WHO I AM. . .This is my name forever.” Soon after, in the Ten Commandments, the one thing God says he will not allow to be profaned is his name. One’s name is who one is.

Many immigrants have had to assume completely new names, often undesired new names, and they can tell you fascinating accounts of how these names were sometimes determined. In a New England Monthly article, Edite Cunha, a Portuguese immigrant to the United States, relates how she had obtained her Portuguese birth name, Maria Edite dos Anjos Cunha, and how her teacher told her she would have to give up her name and become Mary Edith. Says Cunha,

“Mary Edith, Edithhh, Mary Edithhh,” Mrs. Donohue exaggerated it. She wrinkled up her nose and raised her upper lip to show me the proper positioning of the tongue for the th sound. She looked hideous. There was a big pain in my head. I wanted to scream out my name. . . .

Day after day Mrs. Donohue made me practise pronouncing that name that
wasn’t mine. . .Weeks later I still wouldn’t respond when she called it out in class. Mrs. Donohue became cross when I wouldn’t answer. Later my other teachers shortened it to Mary. And I never quite knew who I was. . . .

“And I never quite knew who I was”—this account by Cunha underscores the truth that people’s names place them within their culture and heritage and give them their identity within a tradition.

Let me tell you the story of my old and new names. At birth I was given the name Arie Huyg Kok, the name of my father; both of us were called by our middle name, my father Huug, I Hugo, with the soft, guttural g. Soon after we’d immigrated my father was informed by a co-worker that Huug was not a Canadian name, and that it would have to be changed—to Hugh, which is what my father and I both became, and so our Dutch name containing a diphthong and a guttural sound which speakers of English cannot pronounce was exchanged for an English name that Dutch speakers cannot pronounce. (Many people in my community still mispronounce “Hugh,” even second generation Dutch Canadians). As for our family’s last name, it must have been the same co-worker who suggested to my father that he might wish to turn K-o-k into C-o-o-k. He had reason, as the following story illustrates.

Looked at objectively it is one of the most comical moments, I have to admit, that happened in our congregation, and is a story, I hear, that has been told often. On a particular Sunday our minister was preaching elsewhere and one of the church elders, a dairy farmer, conducted the service. He spoke with a very heavy Dutch accent, and this Sunday had to read the wedding banns for my wife and me. My full name, Arie Huyg Kok, had become Harry Hugh Cook when my father legally changed our surname, but the elder leading the service experienced difficulty pronouncing Hugh and must still have had our Dutch surname in mind as he read the banns in thickly accented English. What he read came out as follows: “Harry Huge Cock and Judy Metha Vanden Eykel have signified their desire to be united in holy matrimony. . . .” A titter ran through the congregation. Judy and I stared at each other, disbelieving. My face burned as I heard my name, neither English nor Dutch, turned into a lewd and comic hybrid.

If Appelstraat was the locus for my first seven years as Hugo Kok, my life in Canada as Hugh Cook goes back to Morley Street in the Vancouver suburb of Burnaby where my parents bought a house for $7500 three years after we’d landed in Canada. Morley Street was still semi-rural then; the house my parents bought stood on half an acre of land which sloped away from the back of the house, giving us a dramatic view of the mountains of North Vancouver where, to my child’s eye, the peaks of Seymour, Grouse, and Hollyburn mountains created the silhouette of a supine woman, hair flowing behind her, the twin outcroppings of rock known as the Two Lions representing her upthrust feet.

The house my parents bought was old, covered with grey wood siding, and my parents’ first concern was to turn it into a suitable habitation for a family with five children. There was no stairway to the basement inside the house, a problem my father soon rectified, then he built two basement bedrooms, a tool room with a workbench, a laundry room, and a sawdust bin to hold the sawdust which we burned in the kitchen stove but which often lay dank and wet from water that seeped through the basement walls until my father laid weeping tile. With the interminable rain, many Mondays my mother would not be able to hang the laundry on the clothesline outside, so my father hung up lines in the low ceiling of the basement, and we would often have to shoulder our way through swarms of wet clothes that took days to dry. My father eventually remodeled much of the house, hanging new gyproc walls and laying new tile floors. My brother cut a decorative capital letter “K” to mark our last name as an inlay for one of the kitchen tiles, a touch which became obsolete after my father changed our last name to Cook, nevertheless the ornate letter always served as a visual symbol and reminder to me of our Dutch origin.

My parents loved animals, and the half-acre property gave us space. My father bought a large shed which was delivered to our property on the back of a huge truck. In turn the shed housed four black-faced Suffolk sheep, two black and white goats, and a flock of geese. The goats, as goats are wont to do, loved to climb, which was fine when they were kids and hopped onto our backs when we children got down on all fours, but when the goats developed a love for jumping onto the hood of our ‘53 Chev and then clambered onto the roof and peered over the edge into the windows, they’d tested my father’s limits and he traded them for four geese—two white, two brown. We dug a pool in the back yard where the geese swam, copulated, and shat. My father fried two large goose eggs with orange-colored yolks every morning for his breakfast. When the geese laid eggs that had been fertilized we took the eggs indoors, placed them in an incubator, and, weeks later, helped to peel the slimy goslings out of their shells. Later, when I went down to the shed mornings to feed the geese, every so often I would notice a scattering of white feathers on the grass and one or two of the geese missing, and knew that a fox had visited the yard. My father also thought it would be economical to buy a calf and raise it for slaughter. He bought a red and white Ayrshire bull calf, which he later tried to castrate by placing an elastic band around its scrotum; instead, the calf developed tetanus, its tail standing out as straight as a pump handle. We fed it a mixture of milk powder, water, and white bread, and finally the calf got well, well enough to be slaughtered and eaten.

Of course, having animals meant work. We dug holes and creosoted the bottoms of fenceposts and stretched wire fences. We fed and watered the animals, cleaned the shed of manure, laid down fresh straw, collected eggs. That was only part of it. We had a large vegetable garden to feed the family, and I spent what seemed endless hours on hands and knees weeding rows of beans and carrots and potatoes under a hot sun, aware that my father, when he came home, would check to see whether I had done “a good job.” Every Saturday night shoes had to be polished for church and my father’s car had to be washed. My purpose in telling you this is to underscore another important writer’s lesson. Try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost, Henry James advises writers in “The Art of Fiction,” and clearly the lesson that my father did not intend to be lost on me was the conviction that any honest work was worth doing well, instruction I’ve found rather useful for writing. Ann Patchett, in a recent Image conference address printed in this journal, explains that those who have learned discipline, by whatever vehicle they were given, are the ones who are best groomed for writing, and she goes on to explain that for her, a Catholic upbringing with an endless practice of saying prayers and rosaries and Hail Marys on bended knees provided this discipline. In my case, it was not a regimen of prayer but, as one might expect in a Dutch-Calvinist immigrant home, a regimen of work—repeated cleaning of manure from a sheep shed, endless hours spent on bended knees weeding of rows of cauliflower, carrots, and beans—that provided me with the discipline a writer needs. I am grateful now—though I wasn’t then—that my father drilled it into me, for his “advice” offered years ago provides me with the persistence now to spend an hour on a sentence, a whole morning to get a single paragraph just right.

All this emphasis on work, you may be thinking, aren’t you being just a bit too Calvinist about it? What about the muse? Where does inspiration come in? Novelist Peter DeVries, not known to be an ardent Calvinist, was once asked whether he wrote only when he felt inspired. Oh yes, DeVries answered, “I write when I’m inspired, and I see to it that I’m inspired at nine o’clock every morning.” My father would have understood that sentiment.

I said earlier that the locus for my new life in Canada was Morley Street, a short dead-end street, still gravel in the 1950s, that was a self-contained little community of a dozen houses, a highway at one end, bush at the other, and if the street was a microcosm of Canadian society at large I knew we had moved to an interesting country. Across the street was Gus Dietrich, whom I admired because he drove bulldozers. Diagonally across from us were the Barkers, whose house stood behind tall evergreens and whose two kids we were not to play with—or rather they were not to play with us, for the family were Jehovah’s Witnesses and were recluses who hid behind their tall cedars. More interesting to me was Rev. Mackay down the street, an elderly retired United Church minister who also happened to be a nudist. Apparently he went without clothes inside his house, but working in his yard outdoors he bowed to public decency by wearing a blue loin cloth similar to the ones Indians wore in Hollywood movies, the skin of his leathery torso tanned and weathered—“a saddlebag with eyes,” as the line goes in City Slickers. I was puzzled by Rev. Mackay, for the only ministers I had experienced until then were Dutch dominees who wore black togas in church and preached long sermons and taught me catechism—now here was a minister who went around naked! I couldn’t fathom that. I had seen photographs in the Vancouver Sun of the Russian Doukhobors in the Kootenays whose zealot Sons of Freedom—women included—protested government interference in their lives by taking off their clothes and torching their homes and dynamiting schools, but Rev. Mackay dressed in a skimpy blue loin cloth picking raspberries or hoeing a flower bed did not strike me as the sort to blow up his home. Reclusive Jehovah’s Witnesses, a nudist United Church minister, Doukhobor arsonists—I knew we Dutch Calvinists must have been a strange lot in the eyes of Canadians, but we had nothing on some of the others!

The person our family was closest to was Miss Morley next door, a single elderly woman whose grandfather the street was named after. Miss Morley was a large woman (very similar, in fact, to Juffrouw Diepersloot), the grey hair in her bun tight as a knot in a wet rope; thick grey hairs sprouted from moles in her chin. She usually wore blue denim overalls covered with an apron made from gunny sacks and lived in an old house identical to ours, except it had not experienced my father’s compulsion to remodel; whereas our house now sported yellow and maroon siding, hers was covered by ugly brown glass stucco, nor did she have an interior stairway to the basement such as my father built, so we would see Miss Morley every day, slowly making her way down the slippery back stairs, when it rained, to feed the 20 Red Hampshire chickens she kept for eggs. (Don’t ask me what an elderly single lady did with so many eggs). If she was sick I would have to feed the chickens for her, and I would step into her dark, spider-webbed cellar with dirt floor for the chicken feed and water.

The most interesting thing about Miss Morley, however, was that she had a parrot, a blue and green macaw named Polly which she kept in a cage in her kitchen, and on warm summer days when all the windows were open we could hear Polly’s screeches split the air. I’d never seen anything as exotic up close as Miss Morley’s parrot; the top of its head was a brilliant red sheen, the area around its eyes was also streaked with red, which gradually turned bright green on its back and the top of its wings, then an electric blue on its stomach. Its long tail feathers were a shimmering blue and red. I did not often enter Miss Morley’s house, whose brown wallpaper and wood furniture and carpeting seemed as old as she, but whenever I did, Miss Morley, knowing why I had come, would lead me to the kitchen to meet Polly. She’d taught the bird to say—what else?—“Polly want a cracker,” and I thought back to my first days in Miss Thomson’s class learning vocabulary. The round stub of Polly’s small, leathery tongue bobbed up and down inside its beak, then the bird would eye me from inside its cage with piercing eyes—perhaps wondering, since she’d performed, why I didn’t indeed give her a cracker. The bird struck me as being infinitely more interesting than the yellow budgie named Pickles my mother kept in a cage in our kitchen.

These were among the habitants of Morley Street, whose lives were to us as odd and eccentric as ours must have seemed to them. From these neighbors I learned still another equally important lesson for writers, which is that the mystery and complexity and staggering variety found in human lives exists not far away but on our very own street, next door, under our noses, lives as luminous as our own if we will but open our eyes—lives, as Alice Munro’s Del Jordan observes, that were “dull, simple, amazing and unfathomable—deep caves paved with kitchen linoleum.”

Last summer when I was out west I made a point of visiting Morley Street. I don’t always like to do so, for I feel a stranger there now; it does not seem like the street where I played touch football with friends and built a fort in the bush and stole grapes from an arbor beside Rev. Mackay’s house. A few familiar houses from long ago still stand, old and dingy compared to the new homes meticulously landscaped with rhododendron and juniper and Japanese red maple. Our old house no longer exists, torn down to make way for two new houses, large two-storey white Mediterranean-stucco homes with red-clay roof tiles. Rev. Mackay’s house has also been torn down. Miss Morley’s house, however, still stands, covered in white and beige vinyl siding and sporting a flat-roofed double garage topped with a deck for the owners to enjoy the view of the mountains. The supine woman with flowing hair and erect feet is still there, barely visible now above the tall new homes.

Miss Morley passed away some years ago. I do not know what happened to Polly—parrots have an amazing longevity, up to a hundred and twenty years, so that they often outlive their owners and are passed on to a son or daughter. I’d like to believe that Polly still wants her cracker, somewhere. My father and mother have also died, yet the Reformed tradition which they passed on to me, a tradition of Old Testament story and Genevan psalm and vigorous intellectual and artistic pursuit—this tradition still lives, rich and vivid as the red and blue feathers of a parrot.

Hugh Cook was born in The Hague, The Netherlands. His family emigrated to Canada in 1950. He earned a B.A. from Calvin College, an M.A. from Simon Fraser University, and an M.F.A. in fiction writing from the Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa. He has published three books: Cracked Wheat and Other Stories; The Homecoming Man, a novel which appeared in a Dutch translation under the title Een Man Komt Thuis; and Home In Alfalfa, which was awarded first prize in the City of Hamilton Book Awards; The Word Guild named it co-winner of first prize in the fiction category for books published in 1998. Hugh and his wife Judy, a family and marriage therapist, reside in Hamilton, Ontario.

For more information, or to contact Hugh Cook, visit the author's web page.

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