APPRECIATE RAINBOWS
Enjoy life's happy moments
In my building in downtown Edmonton, our book room is closed due to COVID-19. So now there's a box in the lobby in which residents can put books they no longer want, or from which they can take books that look interesting. This fits my philosophy that if we can make an effort to use things twice, we will automatically reduce by half the amount of garbage we produce.
A few weeks ago, I took out
The Rainbow Comes and Goes. Published in 2016, it reports on a dialogue by mail between CNN's Anderson Cooper, then in his
40s, and his nonagenarian mother, Gloria Vanderbilt (who died in June 2019).
At first it captivated me since their weird youths and upbringings contrasted with, and made me thankful for, my own. (Even though in the Second World War my father was shot through the head and then, after his lengthy recovery, spent three years in a PoW camp. Moreover, during the war years, I had some other pretty unpleasant experiences. Many of these came from the fact that my father's youngest brother wasn't just the No. 2 collaborator with the Nazis, but also the Nazi-appointed governor of the Dutch Central Bank. So his name was on every banknote in circulation. This got me, barely 10 years old, in daily scraps with compatriots, for most didn't know there were “good” and “wrong” members of our family, and I didn't take derogatory remarks kindly. This was capped by living through the 1944-45
Hunger Winter when there was little food in Holland. And while an estimated 22,000 people died from starvation, we managed reasonably well because my mother was a very resourceful person.)
Halfway through the book, I got bored. But I persevered and I'm glad I did. Just before the end, the choice of title becomes clear and sends a message to every one of us, regardless of age, but especially those of us who are, as one reader put it earlier, “not 80, just 16 with 64 years of wear!”
At that point Vanderbilt quotes William Wordsworth's line, “The rainbow comes and goes.” And she responds to her son's critical remarks by noting, “I find it reassuring knowing the rainbow comes and goes. It helps me accept the way things often are ... In every life, you have moments of blinding beauty and happiness, and then you land in a dark cave and there is no colour, no sky ...
“Then the rainbow returns, sometimes only briefly, but it comes back ... Nothing is meant to last forever ... We are not meant always to be happy, and who would want to be? Happiness
would become meaningless if it were a constant state ... If you accept that, then you will not be surprised when something bad occurs, you will not gnash your teeth and ask, `Why me?' ... It has happened ... because that is the nature of things. No one escapes. The rainbow comes and goes. Enjoy it while it lasts ... There is so much to be joyful about, so many kinds of rainbows in one's life ...”
I got feedback to my last column from another Dutchman, even older than I. At the age of 74, Chilliwack's Art Lengkeek learned from his doctor he had Type 2 diabetes. So he took to hiking with a vengeance and lost 40 pounds, causing his doctor to marvel: “Your blood sugar is lower than mine!”
Then came his 88th birthday last July. Some hiker friends organized a birthday party for him on top of nearby Mount Cheam (which he had climbed six times in the previous 12 years). It overlooks the Fraser River and can be walked up but involves a 715-foot vertical rise, more than the 659-foot height of Vancouver's tallest building and three-quarters the height of the Eiffel Tower in Paris.
On the way up, they surprised him with their birthday present, a bench placed along the trail with a plaque commemorating his many years of community service. After that, the rest of the way up, they enjoyed what he called a “sublime subalpine flower show.” (I know whereof he speaks, for I had a similar experience on the way up Mount Kenya in 1994.) On the way down he remembered, “As they get older, hikers notice going down is taking longer than ... going up!”
Feedback from another reader should also inspire us octogenarians. It was about his mother, Rita Baker. Age 87, she lives in Toronto and has 450 followers on Twitter.
She grew up in London during the Blitz and is tenacious and courageous. (Dutchmen with those qualities are often called “boneheaded and stubborn,” hence the saying, “You can always tell a Dutchman, but you can never tell him much!”)
About three years ago, after years of trying, she got a book published by Adelaide Books, a small New York-based publishing house. And the following year, her son took her to a book show in New York where she
“had the time of her life signing her books.” His only complaint: “I am 64 and cannot keep up with her!”
Both are examples of people working to make old age a rewarding, positive experience!
In every life, you have moments of blinding beauty and happiness, and then you land in a dark cave and there is no colour, no sky ...
“I'm not going to croak yet,” Christopher Plummer said impishly in 1999. “I'm only 70.”
He was in a Beverly Hills hotel suite, supposedly there to talk about his latest film, The Insider. Yet he seemed more anxious to reassure everybody that retirement was not in the cards.
Indeed, the most astonishing thing about Plummer, who died last week at the age of 91, was how productive and fulfilling his final years would be.
His hellraising days long behind him, he would deliver an astonishing quantity of film work during his final two decades and win his first Oscar at the age of 82 for Beginners.
But perhaps the most meaningful moments for him came when he returned to the place where his fame had really begun, to the classical ranks of Canada's Stratford Festival after an absence of 35 years.
He was reticent in telling the full story behind that absence, repeatedly insisting over the years that he simply wanted to move on after the 1967 season. But he did let slip a couple of revealing statements in 1999. Remain too long with a company and you outstay your welcome, he suggested. Then more significantly: “Stay too long in Stratford and you become an alcoholic.”
Plummer was in confident control of his life and art when he made a triumphant return as an aging, doom-haunted King Lear in 2002 — signalling that, in the golden autumn of his life, he had conquered the turbulence that had hastened his earlier exit, and reasserting his stature as one of the world's great classical actors.
In a quiet interview one afternoon, he admitted it had been an emotional homecoming. Over the years, his devotion to Stratford had remained paramount. And now, this courtly 74-year-old legend was trying to explain the reason — travelling back in memory to 1956 when the festival was still operating out of a giant tent and 28-year-old Chris Plummer was experiencing the defining summer of his life on a salary of less than $100 a week.
His performance as Henry V would bring him stardom, with The New York Herald-Tribune declaring that Plummer had “established himself as the most promising classical actor on the continent today.”
“I was nervous,” Plummer was later remembering. “I'd never played such a huge role, and I had to learn an immense amount in a very short time. It actually made me, that production. Even though I'd already been on Broadway, I now went back there with my name above the title. So I owe a lot to Stratford, that year, and that regime.”
The festival entrusted him with major classical roles in the years that followed, but by 1967, he was becoming a problem. A highly touted production of Antony and Cleopatra received mixed reviews, with one critic likening Plummer's eccentric performance as Antony to Tarzan of the Apes. More ominously, many company members were fed up with his behaviour, and years later would still be ticking off the reasons: booze, arrogance, a lack of professionalism.
The disarming young Plummer of the 1950s had given way to an arrogant, hard-drinking prima donna, the kind of smartass who would take pride in disdainfully suggesting that The Sound of Music (in which he played Captain Von Trapp) be renamed The Sound of Mucus.
It was a time when Plummer's life became as self-destructive as those of favourite drinking buddies like Peter O'Toole and Robert Shaw. “I used to be a monster,” he told Maclean's magazine late in life. “In that respect, I suppose I have mellowed. It was just too exhausting to go on being a p---k.”
It was Plummer's third marriage, to former actress Elaine Taylor, that would bring him stability, endure for half a century and rescue his career. It would finally allow him to close a major gap in his life and return to the southern Ontario theatre that was his spiritual home and would welcome him back with genuine affection. Lear would be succeeded by further triumphs — Prospero in Shakespeare's The Tempest, Julius Caesar in Shaw's Caesar and Cleopatra.
Still, he found an amusing irony in the fact that it was King Lear that had brought him back. It was never on the list of plays he wanted to do. “Definitely not,” he chuckled in 2002. “I avoided it like the plague. I was hoping I would croak before I had to play King Lear, or else that I would outlive it and it would pass me by.”
Instead, Lear would bring him further glory — and further insight into himself and his lifelong passion.
“The play is extraordinarily human,” the actor admitted in 2002. And there were tears in his eyes.
Perhaps the most meaningful moments for him came when he returned to the place where his fame had really begun.