Summer

Some men there are who find in nature all
Their inspiration, hers the sympathy
Which spurs them on to any great endeavor,
To them the fields and woods are closest friends,
And they hold dear communion with the hills;
The voice of waters soothes them with its fall,
And the great winds bring healing in their sound.
To them a city is a prison house
Where pent up human forces labour and strive,
Where beauty dwells not, driven forth by man;
But where in winter they must live until
Summer gives back the spaces of the hills.
To me it is not so. I love the earth
And all the gifts of her so lavish hand:
Sunshine and flowers, rivers and rushing winds,
Thick branches swaying in a winter storm,
And moonlight playing in a boat's wide wake;
But more than these, and much, ah, how much more,
I love the very human heart of man.
Above me spreads the hot, blue mid-day sky,
Far down the hillside lies the sleeping lake
Lazily reflecting back the sun,
And scarcely ruffled by the little breeze
Which wanders idly through the nodding ferns.
The blue crest of the distant mountain, tops
The green crest of the hill on which I sit;
And it is summer, glorious, deep-toned summer,
The very crown of nature's changing year
When all her surging life is at its full.
To me alone it is a time of pause,
A void and silent space between two worlds,
When inspiration lags, and feeling sleeps,
Gathering strength for efforts yet to come.
For life alone is creator of life,
And closest contact with the human world
Is like a lantern shining in the night
To light me to a knowledge of myself.
I love the vivid life of winter months
In constant intercourse with human minds,
When every new experience is gain
And on all sides we feel the great world's heart;
The pulse and throb of life which makes us men!

Amy Lowell

If The Shoe Fits

I found the following article archived online when I went looking for a Croc store today:

A Croc of Shit

2008 November 24

I’m not quite sure how I missed it up until this point in my life, but there is an ENTIRE CROCS STORE located near Queen and Spadina.  Although I’ve never owned a pair of Crocs, they are to shoes what Texas is to travel for me: that which I need not experience to know that I never need to.

I found [a] hilarious review of the store (by Connie T.) and I couldn’t have said it better myself:

“Uh, what sane person on Queen West would walk into this store and take a beating to their boutique cred? Like that Facebook group states, ‘I Don’t care How Comfortable Crocs Are, You Look Like A Dumbass.’

I stepped in, more out of curiosity than anything else, and was bowled over by how many ugly shoes and colours were packed into one location. It blew my mind.

But I think more than anything else, I don’t get why this store is where it is. It would seem more appropriate in the Eaton Centre or Dufferin Mall. In fact, I’ve passed by a number of times throughout the day and no one is ever inside. Big surprise.”

The Crocs store is located at 356 Queen Street West.

~

Well, that all said and done, I would like to share my side of the story. Anyone who reads my blog knows that I have back, and therefore, foot problems. I have, as a result, been sent to all kinds of specialists – orthopedic surgeons, physiotherapists, shoe clinics, and even specialty stores.

I also have, as a result of my problems, had to stash in the basement all of the beautiful shoes I have collected over the years. Most of these shoes, if examined carefully, would render a verdict of sensible, almost none of them too high or too low, and many of them made by reputable shoe-makers.

In the last six years, I have been relegated to Birkenstocks (irony, thy name is granola), Naots, a lovely pair of Borns, and a pair of Echoes that didn’t hold up quite as well as I expected. Even at that, I can only wear any of these shoes for a limited time period before my back gives out.

Not so with Crocs. I bought my first, and thus far only pair, several years ago (at The Bay at Yonge and Bloor), a little sceptical of their look and colour, but knowing that…vanity, thy name is idiot…and brought them home.

In a nutshell, I haven’t taken them off since. I wear them exclusively at home, to the pool, at the cottage, to the beach, and even sometimes when I’m out running errands.

So I would like to say to the presumably young writer above

• don’t knock what you haven’t tried – even Texas (have you read up on vibrant Austin, the Live Music Capital of the World, for example?)
• you cannot know when the day will come that you will need to walk a mile or more in someone else’s shoes or shoe styles
• thesaurus.com is a useful place for locating synonyms (in this case, dumbass)
• dictionary.com is a useful place for locating definitions (in this case, hilarious)
• who are you to decide what stores merit being where?
• who are you to mock the shoe that has saved my walking life?
• if boutique cred is the thing that means I’ve made it, count me out. I’d rather wear Crocs to my wedding than be considered a part of that crowd.

As my mother always said, handsome is as handsome does.

And as my daughter likes to say – Bite me!

Milkmaid

The girl's far treble, muted to the heat,
calls like a fainting bird across the fields
to where her flock lies panting for her voice,
their black horns buried deep in marigolds.

They climb awake, like drowsy butterflies,
and press their red flanks through the tall branched grass,
and as they go their wandering tongues embrace
the vacant summer mirrored in their eyes.

Led to the limestone shadows of a barn
they snuff their past embalmed in the hay,
while her cool hand, cupped to the udder's fount,
distils the brimming harvest of their day.

Look what a cloudy cream the earth gives out,
fat juice of buttercups and meadow-rye;
the girl dreams milk within her body's field
and hears, far off, her muted children cry.

Laurie Lee

Hoses Run In my Family

Hoses have changed a lot in my short (relatively short…cam’ on!) lifetime, the first ones I remember issuing out a soft spray of ridiculously cold water onto my short bare legs and goose-pimply thighs as I ran back and forth across a lawn (I don’t remember whose lawn, but not ours. We didn’t have one) on a hot summer day. I was probably five or six the last time I did that, but wish it had been more often.

At this same time during my preschool days my mother had a vacuum whose hose practically had a life of its own. She would set up her cleaning machine on the Persian rug (the rug was so beautiful, and clean) and let the thing stand, its long, sturdy hose managing the cumbersome vacuum with ease. I would watch this with awe, thinking my mother’s vacuum the eighth wonder of the man-made world. Fast forward three decades or so (cam’ on!) and the vacuum/hose I have now has more duct tape holding it together than it has hose, and the dirt doesn’t suck up the way it used to at all.

Later, when I was aged seven to twelve and living (now there’s a euphemism) at Dorothy and my father’s, hoses came in two forms: as an item you used to spray dirty dishes with – quite a luxury in those days – and as the thing Dorothy engineered while rinsing her customers’ hair, usually with blistering-hot water, in her hairdressing shop.

When I was a teenager, hoses meant something even more inflammatory (although I am not qualified to know the exact difference or to rate that difference). Hoses symbolized gay men, beaten up by Toronto policemen, in the obscurity of night-time Queen’s Park. This happened to, among many, a friend of mine as he cruised home from The Quest, and I know – everyone in the city knew – that this sort of brutality went on. Rubber hoses hurt, but they do not bruise in the same way that lead pipes bruise. And it’s always better to hide the evidence anyway, yes.

Close to this very same time, when I was eighteen or nineteen, I had a new hose experience that involved this same friend. I had been invited by his family for Christmas (an invitation that was especially welcoming that year, as I had just been uninvited the day before by my father, who was travelling to Peterborough for the holiday and whose wife had decided last minute that they didn’t have room for me in the car. And I was skinny.) (Sound familiar, Gaspar?)

Anyway, I have told this hose story about a hundred times, and I hope it is worth repeating: I was taking a quick bath that Christmas morning (the living room, which adjoined the bathroom, rocked with the happy sounds of mellifluous merry-makers) when my friend accidentally opened the bathroom door. I shrieked, of course, all modesty prevailing, and shuddered upon hearing him say, cheerfully and to everyone present: “Jenny’s in there hosin’ down her beaver.”

In and among all of this, I can’t help but remember the hoses used to fight the three fires my family and I have been fortunate to survive, two of the fires set (nephew and matches/mother and cigarette) in Fredericton, and one (neighbour’s overnight-guest’s cigarette) in Charlottetown. Did you know that the usual working pressure of a fire hose can vary between 8 bar and 20 bar (0.8 to 2.0 MPa or 100 to 300 psi), while its bursting pressure can be up to 83 bar (8.3 MPa or 1200 psi)? Neither did I.

Anyway, in happy coincidence, the friendly man who lives next door to us now is a fireman, and given my history of house disasters, I am often relieved when I think that, should I light fire to this house (as I almost did this morning, setting off the alarm as I tried to boil water for tea. You can ask my daughter if you don’t believe me. We were talking on the phone at that time, while a marble-sized ball of leftover whatever morphed into a flame), he will know what to do.

Anyway again, speaking of the fireman next door and of his hoses (cam on!), later this morning while I was still chatting with Sarah (and after I’d put the stove fire out on my own) we – she and I – heard a horrendous hissing noise from what I imagined as a supersonic hose, its deafening whistle coming from right outside the kitchen window.

“What was that?” Sarah roared, trying to make herself heard over the racket outdoors.

“Armageddon?” I replied, knowing it is always impolite to answer a question with a question.

I looked out the window, staring at our backyard fence and at the abruptly shifting furniture (some of it heavy-enough wood), as gallons of muddy water flew over our fence and onto, and into, the white (well, it used to be white) goose-down cushion (I had hand-washed it and left it there to dry in the sun), soaking two chair cushions, which are now a mottled brown colour, the power-hose (maybe it’s a fireman thing) firing soil out of our plants and down the sides of our white (well, it used to be white) ringer washer; dirtying our chairs; lop-siding our wonderful wall hangings created by our even more wonderful friend, Mike, and splashing up through the open second-storey window onto the computer.

(I know this last part because as I ran breathless up the stairs toward the open back window, my daughter repeated herself: “What was that?”)

So all in all it was an eventful morning, filled with excitement, evocative sounds, and memories of all shapes and sizes. In fact, had this day not occurred I might never have thought to look back at my hose history (stockings aside) or thought to regale my grandchildren with these various anecdotes. But like all responsible progenitors, it now feels incumbent upon me to remind my children’s children that, undoubtedly, hoses run in our family.

Cat Tales

Once upon a teeny time, five cats –

 

 

Sneakers,

Ralph,

Boots,

Slippers

and Galoshes  -

lived in a rustic (that’s euphemistic for “small, work-in-progress”) city home,

which they shared with two adults; the late and much lamented Pooh Bear,

and a bevy of now-dead and mostly goldfish.

In fact, at the time of this entry, each feline has made his or her way past the ten-year marker, Ralphie the oldest, and the dottiest, at seventeen.

As any of us can expect with great age and, in one case girth (most likely caused by that darning needle poking into his pituitary gland), medical challenges have set in, the greatest not our diabetic Boots,

but rather our too-fat-to-make-it-to-the-basement-litter-boxes – sneezing, snoring Sneakers, 

 

who has found comfort and release just inside our front door entryway.

In house, we have tried everything: pans without lids, shallow pans, special trays, happy kitty mats, deterring sprays, magic scents, deodorizers, collars, candles, and hours of cajoling. We have even promised winter holidays in Southern France,

if only he will make an effort to make his way downstairs.

But nothing seems to work. No matter what we try or say, every day, like a diligent chubby cleric at the corner bank, Sneakers makes his deposit – sometimes once; often twice, and on really busy days, three times.

And as tales would have it, there is sometimes a happy ending, sometimes not. I guess for now the way we have to look at it is this: as long as Sneakers is here beside us, sneezing, snoring, and leaving his collections in at the front door, the climax of this story is a happy one.

And until such time as we can find a feline diaper, a kitty treadmill, or an able surgeon for that darning needle, Sneakers will have to remain, and be loved, just the way he is.

Pussy willows, cat tales, soft winds, and roses.

Candygram!

I am sitting here eating a preservative-free blueberry sucker – I think the seller called them lollipops (My boy, Lollipop – he makes my heart go giddy-up!) – from the CNE, which is about the only sweet memory I came away with yesterday. The CNE has changed so drastically it is unrecognizable. Mind you, what hasn’t changed since 1867?

That said, I stole enough glances and glimpses to know that much of the exhibition edibles are still the same: frozen ice cream waffles, cotton candy, candy apples, caramel corn, doughnut holes, giant dill pickles, homemade fudge; snow cones, hot dogs, corn dogs and hamburgers – it was all there. They even have something called “deep-fried butter.”

Sadly, I can no longer eat the ice cream waffles (lactose intolerant), scarf down the red meat (cholesterol), or munch on a candy apple (dental work). I can only gaze at them in memory and salute as I walk by, a leaky tear escaping my big, sad eyes.

I think the most important part of the CNE when I was a kid, past the carousel and the neon lights, was the thought of a candy apple – the thing for which I coveted my money so that at the end of the night, after the rides and the fireworks had made me repugnantly dizzy, I could buy one and spirit it home.

In fact, when I was a kid I used to have dreams about candy apples, their glazed red deliciousness only minorly inferior to the juicy sweetness of the apple itself – heaven on a stick – the last bits of goodness licked away slowly, the delicate nectar lingering on my salivating tongue.

I confess to a lump in my throat yesterday in fact, as I walked by the sturdy rows of crimson invitations, their glistening roundness calling out to me, “Jennnnnnnifer…Jennnnnnnifer….” But I was strong. I walked alone, head held high, and right into the booth called Gourmet Lollipops – six for $5.00 – where the owner told me he had been selling these suckers for 39 years. I asked him if he, too, had noted drastic changes in the CNE over the decades, and he nodded morosely, saying nothing.

Anyway, I am sitting here at the keyboard licking away at my blueberry confectionary – it’s quite good – and at less than a dollar a pop, thinking to myself, “Not a bad deal, after all.” But oh oh oh, what I’d give for a big fat juicy crimson drool-inducing candy apple.

Blue Born Today

Blue is a colour, the perception of which is evoked by light having a spectrum dominated by energy with a wavelength of roughly 440–490 nm. It is considered one of the additive primary colours. The English language commonly uses "blue" to refer to any colour from navy blue to cyan. The word itself is derived from the Old French word bleu.

The modern English word blue comes from Middle English bleu or blewe, from Old French bleu, bleve, blöe, a word of Germanic origin (Frankish or possibly Old High German blāo, "blue"). [And the list goes on…]

Also related is the English word blee meaning "colour, complexion." Ancient Greek lacked a word for blue, and Homer called the colour of the sea "wine dark," except that the word kyanos (cyan) was used for dark blue enamel.

As a curiosity, blue is thought to be cognate with blond, blank and black through the Germanic word. Through a Proto-Indo-European root, it is also linked with Latin flavus ("yellow"; see flavescent and flavine), with Greek phalos (white), French blanc (white, blank) (borrowed from Old Frankish), and with Russian белый, belyi ("white," see beluga), and Welsh blawr (grey) all of which derive (according to the American Heritage Dictionary) from the Proto-Indo-European root *bhel- meaning "to shine, flash or burn."

In the English language, blue may refer to the feeling of sadness. "He was feeling blue." This is because blue was related to rain or storms, and, in Greek mythology, the god Zeus would make rain when he was sad (crying), and a storm when he was angry. Kyanos was a name used in Ancient Greek to refer to dark blue tile (in English it means blue-green or cyan). ^[3] The phrase "feeling blue" is linked also to a custom among many old deepwater sailing ships. If the ship lost the captain or any of the officers during its voyage, she would fly blue flags and have a blue band painted along her entire hull when returning to home port.^[4]

• In the English language, blue often represents the human emotion of sadness, e.g., "He was feeling blue." In German, on the other hand, to be "blue" (blau sein) is to be drunk. This derives from the ancient use of urine (which is produced copiously by the human body after drinking alcohol) in dyeing cloth blue with woad or indigo.^[5] It may also be in relation to rain, which is usually regarded as a trigger of depressive emotions.^[6]

• Conversely blue, a very popular colour,^[7] can represent happiness and optimism^[8] as days with clearer, blue skies tend to be considered times where these emotions are more easily expressed. Many artistic contributions have been made referencing clear days with blue skies as part of the happiness or as a symbolism of the happiness the artist felt, such as Tony Bennett’s Put on a Happy Face.^[9] If this were untrue there would obviously be more complaints about days with clear blue skies.

[Excerpted from Wikipedia, apart from some tinkering with punctuation.] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue

Blue also carries mystical, religious, symbolic (as in symbols) and political significance, and is the national colour for numerous countries, among them but not exclusive to Scotland, Argentina, El Salvador, Finland, Greece, Guatemala, Honduras, Israel, Micronesia, Nicaragua, and Somalia. Further, the United Nations uses a light shade of blue, symbolizing peace.

According to http://www.precisionintermedia.com/color.html  and their psychology of colour, here is what Blue represents:

“Ask people their favorite color and a clear majority will say blue. Much of the world is blue (skies, seas). Seeing the color blue actually causes the body to produce chemicals that are calming. … Many bedrooms are blue because it's calm, restful color. Over the ages blue has become associated with steadfastness, dependability, wisdom and loyalty. … People tend to be more productive in a blue room because they are calm and focused on the task at hand. Some studies are showing that weight lifters can lift more weight in a blue gym - in fact, nearly all sports are enhanced in blue surroundings.”

So you see, blue is everywhere and, according to most of what I’ve read today, blue ought to be everywhere.

But far more important to me than any of these descriptions, etymologies or interpretations is the fact that Blue is the name of my grandson, and today, ladies and gentleman, is his first birthday.

Now, I am no dictionary, but if you were to ask me to define Blue, this is what I’d say: adaptable, adorable, affectionate, comical, curious, delightful, determined, eager, enchanting, endearing, energetic, good-natured, happy, healthy, huggable, husky-toned, resilient, smart, squeezable, strong, sturdy, sweet, tenacious and downright wonderful.

Frankly, if there weren’t so many weirdoes out there, I’d put up a picture of him for you to see. Mind you, he is so absolutely gorgeous that, were I to do that, you probably wouldn’t get much work done. You’d spend your entire day gazing into the blue blue blue eyes, as fortune would have it, of this darling baby boy…wishing he were yours.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, BLUE. Today, you are one.

Love, Grammie and Gramps XO

Wallace Stevens On His Way To Work

He would leave early and walk slowly
     As if balancing books
          On the way to school, already expecting
To be tardy once again and heavy
     With numbers, the unfashionably rounded
          Toes of his shoes invisible beyond
The slope of his corporation. He would pause
     At his favorite fundamentally sound
          Park bench, which had been the birthplace
Of paeans and ruminations on other mornings,
     And would turn his back to it, having gauged the distance
          Between his knees and the edge of the hardwood
Almost invariably unoccupied
     At this enlightened hour by the bums of nighttime
          (For whom the owlish eye of the moon
Had been closed by daylight), and would give himself wholly over
     Backwards and trustingly downwards
          And be well seated there. He would remove
From his sinister jacket pocket a postcard
     And touch it and retouch it with the point
          Of the fountain he produced at his fingertips
And fill it with his never-before-uttered
     Runes and obbligatos and pellucidly cryptic
          Duets from private pageants, from broken ends
Of fandangos with the amoeba chaos chaos
     Couchant and rampant. Then he would rise
          With an effort as heartfelt as a decision
To get out of bed on Sunday and carefully
     Relocate his center of gravity
          Above and beyond an imaginary axis
Between his feet and carry the good news
     Along the path and the sidewalk, well on his way
          To readjusting the business of the earth.

David Wagoner

History, Like Cucumbers, Repeats Itself

Sunday, December 7

So You Think You Can Dance Canada

As Nico Archambault, tonight's winner of So You Think You Can Dance Canada, was credited with saying -- "I don't love to dance. I am dance" -- I wish to reiterate to my own tune: "I don't love to write. I am right."

Shooby dooby dooby...

<:^)

Posted by Jennifer Coffey at 11:05 PM

~

I repeat the above entry only because, instead of hearing it from Nico Archambault, we heard it tonight from the ageless, sageless Tracey ‘Tré’ Armstrong: “You don’t love to dance – you are dance.”

And still I sit here at the keyboard saying to myself, over and over, “You don’t love to write, Jennifer. You are write.”

Shooby dooby dooby – yeah!

Fruit Cobbler

And I don’t mean the kind who fixes shoes. I mean the yummy kind that Mary keeps making – sometimes peach, sometime blueberry. The kind that has stopped me from losing ten pounds before the end of August. The kind that means I am going to have to do the dishes, by myself, for the month of September. Isn’t that the saddest thing you ever heard?

Anyway, this recipe comes, more or less, from a book called crumbles & cobblers ISBN 978-1-4075-4982-8, although perhaps I ought first to have asked their permission, in which case I will reprint Mary’s recipe (after she arrives home, and because I have no memory whatsoever even when I have baked the thing myself), which is almost identical to the recipe below.

serves 6

2 lbs/900 grams fresh blueberries (or a mix of berries and currants: blackberries, raspberries, red & black currants)

1/2 cup superfine sugar

2 tbsp cornstarch

light or heavy cream, whipped cream [or ice cream], to serve

cobbler topping

1 1/3 cups all-purpose flour

2 tsp baking powder

pinch of salt

4 tbsp unsalted butter, diced and chilled

2 tbsp superfine sugar

3/4 cup buttermilk [i.e., Pour milk into a 1-cup liquid measuring cup. Add 1 tbsp. white vinegar or lemon juice. Let the mixture stand for five minutes. Use as much or as little as the recipe calls for.]

1 tbsp raw brown sugar

fruit cobbler

Preheat the oven to 400F/200C. Pick over the fruit [which I think means select the berries that look healthy], then mix them with superfine sugar and cornstarch, and put in a 10-inch/25cm shallow, ovenproof dish. [I especially like the one we bought from the lovely man who adores his daughter so…Richard of Richard Fisher Pottery http://www.richardfisherpottery.com/  at the One of a Kind – better know as oneofakind: http://www.oneofakindshow.com/ Christmas Show.]

To make the cobbler topping, sift the flour, baking powder, and salt into a large bowl. Rub in the butter with your fingertips until the mixture resembles fine breadcrumbs, then stir in the superfine sugar. Pour in the buttermilk and mix to a soft dough.

Drop spoonfuls of the dough on top of the fruit roughly [although by roughly I don’t think they mean abusively], so that it doesn't completely cover the fruit. Sprinkle with the raw brown sugar and bake in the preheated oven for 25-30 minutes, or until the crust is golden and the fruit is tender.

Remove from the oven and let stand for a few minutes before serving. [When serving the next day, cool the cobbler on the countertop before refrigerating, then next day at serving time, microwave individual portions for 1 minute at 80% power. Or, you can do as the Southerners do, which is argue incessantly about whether a cobbler ought to be served hot or cold and, while arguing, give the entire dessert to me.]

From Paradise to Purgatory

What if there really were a heaven and a hell, and we went to hell based on only one particular sin?

For example, what if the requisite for admission to hell was lying, and nothing else?

Would you be in trouble? Or could you look back on your life and say to yourself that, no, for the most part you had been pretty straight-forward and truthful; that not even the littlest lies ever escaped your thinking, your income tax forms, or your mouth?

I think now of my ability to lie over the telephone, and realize that the phrase hell in a hand-basket is scarily applicable. Mind you, I don’t lie about serious or legal things. I am more apt to fib (oh, the euphemistic fib…) about why I am not available to perform a telephone survey or why I cannot volunteer for the Cats Need Mittens project.

Anyway, I think lying would send significant numbers of us hurtling toward pandemonium, even faster than you can say, “But Your Honour, I swear on a whole stack of King James Bibles – "

Or what if the requisite for going to hell was being exclusive – omitting kind people from your plans, for instance, because they didn’t have the right-for-you look or job or salary or sexuality or age or wonderfully wicked sense of humour that you have?

I’d like to think that I would never be guilty of this sort of behaviour, but something sticks in my craw (where I hope it stays).

Still, if I abhor anything it is exclusion. In fact, being left out was the chief reason I tried to bring (probably too) many people into my children’s lives. Never again was anyone going to sit in her room for reasons devised and fabricated, lonely and alone, listening to the laughter downstairs and hearing those chocolate wrappers rustle like Christmas paper.

Still further, I imagine there have been times when I have quietly deleted someone from my day planner or simply-oh-so-simply forgot to include them in my mailing list because they didn’t quite fit in with my idea of cohesive company. I am not positive of this, but I wonder and suspect. And I know I don’t want to look too far over my left shoulder to figure it out.

Or what if the River Styx waited for all those for whom the word gluttony bore boundless proportions? In other words, what if hell existed for all of us who have shoved one…just one…more…Marguerite doughnut into our greasy faces while our bellies cried out, “Oh my God! No! Help me!” and out eyes grew liquid with cholesterol tears? (I could go to hell on the basis of potato chips alone.)

I am not sure why this idea came to me, but I think it had something to do with the always-unassuming George Utley on the Newhart show late last night, claiming to have seen something akin to a UFO (a teacup was how he described it), and the townspeople mocking him and being so cruel.

Or it might be because of that man Mary told me about yesterday; the man she knew peripherally, but liked so well; the man who used to become distressed by everyday injustices and inequities; the man who threw himself off a bridge and was found dead over the weekend.

Anyway, one half-funny thing led to the tragic and then back to the absurd, and so I wondered…if there were a heaven and a hell, and if there were only one sorry habit that took us there, which of those habits would hook me? And then I wondered – what kind of hell does a person have to be living in to walk to a bridge and throw himself off? And is that sin his sin, or ours?

National First Person Narrative Essay Contest

Express Yourself: The Canadian Lesbian and Gay Archives Launches its Second National First Person Narrative Essay Contest

Award-winning writer and CBC Radio host, Bill Richardson, and Anne Fleming, critically acclaimed author, and creative writing teacher, will judge the Canadian Lesbian and Gay Archives’ first person narrative essay contest. Novice and veteran writers—and everyone in between—are being asked to submit 2000-2500 words on the theme, Where I Come From.

Submissions must be received by November 1, 2010, and, in addition to four cash prizes, including a prize for Best Under Nineteen, all entries will be considered for publication in Keeping Our Stories Alive, Volume I, A Journal of the Canadian Lesbian and Gay Archives. Entries can be non-fiction, memoir, or creative non-fiction. Additional information will be posted at www.clga.ca. Winners will be announced December 10, 2010.

~

This is the second time I have had the great good fortune of writing a press release for a contest that I, with Mary’s invaluable input, designed two years ago, not only to help contribute to an organization for whom I have been volunteering for many years, but as a way of encouraging writers and would-be writers of all ages and backgrounds.

We had stellar entries in 2008, and new essays for the current contest are beginning to trickle in. So do not be shy. Everyone comes from somewhere – a place, a past, a culture, a family, a time, a political environment, a history – and if you can find your way to write about this as it relates to your LGBTQ experience, now is the time to pick up your pen or sit down at your keyboard and begin writing.

Nick Drake

I stumbled upon his music today, looking up versions of Day is Done for a friend who had sent me a lovely video of a young girl playing Toque de Silencio.

There he was, all black-and-white of him, still photos smiling out shyly, his beautiful guitar playing, his soft, poetic voice singing…all of him reminiscent of Ron Sexsmith.

Then I looked him up in Wikipedia, and began to read:

“Nicholas Rodney "Nick" Drake (19 June 1948 – 25 November 1974) was an English singer-songwriter and musician. Best known for the sombre pieces composed on his primary instrument, the guitar, Drake was also proficient at piano, clarinet and saxophone. Although he failed to find a wide audience during his lifetime, Drake's work has gradually achieved wider notice and recognition; he now ranks among the most influential English singer-songwriters of the last 50 years.”

I had only to listen to him through one song – when the day is done/down to earth then sinks the sun – and read how old he was when he died (twenty-six) to figure out that he struggled with depression. (I have often wondered this about Ron Sexsmith, but have never thought it my business to look that up, which is quite odd given all of the other invasions I make.)

I flitted from one video to the next, listening to him sing; hearing other people tell stories about him. It seems he was well-loved when he was alive, and that, after he went on scholarship to Cambridge University (where he majored in English Literature), his interest in music, and marijuana, flourished. He lost interest in the curriculum – when the party’s through/seems so very sad for you/didn’t do the things you meant to do – and left his studies before completing his third year.

He apparently moved to London, where he drifted about, sleeping from sofa to sofa – when the bird has flown/got no place to call your own – at the same time producing music, yet too shy for anything but awkward public performance. He fell into depression, which led to bouts of psychosis and eventual complete breakdown, and died from an overdose of amitriptyline in his family home in the fall of 1974.

It’s funny. From the time I was a kid I have been able to suss out a middle-aged alcoholic woman at first sight. They walk about with that haunted and tragically guilty face that was my mother.  And when I hear the voice or see the face of someone who I am sure is headed toward suicide, I am stopped dead in my tracks, my own day put on hold while I spend time reacquainting myself with the familiar, sharing moments with people who feel, as strange as this might sound, safe.

Some people might call this recognition an odd kind of curse – along with everything/that was lost and won – but mostly I am grateful for what life has taught me. Otherwise, I might never stumble upon those individuals who seem to carry the most weight for me; men and women who resonate as family; evocative, lonely, magical people like Nick Drake.

Have to go back where you begun, when the day is down.

Jack Payne

I didn’t know him well and I did not know him for long, relatively speaking, and I am not quite sure if I am spelling his surname right. I met him through a friend, Theresa, who died several years later in her thirties, of cervical cancer, which might be why that connection with Jack faded away.

The general impression I had of him, the one that I carry forward to this day, is that he was what my mother would have called earthy; that he once struggled with demons and had won, and that he was kind. I also found his last name ironic.

I was sitting in the bar of the then-Hilton Hotel in downtown Charlottetown, following my afternoon shift (in that same hotel) as a dining room waitress. I forget why I was there – I was probably waiting for Don – but Jack, who I had only ever before known in the presence of other company, came over and sat with me while I waited.

It was summertime in the 1980s – not as hot as it is these days – and I had ordered a glass of white wine. I was young and energetic and friendly, but still as shy and awkward as I have always been in these types of settings. I remember that I was facing the enormous Georgian-style windows, and I could see the rays of dust and cigarette smoke as they filtered through the room in the sunlight. A band – I think it was Mike Mooney’s band, but I can’t exactly remember that either – was playing…a rare treat in the middle of a warm July day.

The bar was already half-full when Jack came down and sat down with me.

“You see all of these people?” he said. “All of these people have stories. The kind that I usually see you listening to whenever I happen to see you.”

I had no idea where he was going with this, but I was relieved having a glass of wine in my hand. I know I was also delighted that someone I hardly knew – someone I liked enormously from the little I knew of him – had paid attention to me. In fact, until that moment, I hadn’t quite realized that listening to people tell stories was a habit of mine.

Jack went on, saying something like," “Whenever a person tells you a story about their lives, they are opening themselves up to you; allowing themselves to be vulnerable.”

I could see that this would be true, yes I could, and I am pretty sure I would have known this instinctively, although I don’t think I had ever quite articulated it in these ways.

He continued. “If you were able to do that – if you could find yourself opening up, if you could show your vulnerabilities, I think you would feel better; more comfortable with yourself, even better able to listen to and help – because helping is the thing I think you want most for those people who tell all of those stories. Best of all, Jennifer, people would know who you are. You would get to feel known.”

I sat there red-faced – I don’t need the memory to know that – embarrassed, shocked, moved almost to tears. As I said, I hardly knew who Jack was. But what he taught me is this:

It is easier to be useful, helpful, kind, safe, and emotionally meaningful for people, and to take all of this from them in equal measure, when we share at least some of our personal history with them.

Living life this way makes every day and every act more meaningful, and helps eliminate those people, as lovely or unlovely as they might be, with whom we have little to mutually share.

In the end, it is far better to be loved, liked, disliked or hated for exactly who we are, and none of that is possible if we never reveal anything sweet or sadly personal about who we are and where we come from.

And while I know this entry is long, it takes me to the Robert Frost poem that I memorized years ago, standing among the stacks in my high school’s library.

Revelation

We make ourselves a place apart
Behind light words that tease and flout,
But oh, the agitated heart
Till someone find us really out.

'Tis pity if the case require
(Or so we say) that in the end
We speak the literal to inspire
The understanding of a friend.

But so with all, from babes that play
At hide-and-seek to God afar,
So all who hide too well away
Must speak and tell us where they are.

I never had or made a chance to thank Jack Payne. I’d like to thank him now.

Footnote: Mary read today’s entry and sent me this article (see page 12): http://www.hollandcollege.com/admissions/full_time_programs/journalism/surveyor/pdfs/2007/Nov.30.2007.pdf

Eat Your Vegetables: They’re Good For You

I am trying to wrap my tongue around Mandarin Chinese Pinyin pronunciation (see: YouTube) and, so far, can barely replicate the word pinyin. In fact, when I was at the corner store the other day talking about pronunciation with Jasmine, who is from China, she tried to give me a lesson by having me pronounce her Chinese birth name. We had quite a laugh, as I butchered my way through the tones and syllables, forgetting almost as quickly as I said them how to reproduce the sounds.

I have, since grade school, studied French (seven years + university immersion); Latin (two years in high school…amo, amas, amat), and German (two years in university + one continuing studies course), and have taught students from all over the world. I have won prizes, too, for these very language courses that I have taken. I love language – all of it – but am astounded by what I fail to pick up or remember.

I recall fondly one of my English professors elaborating on why he, born and raised in Great Britain, could not – I mean physically, could not – pronounce sounds in exactly the same way that we Anglophonic Canadian-born students could. I hung onto his words like an overboard victim of the high seas, hoping that they would comfort me along the way.

I also think of my years spent in linguistic classes, where I studied semantics, syntax, phonology, morphology, phonetics – most of these concepts indecipherable to me now. (In fact, the only clear memory I have from linguistics is taking a Van Morrison song and rewriting it exactly as my ears heard it, syllable by syllable. And if Don hadn’t suggested we name our son Noam, and then tell me why, I might never have taken linguistic classes in the first place.)

So I am not sure why it is I keep picking up books where I for certain am going to have to be doing some etymological and pronunciation research. While it isn’t the research I mind – in fact I quite like it – knowing that in a month’s time I won’t be able to reproduce one word or one meaning feels rather hopeless to me. And still, I plod on.

Maybe it’s like what we used to tell our kids: “Keep practicing your clarinet and piano. You may not realize it today, but while you might grow up and not become a concert musician, you have no idea what all of this practice will teach you – how to type well, for example, or how to fold towels the way they do in those boutique hotels.”

Come to think of it, maybe that’s why I spent all of those years working in bars. It wasn’t that I was going to be able to exactly remember the French and the Latin and the German, but boy, did I know how to pour a good bottle of Heineken and reminisce about Edith Piaf.

Anyway, I am not entirely sure what the point of this entry is except to say that I am in numerous ways language-challenged; that one thing sometimes really does lead to another, and that my musical children, who now work as a printer, a fishmonger and a bar and restaurant manager, figured out early on why university really isn’t for everyone…thank God.

I've been all around the world
marching to the beat of a different
drum.
But just lately I have
realized…

Van Morrison Someone Like You

The Loneliness of the Long Distance Writer

I was going to write an entry today about the world and its busyness. But something else overtook me – has long overtaken me – and being able to write about it might feel freeing. And no one needs freeing more than I do.

I think back to that evocative story, The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner. Do you know it? If not, I think you might like it. Alan Sillitoe published his short story in 1959 as part of a collection, and Tony Richardson later (in 1962) directed a film based on the story.

I was never very much of a runner, at least not for long distances. I could run the 100 yard dash faster than anyone in my school, but if anyone had asked me to dash 110 yards, I am afraid I would have failed them. I always run out of steam.

So when it comes to emotional distances, I find those harder to bridge, especially as the span grows past the moments and days and on into the years. Mind you, I used to be quite good at waiting. I once waited for my mother, for example, for five years, never quite knowing if that two-week vacation they told me I was on would ever see signs of ending.

While writing cannot replace a cup of tea and a biscuit, or the ability to simply say out loud and in detail what is so troubling, it beats the heck out of turning to wine or shooting oneself in the foot. Wine only makes life more depressing, and who needs the threat of imminent surgery or potentially fatal blood loss?

Perhaps like the boy in the story – his name is Colin, and he takes up long distance running after he is confined to prison school for robbing a bakery – I will find comfort and peace in clattering away at the keyboard. Perhaps I will learn to stop looking over my shoulder or slowing down to wait for the past, and its people, to catch up with me. Perhaps I will suddenly understand the advantage of only looking ahead, trusting that the ruts and the chasms I have come to know so well won’t take me down.

When I was 18 or so, my father handed me a beat-up Philip Roth novel, Letting Go. “Read this,” he said. “I think you will like it.” I don’t remember much of the story, except that I think Richard Benjamin ought to have played the lead in the movie, a theme I always seem to mix up with Roth’s Goodbye, Columbus.

But the point is, it doesn’t seem to matter how many books I have read (and, like many of you, I have read hundreds) or how closely linked to mine these stories are. I seldom find in them or from them the urgent kind of freedom I so desperately long for now – the kind that sings through the air and whistles in your head; the kind that takes you outside to afternoons of kite flying and lingering days at the beach. The kind I mostly never had.

I’m not saying I don’t get and take a multitude from reading. I would die without books. But writing things down – letting them go – can give me a kind of relief that is life-saving; that allows me to go back into my day – three deep breaths, as Donnie would say – and get on with the pace of my life.

“It isn't that you subordinate your ideas to the force of the facts in autobiography but that you construct a sequence of stories to bind up the facts with a persuasive hypothesis that unravels your history's meaning.”  Philip Roth

Bobby Long: “We cannot tear out a single page of our lives, but we can throw the whole book in the fire.”  Taken from The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner

Medical Anomalies

I know there is a clause about doctor/patient confidentiality that my boss used to remind his staff about, but I was never a doctor and anything I might say nowadays is so long-ago and generic enough that I am certain no one would mind me straying into the topic.

Medical anomalies, after all, do abound (to the point where the anomalous description seems erroneous), and for the benefit of science and health, ought to be discussed from time to time.

And by anomalous, I mean things like the patient whose prosthetic eye would pop out whenever the temperature dipped below the zero mark on the Celsius scale. I could always tell what sort of day it was whenever he came in and, once, by mistake, I referred to him as Mr. Barometer, which he seemed to take in good humour. (Mind you, when you have an eye that falls out and rolls around on the floor periodically, you need to take things in a positive light.)

More than once I suggested that he be fitted for a coral eye – these eyes look absolutely real, and patients never seemed to find them uncomfortable. But for whatever reasons (cost?), he opted out. I imagine that he keeps losing his eye even to this day – in shopping malls, in restaurants and in walk-in dental clinics. Even on the cold floor of Sunday mass. He was a lovely man, and I often wished I could have helped him more. But I digress.

We had other anomalous patients, too: people with sudden and completely unexplained bouts of bilateral cellulitis; patients with pockets of bone and bits of conglomerate tissue emerging from the lower fornix of their eye (which might not be exactly anomalous, but sure felt weird); children who had absolutely impaired visual field tests from staring at a solar eclipse, but whose true vision was in no way diminished; patients with cancerous brain or lung or kidney tumours that either spontaneously disappeared or seemed to cause the patients no problems at all, year after year after year.

Anyway, I cite these examples by way of making my own anomalous tale believable, because otherwise you might begin to doubt my word.

It all started last night just after 7 PM. I was sitting in a sound booth at a studio where I volunteer, reading a book onto cd, when the monitor listening to me read said suddenly, “I hear a clicking sound.” (Clicking noises are the sorts of things he is supposed to suss out, and I am supposed to fix.)

Without a word, I slipped off my shoes, which have small metal attachments on the sides that I thought might have been making some noise as I shifted in my chair.

But apparently I was still clicking.

I hauled the two cellophane-wrapped peppermints and my elaborate keychain out of my pocket, the technician’s eyes widening like a child at a magic show. I was certain that the cellophane was the culprit, and felt embarrassed for not having considered this prior to our shift.

But that wasn’t it.

“Do you have dentures?” he asked. (What am I? Eighty?)

“No,” I replied. “I have bridge work, and some crowns. And several hundred fillings. And a false tooth. And a veneer.” I checked those with my tongue (– this was another anomalous occurrence at my old job: patients whose bridgework suddenly collapsed into their mouths –) but my teeth all seemed to be exactly in place.

We called in an employee, who listened in on our recording and who could also hear clicking.

“What about your watch?” he asked.

Off it came.

But that wasn’t it, either. I was still clicking and clicking.

I have to tell you, too, that by this point I was becoming a little bit nervous. I am the woman, after all, who once thought she was spontaneously combusting.

Next, I took off the headphones, thinking they were at fault. But that wasn’t it, either.

By now, the technician was looking at me a little bit suspiciously, as if I might be harbouring some wing-nut plot designed to drive him crazy.

I protested with my googly eyes.

“I have no idea,” I said. “I have moved back from the table; tied up my shirt; taken off my ring, my hair clip, my watch, my shoes, the headset, and removed everything from my pockets. Soon I’ll be naked.”

I pictured everyone shrieking from the building.

“Well,” said the technician, “it only shows up in the recording, so it has to be you.”

I suggested we try someone else in my place, as a kind of litmus test. But she wasn’t clicking at all.

At break time, I came out of the booth. The technician suggested I talk, to see if [let’s be honest: to prove that] the clicking was coming from me. And I spoke. And it was. Of course, nobody else could hear this with their naked ears except Superman, but the clicking – which was small and staccato – was evident on the recording, so for sure he was right.

Anyway, the employee suggested we keep going, which we did. I held my jaw bone with one finger while I read nervously from the book, hoping this would solve the problem. But when I asked if the clicking sound had disappeared the answer I got was something like, “I don’t think you really want to know.”

And he was right. I didn’t.

I left my shift downtrodden, expecting to blow up halfway between the parking lot and home, an anomalous clicking mass spread out across the tarmac. Bomb inspectors would be called in, relieved of their heavy suits and any worry that they would be blasted sky-high only to end their lives in hurtling amorphous heaps, lying beside me on the roadway. What a shame it all was. What a mess.

Anyway, I guess you have figured out from all of this typing that this is not the way the – the way my – story ended. While it is true that I was still clicking when I got home (Mary Big Ears was able to help confirm Superman’s suspicions), the general consensus has it, after much strain of listening and deciphering, that the clicking noise most likely emerged from the confluence of a lip canker in the corner of my mouth and some trapped air-smacking that emerged from the tiny pocketed sore when I spoke.

Which in a way is too bad if you think about it. I mean, let’s face it. If my clicking had persisted, there might have been some way for me to make some money from it. I could have been sent out into the world as a remote control or as a slide projector operator or even as a teeny tiny tap dancer. As it stands now, I am most likely going to have to go back in for an extra shift and redo the pages we struggled with last night. And I’m going to have to do it with all of my clothes on, which in this hot weather is really no fun at all.

Click.

So You Think You Can Cry

Mia Michaels and Adam Shankman’s fiddle dee dee tears are so predictable that we were howling with laughter tonight just waiting for the waterworks to begin.

I offer some hypotheticals:

She: Oh, I am so honoured to be watching this heartful performance – you move me more than words can say – in fact, I am trying to speak and finding nothing [I wish] but these squeaky tears rolling down my wide and inauthentic, manipulative and don’t let me forget divisive face out of which come cruel comments designed to rid the program of anyone – dancer or choreographer – whom I have deigned either beneath me or so unlike me that they might actually have genius talent and character…I mean, like, I know I’m talented, but character? Give me a break!

He: Gosh oh golly oh gee, what can I say? I am so moved by you – like, ya know? I am so moved by you, oh gosh, I’m all choked up. It’s like Mia said, ya know? There are no words. You’re just so real up there, so gosh golly real, so much what dance is about. Wow. I am humbled in your presence.

And Tyce Diorio as guest judge? If you want to take him in in all his splendour and khaki pants, have a look at the fabulous documentary, Every Little Step, and see what megalomania looks like up close and impersonal. A person has to walk a long way to run smack dab into the face of such colossal arrogance and disingenuousness, Mr. Diorio pretending he couldn’t give a farthing whether or not he got a callback, then quaking at the first sound of what might be some inside news or opinion for or against him.

Up until now, I have been fairly good-humoured about this program, even about the nasty and pretentious people who sit on the judging panel. But tonight my blood practically boiled over as the critique coven once again manoeuvred and manipulated their final picks – which was something I saw coming, like a train wreck, weeks ago, and predicted spot on, as I am sure thousands of others over the age of thirty were also able to do. (How fortunate for the show’s producers that their voting demographic is so young.)

It’s one thing to throw back-handed compliments designed to eliminate talented contestants, but another even worse thing when you prohibit their dancing futures by casting such aspersions against their so-called inabilities that you drastically reduce their chances of finding an agent, let alone a career. I have watched this season of So You Think You Can Dance for weeks now, listening to Mia Michaels’ trash talk of Adechike slowly, predictably crescendo to a curdling point, and we in this household knew it was only a matter of time before all three judges would be chiming in likewise.

Add to that my monumental distaste for Nigel Lithgoe, and I am not in any way surprised that Mary Murphy was replaced this season on SYTYCD. Like attracts like attracts like after all, which is also why listening to this season’s judges is like spending time in a parakeet shop. Well, let me rephrase that: a parakeet shop where all of the birds have Fledgling Disease.

Anyway, this all takes me back to my point about a program where everyone, it seems, cries – especially Michaels and Shankman. I say that if it’s tears you want – and real ones at that – keep Travis Wall on as choreographer; give Sonya Tayeh more work (you can’t tell me that Mia Michaels is not jealous of Sonya Tayeh: count the back-handed compliments there, and the criticisms), and bring back Mary Murphy. At least when Mary cried, you knew her tears were genuine, heartfelt, true, impassioned, and any other word that is synonymous with authentic.

Meanwhile, if the producers insist on keeping Mia Michaels on board, I am afraid that I am going to have to be baking a lot of cream pies to throw at the screen or, more likely, I am going to have to tune in to something – anything – more real and fair-minded than the current season of So You Think You Can Cry. No wait. I mean Dance. I think.

Summer Heat

I was flipping through channels recently, trying to find a cool oasis on a hot summer’s night. Even with the fan blowing in my face, the air hung dead and heavy. (I choose adjectives over adverbs for poetic stress and stasis sensibilities.) So dripping in perspiration was I that I would have been happy with a Popsicle commercial.

Unfortunately, at that late hour, one’s choices are limited to infomercials (pimple de-stressors, cooking grills, dietary supplements, and pilates videos); late late late-night talk show hosts (usually anxious-looking men under thirty), and Ernest Angley and Jimmy Swaggart re-runs. Not one of these programs leaves me feeling any sort of relief.

So, as has become my habit on these steamy nights, I punched in the higher numbers on the remote control, looking for great classic movies or a riveting HBO special. Failing anything exciting there, I landed on the remaining movie network channels, searching for anything that had snow in it. (The kind that comes with winter. Remember how hot it is and the theme of this entry.)

Lo and behold, it seems that a great deal of our post PM movie network programming includes an excess of pornography – generally what one would imagine the very antithesis of cool and refreshing. In fact, some of the leathery skin tones, badly rendered tattoos and precariously placed pubic piercings (a replacement for hair?) are enough to leave a viewer gasping.

But the worst part for me – apart from the vapid truth that this is what has become of our culture – is the absence of eroticism; the very absence of heat. Who could ever imagine that the half-grinning crooked-banged (no pun intended) girl, teeth bared in a pose that is supposed to suggest hot sexuality, is the epitome of sexual frigidity, her moon-shaped eyes dulling to empty as her libido mounts and her emotional passion lessens.

Even more depressing are the men, standing in sway-back position, jabbing their penises into the waiting orifice like punch cards hitting a time clock. And really, I ask you – what is with all of the spanking? Does everyone but me have infantile/S&M smack-me fantasies? And doesn’t anybody wonder why the current fashion is for women to shave themselves bare? Does this not strike anyone as depressing and more than just a little bit pedophilia weird?

Anyway, I am straying from the point, which was about finding cool TV on a hot summer’s night. In the end (and longing for my own childlike version of things), I turned to Channel 221 so that I could watch Franklin, the children’s show featuring a bevy of forest animals who live civilized lives in tidy houses that are surrounded by fruit trees and flowering gardens. In this episode, Franklin is floating down the river on his back, buoyed by his wonderful shell, the envy of all of his friends.

I lay back on my pillow, imagining myself splashing in the Credit River, several giggling girls and boys having just swung ourselves down from Mary Fairs’s backyard tree, set for a day of rubber tire rafting and water tag. I felt the breeze sweep over the water, the air fresh and fragrant with the scent of Summersweet flowers, the sky dotted with fair-weather clouds. Finally cool on a hot summer’s night, I fell asleep, drifting off to the sounds of Bruce Cockburn’s, “Hey, it’s Franklin…”

Now whenever it feels too hot to sleep, I will find my way to channel 221, hoping that the sounds of happy forest creatures and their sensible parents will lead me to happier, safer times; times when late night television consisted of half-hour singing shows and sentimental sign-offs.