Harkness – MacGillivray Stories

Having read about the adults in York Avenue in our Chapter 3 stories, it made me question whether the adults in our childhood actually ‘knew what they were doing’. Yet when we were young, we believed them wholeheartedly. That trust propelled us to take risks and live our lives later on. After all, the things these adults did seemed okay to us most of the time, at least my parents did. But were they really? Do they all have regrets? How about us, the adults of today? Do we really know what we are doing?

Some time after my father died when I was already a grown man, I visited my mother. She would sometimes say, “If I could do it again, I would do it differently.” It was surprising to the adult me. I never felt the sense that they had regrets about any of their decisions. But as we already know, my Presbyterian Scottish mother rarely easily expressed her feelings. I guess during my childhood, my parents did a good job of making ‘a good show of it’. I even felt like we experienced a sense of stability that even felt ‘permanent’.

It is, in part, this feeling that has inspired me to write this account – because a life that once seemed ‘permanent’ has suddenly disappeared like a wisp of smoke. The Russian folktale Snow Maiden⁹⁹ comes to mind; of how the Snegurochka‘s¹⁰⁰ body just gradually dispersed into wisps of smoke. In a way, I wanted to keep its permanence.

Now that we have somehow uncovered how the adults have shaped my life, the next posts would be dedicated to the wonders and adventures of the children at that time, including myself. We probably didn’t know ‘what we were doing’ most of the time, nor had we learned a lot of life’s lessons. But we lived and had fun in a way that the adults in our life probably were not able to do as they were busy getting all our lives together and figuring everything out so we didn’t need to.

⁹⁹  ‘The snow-girl jumped over the fire.’ Painting above by Katya Ivanova, 11 yrs, Murmansk Art School, Russia. 1999.

¹⁰⁰  Snegurochka grows up quickly. A group of girls invite her for a walk in the woods, after which they make a small fire and take turns leaping over it. When Snegurochka starts to jump, she only gets halfway before evaporating into a small cloud.