Conrad Boyce is the editor and publisher of the Cosmos. He has a BA in English from the University of Alberta and a diploma in journalism from Grant Macewan Community College in Edmonton. He lived and worked in the Yukon and Vancouver Island before arriving in Ontario in 1995. Beyond these pages, he is the Artistic Director of OnStage Uxbridge, and the technical manager of the Uxbridge Music Hall.
Previous
Ardath of the Rubaiyat
?Ardath of the Rubaiyat
Christmas is family time. So there I was, a few days past the 25th, engaged in a very “family” pastime with my older sister Cathy: rummaging through boxes of old photo albums.
Most of them were travelogues of bus or car tours that Mom and Dad had taken in the years after Dad’s retirement, to places like Italy, or New Zealand, or England, or even to the Yukon or Arizona where I figured briefly into the itinerary. There were lots of outdated brochures, and photos of architecture or, less frequently, landscapes. Every once in a while, there was a photo of my father, smiling in front of the architecture or the landscape.
But almost never was there a picture of the photographer, of the travelogue writer, of the woman who put the album together. She created the projects, she wrote the stories, but as a character, she was on the sidelines.
It wasn’t until we starting looking at some of the older albums that we caught glimpses of the beautiful woman that was our mother. She and Dad emerging from the church in Vancouver on their wedding day, a knockout couple to be sure. The two of them standing in front of the airplane that would take them on their first dream vacation to Hawaii in the mid-50s, another of them at the hotel at Waikiki, standing in front of a palm tree in garish garb, arma around each other, cigarettes in hands (like everyone those days, right?).
There were also photos from Mom’s own youth, of her and her siblings, her parents, her pets. But it wasn’t until we started looking at the books, that my remarkable mother really stepped into the spotlight.
My sister has been a nurse for 40 years, and her current job is assessing people, most of them older seniors, for placement in long-term care facilities. A little more than a year ago, she faced the heart-wrenching task of placing her own mother in a nursing home. It was necessary, but that didn’t make it easier.
When my mother’s house was sold, very few of her treasured possessions could go with her to her small room at St. Joseph’s Auxiliary in South Edmonton. So Cathy took a lot of them to her own small house, since my brother and I both live thousands of miles away.
While we were silently looking through some of Mom’s antique books, Cathy handed me one beautiful title.
“She and Shireen (her sister) were obsessed with the Rubaiyat.”
She was right. There were at least five different richly-illustrated editions of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, each one more beautiful than the last. Then Cathy took a quick intake of breath.
“My God. Look at this.”
This edition of the Rubaiyat had a simpler cloth cover, but the inside was spectacular. My mother, then a teenager, had painstakingly typed out all the verses, and accompanied them with the most vivid watercolour drawings. They were beautiful. And the book, although created in the late 1930s, had been so carefully preserved that the drawings looked, and felt, as if they’d been done yesterday.
I realized as I leafed through the book that here was the essence of my mother. The young woman who had made these drawings, Ardath Huddleston, was the woman I had come to Edmonton to see.
At first glimpse, though, walking into her room at St. Joe’s last Sunday afternoon, it was hard to imagine this frail 89-year-old had ever been youthful. Not until she slowly awakened and realized who was there. Then a warm smile slowly came to her slips, and a twinkle to her milk-blue eyes. Then I could see her several decades younger.
We spoke a few words that day, and I showed her the pictures of my step-son’s wedding. She held them a long time; it seemed like she wanted to absorb the life of the people in them. Each day I returned, she was weaker, less able to talk, less willing to move. I was frightened.
When she went into the nursing home, she was already alone. My father, her sister and brother, all had passed away many years before, and now her best friends were gone as well. The first time I went to see her after she lost her house, she told me she was upset when she kept waking up each morning.
She wasn’t certain where she was going, but she was ready to go.
My last day in Edmonton, Dec. 30, she wasn’t even able to speak to me. I suddenly had the feeling, sitting there holding her hand, that this would be the last time I would ever see my mother.
I kissed her forehead, and told her I loved her, and I thanked her for being such a wonderful mother and wife to our family. I said goodbye and I left.
Two days later, on New Year’s Day, my sister called to tell me our mother had passed away. She’d waited to see me one last time, but Ardath was gone.
Gone until I open her Rubaiyat, and I look at the lines and colours of those drawings. I may never have met the girl who painted them, but I knew her very well, and loved her very much.
