My two daughters and I had an uneventful Good Friday trip home. It ended with coffee and homemade choc chip cookies around the table with my Dad and stepmother. Before our salmon and vegetables we had caught up on all the news - well all the news that Dad had heard. He's pretty busy in his retirement - manning the Rural Museum, Meals on Wheels, the Visitors' Centre, serving as Probus secretary and on the Cooee Lodge retirement centre and hospital management boards, among other things - and hears about the over sixties.
Down the main street today we heard the whispers from the rest of the demographic. All the news in a single sentence when I know that behind each sentence lies weeks and months of shifting and changing. Dominic diagnosed with cancer, the treatment, his reponse to the treatment, the support of their friends and family, the changes in his ability to keep up at the pub and the golf course and finally, the sentence that I heard in the bakery, his death in the palliative care unit. Moving away meant I missed all the subtleties and dailiness of his illness and the multiple impacts on his family, friends and the town.
This is what I most miss about small town life: the interconnectedness and the multiple intersections of relationships. I knew Dom's children through my children at the school. Mary his wife was in a reading group with me but also owned the corner gift shop and had been on the preschool committee with my husband. His brothers owned the pub and the butcher's shop. His father and step mother were much valued clients of my business. In the city I know people in one situation only. They are clients or they are musicians or they are writers. I don't know them from different angles or through different members of their family. I only know what they present to me in that single situation. In a small town a person is multidimensional; in the city I usually can know only a single dimension.
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