Mary Meigs (1917-2002) was a writer and painter who lived in Montreal. She was the author of several books, including Lily Briscoe: A Self-Portrait and The Time Being, and a lead actress in the film The Company of Strangers.
Mary Meigs and her friend Lise Weil, editor of Beyond Recall, met regularly to do freewriting together. For each exercise they chose a line or phrase from the work of a poet they both admired; then, inspired by that “prompt,” both women wrote for five or ten minutes, recording whatever came to mind (and hand).
Mary Meigs wrote this piece in spring 2001 while she was recovering from a stroke, and which is reproduced here exactly as she typed it, Meigs writes: “In occupational therapy, it was a great joy to use the old Underwood electric typewriter to strengthen the fingers of my left hand.”
My greatest difficulty at eighty-five is to think coherent thoughts. I want to think about old age and instead my blurry eyes are drawn away from this paper by the movement of spring leaves, yellow-green, outside the window. They have been tossed by the wind for days and have grown into darker green summer leaves that fill the red spaces of the brick wall behind.
Childhood photographs are merciless, and state the passing of time with inarguable clarity. We dig them out of our archives, learn how we were as children, as young women, and too often we do not recognize each other. I ache with the pain of seeing what we were long ago, when every one of us was beautiful with the beauty of a child or a young person full of careless energy.
The time: early morning in mid-December. The sky and harbour, the leaves on the trees, the pavements and streets, have been scoured by last night’s thunderstorm, which turned the harbour lead-grey under a purple sky, drove the motorboats to safety, and the sailboats racing under their jibs before the east wind. Marj is waked by the brightness in her room, she sees strips of sunshine dancing on the wall, and hears the sound of Kate’s steady breathing across the hall. She and Kate separated coolly last night without even embracing.
In the pre-time being, in the rehearsal period for the real, Marj wrote to Kate, “I’ve been doing exercises between visible and invisible, between imagining touch and really touching.” At the moment of meeting they are not surprised by the alchemy that instantly changes imagination into reality. They don’t say a word; their two dissimilar bodies recognize a long, predetermined assent. They are speeding away from the airport in Kate’s little car; Marj's right hand closes over Kate’s small, sunburned left hand.
The real story is truer than fiction, Marj once thought. But where is the truth in an imaginary love story that grows from a correspondence between two old women, separated by the distance between New South Wales and Quebec?
Out on the set, except for the fact that there is always someone to catch us if we stumble, or someone to set up folding chairs for us between scenes, we are beneficiaries of the semi that denies the passing of clock-time. There is nothing to remind us that we are old except direct comparison with all those staff and crew members who are young.
Our film is a semi-documentary. We are ourselves, up to a point; beyond this point is the “semi,” a region with boundaries that become more or less imprecise, according to our view of them. In one sense, it is semi from beginning to end, for we wouldn’t be out there in the wilds, wouldn’t have boarded the bus together. Semi has worked to put together seven old women and a young woman who would never have known of each other’s existence, with the ironic outcome that both in real life and on film, we become friends who now need to keep in touch with one another. A real documentary might not have had this effect: it might have isolated each of us in her own life and surroundings.
