frank after his life  work & days: a lifetime journal project  

Journal for the summer of 1965

Summer vacation after second year at Queen's in Ontario. I am in the Fraser Valley picking raspberries, staying in a picker's cabin near the US border. Frank is farming his own land but still living at home. At the end of the summer I go to Europe for a year. Frank and I don't see each other again until I visit him and his wife and kids in 1979.

Sue or Susy is my sister Judy's friend Susan Ksinan.  

Dyck's cabins, July

Sunday. Frank, dressed in his favorite light blues and looking exceptionally good, dropped Dave here and stopped, with reluctance, to talk. A few restrained sentences from him, desperate replies from me. And then Homer, all unintelligent friendliness, stopped to say goodbye and Frank escaped into the raspberries, was gone in a moment, waving - "If you have a day off, be sure to call me" with complete impersonality.

Monday, July 26

Frank came tonight, in his baggy, strong work clothes and small beautifully made leather boots, his face sharp, hair curled all over his head. He sat on the table leaning his head against the sharp edge of the open window, swinging one foot from the knee and bracing the other against a chair rung. Hands loose but strong on his knees. In contrast was George with his red face and the roll of fat around his chin, lethargic and tedious, slumped in the chair. "I don't try to think into the future. Things change too fast, things happen to you." "You have at least fifty percent control over what happens to you" I said, thinking of Frank. And Frank, getting up to leave, with no excuses, stopping at the door, said "Will is like a flame. It keeps burning faster."

I had felt as though there was a substance, thin threads, connecting my outline crosslegged on the bed to his on the table - points connecting like a shadow stretched taut but elastic. I wanted to hold him. I felt myself and still feel myself glowing toward him. He is honest and tough and strong. I want his type of honesty and his warmth, meaningfulness, sharp lingering flavor. If he ever marries I will feel cheated of something I have a primary emotional claim to; and yet my relief that we are still real to each other, and my many-sided attraction to him, content me now. Almost.

Tuesday August 3

Frank was here on Saturday night, lay on the ground beside me as we watched the sky darken; after Valery had gone inside, leaving her empty tea cup with ours, we were self-consciously close physically and gropingly close intellectually. I was aware of his compact body, as I always am, and I wanted to move toward him. But "loved I not honour more" and unsureness prevent it. I wonder if my vulnerability to Frank is nothing more than the impetus of memory toward return - or is it the fatal, cyclical, romantic impetus of personal chemistry? Will I long for Frank as an impossible ideal relationship which was safely, mercifully, impossible?

September 10, Friday afternoon

Sue, bent over a row of strawberries, said "Life is so full. It keeps getting fuller."

Reading Borstal Boy in bed, thinking of the luxury of an O Henry chocolate bar and drinking coffee from my green stoneware cup. There is just enough light on the top bunk to read comfortably, the hotplate is glowing in red concentric circles, the flowers in the milk bottle reflect the reds and oranges of the painting above them, and the Van Gogh Road with Cypresses is reflected in the mirror above my row of books.

Beyond this fullness is the independent fullness of other good things - Susy herself, selfish, curious, garrulous and intent on every molecule that reaches her. The Schumann A Minor Concerto on our static riddled old radio. The sun sometimes clear and wide open, sometimes a closed flat pink disk seen through the smoke, just off center in a tall photograph of the fence posts disappearing down Boundary Road. The faces of the Hindus on our broccoli crew, especially of Suarn smiling; of the old man Shif, long beaked face and emaciated body, the white beard curled under and the new bluejeans almost flat on his body; Jornel smoking his decrepit cigarette delicately, through his ragged hand; Farmir squatting on the waggon with the red sun wild beside his wild face. The unbelievable two-colored shiny green of each dandelion leaf in the space behind my door. The flat valley seen from the road just east of Mt Lehman, with evergreen and mountains rimming it sharply. Fields of brussels sprouts rising in swells all around, in a fused mosaic of greens and blues, and the pairs of white butterflies darting across them. The sweat and exhileration of being pushed to what seems the limit of physical effort topping sprouts. The airport lights scattered and changing in many colors. Elizabeth Ksinan like an arrogant Italian pageboy, swarthy, slight and strong, dark-eyed. Susy dancing in edge-of-the-beat tautness, her luxurious skin and sensuous body. Nights of hard rain, or red moons, or stars, or the satellite moving graciously and confidently from south to north. "Escaping from metaphysical bombardment into physical bombardment" by sleeping outside and staring at the constellations for a long time.

Then Friday night. Frank came and said goodnight. "I have a feeling I may never see you again." The sadness, all evening, of the distance between us. ("Tell me - why are you so sad" on Wednesday night, and my blurted answer, "Loneliness. The old universal." "I don't know anything. Sometimes it is like a cry in me," he said; "We can talk, but always I feel this undercurrent of loneliness. My older friends tell me that when I have blood ties with a child or a woman the sharpness will go away. But I don't think so.") The surprise of his remark as I ran around the corner to get his tea: "The back of your neck isn't very tanned," and my lighthearted answer covering my joy at the knowledge that he desired me. Sudden embrace by the steps, reluctance becoming abandon, long long kisses and the sweetness of his arms and shoulders, the side of his face again. We were cold, and went back to my cabin, stared at each other, both reached for the light cord at the same time, and lay under the quilt with the hotplate on next to our heads, naked, committed to recklessness, happy and confidential. "I'm glad it was you." Near dawn I ran outside to the toilet and came back, naked, into his arms to say goodbye. "The human body is a beautiful thing. And skin." I was bursting with joy because I had given myself to Frank at last and because of his wonder at being made a lover for the first time. The light was red on the outlines of my body, and we held each other in a vacillation between passion and incredulity. How beautiful he is.

Sunday night we had each other for the first time, again and again, slowly and joyfully, with all our motions slowed and tightened to almost a dance, lovemaking smoothed off by the force of how much we loved each other. Even remembering, my stomach tightens.

Tuesday night, his knock and the reflex-quick happiness at seeing each other.

September 13

Last night his knock woke me from a quilt-wrapped sleep over my Spanish book. There he is on the doorstep in his green work clothes, with night around him in the doorway; smiling, with a bag of grapes to split with Susy.

"We have always been at home with ourselves, with each other," I said and felt his nod rather than saw it. "It doesn't happen with very many." "I don't expect it to ever happen again," he said. "Isn't that a bit bleak?" "The gods aren't generous twice." Today the thought of never-twice, for me and for him, is not softened by his presence; and life without him - what seems years of trying to return to what he is and what I have with him - has a very sharp edge.

There is no malice, no distrust, in this love relationship with Frank. I am twenty now, and he is twenty-five, but we meet with the same wonder and tenderness we had when we were sixteen and twenty-one. He is stronger, and I am freer, only good has happened. Can there be no return? Is there anything that isn't hollow without Frank?

My sensitivity has grown in the last month: I think of Grandmother being old, I think of Mother becoming old, I think of the never-twices I will always long for, and I'm afraid. I see the shaking of the poplar tree above the cabin roof (turning gold) and I'm frightened. The sudden realization of far distant past, of "thought's the slave of life and life time's fool" (all from reading about the persistance of the Old Spanish y in the modern hay!) frightens me. The thought of Frank changed, me changed, and of all the time and good beautiful things and painful things that we won't be able to tell each other about, frightens me.

I am happy that we've slept together these two weeks; it is a debt paid, a declaration for the present, something definite to look back on.

"But in spite of my butchered reputation, you do know that this with you isn't light, for me? That is very important to me." He was quiet so long that I touched his face to question him. "Just stay in my arms for a while."

After a while we lay on our backs together and ate all the grapes in the bag. I spit my seeds onto the floor beside the bed and he swallowed his. We were giddy. Then he talked about the children he'll have, the tall sons. "What are you laughing at, my tall sons?" "And my daughter's pretty legs." "She will have pretty legs, I'm sure she will, she is sure to," he said very seriously. I cried. He gave me his hanky. I soon stopped, but the giddiness was gone and we were forced to think of Saturday.

He laughs wonderfully, at me and at himself, quietly and warmly, with his face and his body focused into the laugh. His body - strongly muscled but rounded-off, shoulders and arms, sinewy forearms, delicate hipbone, soft genitals, rounded-square buttocks, soft warm skin. I take an inventory.

He lit a match to find his t-shirt, and his face and bare chest, with his hands around the match, are a picture I'll remember. With it I'll remember his picture of me lying in bed watching him dress.

Thursday September 16

This morning was bright, very cold, and very windy. Mount Baker is covered with fresh snow and it, with the other mountains, glistens as it never has all summer. This afternoon while I was driving tractor on the broccoli field, a long trail of smoke came from Harrison Lake, between the mountains, and spread west toward the coast shutting off the sun and giving the light an odd yellow look.

Last night the moon was frozen in a hoary pale sky and it was so cold that when I ran out to the toilet naked I was chilled through. Frank warmed me quickly by wrapping me around in his arms. When we were hungry we ate the two bananas he brought. We talked about the different levels of our life, and of the one level of fear and uncertainty that few speak of and how many? experience. His sensitivity is painful; his uncertainty, agony. He needs a "point of life" as I do not need one yet. He is tortured even physically by his own purposelessness. Yet he is strong, serene, uncompromising, unwilling to pick up a cheap "point" that would give him peace. "I don't think I'll ever need one that badly." His pain isolates him even from me. I understand the horror of questions swirled in echos through the mind at night and the need to escape the smothering confusion of words into the explosion of mind into infinite starry space. I understand the stabbing need for a reason. But I cannot invent one for him, nor can I create peace in that last level of his mind as I do in others.

 



frank's letters after the summer of 1965