A few words about John

Two mornings ago I learned that John Stranach passed away.

You may as well say that the thunder has left the sky.

To say anything now… is to test the limits of language. As long as I have had awareness, Grandad John… from “Nunny and Grandad”… the two permanently joined in my mind as a single entity first, and individual presences after… has inspired me to whatever narrative interest and intent that I have possessed… or tried to…

This was a man who taught me how to play blackjack poker… which he called, if memory serves, which it probably doesn’t, Twenty One or Bust…

And got me on to Robert W. Service…

And drove us around Chatham and the Miramichi in the back of a station wagon with anatomy models from his gig teaching First Aid and other courses for St. John Ambulance… and later around the Carlisle Road area outside Fredericton…

There is a grab-bag of wild, colorful, distorted and also startlingly clear images of him, and everyone around him in houses which seemed to emanate from his very presence…

In many ways he was one of the key influences of a life which has been spent in large measure in front of books… and computer screens… and English classrooms…

Now it feels like the roof has blown off a house. Raindrops are starting. It’s hard to feel calm. But calm… or, maybe better, balance… is exactly what is called for & what is wanted…

A young grandfather

This was a man in his ninety-first year… which, somehow, means that he was forty-six years old when I appeared on the scene.

A young father who had a son who became a young father.

In my mind he is perpetually in ripped gardening jeans and a plaid shirt and is wearing a round hat. He is not tall but imposing anyway… not burly or stocky… yet somehow almost pugilistic… he isn’t a fighter… but he looks like someone who has been in fights… or could have been… and his arms are brown and covered (seemingly) in tattoos which he quietly but persistently disavows… and which are the surest sign I will get inked as early as I legally can…

There are early memories of Catholic services… and post-Mass treats… and fast food restaurants… enmeshed between and among one another… and faces and specific instances or utterances become secondary to a prevailing calm that in all circumstances this man will know what to do. It will be correct, implicitly moral, faith-informed, and for the benefit of everyone who is privileged enough to know Anne and John… and to imagine that list of personages from his first day to this past weekend… extends in words and language beyond words… into the spring rainclouds…

And yet somehow seemingly always with humor and a smile. And with a spiritual life as multifaceted and inspiring as any other aspect of his character.

That man is close to my own age. And somehow he managed to exemplify in his own graceful, humble way how to live a good, balanced, dignified, and, I would like to hope, joyful life. And we are all better for it.

An abundance of gifts

I’ve been on what feels like a dissembling path for some time. The past two to three years, particularly, have been tumultuous… it is as though a valve was opened and steam or water or boiling oil or lava is blasting out of it…

I was in transit when I learned John Stranach passed, and remained in transit, and feel in all cases transitory in what I am tentatively calling my early mid-life.

John, in life and in myth, travelled widely and early and for brief periods and for prolonged periods of time. Winds shift. Children are born. Decades dissemble in a blink. While the universe was forming, John and Anne stopped in New Brunswick. That is the beginning for me… among many other possible beginnings…

Throughout my life I have accumulated cards for every kind of occasion with the entire inside written by Nunny and Grandad… and emails… and text messages… and this trove of language deserves its own permanent, public display… the casual wit and gravitas astonishing in a man who may have finished high school… in fact, I’m nearly certain he did…

His language and their language is there, physically. I can touch it. And it feels like years are crossed.

And in truth it was sometimes not easy to see such a positive light. By being who he was and living as he did… pious, devoted, generous… again, the limits of language are apparent… he provided a living, breathing example of how to have a good life… which, as I grow older feeling more flummoxed and tumultuous by the day, seems now a rarified thing… meanwhile since the stars began and likely before… the archetypes of decency are being cast… the truest and highest standards… and John and Anne come flying out of the gate. His… and their… achievement is perpetual. As long as my kids and everyone’s kids are out there influencing and being influenced in ways we can barely imagine.

I am sitting here struggling at my inability to express what this means. John Stranach taught me and all of us early and often that effort matters. Character matters. You can be in love for your entire adult life. You can find the spirit and the spiritual in any and all things. For these and myriad, incalculable other reasons we are thinking of you John, from now until the end of any and every thing… and further, if further is there.

Thank you as always for visiting, friends.