Chasing connections and grains of understanding

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 22/11/2024 (345 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The woman on the phone is yelling at me, cursing me for calling so late at night. It’s only 8 p.m., and I mention as much, to which she replies that I should be more considerate of the fact older folks go to bed earlier than younger folks.

Disparate bedtimes aside, I had been betting on my call being somewhat intrusive anyway, having never met this person living 3,000 kilometres away in Southern California.

I’d plucked her phone number from the internet, having followed every lead to track down the original owners of our century-old home. She was married to the grandson of the first residents here, but now, I learned, he was 92 and palliative, and his worried wife did not take well to being awakened at some ungodly hour by a stranger from Winnipeg.

Despite this, she tells me her name is Virginia, and she’s planning to visit her husband in the hospital the following morning. She says he’s not doing well, and is no longer able to communicate.

I explain the reason for my call, even though I’m not entirely sure myself. I tell her I just purchased his grandfather’s home, and that it’s still very original and likely looks a lot like it did when he lived here.

I suppose that’s all I wanted to say. That someone here was caring for part of a life he left behind. She sighs, pauses and hangs up the phone.

Going down rabbit holes is an irresistible pastime of mine. I become enamoured by the shiny pebbles left along the trails where others have passed, and the possibilities for connection they beckon to me to explore.

When I’m able to establish a link that wasn’t there previously, the reward is sweet. It feels like shining light into the darkness. I get to poke a hole in the universe, letting a tiny point of light shine through. The phone call to California was one of those moments, despite its apparent unwelcomeness.

I strive for these moments in my writing, too. I see my job as a columnist is to curate a place where we can ponder one small part of our co-existence in this place and time.

Sometimes my work helps poke lots of holes in the universe at once: creating connections and prompting further conversations with readers or between readers.

Sometimes, I am misunderstood. Sometimes, like my call with Virginia, I am shouted at for intruding on thoughts, for interrupting peace or for threatening a different perspective.

Such was the case with my last column. In it, I made the decision to sit with some dark thoughts brought about by the confluence of the American election and the approach of Remembrance Day. Assuming others might be doing the same, I chose one small part of a complicated mosaic of emotion to focus on.

I received several responses ranging from commiseration to condemnation: accusations of factual incorrectness, pessimism and indulging in doomsday fantasies.

My first reaction was to clarify the roles of columnists versus reporters, but I couldn’t figure out how to communicate that without sounding condescending.

But then I remembered Virginia, and the lesson that not every attempt at connection is going to be successful at first, and sometimes, time and silence are what’s needed.

I hadn’t expected it, but Virginia phoned me back a couple of days after we first spoke.

She told me that when she went to visit her husband, she held his hand and told him she’d received a phone call from Winnipeg. He opened his eyes, and spoke of our city as his favourite place on Earth, a place where as a child, he felt anything was possible.

Virginia’s voice broke as she told me this was the first lucid conversation she’d had with him in weeks.

These are the moments I strive for from my position of privilege on these pages. The phone calls and newspaper clippings, the attempts to understand one another, emails sent days and weeks after publication: the pebbles we carry and drop for others to find.

These are the holes we poke in the universe through the stories we tell one another, trusting that we’ll be understood.

In a time when we are encouraged to doubt and accuse, to find fault and assume malice, it’s these small moments of connection that can give us pause, and reason to hope.

rebecca.chambers@freepress.mb.ca