-by Frank Macdonald
I have an opportunity once a year to visit the afterlife, as I would have it unfold for me.
It’s a place where there aren’t many cherubs loafing around on fluffs of cloud. Harps are absent, probably because the Irish are lounging in a pub elsewhere. My heaven is not even within the pearly-gated city where immigration officer, St. Peter, weighs the pros and cons of lives lived on Planet Earth.
I am not a theologian interested in how many angels can square dance on the head of a pin, or to whose fiddle they step. Nor do I dwell deeply on the existential aspects of Being, or the Nothingness of Buddhism, or the non-Being of atheism. I’m not even covering my bases with Pascal’s wager.
I am merely negotiating the terms of how I will spend my time in eternity.
What I pray for, meditate upon, and expect, is to be sentenced to an eternity of sitting on the Inverness beach in the middle of the 15thof July.
Some souls may want to be at that square dance. Others may want to be in that Irish pub. Others may prefer basking around an oasis, or enjoying the joys promised by a myriad of faiths. I want what most Cape Bretoners want. I want to stay home.
Since childhood, the middle of July has encompassed for me summer perfect, far enough away from either end of summer to make the season seem eternal. At some time in that awareness, I have marked the 15th of July as my Heaven Day, and the nine summers out of 10 when the 15th of July arrives exactly as created, 80-ish, sunny, soft sea breeze, with a few shape-shifting clouds in a blue sky to entertain my imagination, I have devoted a segment of that particular day to practicing for my term in eternity.
This involves finding a large rock sunk deep in the sand, or a driftwood log comfortable enough to please the most discriminating of couch potatoes, and just sit there, toes wiggled into the warm sand all the way down to the first signs of damp, eyes closed, that being the only way to take it all in, the expanse of forever that is the 15thof July.
Perhaps in my birth search, as I wandered the world from one prospective womb to another, I was drawn towards tropical climes, places of the legendary endless summer. Perhaps, too, I was fooled into thinking a Cape Breton summer happened on a Caribbean island, the island for which I was searching as the place of my conception. As one of the very amused Fates would have it, nine months after the middle of July I would be born into a Cape Breton April.
I’ve been told that I cried when I was born. I’ve been told that most babies cry when they are born, but I had a reason far beyond a whack on the bum. I had yet to read that powerfully perfect line of poetry, “April is the cruelest month…”
Looking out the window of Inverness’s Memorial Hospital at the cold rainfall and the lawn gardens full of buds too cold, too timid to bloom, I learned the truth of T.S. Elliot’s words.
I was pronounced healthy for which every baby is grateful, had parents who claim they wanted me, and was raised in a place I quickly learned to love, despite that hasty mid-summer decision made in fetal ignorance of the nature of this island’s winters, best described as six-month-long driveways.
I have left the island countless times, as Cape Bretoners are wont to do, following the Cape Breton calendar that runs from September to June, those months spent in employment wherever employment was to be found. But as July worked its way to the surface of calendar Cape Bretoners collected their back time and worked their way home by car, thumb, train, or plane.
It was obvious from the influx of ourselves onto our island in greater numbers than any hoards of tourists, that Cape Bretoners don’t separate themselves very far from their beaches of summer. It is even probable that prison parole applications soar as summer approaches.
So this week, I woke to the 15th of July. It was overcast, carrying a mild threat of rain, but with enough warmth to be able to put the garbage out in my pyjamas. It was not the Platonic version of itself that my soul seeks each year as it again stakes its claim on its preferred corner of paradise.
Despite its worldly imperfections, this year’s 15th of July was reasonable facsimile of what I have in mind for my soul. A fine breeze fingering its way across the waves like a pianist coaxing awesome rhythms from a piano, while the grace notes of gulls and gannets added their worth to the composition. The scattered laughter of children and barking of delighted dogs gave the music another layer of depth. An occasional sea glass scavenger oh-ing or ah-ing over an ocean-polished discovery turned the vision behind my eyes to one of stained glass sunlight.
Eventually, the world I live in made my stomach growl, a not very musical contribution to the whole, but quickly and quietly quelled by a Beach Hut burger, devoured in a sort of grateful communion.
There will be more hot summer days (if we win a fragment of the global warming lottery) when the Inverness beach becomes the social centre of the town’s visiting, a mix of home-from-aways, come-from-aways, and never-went-aways bartering a winter’s worth of stories with each other. Somewhere amid it all I will have stored away the 15thof July, to be pulled out and looked at some blizzardy morning next January.
