A Shifting Villanelle

A Villanelle Shifting Metonymically

To Express Doubt Over the Desirability

Of Either Heaven or a Second Coming

Solid, all-perfected, I fear it will
Enter to end our common loneliness;
Stop each heart's aching for a miracle.

The constant hymn for whisper lyrical,
And brilliance shadows the light holiness --
Solid, all-perfected -- I fear it will ...

Knowledge, more than round; more than spherical,
Confirm/deny what now we only guess;
Stop each heart's aching for a miracle.

Then nothing to curse, nor curse to fear; still
When all is bless'd, will it be waste to bless
Solid All? Perfected I? ... fear it will.

What more wonderful than a year in Hell;
He comes and all passion turns to excess.
Stop each, Heart's aching for a miracle.

So that's the deal; I wait here until
Jesus speaks his inaugural address --
Solid; all perfected. I fear it will
Stop each heart's aching for a miracle.

Don Ives
1986

From The Frontier Of Writing

The tightness and the nilness round that space
when the car stops in the road, the troops inspect
its make and number and, as one bends his face

towards your window, you catch sight of more
on a hill beyond, eyeing with intent
down cradled guns that hold you under cover

and everything is pure interrogation
until a rifle motions and you move
with guarded unconcerned acceleration—

a little emptier, a little spent
as always by that quiver in the self,
subjugated, yes, and obedient.

So you drive on to the frontier of writing
where it happens again. The guns on tripods;
the sergeant with his on-off mike repeating

data about you, waiting for the squawk
of clearance; the marksman training down
out of the sun upon you like a hawk.

And suddenly you're through, arraigned yet freed,
as if you'd passed from behind a waterfall
on the black current of a tarmac road

past armor-plated vehicles, out between
the posted soldiers flowing and receding
like tree shadows into the polished windscreen.

Seamus Heaney

Freedom

There is something comforting about being mildly cut off from the world.

My daughter is working late, my son is working late, Mary is working late, and my favourite neighbour is away in Vancouver. My two most communicative female friends are busy, too -- one is away on holiday, the other committed to a night of cleaning.

The cats are fed, the fish fed, and the dog has had her supper.

The house is clean (enough) from yesterday's party.

I have had dinner.

My daily work is done.

My book is read for tomorrow.

I can hear the wind beating at the upstairs windows, and I feel a chill at my feet.

This means there is nothing left to do but...

tuck myself upstairs in my Heidi bedroom with the movie network on, a crossword puzzle book, a novel and a big bottle of Pepsi (it ought to be tea, but I am not ready to become newly unaddicted) and

turn off the computer

turn off the computer

turn off the computer

turn off the computer

turn off the computer

turn off

Twinkle Twinkle

Thanks to Diana, I have Star of the Party nails. You might not think this out of the ordinary, except that Diana brought dozens of bottles and colours, and I had no way of knowing the names of any of them. And given that this was our Psychic Sunday party, well -- what are the odds?

So...whenever I am griping about the many things I can find to gripe about in a day, I will look down at my Star of the Party nail polish and remind myself that wonderful things, and people, happen every day.

Punctuation Day

Today's Toronto Star has an article (A19), written by Ben Rayner, about Punctuation Day (which, in the US, is today).

In honour of Jeff Rubin, who keeps running tabs on incorrectly-punctuated signs, I am going to show you my least favourite mis/use of punctuation:

Oh my gosh! Is it ten-thirty already?! Have I slept in!?! Oh no!! I was going to try and be up in time for Regis!!! I always think that today will be the day he is going to call me, and I will have a chance to win the on-air contest!! Can you imagine?! What would I do with seven days on an island resort?! My GOD! Think of it! I mean THINK...OF...IT!!!

I phoned my mother this morning, but she was at the doctor's. I hope nothing is wrong! She had an ingrown hair last week, but I thought she had taken care of it! I wonder if my father is at work yet, so I can call him. I don't want to worry him, though! He has enough...I mean ENOUGH...on his plate. Just last week one of his tires blew out in the driveway!!! We were so scared -- until we realized that we had a jack in the garage!!

My boyfriend isn't always very nice to me -- although I want to keep that a secret between you and me! PLEASE. Don't tell him what I said!! He would kill me!!! I mean KILL ME!! Just last week he dropped one of my books on the way home! I told him he shouldn't carry so many on one arm, but would he listen?! No way!!!!! I told him if he wasn't careful there were lots of other boys who would like to help me!! He was SO mean to me! Do you know what he said? "Name two!" NAME TWO!!! Imagine!


Well, I have to go now. My homework is piling up and the teacher -- she is SO SO mean! -- told me she might fail me -- FAIL ME!!! -- if I couldn't pull my mark up above a D-!!! WOW. Where do they get off?!?! Anyways, what do I care? My daddy is president of the university, so we'll just see about that!!!

Have a nice day!!!!!

Alexander McCall Smith

Perhaps Don still knows how the moodiness of the season --Thanksgiving, Hallowe'en, his birthday, Remembrance Day, the mouldy blowing leaves, the haunting wind running up the insides of my sleeves -- would affect me, and this is why he is channeling me through Alexander McCall Smith. I quote now a from paragraph two, page seven, in Friends, Lovers, Chocolate:

For the most part, the house was in good order; a discreet and sympathetic house, in spite of its size. And it was known, too, for its hospitality. Everyone who called here--irrespective of their mission--would be courteously received and offered, if the time was appropriate, a glass of dry white wine in spring and summer and red in autumn and winter. They would then be listened to, again with courtesy, for Isabel believed in giving moral attention to everyone. This made her profoundly egalitarian, though not in the non-discriminating sense of many contemporary egalitarians, who sometimes ignore the real moral differences between people (good and evil are not the same, Isabel would say). She felt uncomfortable with moral relativists and their penchant for non-judgementalism. But of course we must be judgemental, she said, when there is something to be judged.

Don also used to say, "To never judge is amoral," words that ran through me like a giant beam of restorative light, as did so much of what he said. He did not hold back on this, either. He looked at everyone, including himself. I tried to do the same. We both aspired to goodness, but goodness is a difficult achievement and the hardest road to hoe given all of the challenges we keep banging into along the way.

While I mean to never lose my temper (a kind of slow, simmering, often moving into volcanic eruption), my temper has to be my most calloused Achilles heel. That little buckle-up patent leather shoe still stamps in my brain (thus the calluses, I suppose) when people are mean or divisive or jealous, or when they play at something, and I know exactly what's going on and I feel I will burst if I do not say exactly that -- especially when it's about to cost me or someone I love in ways too big to enumerate here.

Apart from that, I don't want to be the one who is silent at the table; the one who has nothing to say against what I see are egregious mistakes or dangerous people. I am not, for example, ever going to sit in a room and condone Dr. Phil or Stephen Harper or George Bush or Stockwell Day or Ann Coulter or Rush Limbaugh or Bill O'Reilly (how many Americans? how many men?) or bullies or exclusionists or people who change their stories around to make themselves seem as if they have been injured when in fact they are the ones who have been skulking about in an up-to-no-good way. (The last two always cross one another, if they are not already one and the same thing.)

On the other hand, my mother always said, "Take people as you find them, darling, not as I or anyone else finds them." And there's the conundrum.

If I sit back and say nothing, not only do I feel as if I am leaning into obsequiousness or martyred victimhood, but I am absenting myself from the responsibility that I have to take full part in the life I was given for God knows how long. And if I say something like, "No! No! No!" I am risking the loss of relationship -- and not always the ones I care (about) as much as I care about the ones associated to that relationship -- although I try to strike the balance between what my mother meant (she was speaking of one-on-one relationships) and what Don meant. Still, it's not easy.

Don and I had almost always the exact same opinions on everyone's behaviour, including our own, and we spent the bulk of our free time together in what we saw as philosophic discussion about motivations, meaning, matter and responsibility. We took risks, too, because we saw risk-taking as our obligation to what is true and correct and healthy and honest and productive. We were as hard on ourselves as any two people could be, and in ways that we did not share and did not feel the need to share with anyone but each other. We second-guessed ourselves at times, and at others felt absolutely strong in our conviction about what we felt was right or the right thing to do.

I am still doing that, here without him and here with Mary, and I continue to find respite in like-minded and long-standing and less long-standing friendships; in old and not so old movies whose themes call out to me, and in authors who span the ages -- authors such as Alexander McCall Smith, who also wrote (page 80),

And then there was another one, a large picture that dominated the wall behind the piano, a portrayal of pride, an actor whom Isabel knew very slightly but who was well known in general, standing with a self-satisfied sneer on his face, a curl of the lip, pure arrogance. Did he recognise himself in the likeness, she wondered, or did he not see himself as others saw him? Burns had said that, of course, and it had been repeated at the last but one Burns Supper downstairs, in a bucolic address given by a former moderator of the Church of Scotland: the gift to gie us/to see ourselves as ithers see us.

And so I move on, in this morass and mystery of kaleidoscopic complexity, trying to do right by others, and trying to do right by me, so that I can do right by others so that...

Mirror mirror on the wall...sigh...

<:^)

Posted by Jennifer Coffey
November 12, 2007

You Can't Take the Gal out of Gala

I am going to a gala (what a word) tonight (the Urban Design Gala Awards, actually), and I don't know what to wear. It isn't as if I don't have plenty of outfits. I do. But whether or not they will shape themselves around my newly-reforming girth is another question. And whether I can find anything to go with my worn-out orthopaedic shoes (ach ach ach plantar fasciitis!) ... I'm not old enough for orthopaedic footwear! (A ridiculous assertion, I know, but cam' on, Jean-Marc! Thirty seven is too young for special shoes!)

I think the black dress with the orange flowers might look nice, except for that bit around my middle, which will protrude like a fun-house mirror Georgia O'Keefe print. And we all know the rule about prints. Besides, what if someone mistakes me for a moving canvass?

There's that red dress I have, but my cleavage -- I only have any when I'm fat -- will inevitably spill out like over-ripened honeydews. I have a necklace that matches the dress, but I am worried that jewellery will only attract attention to the wrong part of me and not to it.

I could wear pants, but you can see my cellulite through (all of...every pair of) them -- lardish rivulet outlines -- which is even worse than the camel toe effect I first learned of from watching The Weatherman. (I haven't found one successful pair of pants with my Roots' card, for example, although I am posthumously [post-modernly?] [post-somethingly...] relieved to learn of the camel toe anomaly.)

You can tell that I am anxious, too. Look at all of these parenthetical asides and the (dreaded) exclamation marks. Yikes!

Anyway, I don't think anyone is going to be there looking at me. I could probably walk in naked and, apart from being confused with a markedly bland building design, no one would notice. (No one has noticed me since my hair turned prematurely grey. A few [hundred] pounds isn't going to make any difference.)

Still, I don't want to draw any negative attention, either...which is hard enough to avoid when my head's hanging over the hors d'oeuvre table and I'm stuffing my pockets with crudities.

Serves me right for falling off the Weight Watcher's wagon. If I'd only behaved myself I could be trotting off this evening in my pink organdy and diamond tiara making googly Dame Edna eyes at everyone, dancing a lithe tarantella to the soft beat of the bongo drums (while still being ignored).

My one consolation? (And oh, would that I could credit my sources here:) "For a fat girl, I don't sweat much."

<:^)

Samantha Morton: The Unloved

Samantha Morton is quoted on IMDB as saying, "My foster mother died and I did not have a relationship with my real parents. I know who they are. It's not upsetting; it's just the way it is. You cannot change things. My childhood isn't an albatross around my neck."

After sitting in an AMC theatre last night, glued to the International premiere of Morton's directorial debut, The Unloved, a screenplay inspired by Morton's own childhood, and after listening to the director herself speak of wanting the film to be "perfect" because she has a "responsibility" to the audience and the time they will spend viewing it -- no one but those who grow up in untenable circumstances speak in this way -- it is hard for me to imagine that this superbly talented actress/writer/director doesn't have something hanging from some part of her body. It may not be an albatross, or even a moderately weighty seabird, but there are lingering creatures dangling somewhere, however invisibly.

If this were not true, Samantha Morton would not have been able to re-create with such exactitude and clarity the internalized realm of a young girl who half-lives between the starkly uncluttered home of her abusive, loving father and the careless recklessness of urban foster care. She would not have understood the long shots of the child walking alone in her tired, dirty knee socks, marching against the backdrop of oppressive brick and grey, smoke stack skies stretching endlessly across the top 7/8ths of the screen. She would not have known the deep comfort a winter's graveyard brings to this same lonely child, or understand so completely how this anaesthetised and unself-pitying girl would have made her own way simply, resolutely, and without tears.

Actresses Molly Windsor (Lucy) and Lauren Socha (Lauren) are alarmingly believable as two awkward foster friends, an eleven- and sixteen-year-old trying to make their way through families and a system that have abandoned and abused them. And Morton lets us know that there, but for the grace of God -- the film opens with a child's reading of Psalm 27, and we are given ample evidence throughout The Unloved of Lucy's hope and faith -- Molly would assuredly follow Lauren into irremediable patterns of petty thievery, prostitution and aerosol euphoria.

That the action takes place through Christmas week, and that neither girl loses herself to the heightened and conventional self-indulgence that holidays tend to bring, helps to highlight the director's point of view. More, the illuminating lights and sounds -- chimes, bells, birds, roaring percussion -- as well as the absence of light and sound -- reflect with quickening accuracy the tragic intensity of the abandoned child.

As Mary and I were leaving the auditorium, I said of Samantha Morton that I would like to adopt her. I also said that this was a film I wanted to write about. A woman ahead of us (as it turned out, a woman belonging to the film's entourage) turned to us, smiled, and said, "Good." In fact, their intention is to take the film into schools and try to make headway there.

The value The Unloved will bring to scores of abused and abandoned children, and to the families who are trying to love them but cannot, is inevitable. And that Samantha Morton -- who trailed behind the crowd self-effacingly, clutching a Kleenex -- is the most equipped person to tell this story, seems also inevitable.

What I worry about, somewhere in the margins, is that those things that do not upset her in her waking life will come back some day and haunt her in her sleep.

Balibo: A Review

With so many sophomoric films permeating our nation's theatres -- as more and more teenagers pump parents for movie-going money, as more competitive advertisers and greedy producers harp on bankability, as almost all women over the age of forty are relegated to backyard pastures, and as everyone cares less and less about texture, compassion, generosity, humanity and realism -- I am always grateful, relieved, heartened, made hopeful, giddy...whenever a film of Balibo's calibre finds its way to any-sized screen and most especially to big-screen audiences in film festivals that are widely covered by media whose income depends on opinions about how these films should fare. (There's that word again.)

I have no idea if Balibo has had a chance of being even modestly reviewed, and I don't want to check because I am afraid of buckling under the threat of derivation. (I wouldn't mean to steal, but sometimes a great word or notion can be as tempting as a plateful of Marguerite doughnuts.) I am not a paid movie reviewer, and I know there are structures that qualified critics likely adhere to.

That all said, I have several opinions about Balibo and about how the movie made me feel, and if I can inform or persuade one person to see this film, I will have contributed to a better world.

Here's why:

The story is cautionary, compassionate, gripping, heartbreaking, honest, hopeful, real, relevant, revelatory, tense and true.

The actors are authentic, believable, informed, inspired, invested, skilled and touching.

The direction is balanced, certain, genius, kind, patient, perceptive, precise, and seasoned.

The message is clear, compassionate, direct, necessary, resonant, timely and urgent.

(And please forgive any redundancies. Redundancies seem to be my way this week. But when it comes to films of this merit, superfluity seems inevitable.)

If only more filmmakers cared about -- understood why -- stories such as Balibo are crucial to the survival of our species. But then again, if more people understood why (films such as Balibo are crucial to the survival of our species), films such as Balibo wouldn't be necessary at all -- because what happened in Balibo wouldn't have happened at all.

It seems that this entry, like history, repeats itself. And that is the absolute point of the film.

http://www.balibo.com/
http://www.balibo.com/press/reviews.html

On Leaving Partir

Last year I missed taking photos of Kristin Scott Thomas at the Elgin & Winter Garden Theatre during the Toronto International Film Festival where she was first viewing, and afterward speaking, in regard to her role in Il y a longtemps que je t'aime (I've Loved You So Long). And last year, Kristin Scott Thomas missed receiving an Oscar nomination for what turned out to be one of the most accomplished performances by any actress that year.

If fair happens to play out as fair -- and why would it, given what I have just said? -- there may be another opportunity for a nomination this year, although I am not sure -- despite the uniformly spot-on performances from all the actors in the film -- that Partir, Thomas's 2009 Film Festival offering at the Elgin & Winter Garden Theatre, will be able to lay claim to the same reassurances.

In fact, I think in several ways the film betrays the very thing it means to make clear, which is in pointing out the spiralling reductive effects of gaslighting that occur in a patriarchal society.

Instead of portraying a woman who is not only passionate, energetic, undervalued (I can't remember when I so badly wanted to walk through a film screen and punch a husband or slap a daughter as profoundly...speaking of violence), and caught up in the throes of mid-life discovery, the director, Catherine Corsini, doesn't trust her audience. She therefore omits those parts of the film and relationships that let us know that, apart from the embedded heatedness, her lead female character, Suzanne, also possesses the requisite love and compassion -- would in fact have displayed this -- toward her children. Instead, Thomas comes off in moments as a maniacal, self-indulgent monster.

While we have every reason to believe that the director intends us to understand Suzanne's extreme distractedness, Corsini's failure to allow us the full expression of a mother's (at times tantamount to devotional) love depletes Partir considerably. And while I am never an advocate for a film becoming merely a poster child for the loss of money, food, sanity and self-respect; abysmal divorce laws, and the ultimate horror -- domestic rape -- that a woman, mother and wife experiences in a culture where professional, upper class, and generally sober men dominate, Partir would have done itself, and its viewers, a better service if there had been more of an indication that Suzanne felt driven to the ultimate extremity by -- because of -- having lived an adult lifetime in a male-dominated circumstance and culture, and not only because she is a crazed, selfish, and ultimately heartless perpetrator of her own emotional demise. (Wow. That's a long sentence. Who do I think I am -- Henry James?)

Anyway, as I was leaving the theatre, I couldn't help but think of Thomas Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles. The difference between the two stories, of course, is that Hardy would have understood that inserting the sound of police sirens on the last page is not only unnecessary but, in fact, detracts from what the audience needs to discover on its own: the exponential driving component, the thrust and heart of the story, that can only be discovered when all of the parts and pieces are presented adequately as a whole.

Vanity Fare

En route from one of my volunteer places on Friday, I cut through Cumberland so that I could pick up mareseatoats at her work on Bay Street. The traffic on Cumberland was deplorable, and I had lots of time to gaze out at the Yorkville crowd. Even for a sunny Friday, I found that people were dressed far beyond their typical nines category and were well up into the eighteens and twenty-sevens. (I stopped counting the pairs of Jimmy Choo shoes when I reached thirty-six.) Anyway, eventually I made my way past Wannabe World, grateful that, despite my numerous flaws, having to dress to impress was not among them.

The weekend progressed as weekends do -- well, that's not entirely true, but that's an entry for another day -- and on Sunday I remembered that we had tickets to the first of our Film Festival movies. We made our way through the day, after MCC and Vietnamese lunch with Mike and Stephan, and a bit of shopping for my daughter (who is going to embark on her first resort holiday this fall), eventually standing in line at the Scotia Bank movie theatre with dozens of other people who, unlike the usual TIFF crowds, seemed low-key and unassuming (which might be redundant; I haven't decided). Mary and I concluded that their pleasing demeanour had something to do with our collective political like-mindedness, and we satisfied ourselves (I confess to a minor note of self-indulgent pleasure) with that thought and a bucket of popcorn, two extra large Pepsis, and a medium-sized bag of M&Ms.

The movie was (still is) Balibo, and it was the film I was most eager to see. Without giving the entire story away, I think by now it is no secret -- or should no longer be a secret -- that the Balibo Five were a group of young journalists who worked for Australian television networks and who travelled from Dili to the town of Balibo in East Timor where they were killed on October 16, 1975 during the Indonesian incursions. The film focuses on Roger East, a freelance journalist with the Australian Associated press, as he follows the trail of these five young men.

I have to add here that I especially wanted to see Balibo because Anthony LaPaglia was featured in the starring role. I have never forgotten his stellar performance as Leon Zat in Lantana, and as little as any of us can know about actors, I have long thought that I would like to know him.

As I sat up in the back row stuffing popcorn into my face, riveted to this monumentally portrayed and beautifully directed masterpiece (and ultimately shocked by the laissez faire attitude of Toronto audiences, who are always so glibly, underwhelmingly responsive at the Toronto Film Festival), it occurred to me that Anthony LaPaglia himself might stand up with the director and producer at the end of the film and answer questions, which, as good fortune would have it, turned out to be the case.

I listened to him with keen interest (is there any other kind?), admiring his story choices, the way he credited his sources, and his passion in helping this movie get made. I felt some small regret that I had left the camera at home. After the question and answer period ended, we stood up to make what turned out to be our extremely slow way down the aisle and out of the theatre.

The hold-up seemed to be Mr. LaPaglia himself, who was standing handsomely under a quiet corner exit light, chatting with film goers, signing autographs, and having his picture taken with whomever made the request. Lovely man, I thought, doubly regretting the absence of my camera.

Then I looked down at myself, my t-shirt covered in popcorn, my knee-high exercise pants faded and torn in little bits along the seams, my overshirt wrinkled and caught up on one side. I grabbed for a comb, and then remembered I hadn't brought my bag with me, and I wished I had thought to primp myself up a little. I looked like a gas station owner retiree (no offence).

It wasn't that Anthony LaPaglia would have noticed me lumbering at a snail's pace among the throng, or that even if he had he would have had the forethought to call out my name. But oh, had that rare opportune moment occurred when he looked up and caught my frame beneath a second exit light -- if only I had thought to dooty myself up fittingly, I said to myself.

If only, instead of these tired old pants and threadbare t-shirt, I had thought to put on a dress and a little make-up. If only I had worn a prettier overshirt. If only I had had that haircut I've been promising myself all month, or gone for that tooth capping as originally planned. If only...yes, I said to myself, yes...if only I'd bought, and worn, a pair of Jimmy Choo shoes.

<:^)

http://www.balibo.com/
http://www.balibo.com/press/reviews.html

To Their Dead Bodies

When roaring gloom surged inward and you cried,
Groping for friendly hands, and clutched, and died,
Like racing smoke, swift from your lolling head
phantoms of thought and memory thinned and fled.

Yet, though my dreams that throng the darkened stair
Can bring me no report of how you fare,
Safe quit of wars, I speed you on your way
Up lonely, glimmering fields to find new day,
Slow-rising, saintless, confident and kind—
Dear, red-faced father God who lit your mind.

Siegfried Sassoon
To His Dead Body
1916

I think we all remember where we were on September 11, 2001. I was upstairs making the bed when Don called from work and told me to turn on the television. We talked, mostly in silence, and then I called my work to tell them to find a TV. After that, I went downstairs to the computer.

That morning I went sifting through poetry, stunned not only by what was happening, by how many people had died and were dying, but looking for a poem to honour the deaths of my mother and father. (My parents died many years apart, but oddly in this same month, on the same date and close to the same hour.)

Siegfried Sassoon wrote To His Dead Body to honour Robert Graves, who, at almost-twenty-one, was suspected dead in battle at Bazentin-le-Petit on the Somme. (In fact, Graves died in England at age 90.)

They are all dead now, of course, as we shall one day be. But I cannot imagine what it must have been like for those victims in New York, gasping through the roaring black of smoke, for whom it seems this poem was written presciently.

Betrayal

It can come in the form of outright disobedience or as disrespect from someone in charge. It can happen in your home, your workplace or among friends. It can be blatant or as small as a warped thread in a sweater. It can be expected or come from so far out of left field you feel as if you'd been hit with a hard ball. It can happen once or again and again -- in a whisper, a blow, a titter, a comment, a snort, an exclusion, a bypass; in a decision to take the wrong side or take no side at all.

There are no preparations for it; no pills you can take; no pre-emptive tactics you can apply. In fact, if you are courageous, you're better off waiting and sitting still, because in the end you will need to see what it is -- that it is -- in order to understand it in its full, unbidden force. There are fewer more difficult words than, "I thought they were my friends." Yet it is always better to know.

If a man says half himself in the light, adroit
Way a tune shakes into equilibrium,
Or approximates to a note that never comes:

Says half himself in the way two pencil-lines
Flow to each other and softly separate,
In the resolute way plane lifts and leaps from plane:

Who knows what intimacies our eyes may shout,
What evident secrets daily foreheads flaunt,
What panes of glass conceal our beating hearts?

A.S.J. Tessimond

Ottawa vs: Toronto

The subject of Ottawa vs: Toronto came up over the weekend. Having spent approximately the same number of years in either city, I feel unabashed in stating what, for me, are some of the critical differences between Canada's capital city and the capital of Ontario.


Ottawa Toronto

pristine/historic

river town/lake city

circuitous/grid pattern

exclusive/inclusive

status/money

Facebook/community centre

architecturally beautiful/architecturally reviving

affordable (although...)/expensive

suburban/urban

comfortably-sized/enormous

bilingual/multilingual

National Gallery/Art Gallery of Ontario

Senators + pending/Leafs; Raptors; Bluejays; Argonauts; Toronto FC

winter/summer

beer/wine

conservative/complicated

Queensway/Gardiner Expressway

canal/harbour

daytime/nighttime

biking/streetcars

sporty/mixed

bottled water/mineral water

beaver tails/hot dogs

Blue's Fest/Jazz Festival

dragon boats/sailboats

Winterlude/Nuit Blanche

small business/big business

ice skates/rollerblades

planned communities/condominiums

Byward Market/St. Lawrence Market

NAC/Massey Hall

Little Theatre/big theatre

Glebe/Rosedale

shooter parties/martini parties

brunch/breakfast

parochial/non-denominational

semi-precious/precious

sparse/dense

openly closeted/Gay Village

nuclear family/family of choice

diplomats/laundromats

buttoned down/unbuttoned

Chateau Laurier/Royal York

Scotia Bank Place/Air Canada Centre

federal/municipal

Parliament Hill/Queen's Park

resorts/hotels

insular/outward-looking

careful/opinionated

down jackets/leather jackets

fur hats/toques

health care/finance

Rideau Centre/Eaton Centre

university town/university city

dry/damp

hayfever-induced asthma/smog-induced asthma

Silver City/TIFF; Hot Docs; Inside Out Film Festival

War Museum/gang wars

tulips/ivy

World Exchange/Stock Exchange

detached/semi-detached

neighbourhoods/neighbourhoods

my children/...

~ Bi Lines ~

My father wrote a poem for my mother in the late 1940s, in honour of my mother's first husband, Bob MacDonald, who died during the early years of World War II. He was shot down as a tail gunner in a plane of seven men. Everyone else survived.

My mother was not informed of her young husband's death until several months after the event, the war being what it was. But while she waited for news or a letter, her father-in-law, Alistair (or was it Alysson?) had a dream. In this dream, Bob MacDonald came down from the sky inside a star. When the star landed on his father's back stoop, it opened up and Bob stood inside, smiling. He said to his father, "Tell Sally I'm all right. Tell her I love her and that I'm all right."

This thought occurred to me five minutes ago when the airplanes from what I can only imagine is the CNE air show flew overhead.

When I hear airplanes ripping through the sky, I am reminded of many things -- the day at Cavendish when the fifty-year-old war plane flew low over the beach, all of us standing in the sun below, gaping upward, mesmerized. Rosaleen's husband, a bombardier, who came home on compassionate leave to comfort his wife when he found out she was pregnant with another man's child. The British film (the name of which I can never remember) about the house and its various tenants, all of them living, and some dying, through the Second World War.

I have a copy of Bob's notice of death here in the house. Don finally found it through his work at Veteran's Affairs, just as he was able to find information for Rosaleen about her husband. I don't know why it felt so important for me to have Bob's notice of death, but I am relieved that I do. I only wish I had copied out the poem that my father wrote for my mother, not only because he was my father, after all, but because she was the woman I loved most dearly. I wonder what she would think had she known I had gone snooping through her private (or is that personal?) effects, and this years after my parents divorced.

Anyway, I was thirteen at the time and here is what I remember:

Taken from those war-torn skies
That once were oh, so blue,
He gave his life and left his heart
Devoted to his country and to you.

Oh Lord, why did he have to go?
But in your heart you ____ know
He went to fight,
And fight he did
And with God's blood he made the bid --

My father, who was several years younger than my mother (eight, in fact, and unbeknownst to him), was twenty-four when he wrote his poem for her. That was a long time ago -- long enough for me to have set the fact of it aside permanently. Long enough ago for me to have forgotten even these first two stanzas.

My friend Juanita says it's better to live in the present; that what's the point of looking into the past; that life is too short to go mucking about in the long-ago.

But I say, how can I understand the present if I don't bring the past along with me? How can I know what is true? How can the airplanes flying over my head signify anything more to me than the CNE on a sunny day if I do not honour my, and everyone's, past?

Tré Armstrong

I wish I were more like my friend Diana, who sees the good in everyone. I don't know if I have ever heard her say a truly negative word against anyone.

Not me.

And here comes another onslaught.

Between So You Think You Can Dance host Leah Miller and judge Tré (aka Tracey) Armstrong, I think I might hang myself. I love So You Think You Can Dance -- all versions -- and I look forward to every new season. And I am willing to put up with one super-irritating host or judge. But not two.

I won't even waste my time, or yours, on what I find particularly annoying about Leah Miller, because if I started I am not sure I would ever be able to stop.

Typically, I have a fondness for babies, children, teenagers and young adults to such a degree that my children, endlessly irked, used to say to me regularly, "Why don't you just go out and adopt them all, Mom?"

Apart from what seems to have become my more acidic middle age, I try to be kind, most especially toward young people who are starting out in a world that must seem extremely confusing and at times overwhelmingly competitive.

But there are characteristics I can't abide in any age: insincerity; insipidness; falseness; obsequiousness; exclusivity; smugness and, most especially, what Don and I used to call the phoney loney factor. And if you ask me, these women have that last one in bucket loads. Of course I could be wrong and unfairly judging them, but I have lived a long (long) time, and I usually know sooner than later when I have a septic sliver in my hand.

Until last night, however, I was able to tolerate each of them by focusing on the talented, captivating dancers; the sweetness and what feels like real sincerity of Jean-Marc Généreux; the lower-keyed softness of Luther Brown, and the occasional (judge) but always delightful Mary Murphy. I said to myself, "Jennifer, you're too old to be so highly critical of young people who are trying to make their way through the world." And, of course, I thought of my friend, Diana.

Here's what did it.

At first, I was sure mareseatoats had got it wrong. I thought the "Mma" we heard issuing from Armstrong's mouth was a short-form or nickname for one of the dancers (Melanie, in fact). I said to Mary, "No, that just can't be. She couldn't possibly be calling her Mma."

And then it happened again.

It isn't enough that this fledgling judge looks barely into her twenties -- interesting that I can find nothing about her age, which I suspect is being withheld because the producers want her to be seen as thoroughly viable -- and that her first film role listed on IMDB is for 2004 where she has 54th billing (which is only to say she is a newbie). (She's also noted elsewhere for but not listed in IMDB's 2004 Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen, and while she no doubt had a small role, I bet you she was still a teenager or close enough to it.)

As Jean-Marc likes to say, "Come on!"

It isn't enough that we have to sit through her grown-up lady posturing, her measured commentary, her world-wise tone -- but "Mma"?! How many episodes of The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency did Armstrong sit through before she decided that this would be a good Setswanan word for her to use on the show? And why would she be calling these equally young dancers "madam"? And why did she not use this word -- I know we would have caught it -- last year, before the popularity of The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency?

Yes, I can picture her now, a five-year-old pigtailed Canadian girl hopping about in her dance classes, sucking up all the Botswanan culture she could absorb. Or maybe she thinks that Mma stands for Ma, as in mother, as in Mom, as in "Hey! Ma! Wait up!" Or maybe she has confused her skills and genres (and if I have to hear that word one more time...) and what she really means is Yo-Yo Ma.

Whatever she means, I hope she stops. Playing at composed dignity is one of the least attractive features I can name in a young woman, and let me tell you, when you cite your favourite movie as Flashdance, it just doesn't wash. Regardless, had Tracey Armstrong been born and raised in Gabarone and had written The No 1 Ladies' Detective Agency, she still ought not be addressing her burgeoning peers as "Mma."

And even Diana might agree with me on this.

<:^)

TV Time

I am sitting here looking for things to do, despite all of the pages to my left and to my right that are screaming for my attention. It makes me think of those old drugstore and kitchen cartoons where, after closing time, all the pills and the teacups come to dancing-and-singing life. Frog in the lunch pail kind of thing, but more frenzied.

My brother and I used to get up in the pre-dawn light in London, Ontario (I was ten and he was six) (we rode on horses made of sticks) (okay, so he was four, but it didn't rhyme) and plant our faces two inches from the TV watching Looney Tunes. In fact, apart from The Wizard of Oz and one episode of Outer Limits (in which hordes of frogs came spilling over a rocky precipice, my brother screaming, "Cartoons! I want cartoons!" and Dorothy flying upstairs in her plastic hairdressing smock and striped knee socks), this was the only TV I was permitted to see.

When my own kids were little, I ran the whole gamut with them: Sesame Street; (oh you know my name is) Simon in the Land of Chalk Drawings; Mr. Dressup; Barbapapa; Jeremy (oh, my name is Jeremy, I can dance and I can sing); The Littlest Hobo (or as my older son used to say, The Littlebist Hoboat), Davey and Goliath (that one was mostly me alone...watching reruns. Hiya Davey.); The Green Forest; Mr. Gadget; Fraggle Rock (Hi Gerry! Okay, so I'm name dropping, but he was like a father to me. And besides, he was as good a Hamlet as Olivier); Bill Nye the Science Guy; Mr. Wizard; Switchback; Street Cents; Degrassi Junior High; The Muppets; Peewee's Playhouse (Mecca lecca high, Mecca hiney ho); Adrian Mole -- is there an end to this list?

After the kids outgrew these programs, I fell into watching Teletubbies, the best show on earth for relaxing after an intense day with patients and yucky office staff. In fact, I still have the Laa-Laa Teletubby that my daughter's boyfriend gave me for Christmas the year I first discovered them. And she still talks.

Overall, though, I think the best part will be watching these shows again with my grandchildren, me all Tetleyed up and dottery, an Easter quilt wrapped round my bony knees and a box of chocolate wafer cookies half-open on the table beside me. (You don't need teeth for those, and even if your gums fell out you could still get them down by sopping them in tea.)

For now, though, I had best get to the pages beside me. I'm thinking with enough imagination, I could get them to hop up and do a little soft shoe.



Hello my honey, hello my baby, hello my ragtime gal...