HUMAN WRECKAGE

Keeping Records

On the occasion of his twenty-first birthday, July 6, 1886, Edwin Moore, a resident of the UK port of Bristol, was presented with a family bible by his father Cecil. That heavy and relatively ancient tome now resides in a cotton pillowslip on a closet shelf in the Crooked 9.

‘Brown’s Self-Interpreting Family Bible’ by the Reverend John Brown, Minister of the Succession Church, was printed and bound in Newcastle-on-Tyne. Its black leather cover is embossed with gold. The great book stays closed with two ornate hinged brass clasps. The colour plates depicting biblical scenes and the flora and fauna of classical Palestine are softly rendered. The type is set in two wide columns with smaller annotations to the text running flush left beneath them. While I cannot vouch for the content of the gospels there is historical context too, such as an essay describing the Jewish laws and rituals of that time – as they were understood nearly 2000 years later. The Moore bible is a relic from an era when printing was truly an intricate craft process.

The second guardian of the book was Edwin’s son Leslie, my grandfather, who was born in 1891. Under his care the bible arrived in Montreal in a steamer trunk aboard a Canadian Pacific ship about five years before the outbreak of the First World War. Like his father’s, Leslie’s handwriting on the blank pages provided for recording births, marriages and deaths is stunningly elegant. My father Stephen’s birth in 1924 is recorded in a finely wrought script.

Generations come and go, as they will, as they must. Life adds up. To keep our family’s records up to date, Stephen, now living in Ottawa, began inserting information into the Moore bible on his personalized stationery. Alas, my father’s final entry before he died was the death of his eldest child in 2012, my older brother Robert, born in 1951. Consequently I have become the placeholder, the temporary secretary, our family’s current record keeper.

My father once instructed me to avoid cursive whenever possible - time and circumstances permitting. To write a figure eight as two circles, like a snowman. Printing was so much neater and precise than handwriting. I have compared Stephen’s printing and Robert’s printing to my own printing and it takes a moment to tell us all apart. They were both right-handed, engineers; I’m left-handed smudge and drag.

I cannot put down a sentence without an ascending or descending arc on unlined paper. Tucked into the bible amongst the sheets of my father’s stationery I found a sheet of graph paper. I realized how Stephen had made his entries. A horizontal sheet of graph paper underneath a plain vertical sheet of paper provided guidelines for the straight edge of a ruler. I noted too that Stephen had recorded deaths in black ink and the balance, the good news, was in blue. “Got it, Dad.”

Stephen’s death in 2014 was the first of the four black entries I’ve had to enter into the Moore bible. I find the task solemn and intimidating. I pull the bible from its shelf and place it on the dining room table. I stare at the white rectangular lump for a week. I double-check dates, names and spelling. I practice printing them on a pad of graph paper of my own. I make certain there’s enough ink in my particular preferred pen, black or blue. I believe this is an important task and ritual for our family in this disconnected digital age, we need to understand how we got here and from where.

The modest grace is that I’ve been able to add one blue note. Late last fall my late brother Robert’s son Harry, born in 1988, married. Harry is destined to be the fifth guardian of the bible and he is its rightful keeper; our future family archivist is the eldest male of the eldest male. Harry and his wife are preparing to welcome their first child in October. They have chosen a given name. I was delightedly stupefied to discover that their proposed name was already in the Moore family bible, an entry dated November 2, 1896. I expect to write it down a second time 124 years later, in blue.       

 meGeoff has been your most unreliable, unbalanced and inaccurate alternative source of memoir since 2013. Don’t sign up for e-mail alerts from the Crooked 9, stay safe.