That Was Then, This Is The Ironic Now

I come from a generation, society and culture…

where new mothers went back to work when their babies were barely able to hold their own heads up

where parents felt guilty for using disposable diapers but had no time to launder cloth ones, especially when laundry meant either a three block walk or a wringer washer and a clothes horse

where soothers were an anathema (thank God)

where breastfeeding was considered key to good health (also thank God) (and thank God for breast pumps)

where we took jobs (nightshift bartending) that accommodated our home lives instead of pursuing careers (international journalism)

where unemployment cheques were for the lethargic or the ill

where drug plans were affordable for people who could afford them (that is, the rich)

where a luxury vacation meant a weekend away at a friend’s house in New Brunswick, kids in tow

where husbands who cooked were considered effete (bring it on!) and wives who didn’t lazy

where the notion of a savings account was laughable because nothing was left after the rent and the bills were paid

where high fat diets were the norm (my mother kept a can of reusable bacon drippings on our kitchen counter, and even in my generation women often cooked with lard)

where dentists were visited in an emergency only

where cable television meant moving from two channels to seven

where New Year’s eve consisted of mushrooms on toast, a little glass of wine, and a trip to the cinema

~

I was listening to Doris Roberts speak about her sons, who all live away from home and who, she said (and I have no trouble believing) never contact her and never answer her email, her letters or her telephone calls.

She said that everything changed, however, when she learned how to text. Now her sons answer everything she sends on a blackberry – and nothing else.

It struck me immediately how ludicrous this arrangement was. Their way or the highway sort of thing.

And then I began wondering what life was like for these parents – for Doris Roberts and her husband – when they were the same age as their sons, and I wondered how these children had become so ludicrously self-important, entirely selfish, and monstrously lazy.

I didn’t wonder long – through half a morning and a warm shower –when it occurred to me that for all we laud modern conveniences, we are throwing babies out with bathwater faster than anyone can say (thank you Harry Chapin)

And the cat's in the cradle and the silver spoon
Little boy blue and the man on the moon
When you comin' home son?
I don't know when, but we'll get together then son
You know we'll have a good time then

But if I need to have a blackberry in order for my sons to communicate with me – if this is the only way – then the hand basket has reached hell faster and harder than I thought it would.

* I wrote this entry before coming upon Martin Scorsese’s Fran Lebowitz documentary, Public Speaking, which led me to the Internet and more on Fran, which led me further back to her well-loved (by me, at least, Tips for Teens). I think it is because Fran Lebowitz had no teens, however, that she is better equipped to come at/to the topic in a happier frame of mind than I am.

That said, where was she when I needed her? Clearly, she’s my kind of woman.

Why I Love Fran Lebowitz

TIPS FOR TEENS

• Wearing dark glasses at the breakfast table is socially acceptable only if you are legally blind or partaking of your morning meal out of doors during a total eclipse of the sun.

• Should your political opinions be at extreme variance with those of your parents, keep in mind that while it is indeed your constitutional right to express these sentiments verbally, it is unseemly to do so with your mouth full–particularly when it is full of the oppressor's standing rib roast.

• Think before you speak. Read before you think. This will give you something to think about that you didn't make up yourself–a wise move at any age, but most especially at seventeen, when you are in the greatest danger of coming to annoying conclusions.

• Try to derive some comfort from the knowledge that if your guidance counselor were working up to his potential, he wouldn't still be in high school.

• The teen years are fraught with any number of hazards, but none so perilous as that which manifests itself as a tendency to consider movies an important art form. If you are presently, or just about to be, of this opinion, perhaps I can spare you years of unbearable pretension by posing this question: If movies (or films, as you are probably now referring to them) were of such a high and serious nature, can you possibly entertain even the slightest notion that they would show them in a place that sold Orange Crush and Jujubes?

• It is at this point in your life that you will be giving the greatest amount of time and attention to matters of sex. This not only is acceptable, but should, in fact, be encouraged, for this is the last time that sex will be genuinely exciting.

• The girl in your class who suggests that this year the Drama Club put on The Bald Soprano will be a thorn in people's sides all of her life.

• Should you be a teenager blessed with uncommon good looks, document this state of affairs by the taking of photographs. It is the only way anyone will ever believe you in years to come.

• Avoid the use of drugs whenever possible. For while they may, at this juncture, provide a pleasant diversion, they are, on the whole, not the sort of thing that will in later years (should you have later years) be of much use in the acquisition of richly rewarding tax shelters and beachfront property.

• If you reside in a state where you attain your legal majority while still in your teens, pretend that you don't. There isn't an adult alive who would want to be contractually bound by a decision he came to at the age of nineteen.

• Remember that as a teenager you are at the last stage in your life when you will be happy to hear that the phone is for you.

• Stand firm in your refusal to remain conscious during algebra. In real life, I assure you, there is no such thing as algebra.

Fran Lebowitz

Erosion (1931)

It took the sea a thousand years,
A thousand years to trace
The granite features of this cliff,
In crag and scarp and base.

It took the sea an hour one night,
An hour of storm to place
The sculpture of these granite seams
Upon a woman’s face.

E. J. Pratt (1882-1964)

The Cuteness Factor

Cute is a word, except when applied to puppies and kittens and babies, I have never liked. In fact, the yuck factor for cute doesn’t even register on my meter.

It is with great irritation, then, that I watch TV and its commercials.

This morning, for example, Lainey and I tuned into a kids’ show in which two young children – a brother and sister, I believe – travel the world while the rest of us sit back at home enjoying our bear paws and rye toast, taking a lesson in geography.

But today, instead of being immersed in the splendour of Africa, I spent my viewing time with my hands over my ears trying to drown out the squealing “wheeees” and “whoohoos” as these obnoxious, self-important children let us know that, really, this program is far more about them than about lions, giraffes, elephants or the plains of the Serengeti.

Then there are all those ‘talented’ children that show up on Ellen – the Justin Biebers and the youtube sensations, who flap their moppish hair from side to side, grin endlessly over the list of their accomplishments, and sit back in between rounds of audience applause, their ankles crossed and arms hanging loosely on their chairs, looking more like seasoned Wall Street brokers than fourteen-year-olds who can – occasionally – sing.

But worse than any of this for me – after all, who can absolutely fault the cuteness factor in a kid? (hello mother, hello father) – is a commercial I saw today for World Vision, an organization I wholeheartedly support. During the exchange, a couple are sitting on a couch surrounded by goats.

The point of the ad (which is a point I take) is that there are ways to assist hungry third world families but that, in order to support effectively, a process must be followed. At the end of the commercial the man takes a sip of what is presumably goat’s milk – to the repulsion of his partner – and makes a comment that it’s not too bad. (Don’t quote me. I have the gist, but probably not the words.)

For anyone who doesn’t understand what’s wrong with this deliberately coy, cute, attention-seeking climax, no matter. You likely stopped reading this entry somewhere near the fourth paragraph.

But for the rest of us, and certainly for me, I despair of a world that feeds us disingenuous, ridiculous, pandering, posturing, pretentious, insulting and utterly cute haircuts, gestures, grins, stances, antics, sentiments, comments and messages.

If Lainey or I need a lesson in geography, better an encyclopaedia, a classroom or a Blue Planet series.

And if it’s humanity we are trying to teach, we need to eliminate the whoohoos and the wheeees, and eviscerate the patronizing stupidity that leads a person to wonder just what kind of organization, and world view, she has been supporting these many years.

In the meantime, Lainey and I are on our way out. We just spotted an adorable kitten across the street.

Meow.

Dear Santa…2010

Dear Santa,

This year for Christmas I would like the following:

Love, health and peace for everyone I love, as well as for me.

A beautiful Vita-Mix Blender, partly because I am thrilled by the notion that our greens can triple in value, and partly because the product reminds me of I Love Lucy and Vita-Veeta-Vegamin.

A fat-resistant gall bladder.

A new television service provider: one that is precise, quick and customer-oriented.

Houseplants that do not wilt, produce moulds, collect dust, or die when my back is turned.

Five astonishingly well-written novels.

A return of The New Adventures of Old Christine, The #1 Ladies’ Detective Agency, and Samantha Who?

Stephen Harper’s sudden abdication, brought on by a people-and-their-puppets sex scandal.

A cozy, three-bedroom cottage built on the shores of a motor-free lake that contains non-biting fish (which reminds me, in a non-sequitur way, of “Don’t sit here: the crabs pole vault.”) * A rental will do.

Four boxes of Dr. Scholl’s Skin Tag Remover.

Sneakers’ return to the basement litter boxes (we have six of them), so that we can close the inner front door and thereby not freeze all winter.

Jazzy socks.

Home repairs that include…removal of the balcony flag; stair stripping, cupboard crown moulding; new kitchen wallpaper (the one with the birds); second storey floor painting; a new bathroom (well, okay, maybe that’s stretching things a bit); linen closet paint repair; A and D only; E and F only; none of the above; all of the above.

And a way to get this g.d. reindeer out of our living room. How am I going to clean, let alone decorate? And how are Lainey and Blue supposed to get their presents with Rudolph sitting on his fat ass doing nothing.

Vita-veggie-veetie-vermin…

Mondays

bleak, caliginous, cheerless, clouded, cloudy, crepuscular, desolate, dim, dismal, dreary, dull, dusky, forlorn, funereal, lightless, murky, obscure, overcast, over-clouded, gloomy, sepulchral, shadowy, tenebrous, unilluminated, unlit, wintry, blue funk, broody, chapfallen, cheerless, crabbed, crestfallen, dejected, depressed, desolate, despondent, disconsolate, dismal, dispirited, dour, down in the dumps, down in the mouth, downcast, downhearted, dragged, forlorn, glum, in low spirits, joyless, low, melancholy, mirthless, miserable, moody, moping, morose, mournful, oppressed, pessimistic, sad, saturnine, solemn, sulky, sullen, surly, ugly, unhappy, gloomy, weary, acheronian, acherontic, bad, black, bleak, cheerless, cold, comfortless, depressive, desolate, disconsolate, discouraging, disheartening, dismal, dispiriting, drab, dreary, dull, dusky, funereal, joyless, lugubrious, morose, oppressive, saddening, sombre, tenebrific, adverse, disagreeable, discouraged, discouraging, displeasing, distressed, gloomy, grim, melancholy, troubled, troubling, unfavourable, unfortunate, unhappy, unpleasant, atrocious, bleak, depressing, depressive, dismal, dispiriting, distressing, doleful, dreary, foreboding, funereal, gloomy, horrible, lugubrious, mournful, ominous, oppressive, sad, sinister, sombre, threatening, black, cheerless, comfortless, dark, discouraging, disheartening, dismal, drear, dreary, funereal, gloomy, grim, hard, harsh, hopeless, joyless, lonely, melancholy, mournful, oppressive, sad, sombre, unpromising, dejected, depressed, despondent, disconsolate, dismal, dispirited, down in the dumps, downcast, downhearted, fed up, gloomy, glum, low, melancholy, moody, unhappy, austere, black, bleak, blue, comfortless, dark, dejected, dejecting, depressed, desolate, despondent, disconsolate, dismal, dispiriting, dolorous, drab, draggy, drearisome, dreary, dull, forlorn, funereal, gloomy, in the dumps, jarring, joyless, melancholy, miserable, mopey, mournful, oppressive, sad, sorrowful, sullen, uncomfortable, wintry, woebegone, woeful

The repetition is deliberate.

Tell me why
I don’t like Mondays
Tell me why
I don’t like Mondays
Tell me why
I don’t like Mondays…

(which isn’t even true. I just don’t like this one.)

Alphabet Stew

There is so much I take for granted, and so much I have forgotten:

- that an F is merely an upper case E with the bottom stick removed

- that a C is half an O, which is half an 8

- that a W is simply two Vs placed side by side

- that an N begins from the ground up, then stick down, then ground up again (but not like coffee)

- that a B is just a large P with an extra bump

- that an R is the same as a K, but with an added swoop

- that a 3 is, and I quote, “a curve for you and a curve for me”

- that a lower case h looks like a sideways chair

- that i and j are the only lower case letters that take dots

-that a Z is an N on its side

- that an upright C plus an extended, inverted C is an S

- that a t is a cross

- that X, L and K are more fun to make with your body than to write

- that M is W upside down

- that n is u upside down

- and that no matter how many times we write it, we always forget that the Q (which is really just an O with a stick) takes its stick on the right and not on the left-hand side, unless you’re looking in a mirror.

In case you have any suggestions, answers, considerations or suggestions, please send your LETTERS to Lainey and Jennifer’s Evening Correspondence Class, 6-7 PM, EST

A  B  C  D  E  F  G  H  I  J  K  L  M  N  O  P  Q  R  S  T  U  V  W  X  Y  Z

A Little Bird Told Me

Once upon a teeny time there was a little girl – well, not so little when you think that four is halfway to eight and eight is one-quarter way to thirty-two – who lived in a lovely country home that had an enormous backyard and a shared swimming pond and a creek that ran along behind her tall, red swing set.

Now this little girl could name all of the birds in her neighbourhood – bluebirds, yellow finches, robins, crows, hummingbirds, owls, Canada geese, red-winged blackbirds, cardinals…and it just so happened that one day one of these birds whispered into the wind, “Pink dress…pink dress.”

Well, no one in the area – not even people from the big city twenty-five miles away – could imagine what this little bird might have meant when he whispered, “Pink dress…pink dress.” Soon all of the animals were twittering and gossiping, making fun of the little bird who had whispered into the air, and muttering accusations that were cruel and derogatory.

The little bird grew very sad and lonely, small tears dotting his tiny face and glittering like diamonds in the sunlight. Still, he persisted throughout the neighbourhood, whispering into the wind and remembering what his father had taught him so long ago: “Just ginore them, right Daddy?”

And what do you know but that the person for whom these words were meant happened to travel to the little girl’s house one windy autumn day, right past all of the twittering, gossiping animals and smack dab alongside the little bird.

“Pink dress! Pink dress!” it called, this time louder and stronger and surer. “Pink dress!” And sure enough – well, let me stop myself here in these tracks and remember the old cliché: a picture speaks a thousand words (and a little bird, but two).

A little bird told me

Man’s Search for Meaning

Within one week I, on behalf of my daughter, have had offers of

• several books
• one juicer
• a special DVD called Crazy, Sexy Cancer
• home-made smoothies + recipes
• close to ten personal suggestions of naturopath/homeopath practitioners – including one in-person offer from a former student, a doctor who specializes in homeopathy, who lives in Mexico
• countless email
• home-made dinners
• cards and messages
• phone calls
• presents tucked in doorways
• free stand-by airline passage
• offers to take care of the cats
• hopes, prayers; good wishes; kind thoughts
• and only one, “I’m too tired,” which, in my experience, is remarkable. (Both the collections of offers and the “I’m too tired.” Mind you, the subtlety of this cruel, jealous woman has never been lost on me, and I have come to regard her the way one might regard, and ultimately flick away, an insect that has landed carelessly on the shoulder of one’s pretty sweater.)

I cannot help but return in my head, as I so often do, to Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning, the umpteenth copy now sitting here on my desk, ready for delivery.

Here are some quotes from this most worthy book:

"Everything can be taken from a man but ...the last of the human freedoms - to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way." p.104

"It did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us. We needed to stop asking about the meaning of life, and instead to think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life - daily and hourly. Our answer must consist, not in talk and meditation, but in right action and in right conduct. Life ultimately means taking the responsibility to find the right answer to its problems and to fulfill the tasks which it constantly sets for each individual." p.122

"What matters, therefore, is not the meaning of life in general, but rather the specific meaning of a person's life at a given moment." p.171

"We can discover this meaning in life in three different ways: (1) by doing a deed; (2) by experiencing a value; and (3) by suffering." p.176

Frankl, Viktor E., Man's Search for Meaning, Washington Square Press, Simon and Schuster, New York, 1963.

It seems clear to me that countless people live their lives accordingly: that they choose their own paths to walk; that they do not flinch, but instead act; that they understand suffering and what it means to honour that suffering in ways that are humble, truthful and magnanimous.

I hope that I might be guided by the same principles, and in this way conduct my own life accordingly; that I might stop questioning and understand myself as the object, and subject, of life’s questioning.

Royal Winter Fair 2010: Cow Tales




Cows on Parade




Udder nonsense!



The steaks...stakes...are high





The[se] cattle are lowing



Where in the world is Cowman Sandiego?





S stands for...





A bum steer



But overall, a moo-ving experience

Corrections

• The Taf in Tafelmusik is pronounced as in off, not as in taff. This should be especially good news for the announcer on 96.3 FM – and for his listeners.
• Speaking of 93.6 – why do you persist in calling yourselves the “new” radio station, when Canadian broadcaster Moses Znaimer purchased the station in 2006? Four years is not new!
• WE are not pregnant. HE is not pregnant. SHE is pregnant. Since when did couples start doubling up on the concept of conception? If WE are pregnant, then how did SHE get that way? Cam’ on! Grow up!!
• A proper noun is the name of a specific person, place, thing…and therefore takes a capital letter. All other nouns take lower case, as in love, cheese, boyfriend, friendship. Just because a thing makes your pulse race (yes, even cheese can do that) does not mean that the size of its initial letter ought to change. And as far as I know – for the woman who just wrote elsewhere, “She is a Very Special person” – all common adjectives are also written in lower case.
• Maya Angelou is not the first person to say, “Those who know better, do better.” My mother spoke these words all of her life, and she was born years before Ms. Angelou (who is an Aries, however, so she must be pretty darn wonderful). I wish people would learn to credit their sources or make clear that thousands of other people have used the same phrases, clauses, sentiments, and whatever else, for thousands of years.
• Dr. Laura is not a doctor.
• The person or people responsible for writing the television programming descriptions for Rogers TV cannot write, spell, punctuate, review or do anything even remotely sensible in their line of work. So appalling are the mistakes (add to that the myriad delays with the cable program itself), I am considering satellite.
• Inflammable and flammable mean the same thing.
• The word is sherbet, not sherbert. [I did not know this until I was in my thirties.]
• Rob Ford is neither worshipful nor honourable.
• Time does not heal all wounds.
• There is never a reason for everything, despite the number of times this sentiment – there is a reason for everything – is spewed. [I inevitably hear the “dear” at the end of that sentence as implicitly as the word Ma’am follows so many of the other sentences I hear these days.] Some things happen randomly: thus the phrase no known cause.
• Bagels and toast do not contain the same number of calories. According to the Internet, if you substitute whole wheat toast for a bagel, you save about 5,980 calories per year. That’s worth about a pound and a half on the scales, although, as we know, weight isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.
• In the hierarchy of life and love, love trumps, but may not conquer, all. But that’s okay, because no one no one no one, thank God (which would be ironic, or perhaps worshipful, if I believed in God), no one knows what the future holds.

Solitude

Laugh, and the world laughs with you;
Weep, and you weep alone.
For the sad old earth must borrow its mirth,
But has trouble enough of it's own.
Sing, and the hills will answer;
Sigh, it is lost on the air.
The echoes bound to a joyful sound,
But shrink from voicing care.

Rejoice, and men will seek you;
Grieve, and they turn and go.
They want full measure of all your pleasure,
But they do not need your woe.
Be glad, and your friends are many;
Be sad, and you lose them all.
There are none to decline your nectared wine,
But alone you must drink life's gall.

Feast, and your halls are crowded;
Fast, and the world goes by.
Succeed and give, and it helps you live,
But no man can help you die.
There is room in the halls of pleasure
For a long and lordly train,
But one by one we must all file on
Through the narrow aisles of pain.

 Ella Wheeler Wilcox

Things Have Changed

Who needs iTunes, or alcohol, or Lays Potato Chips, when they’ve got youtube?

I have just finished watching a documentary short (Alice Dancing Under the Gallows); two forwarded Sesame Street clips (one on the especially-important-to-my-grandchildren letter N), and am now rocking out to Bob Dylan’s Things Have Changed.

Standing on the gallows with my head in a noose.

There’s something to be said on, or about, a beautiful fall day, writing and looking through the fine-screened window, the leaves a burnt-orange colour of crisp…taking a breather between a rock and a hard place, friends popping by, lots of laughter when you might not expect anything but pain.

Any minute now I’m expecting all hell to break loose.

He said to expect a rollercoaster ride, and he was right. And truth be told, I haven’t cared for riding the rollercoaster since I was a teenager. I would rather spin out on the Scrambler, or give myself a dizzying dose of vertigo on a carousel. But a roller coaster, with all those terrifying highs and lows? Oh, no thank you.

Some things are too hot to touch.

What if that busy little car goes off the rail midair, or I am thrust forward and forfeit my head to a pole? Even more embarrassing, what happens if I lose my lunch all over the teenagers in front of me? What are they going to think of a middle-aged woman puking on a ride that’s about thirty years too young for her?

I’m not that eager to make a mistake.

Still, when I sit back and think about it, there are some aspects of the ride I don’t entirely mind. In fact, I can see ALL of the trees from up here and the colours are spectacular. And oh, the wind in my hair…I haven’t felt like this since Bob and Cal and I drove off along the Lakeshore traveling at crazy speeds in the Austin mini, undulating and curving all the way from Port Credit to the Toronto Island ferry, when I was sixteen.

I’ve been trying to get as far away from myself as I can.

And I quite like being tucked in here among all these people that I feel naturally close to. No one else can get in, and I don’t have to worry – none of us has to worry – because we have, as they say, each other’s back/s. So what if we feel a little bit nauseous or slightly cross-eyed or if sometimes we have trouble hanging on? Nothing too terrible can happen up here, no matter what the weather’s like. No siree. As long as everyone is holding hands, everything will be just fine.

I’m locked in tight. I’m out of range. I used to care…but things have changed.

What Are The Odds?

That two children, a boy and a girl, each aged ten, the boy from Leamington, Ontario, the girl from Kirkland lake, find themselves on Easter Sunday in The Three Little Pigs Restaurant in mid-western Ontario – and that they should meet again seventeen years later in Prince Edward Island and become a couple and parents of three children?

That this same couple, at the age of twenty-one, while both married to other people and living as expectant parents, he in Ottawa, she in Prince Edward Island, each have a best friend (hers – Joey, whom she met and worked with in New Brunswick; his – Jim – they called him Peetzy – in Ottawa), who, as this couple will discover fifteen years later, happen to be brothers born and raised in a rural community in Quebec?

That a father and son, separated for eighteen years, the father living in a narrow-hallway Ottawa apartment building, the son in another (as it turns out, mere blocks away) should both be coming in and out of the same doorway – the father because he lives on the first floor of the building; the son because he is visiting his stepfather’s daughter, who lives in the third floor apartment – this going on for two years, neither person knowing or running into one another or into their families in all of that time?

That the week a twenty-one year old daughter decides to visit her mother – who has recently been released following a several-year hospital stay and who has no idea her daughter is planning to visit – defers her visit in order to attend an ex-boyfriend’s party and in so doing is unable to prevent her mother’s suicide five days later?

That a husband and this wife, divorced for decades, should die twenty-four years apart, on the same month and day of that month, in the middle of the night?

That two people (this daughter being one of them) who meet in a small Ottawa creative writing group and become excellent friends, discover, four years later through a string of strange coincidences, that each has a Cape Breton (he paternal, she maternal) grandfather named Archie MacKinnon and they they, therefore, are cousins?

That two women, one a frequent visitor from Ottawa, the other living with her dog in east-end Toronto, should walk that dog repeatedly in the backyard cemetery and three years later, in the spring, discover the flat-plated grave-markers of the Ottawa woman’s paternal grandparents – Margaret and Ralph – a grandmother who died in her thirties of Bright’s Disease and whose house in which she died sits, as it (odd, odder, oddest) turns out, two blocks from this house in which I type, and a grandfather who met his young granddaughter a handful of times, more than forty years earlier?

That two siblings, both Sagittarians and children of the Prince Edward Island couple, both in their early thirties, both married with children, both lively and vibrant and optimistic, should discover, he in the spring and she in the fall, that he has a brain tumour and she lung cancer – and that he, the day before his surgery, should run smack-dab into his mother, who is looking for him throughout the hospital, as he sneaks his way back into his room from a golf game…and that his sister, on this very day after a scope and a biopsy, should call her mother and courageously, without flinching, describe the location and size of her tumour, and say sweetly and softly, “Mum, I am not afraid.” ?

And that somewhere in the same city of Ottawa, a third child, the youngest sibling, still suffering the loss of his father seven years ago to cancer, sits with his faithful dog, Joe, quietly weeping, devastated for his brother and sister?

I wish someone could tell me: What are the odds?

Where I Come From

The envelopes and postcards litter my bedroom dresser, their colourful stamps and lively drawings calling out to me from Newfoundland to British Columbia. They lie there in happy piles, waiting to be sent back to their owners as confirmation of submissions received.

As I work the morning and early afternoon away opening the teetering stack of entries, I glance over occasionally at the dresser, smiling and half-wanting to wave. I think of all the towns and cities – places I, too, have inhabited – and of all of the people whose stories fill these pages.

Yesterday, however, too sick with this infection to open envelopes, I listened to an eloquent and heart-breaking Portia de Rossi speak, on Oprah Winfrey’s show, about her struggle with an eating disorder that, at least in part, was inspired by a mother who could not accept a daughter who was gay. Portia’s new book, cleverly titled Unbearable Lightness: A Story of Loss and Gain, is certain to help any number of young men and women who find themselves living in a world that is beyond their control.

Today the first part of the unopening process now complete, and me, still glancing at the postcards, I hear Ricky Martin talk about his coming out: why he waited; what made him angry; what he felt like finally being free…but this, only after years and years of worrying about – and the reality of – rejection.

Part of me looks back at my own life now and longs to suddenly, urgently say fuck you – this is the first time I have written fuck on any of these pages, which gives me some idea of my anger – to all those people who rejected me; who trashed me as a member of their (and what used to be my) family; who denied and continue to deny me access to my grandchildren; who have told me, in so many words – or none – that I have somehow betrayed them: because of who I am, sexually; because of what even I didn’t know until less than a decade ago; gay men especially who liked me better as a heterosexual; heterosexuals – men and women – who liked me better straight.

And then I look over at the dresser. “Hello Charlottetown!” I yell, ignoring my sore throat. Hello Fort Erie! Bonjour Montreal et Ottawa! [My French weak, but I’m waving now] “Hello Thornhill! Good day Toronto and Milton and Vancouver and Etobicoke! Howdy Calgary and Guelph and Nanimo and Kingston and St. John’s! (And these cities only the ones off the topmost drawer in my head.)

Hello to all of you lovely, brave, heartfelt, industrious, talented people pouring out your thoughts; sending in your wonderful stories; finding perfect postcards; adding pretty stamps. The best of luck to all of you, and may you never – not even in your smallest, darkest moments – may you never stop telling anyone about the hard and easy places from where and whence you come.