Inside Out

The following excerpt might seem extreme and yet, as I sat on a cement wall last night waiting for the first of many Inside Out films (where, may I say, the audiences are far more flexible, patient, generally warm, funny, supportive and open-minded than they are in mainstream movie theatres), I know that deep-rooted prejudices exist everywhere.

http://www.insideout.ca/20/index.php

From Wikipedia:

Lesbophobia (sometimes Lesbiphobia) comprises various forms of negativity toward lesbian women as individuals, as a couple or as a social group. Based on the categories of sex or biological gender, sexual orientation, lesbian identity, and gender expression, this negativity encompasses prejudice, discrimination, and abuse in addition to attitudes and feelings ranging from disdain to hostility. As such, lesbophobia is sexism against women that intersects with homophobia and vice-versa. Cynthia Petersen, a professor of law at University of Ottawa, has defined lesbophobia as also including "the fear that women have of loving other women, as well as the fear that men (including gay men) have of women not loving them."^[1]

The idea that lesbians are dangerous, while heterosexual interactions are natural, normal and spontaneous is a common example of beliefs which are lesbophobic. Like homophobia, this belief is classed as heteronormative, as it assumes that heterosexuality is dominant, presumed and normal, and that other sexual or relationship arrangements are abnormal and unnatural.^[3] A stereotype that has been identified as lesbophobic is that female athletes are always or predominantly lesbians.^[4][5] Lesbians encounter lesbophobic attitudes not only in straight men and women, but from gay men as well.^[6] Lesbophobia in gay men is regarded as manifest in the perceived subordination of lesbian issues in the campaign for gay rights.^[7]

Lesbophobia is sometimes demonstrated through crimes of violence, including rape and even murder. In South Africa, Sizakele Sigasa, a lesbian activist living in Soweto, and her partner Salome Masooa were raped, tortured, and murdered in July 2007 in an attack that South African lesbian-gay rights organizations, including the umbrella-group Joint Working Group, said were driven by lesbophobia. Two other rape/murders of lesbians occurred in South Africa earlier in summer 2007: Simangele Nhlapo, member of an HIV-positive support group was raped and murdered in June, along with her two-year-old daughter; and Madoe Mafubedu, aged 16, was raped and stabbed to death. In 2006, Zoliswa Nkonyana, aged 19, was killed for being openly lesbian by about 20 young men in the Cape Town township of Khayelitsha, who clubbed and kicked her to death. Eudy Simelane, the Banyana Banyana soccer player, was also raped and killed in South Africa. Zanele Muholi, community relations director of a lesbian rights group, reports having recorded 50 rape cases over the past decade involving black lesbians in townships, stating, "The problem is largely that of patriarchy. The men who perpetrate such crimes see rape as curative and as an attempt to show women their place in society."^[8][9][10]

^{End quote.}

Add to this the difficulties inherent in our pecking order mentality (http://www.cockatiels.org/ownersandenthusiasts/the-pecking-order.htm), coupled with the prevalence of ageism (http://www.cnpea.ca/ageism.htm), and it’s no wonder so many women over 40 have problems.

I am an invisible [wo]man.... I am a [wo]man of substance, of flesh and bone, fibre and liquids - and I might even be said to possess a mind.  I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.  ~ Ralph Ellison, The Invisible Man, 1952

Entry written in the spring of 2010

Stephen Fry Hates Me

How is that possible, you ask me? Secondly, does Stephen Fry even know you, and third, from what anyone can gather from his fabulous autobiography, Moab Is My Washpot, Stephen Fry hates no one. Absolutely no one.

Which, ironically, may be where my real trouble comes in because, unlike Stephen (and apparently his mother), there are many many (did I say many?) people that I do not like. Sadly for me and for some of the people I don’t like, I did not inherit the sort of gene that lets people slide off hooks, long or short. In fact, I am still siding with Don on this one: to never judge is amoral (which makes me, come to think of it, positively high-minded).

I do wonder if Stephen Fry suffers a little from a hint of benevolent omnipotence, but he is so generous, so utterly sweet-natured, so jolly in some ways, so depressed in others, and so so so willing to forgive everyone but himself, I think there is, that there can be, nothing truly omnipotent about him at all.

Moreover, his facility for and with words; his enviable eidetic memory; his alarming and scintillating risk-taking adventures; his genius; his fervour; his techno-wizardry; his maleness, and even his favourably financial background – all of these things mark him as otherworldly, at least from where I sit – polar opposite it seems – on the planet.

How I longed to know him, however, page after glorious page – even when he didn’t understand what meaning the interjectory ‘though’ had, stuck as it was, on the end of that woman’s sentences (I do), or how a person can know where he was and what he was doing upon hearing a certain piece of classical music (I can), or how not all people interested in tarot divination or rune deciphering are spiritless idiots (God help me).

How I shouted with delight and surprise every time I read another title of a poem or novel or movie or song, or a catchphrase, that resonated. From The Go-Between to The Godfather to Groundhog Day, through the span of Dickens and Forster and Sim, I wished with all of my heart that somewhere in my life there had been and would always be a Stephen Fry.

How I wept alongside of him, with him and for him, and for myself, and for my mother and for children over and across all of those 18th birthdays: mine spent alone, as far as I can feebly remember, working at the restaurant, my mother withering away in an Ontario mental hospital, my long-estranged father off somewhere trotting the globe, years away from me or from any knowledge of me. And oh, how I wept for my son…

What a shame, then, that Stephen Fry hates me – I, who am the very depiction of the rare (for him, not of me) sort of person he cannot stand. He, who so seldom despises anyone. I, without memory, drowning in memories; shrivelling from risk; opinionated and critical and wistful. He, joyful and skilful and – just as he wished – exuberantly moving through life.

Stephen Fry, cotton to me or not, radiates in a light of his own making, his tender-hearted nature rendering him one of the dearest individuals with whom I have ever spent seven magical and heartbreaking nights, laughing and crying and wondering throughout why he also, by times and along with that exuberance, hates himself so.

Moab is my washpot; over Edom will I cast out my shoe; over Philistia will I triumph. Psalm 108-9

Simple Song

It's a simple song for simple feeling
You see the moon and watch it rise
Across the continent the night bird sings
And somewhere someone hears its cry

So disillusioned
Keep your head down
If you do they'll never know
You'll have no answers to their questions
And they will have to let you go

And disenfranchised
Revolution
They'll take away by right what's yours
And make you martyrs of your own cause
When they don't know what cause it's for

And all deserted
Stand alerted
They'll love you when you're all alone
But you find a red rose in the morning light
You wait the night and find it gone

So hear my words with faith and passion
For what I say to you is true
And when you find the one you might become
Remember part of me is you

Lyle Lovett

I listened to this song – I hadn’t played the cd in a long time – on my drive down #2 highway yesterday through bucolic heaven, and remembered with chilling clarity the precious time I years ago wasted with a set of women with whom I am so philosophically mal-aligned I still can’t believe I accepted the offer to join their dinner group. My own fault, I know, but the song, if not the experience, is worth repeating.

Sitting on the Sidelines

I just finished watching Bravo’s new reality show, Work of Art, in which contestants were asked to create something shocking. Frankly, I had trouble getting past this week’s mentor, shock artist Andres Serrano, whose touted works in (for example) his own excrement made me gag.

That (well) aside, I, who cannot draw a believable orange or copy something as simple as a pop can, wondered what I would do were I asked to create a work of shocking art.

Sex is easy and overdone, as is sexuality, and suicide and homelessness seem no longer shocking to anyone. War and accidents are numbingly pervasive, and disease is analyzed by and known to all. Religion is over-rated and cliched, and understood as such, and movies have taken the hysteria out of set-backs and (even dire) misfortune.

The one lingering thought I had was this, exemplified below in someone else’s hand:

Saudi Arabia shares some of the social plagues that affect other developing countries, in this case, child-trafficking. Particularly in the Hijaz area, which encompasses Jeddah, Mecca, and Medinah, African gangs bring in small children, mutilate them, and set them on the streets begging. This article in Asharq Alawsat notes that even given this atrocious mistreatment, the children see it as a way to live a life better in some regards than that which they left. http://xrdarabia.org/?s=amputate

The first time I heard of such atrocities was from a woman who had recently returned from Egypt where, she claimed, limbless children gathered in crippling numbers, holding out cans and begging for money. As she spoke I pictured little shadowed frames standing like microscopic insects in front of monolithic pyramids, Coca Cola signs dotting the tawny-coloured sweep of sand that stretched endlessly behind them.

I am not an artist, or at least not the kind that can depict the delineated, visual sorts of searing images so easily rendered by others. Well…I ought not to so quickly say “easily rendered” because nothing on tonight’s show shocked me much in any way (which takes me to the digression of Tennessee Williams, who said something to the effect that he knew his life was over when it had lost its ability to shock him).

But I can imagine that, were I artistic in these ways, I would render an oil painting large and vividly imbued with images of tiny helpless children, alone and half-standing, their only hope of survival resting on what my mother use to call the kindness of strangers, their phantom pain a priceless reminder of life’s sullied, sorry ironies. I look quickly away from their dark eyes and thinning unwashed hair, silently marvelling at the awkward clumps of bony overgrowth accumulating at the site of amputation.

I think now of my granddaughter, caught the other day in a moment of three-year-old brattiness, batting her long lashes at me with surprising contempt and telling me at the end of another long exhalation, “No thank you, grammie. I don’t want you to read to me.” I see her shining there in her princess dress, her hair pulled back in butterfly barrettes, her feet sturdy and bare, her toenails painted a delicate shade of pink.

Such a world of contradictions we live in. Such a shocking world, in fact. Artists who cannot create. Writers who cannot express themselves. Children who must lop off limbs in order to survive. Princesses who do not understand, or even know, that halfway around the world one-legged, one-armed toddlers are begging for a meal.

What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how
infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and
admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like
a god! the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals—and yet,
to me, what is this quintessence of dust?
Hamlet Act 2, scene 2, 303–312

Moving Day

Little Johnny’s moving house

Packing up and going

Parting ways with all his toys –

His seeds want better sowing.

~

His cats are packed in separate crates

His books are in the trunk.

His bats and balls and overalls

Are wrapped and labeled Junk.

~

His comics will be stowed away

At home for younger brother,

Suspenders that he wore to school

Are parceled up for mother.

~

Little Johnny’s leaving home

Box and bag and carriage,

Carting up his by-gone days

And planning out his marriage.

Jennifer Coffey
1999

The Passion of The Christ-loving Ex-wife

I’m not surprised that any woman who chose to live with Mel Gibson for twenty-eight years, bear seven children with him, is a fundamentalist Christian, has been described as very strict, rigid and at many times very intimidating, and, if my guess is anywhere near correct, fulfilled her husband’s ideal of the perfect wife and mother, acting in part as his mother, has nothing negative to say about him.

Could anything be more throwback?

And how is it possible that she can describe him as a “wonderful father” when he sets the kind of example that informs his children that he is racist, misogynist, abusive, alcoholic, violent, anti-feminist, anti-Semitic, homophobic, a self-confessed megalomaniac and clearly one of the most ludicrous individuals to come out of Hollywood (or a worm hole) in a very long time?

Christopher Hitchens writes of Gibson, “I do not believe for an instant that (as God told Moses) the sins of the fathers should descend to later generations. But when asked about his old man's many effusions on this subject, from the cheery view that the Jewish population of Europe actually increased in Hitler's day to the no less upbeat opinion that persons unknown brought down the World Trade Center, the younger Gibson stonewalled consistently by saying that ‘my father has never told me a lie.’” http://www.slate.com/id/2146880

Do we need anymore evidence that Mel Gibson should be considered a threat to women, children, society and to himself? Is there anyone with so much as half a brain who can look beyond the monstrosity that he is and say, “Oh well. His ex-wife Robyn says he has never been abusive and she does cite him as a wonderful father, so I think we ought to just let this recent spate float on by us.”

Even worse to me are those powerful (by way of television, radio and films) individuals – too often women – who defend him. If you listen really hard, you will generally notice that these Mel-supporters have a habit and history of disingenuousness; will go to any lengths to garner attention by way of outrageous commentary; need to let you know how on the Hollywood inside they are (if I had spent time entertaining Mel Gibson in my home I certainly wouldn’t be announcing this on air), and who tend to call (other) women “broads.” Nothing pricks up my ears like that last derogation.

How typical of these Mel-supporters to disavow his actual commentary; disregard his assertion that his current partner deserved to have her teeth knocked out by him; ignore his hurled epithets of whore, prostitute and c**t, and stand silent as he continues to threaten, demean and batter – leaving his current wife and new baby helpless in the face of his life-threatening violence.

The public should have long been horrified by Mel Gibson, edited tapes or not. And I’ll tell you this: there is nothing that I, as a mother of three, wouldn’t have done or would not do to protect my children. I can only begin to imagine the kind of terror that might prompt me to doctor a tape in such a way that I hoped to be believed – especially against a world that lauds any Hollywood male asshole whose arrested (or perhaps ought to be) ex-wife stands by her vicious, dangerous, psychotic, and utterly ridiculous man.

http://www.buzzfeed.com/awesomer/the-13-worst-mel-gibson-rant-quotes-presented-by

Sugar in the Mornin’

Remember that song…sugar in the mornin’, sugar in the evenin’, sugar at suppertime…? Well, I can tell you something about sugar in the mornin’ – startin’ right now.

 

As some of you might know, Boots the cat has, for about two years, been on insulin for diabetes. (Is that redundant? I mean, why else would insulin be given to a cat?) He gets two three-unit injections per day, twelve hours apart, like clockwork, give or take nine or ten hours. (Gotcha!)

 

Anyway, I tend to give Boots his morning needle, and my medic-relief, Ms. MacDonald, is here to stab him twelve hours later.

Which is why, tonight, while I was up here looking up Chinese names/pronunciations for a book I am reading onto cd, I called down at 10 PM and asked, “Have you given Boots his injection?”

I heard a muffled, “No,” along with shuffling feet, which meant that everyone was off to the kitchen for insulin and treats. So I immediately finished up with my book and trotted off to the front bedroom to call my daughter.

I wasn’t on the phone five minutes, but Ms. MacDonald came shivering into the bedroom, whispering. “I need to talk to you. Now. Please hang up.” So I did.

Turns out, Boots the cat did not receive his injection tonight, at least not at the allotted time. Ms. MacDonald, having fallen asleep on So You Think You Can Dance and therefore in a doubly fugued state, stuck the three-unit dose of insulin into Sneakers, Boot’s much larger and completely different-coloured brother of/for ten or so years.

 

But maybe not for much longer.

Anyway, my advice was sought…or rather, I concurred on the advice already taken, which was for Ms. MacDonald to drive Sneakers to the emergency vet halfway across town while I stayed here with Lainey, and with Boots, who awaited his 10 PM injection.

Off they went. I called my daughter back. We chatted briefly, avoiding puns. I hung up. I gave Boots his needle. I waited.

Anyway, long story short is this: 

The next time you give the wrong cat three units of insulin, check his glucose levels (in this case 4), feed him immediately, and offer up corn syrup over the next few hours, but only if the cat begins to look shaky.

Fortunately for us, and especially fortunate for Sneakers, our boy weighs nigh on 30 pounds, which means there’s a lot of him to go round (and ‘round) (as in around), and a lot less of him to react. In fact, he is home now, having scarfed down a can of Fancy Feast salmon and a bowlful of water.

 

Meanwhile, Ms. MacDonald is insisting on sitting at his bedside, intending to check his glucose levels every hour or so.

 

But the thing is, you see, it was Ms. MacDonald waiting to tend to Boots’s needle two hours ago that got us into all of this trouble in the first place.

 

Which means I had best get myself downstairs. The clock’s a’tickin’ and I’m afraid it’s going to be a long night – although for Sneakers, a long night is exactly what he needs.

Put your arms around me
And swear by stars above
You'll be mine forever
In a heaven of love…

 

Summer Hobbies

Lainey has a favourite new game, which she invented. It’s called Let’s Sit On The Porch Chairs, Grammie, and Tell One Another Stories About When We Were Babies.

In fact, we weren’t home five minutes from the flower store today when she made her request.

So down I plunked with our bucket of shared fruit (blueberries, strawberries, honeydew melon – or cantaloupe [whichever is the orange one] – and watermelon) and the tale-telling began, Lainey insisting I go first and following up with her own story (which sounded suspiciously like mine).

I have to tell you that I was fairly certain that the days of little kids being interested in their grandparents in these ways was about ten or twenty years past, and at first I found myself flummoxed and tongue-tied. What could I possibly say about my childhood that would interest a three-year-old?

Well, as it turns out – plenty. She wanted to know all about the tea parties my mother and I had, and the Friday night potato chip man, and the merry-go-round in the park (I didn’t tell her about the Thalidomide children who also played there), and that my mother made ‘coffee’ for me on Saturday mornings when I was three, and how later, when I was five or so, the way my mother would press five dollars – a veritable fortune in those days – into the palm of my hand and send me off down Wilmot Road to the flower lady in our town, where I would hover under the shade of her fruit trees and pick out gladiolas.

There are abundant stories I could tell my granddaughter, many of them magical or easily made magical for ears so young, and I am half-hoping that tomorrow, in between dropping gramps at work and ambling over to the swimming pool, Lainey will ask me again to play our new game. It occurs to me, in fact, had I a grandmother when I was young, I might have wanted to relax on the porch with her and swap stories, waiting to lap up the secrets of her life and hear about those things that made her happy and even, sometimes, sad. (I can’t even begin to imagine what she would tell me; what the details of her life might have been like.)

Anyway, the next time a three-year-old hollers, “Let’s play a game!” don’t be so quick to put the kibosh on her eager ideas. You never know where the whole thing could lead – even if it’s only into the back room to write another blog entry for your grandchildren to read when they have grandkids of their own.

And so it goes.

And so it went.

Summer Reading 2010

Things My Mother Taught Me

The best time to make friends is before you need them.  Ethel Barrymore

Cherish the friend who tells you a harsh truth, wanting ten times more to tell you a loving lie.  Robert Brault

True friends stab you in the front.  Oscar Wilde

There is magic in long-distance friendships.  They let you relate to other human beings in a way that goes beyond being physically together and is often more profound.  Diana Cortes

There is one friend in the life of each of us who seems not a separate person, however dear and beloved, but an expansion, an interpretation, of one's self, the very meaning of one's soul.  Edith Wharton

Many a person has held close, throughout their entire lives, two friends that always remained strange to one another, because one of them attracted by virtue of similarity, the other by difference.  Emil Ludwig

Men kick friendship around like a football, but it doesn't seem to crack.  Women treat it like glass and it goes to pieces.  Anne Morrow Lindbergh

It is the friends you can call up at 4 a.m. that matter.  Marlene Dietrich
A friend is the one who comes in when the whole world has gone out.  Grace Pulpit

Friendship isn't a big thing - it's a million little things.  Author Unknown

I’m like Mary and Don. I don’t have a lot of friends. I have some. Mary says it isn’t because I am not well-liked, but more that I do not like many people well.

She’s right.

I don’t like many people well (although, of course, many is relative…and brother, when it comes to my relatives…).  But I don’t like many (as in dozens of) people (including myself, which might be the crux of my problem) well, at least not in a big picture trust-my-life-with-them way. I have lived too long and witnessed the workings of too many relationships and I understand fairly comprehensively what it means to be human, and inhuman, to be foolish enough to think that most people can manage what I think friendship ought to be: loyal, kind, generous, excited, fun, heartfelt, compassionate, reciprocal, passionate, fervent, patient, consistent, tender, honest and vital.
And if that’s cynical, shoot me. (Ow!)

But that’s not how I intended it to be. That’s just the way they were, and things are, and I say this also full-well knowing how many people I have been able to and do call my friends in this life.

Anyway, the reason I am writing this entry is not to complain but to celebrate an email I received about ten minutes ago from a friend who is – who happens to be, by some lovely mix of nature and nurture – just about the epitome of what friendship, at least in my head, ought to mean. She is every one of those qualities I listed above, and in my experience, she is rare. Mind you, I think  most people feel about her exactly as I do. (The way Betty White feels about Sandra Bullock.)

The long and the short of it is, she told me that if she had a pony she would let me ride on it and even let me go first because she likes me better than even some other nice people. And if that doesn’t say everything, what does? Let’s face it, I know that I am not truly first on anyone’s list, but what I love is that this woman always makes me feel as if I am.

And as a matter of fact, I intend to take her up on this should the day ever come when a Palomino piebald shows up in her backyard. Because I know that when I falter on that horse and start to slide, my friend will smile but she will not laugh. She will tell me that I am the best darned horse rider she ever did see, because in her head, and in her way, that’s how she sees me.

A true friend never gets in your way unless you happen to be going down.  Arnold Glasow

How Hot Is It?

searing, baking, sultry, blistering, fevered, feverish, heated, on fire, oven-like, parching, recalescent, scalding, smoking, steaming, febrile, summery, sweltering, thermogenic, torrid, tropic, stifling, warm, very warm, blazing, burning, roasting, fiery, scorching, igneous, white-hot, flaming, stuffy, humid, close, tropical, boiling, broiling, feverous, calescent, piping, sizzling, afire, seething, withering, charring, simmering, steamy, red-hot, sulfurous

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FIF4Txq8Obw&feature=related

Hot Fun in the Summertime

For all we complain about the heat – and boy, is it hot – it seems to me that these temperatures give us a kind of freedom we haven’t known since the days of our youth.

In the last few days I have

• walked in not one parade but two
• eaten sorbet from a chocolate waffle cone
• swum in a sandy-bottomed perfectly warm but not too warm lake
• sucked back several chocolate popsicles
• read and read and read
• indulged in pre-packaged fresh fruits (the kind you eat) (okay, the kind with rinds and seeds) (although…)
• been back and forth to the local swimming pool, also perfectly warm
• sat on the porch in the dark with the crickets and the outdoor candles (but not the crickets) burning
• taken photographs
• enjoyed Cuveé
• read and read and read
• slept under the purring fan
• laid back on the couch and relaxed
• been interviewed on the radio (whoa oh oh oh, on the radio)
• dined out
• watched some of my all-time favourite movies: The Philadelphia Story; To Kill A Mockingbird; Moby Dick (maybe a bit staged, as Mary says, but personally evocative)
• felt no guilt for my absence of housework
• drank Pepsi
• read and read and read

Apparently, this heat is slated to go on for the next several days. I wonder how much more leisure I can pack into those minutes, slurping and scanning and sleeping and swimming. Damn this curséd heat!

For Michelle

I've lost my shoes Have you seen them
The winged ones that used to carry me

I've heard that when people die they remember
their mothers and call in the night Carry me

When my son used to say I can do it myself
He was whispering Could you carry me

When the quick rain soaks the shoulders of my shirt
it's saying Just for now Carry me

There's a tenderness around your eyes
Have enough tears said Carry me

All day in this new dream I walk on gravel
And the words you didn't whisper carry me

When my mother arrives at the end of something
It's to faint in my arms and say Carry me

I've known how to walk since before I was born
It's useless to try to carry me

What the dazzle of light says as it touches
the wave swelling Cresting Breaking Carry me

What the secrets say as they line the edges
of my eyes Your eyes Carry me

What the shoeless stammerer doesn't say
as she doesn't step into your arms Carry me

Suzanne Gardinier

I Have Been One Acquainted With The Night

I have been one acquainted with the night.

I have walked out in rain -- and back in rain.

I have out-walked the furthest city light.

*

I have looked down the saddest city lane.

I have passed by the watchman on his beat

And dropped my eyes, unwilling to explain.

*

I have stood still and stopped the sound of feet

When far away an interrupted cry

Came over houses from another street,

*

But not to call me back or say good-bye;

And further still at an unearthly height,

One luminary clock against the sky

*

Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right.

I have been one acquainted with the night.

 

Written by Robert Frost, whose poem struck me again tonight as I stood this side of the big hill at Ashbridge’s Bay watching the fireworks, imagining Don looking down upon all of us (way past his bedtime, as I just said to our daughter); and Pablo, taken so suddenly ill; and Pete, Marg’s brother, who recently died, and Michelle, who is having surgery on Monday.

It often strikes me during those frozen moments, when crowds of city dwellers are gathered together and silent except for the occasional ohs and ahs, that when we stand together we are not merely celebrating life, but death, and everything in between.

And if this seems maudlin, to me it only signifies that which is real and true. Or else why would I be here year after year, remembering the dead and those people for whom life feels painful and tenuous, clapping my hands at the end of the display, and looking up for the last vestiges of a glittering star on which to hang my hopes?