Free In Fond Remembrance of Me by Howard Norman

about always.”

    â€œYou have a—what is it—a Dutch-language field guide. Do you read Dutch, too?”
    â€œI like the illustrations in that book. In particular, in that book.”
    In neat columns Helen wrote the names of birds she saw, geographical locales, time of day sighted, and so on. “I’m an autodidact of ornithology,” she said. “Mostly self-taught—. When you’re self-taught, of course, you’re your own best and worst teacher. But that can’t be helped, can it?”
    â€œI thought you told me you had some formal classes at some point, in ornithology, Helen. It was—am I remembering this right?—out west in Canada. British Columbia, wasn’t it?”
    â€œWell, I’d call those informal , uh, lessons. Not classes, really. Not in a classroom situation.”
    â€œOh.”
    â€œYes, and it was complicated by—”
    â€œBy?”
    â€œRomance.”
    â€œComplicated by romance.”
    â€œYes. Complicated by romance. But, still, I did learn quite a bit.”
    â€œI would imagine.”
    â€œâ€”about birds. It was very, very useful knowledge. Knowledge gained, about birds out there, you see.”
    Helen also kept a separate black notebook for prayers. She let me read it on any number of occasions. Come to think of it, she was less guarded about this notebook than the ones having to do with linguistics or birds, ironically enough. “Prayers” was Helen’s word for these compositions.
I remember that exactly. They were written in Japanese; she translated quite a few for me, upon request, and I requested that at least a dozen times while we were in Churchill and a few times in our subsequent correspondences between Japan and Canada.
    To the best of my knowledge—she and I never discussed this—Helen’s prayers did not echo any one religious sensibility. However, they all shared one thing in common: each was a request to see a bird. They each were a request to add, then, to Helen’s “life list,” no matter how she thought of it. In effect, these prayers to see birds elevated bird-watching to a spiritual plane, no doubt about that. Some were stated directly:

    I would like to see
a red phalarope.

    Or—and it made me laugh out loud when Helen translated this variation:

    I would like to see
a red phalarope
(please).

    To my mind Helen’s prayers did not betray outsized emotions, nor were they necessarily philosophical, except for the general and obvious idea that a prayer would be useless were there not some sort of powerful entity—perhaps God—who might be listening, or persuaded through elegant diction to listen, and thus be petitioned. Prayers, of course, are of the
utmost intimate language (intimate dialogue), yet Helen’s were never confessional. For instance, nowhere in her prayers, even the longer ones of ten or twelve lines, say, was her illness mentioned. The word “cancer” was never used. There was no reference or allusion to physical pain at all. My guess—and it is only a guess—is that Helen did not wish to use sympathy to barter with God. Had she even obliquely exploited her “medical condition” it would have been undignified, demeaning, because it would imply a belief in a hierarchy of suffering—therefore, those in the most pain, or those about to die, might exact first priorities of mercy. How could any feeling and thinking person at all alert to the human condition possibly be convinced of something as absurd as that?
    Helen’s prayers were never precisely haiku, nor did they, again as far as I knew, follow any compositional tradition. As I have said, for the most part they were rather declarative; all evidence of desire was monotonal. Her prayers had a utilitarian demeanor about them. Yet in the strictest sense, they were autobiographical, too, and in their own way revelatory as somewhat restrained entries in a