This is the first time I've seen our usually laidback urban deer running.
They're fast.
They bound. They bounce off the grass, and over shrubbery. I turn, to see them vanish into the bushes that encircle the east end of our building.
Another cluster of clattering rings out behind me. I wheel around, and a fourth deer sails by me, only a foot or so between us.
I never see what has spooked them.
I don't enjoy riding sideways on the bus, and avoid it whenever possible.
This particular afternoon, the bus is fairly full, so I find myself fighting momentum sideways while clutching a rail with two full cloth shopping bags dangling from my wrist, and an ice cream birthday cake balanced precariously on my lap.
Across the aisle, a plumpish young woman is curled up in a corner, her bare knees pressed against a bar, chatting nonstop on her phone. Next to her, a young man with odd colouring - pale, pink, and washed out - is gazing into space. He's wearing earbuds. There's something about the proximity between the two that suggests to me that they're travelling together, just not quite in the same universes.
Every now and then, he sings out a snatch or two of whatever is playing in his ears. I don't recognise anything, of course. Knees Up Phone Lady glares at him when he does this for the fifth time.
"I'm on the phone," she hisses, and plunges back into the other conversation.
"I was answering the question," he shrugs.
Cramped and crippled, I juggle my packages, struggling to keep the cake upright, and leap gingerly down to the pavement, wondering what the question was.
The top of her brightly coloured bike helmet is only a few inches above the top of my table. She's moving steadily, but not particularly quickly, backward, so I have time to reach out to steady my tall glass of iced mocha.
She bumps gently into my table, smiles beatifically at me and steps to her left to continue her reverse trek into the back of the legs belonging to a tall elderly gentleman standing in line for his morning cup of coffee.
"Walking backwards is a thing these days," I inform my neighbour on my left. "I've been trying it myself; it's supposed to improve your balance."
The mini-back-pedaller reappears, this time walking forward, having retrieved her grandmother, and they return to their seats at the table to my right, where a tiny bike has been stashed. The lady tells an inquiring fellow grandmother that the little girl is "just three". The child knows she's the topic of conversation, and takes off again, sans helmet -- sideways.
Sinéad O'Connor died a year ago.
The news at that time focussed on the uproar following her appearance on Saturday Night Live, where she tore up a photo of the Pope. She got booed at Madison Square Gardens shortly afterwards - at a tribute for that renowned protester Bob Dylan, of all people.
Now, the reports in July 2023 were all about how ahead of her time she was in decrying the prevalence of child abuse and sexual exploitation by the Catholic Church -- years before it was seen as a widespread problem. True enough, I guess. This was in 1992, but I'd been watching CODCO, the Newfoundland-based comedy sketch series that aired on CBC between 1988 and 1993, where Andy Jones took several swipes at reports of sexual abuse by Catholic clergy, in light of the Mount Cashel Orphanage scandal of 1989, so the sort of abuse Sinéad O'Connor was calling out was not unknown - just not widely acknowledged.
Still, it seems Sinéad took the brunt of the attacks - she was a woman, after all. Bob Dylan and Andy Jones, as men, certainly weren't spared criticism, but somehow, it never got quite as vitriolic, did it?
Spotify startled me, some time after O'Connor's death, by sending me this song by Kris Kristofferson, who approached Sinéad O'Connor on the Madison Square Gardens stage, having been sent to escort her off, and instead said, quietly, "Don't let the bastards get you down."
This morning, for the first time this year, I hesitate, and decide not to crack open the windows. There is a growing wildfire near Sooke, a community west of here, and while the city is bright with summer sunshine, I feel the dryness in my mouth that signals the presence of smoke, something that has become sadly seasonal here.
My mind drifts back, like smoke, to the two summers when my mother was a "hostel parent". These were the summers when I was 7 and 8; Demeter had discovered that an affordable and comfortable summer holiday could be had, if she took over, for a few weeks, the running of one of the smaller and more remote international hostels in the great Albertan parks of Jasper and Banff.
I have about half a dozen memories of the hostels and enough time has passed that I can't readily distinguish which memories are of Jasper, and which of Banff. I remember an early morning breakfast and seeing my mother drop the corpse of a mouse into the wood burning stove.
There was a creek running by one of the hostels, where Double Leo Sister and I would play and paddle in the afternoons. We were equipped with emergency whistles and told to blow on them if we needed help. At the shrilling of them, Demeter would come running, banging a pot, to scare off bears, only to hear: "Wasses, Mummy!!" (We were terrified of being stung.) By the end of the summer, we had become the girls who cried "Wasses", and Demeter decided the bears could have us. (I've told this story before, haven't I?)
Demeter, questioned this summer, can only remember "Coral Creek". There is a Coral Creek Canyon, quite far to the southeast of Jasper - and Demeter believes the hostel was in the southern part of Jasper National Park. However, there is also a Corral Creek to the east of Jasper, past Hinton, Alberta, and another Corral Creek, nearly at Banff and less than five kilometres south of Lake Louise. Perhaps this other Corral Creek was the location of the Banff hostel where Demeter was a hostel parent. None of these places appear to have hostels now.
Nothing left but distant memories. I'm pretty sure that the Jasper hostel was where we were the summer I was seven, because my father came to see us there, and he left the family the summer I was eight, although I was never told.
The second hostel was, I believe, near a railway track, because a family with girls roughly my age came to stay, and we children were at the railway track when a train came roaring through. Our rather feather-brained dog, a poodle/Scottish-terrier cross, stood still on the tracks, gazing at the oncoming train, as it blasted its horn. Too terrified to try to retrieve her, I tried to run in the other direction to avoid seeing her crushed, while the other girls, held on to me. The dog sprang to safety with seconds to spare.
Demeter was called a "hostel parent" because of the youth of the visitors coming through, often in cycling groups. A largish contingent came from New York City; they were loud and lively. I was furious to be banished to bed. For years, I remember a song they'd sing after dinner: Hey, jig-a-jig, kiss a little pig, follow the band . . . . My husband's a baker . . . is he/ All day he bakes bread, he bakes bread, he bakes bread, and at night he comes home and (expectant pause) drinks tea!!
The implications of the pause zoomed right over my eight-year-old head. I didn't know that the song is at least 300 years old, and was far filthier. The cleaner version I remember turns up in the 1976 television movie Sybil, which starred Sally Field and Joanne Woodward.
Toward the end of this second hostel summer (I'm pretty sure), Demeter had the bright idea of taking six-year old Double Leo Sister, and eight-year-old me on a spiralling hike up and around a mountain. The gravel road climbed in an ever-upward curve, as the sun beat down, and we wore out. I've seen the pictures Demeter took that afternoon. We looked weary. We never found what Demeter sought: the fire look-out station at the top.
This week, Jasper National Park and the town of Jasper itself is aflame. I probably visited the town at some point, but my only memory of it was passing through it by train, when Demeter, Double Leo Sister and I moved to British Columbia. I was in my bunk half asleep when the conductor passed, calling for everyone to set their watches back an hour for Pacific Time. I may have thought of the hostels before drifting off, like smoke.
While slipping out for a slightly-post-sunset stroll, I descended the hill on Linden Avenue and was dismayed to spot a tiny dog trotting on the opposite side -- trailing a lead about four times its length, with a cluster of empty poop-bags attached to the end. Well, I was relieved that the trailing poop-bags were empty, but in this neighbourhood, seeing an unaccompanied dog conjures up scary visions of an elderly person collapsed somewhere.
Distracted and concerned, I crossed the street rather more automatically than I should, my peripheral vision belatedly registering a cyclist whizzing down the hill. He missed me by a comfortable margin, while I kept my eyes on the dog. It turned and gazed at me. I called softly, and it came to be petted, while I quietly pulled the lead into my hand.
Straightening up, I saw a woman striding toward me on the cross street.
"No, not my dog," she said, in response to my questioning glance. Beyond her, a roly-poly woman appeared to be looking around on the sidewalk. She approached me unhurriedly, taking a few minutes, and yes, the dog was hers. She told us (striding lady had paused) that the dog was deaf and near-sighted, being fifteen years old.
And trailing her leash on the very edge of a curb near a hill with speeding cars and cyclists, while you stroll a good half-block away, I thought to myself, saying out loud: "I'm so glad she's yours; I thought somebody might be hurt."
The little dog had finally clocked that her mistress was a few casual steps away, and shuffled towards her, the bags whispering on the concrete.
As I returned up our stretch of sidewalk one morning, I saw a youngish man climbing out of a small truck with some sort of frames in the back. He walked several yards ahead of me, turned up the path to our main entrance, and, instead of tapping a code into the enter-com, or getting out a key, peered in through the glass.
We have signs all over the building, warning about letting in people we don't know, so I decided to side-step any awkwardness, and turned on my heel to enter by the parking lot door. As I got my key out, I heard a voice. It was the fella, who had clearly followed me.
I don't think most men have the first idea of how creepy this is.
He was doing painting in the storage area, he explained, and had left his key behind. The people who had hired him were out.
Now, this was exactly the awkwardness I'd been hoping to avoid. An unfamiliar guy asking me to let him in, on trust.
I told him I'd call a Strata Council member, and as I walked back through the parking lot, I heard him say, with barely concealed exasperation: "I'm locked out."
"I understand that," I told him resolutely, without turning.
I decided to call the Resident Fan Boy, who happened to be home.
"Please come to the front door," I said, omitting any explanation, so he wouldn't dither. As he appeared, I stepped in past him, saying quietly, "This guy says he's locked out. I don't know him."
The RFB, being a Strata Council member, knew that there was work being done in the storage rooms, and let him in promptly. I hated being put on the spot, but he assured me I'd done the right thing. The guy in the truck didn't agree, but he didn't know about the guy who got in.
That particular morning, I was late, and left by the front way to go over to Demeter's to set up her breakfast. A lady from the fourth floor of our building, who regularly takes her elderly dachshund out for a push in a sort of enclosed wheeled stroller, was standing at the open door, talking to a man in a baseball cap. As I passed, I thought I heard him saying something about 306 or 302, and my belly gave an uneasy lurch - I sensed my neighbour's hesitation, but I was in a hurry, dammit.
Later, I learned he'd come in, and gone into an unlocked suite just down the hall from us. He encountered the Council President and his excitable dog; the former unceremoniously escorted him off the premises. I thought, with some relief, about how I'd carefully locked our door as I left - younger daughter was alone in her bedroom and the RFB at a meeting.
That other guy in the truck evidently thought I could tell he was trustworthy just by looking at him. Guys seem to think this sort of thing; I suppose some women do, too. They're not thinking things through.
"I didn't fall down."
The voice came from an unfamiliar place. Entering Demeter's apartment for the second of my three daily visits, I could see she wasn't in her usual seat at the far end of the loveseat. I could also see her walker near the corner of the living room, and just beyond it, two bare feet, toes facing up. One thing I've learned, over years of teaching, parenthood, and working with differently abled people: panic helps no one, so I shoved the instinct aside, and strode over to find my mother, flat on her back in the space behind two armchairs which back the bookshelves, with a small cushion pillowing her head.
"I didn't fall," she repeated. "I was down on my hands and knees, and I couldn't seem to get up this time."
"Why were you on your hands and knees, Mama?"
"I don't remember."
Silently, I reasoned that she couldn't have passed out; the Lifeline monitor hanging from her pendant would have registered a fall, and I would have been notified. I started moving the armchairs, so I could position myself behind her head and draw her to a sitting position.
It soon became apparent that that I wouldn't be able to lift her to her feet. Demeter isn't heavy, but she was too tired to help, and thus a deadweight.
Thinking quickly, I phoned the Resident Fan Boy, and called him away from his customary Sunday lunch with younger daughter. They had just started, so arranged for the food to be packed.
In the meantime, I braced Demeter's back against my shins, and leaning, managed to turn one of the armchairs, a bit of a struggle against the carpet pile, but now Demeter could rest her head and arms in the seat.
It was a muggy afternoon, and Demeter doesn't like the windows open; the traffic noises resound in her hearing aids. Able to step away now, I turned on the fan, noticing it was plugged in a different place. I usually plug the fan in a multisocket behind the couch, where I'm far less likely to trip over it. It was now in a rather difficult-to-access cubby, hidden amid the bookshelves.
After her weekly shower, she had dressed and gone into the kitchen to make lemonade, because "I know we're out of Ribena".
(We're not. She had seen me recycle the previous bottle and assumed I hadn't bought the replacement some weeks ago. I had.)
After this exertion, she felt warm, so attempted to turn on the fan, which I had turned off before leaving after my morning call, because Demeter finds it chilling and noisy. When, for some reason, the fan didn't seem to work, she decided to replug it. On her hands and knees. Demeter is 94.
Then she couldn't get up, so she lay on her back, exhausted, for an hour.
I finally was able to help her to roll to her knees, by supporting and raising her buttocks, then, bracing myself against her right side, she pulled herself to a crouch, and I guided her into the chair. I went to retrieve one of the lemonades from the fridge. They were uncovered, and she had left the stirring spoon in one of them.
I phoned the Resident Fan Boy, now hurrying down from Harris Green. While still on Yates, a cyclist rolled up behind them and barked: "Choose a side!" As he rolled past, something in the RFB snapped.
"You're riding on the sidewalk!" he shouted. To his consternation, the cyclist stopped, tossed his bike to one side, and strode up to the RFB. "Now it gets real!" he snarled. Probably more like surreal, the RFB thinks he was drunk or high. Younger daughter was terrified, and stepped forward to protectively grab her father's arm. The cyclist did not come within six feet. My husband and daughter turned and walked off in the opposite direction, hoping that he was in too much of a hurry to turn and pursue them.
I was reiterating to Demeter (gently, I hope), how trying not to be a bother winds up with more worry for everyone, especially when I'm a two-minute walk down the street, as the dynamic duo came, flushed and frazzled, through the door.
Younger daughter grasped Demeter's hand in concern, something very unusual for her. It had been a frightening afternoon, especially for someone on the spectrum.
The RFB helped me get Demeter safely to her accustomed place in the corner of the loveseat, before helping younger daughter set up the restaurant lunch on the dining room table, while I steamed a corn on the cob for Demeter.
There was plenty of Ribena for everyone.
Somehow, I've managed to pocket-dial 911, and a message advises me that it's counting down to phoning my emergency contacts -- which include elder daughter in London, where it's currently just before dawn: 5-4-3... I hit the "cancel" button in a whirl of adrenaline and bafflement.
A couple of moments later, my phone rings, and a cheerful voice asks me if I'm okay, and would I please identify myself and my location. I'm still so flustered that it takes a second for me to recall where I am. I explain what happened and she laughs, saying it happens all the time.
It does??
Fairly recently, we reached a notable numbered anniversary for the death of my father-in-law.
It snuck up on me, but when the realisation hit, I felt no stab of grief, nor did I feel like doing a jig. He was the Resident Fan Boy's dad, and the grandfather of my daughters. Elder daughter and the RFB genuinely miss him; younger daughter is too young to remember him.
I'm afraid I don't particularly miss him. He was high maintenance, and not fond of me. Nevertheless, I was chagrinned to find, running through my mind on a mildly disrespectful loop: When the o-o-o-ld ma-a-an di-i-i-ed....
"My Grandfather's Clock" was a fairly regular part of my childhood. It was a staple of so-called "songs for children" - even though, as a little girl, I found the lyrics quite creepy: a clock that carefully measures out a man's lifetime and dies when he does? I have a vague memory of my sister's Grade Two class singing it at assembly: Ninety years without slumbering - tick-tock, tick-tock - His life's seconds numbering...
Ick.
Like a lot of songs aimed at children in the late 20th century, it certainly wasn't written for children. It occurred to me that my daughters, children of the dawn of the 21st century, may not be familiar with the song. I have no recollection of their ever singing it.
I looked it up and discovered that: a) the term "grandfather clock" originates with the song; and b) it was written in the 1870s by Henry Clay Work, same guy who wrote the Civil War song "Marching Through Georgia". Work came from a Connecticut family with strong Abolitionist beliefs, and is distantly related to Frances Work, the mother of Diana, Princess of Wales.
There are probably several parodies of this, but the one I know of is "My Grandmother's Cat" by Garrison Keillor. It seems to be carefully copyrighted, so I won't put it here, but it's possible to listen to it through Apple Music.
My late father-in-law didn't quite make it to ninety, although I think I remember a grandfather clock in the front hallway. Don't know what became of it.
"Oh, no-no-no-no-no...." I breathed, gazing in horror out the bus window. Two days in a row, I'd escorted Demeter to medical appointments, the latter being a dental appointment that lasted over an hour.
We'd been thrilled to just catch a bus bound for home, securing courtesy seats with a gap to keep Demeter's walker out of the aisle on a relatively uncrowded bus for a late weekday afternoon.
 |
| Not quite this bad |
The bus turned up the incline on Burdett Avenue, and lined up at the stop outside the Starbucks were two dozen seven-year-olds in day-camp teeshirts and yellow vests, intending to return to the community centre with a grand total of three supervisors. In the grand summer tradition, exactly one supervisor went to the back of the bus with the youngsters, while the other two stayed at the front of bus, calling directions while the kids hung ineffectually from the dangling loops intended for adult standees, and clutched at Demeter's walker.
I caught the eye of one of the minders and said, firmly: "My mother has a walker. She will be getting out at Cook and Fairfield."
"Cook and Fairfield," the minder repeated, a little dazedly.
Looking with some despair at the aisle, a sea of little yellow vests, I rang the bell just after the Vancouver stop and raised my voice: "Lady with a walker getting out at Fairfield and Cook!"
I could hear the message being passed to the front, where at least half a dozen adults, who had been unfortunate enough (or foolish enough) to board behind the ankle-biters, were crammed beyond the yellow safety line. The driver called her acknowledgement and about a dozen people of varying sizes poured out on to the sidewalk to allow us out.
As I helped Demeter step down backwards, I heard the driver yell: "NO! You cannot get on! These people are all getting back in! This bus is FULL!" She smiled reassuringly at us, and I thanked everyone.
This was an improvement on the day before, when a couple (old enough to know better) leapt ahead of us like a pair of gazelles, and claimed two courtesy seats, leaving only enough room for Demeter to sit and clutch her walker close.
I'll bet they were American.
I neither saw The Shining, nor read the book. No disrespect to Stephen King - horror just isn't my thing. The Resident Fan Boy, in the face of my resistance, went to see it in the company of Double Leo Sister, who found it amusing to lean into him at various points of the movie, and hiss: "Boo!" (Seeing films with my sister is, on the whole, a bad idea.)
Every single obituary for Shelly Duvall last week began with some variation on "best known for The Shining". Non-horror fans could see her in a variety of films, usually with a quirky aspect. She was pretty quirky.
My favourite of these was a made-for-television adaptation of Bernice Bobs Her Hair, which was on repeat on PBS stations in the eighties and nineties. It first aired in 1976 as part of a series called The American Short Story, evidently aimed at college students. This was, after all, only six years after PBS emerged from the former NET (National Education Television).
Anyway, I went looking online, and found a couple of reasonably clear full-length recordings, to see if I still liked it.
I did.
Along with Shelley Duvall as Bernice, the 18-year-old small-town, socially inept rich girl, we have Veronica Cartwright (13 years after The Birds and three years before Alien - if we're keeping with the horror film trope) as her 18-year-old small-city socially successful wealthy cousin Marjorie. It's sort of F Scott Fitzgerald's version of Pygmalion. I read the short story (also freely available online) for the first time a couple of nights ago. Published in 1920, it's sly and gentle satire.
The 1976 television version (there was also a 1951 production starring Julie Harris) expands on the short story, because it has to, in order to fill the hour. The late Joan Micklin Silver directed this, but also wrote the screenplay, adding lovely touches as the jellybeans the young women sneak to social gatherings to use as lipstick (a detail not in the short story), and supplying further steps to Marjorie's coaching of Bernice into a daring girl about to be launched into college and dating, with disastrous results, of course.
The biggest change is the fleshing out of the character of Warren, who, in the short story, is your garden-variety handsome Yale sophomore. Played by Bud Cort (who appeared with Shelley Duvall in her first film Brewster McCloud - directed by Robert Altman in 1970), Warren is transformed into a rather stodgy young man, whose self-involvement is hilariously highlighted in this exchange, which is also not in the short story.
Like most television dramas of the seventies, eighties, and even into the nineties, BBHH is slower paced than we've become used to in this century, but it has high production values, witty writing, and an excellent cast. It's an illustration of Shelley Duvall's range as a performer, and no one loses their life.The news last week that Shelley Duvall has died provoked some depressing responses. Older men remembered her chiefly for The Shining, and younger men asked "Who is she?" with little interest, apart from indicating how irrelevant they thought she was.
Of course, at our house, she was the narrator, and executive producer of Faery Tale Theatre, a re-working of tales by Grimm, Hans Christian Anderson, and Perrault, featuring a cast of actors prominent in the 80s (including Malcolm McDowell, Mary Steenburgen, Lee Remick, Vanessa Redgrave, Edith Stapleton, Vincent Price, and a host of others); some remarkable directors such as Francis Ford Coppola, Roger Vadim, Michael Lindsay-Hogg, and a not-quite-famous Tim Burton; and sly dialogue from such writers as Jules Feiffer, Maryedith Burrell, and Robert C. Jones.
What impressed me most was the art design, based on famous illustrators. For example, one of my favourite tales was The Princess and the Pea (starring Tom Conti and Liza Minelli, and written by Rod Ash and Mark Curtiss), where the costumes and sets were based on the work of Aubrey Beardsley - sans the oversized phalluses, thank goodness.
Duvall produced other anthologies, such as American Tall Tales and Legends, but, although she was still able to enlist the participation of many fine actors, I think, from what little I have seen, that she did not have the same budget as for FTT, and the writing and art direction simply aren't at the same level.
Younger daughter used the sad news as an excuse to explore some of her favourites (Cinderella, Rapunzel, and Little Red Riding Hood), and I set off in search of an earlier television production, starring Duvall, and based on a short story by F Scott Fitzgerald.
I found it. I'll talk about it tomorrow.
Nightmarish images on all news media:
That horrible man with blood on his jaw from his clipped ear, pumping his fist as if in victory.
A roaring sea of red and white - unsettlingly like Hades on Canada Day, except with twisted faces topped with scarlet baseball caps, torquing their hands into one-finger salutes, while their contorted mouths form "F*** YOU" through snaggled teeth, over and over at the news cameras. (We didn't get much of that in Ottawa, not even on Canada Day.)
The shooter, some foolish young man, apparently a registered Republican, with an automatic rifle so beloved of Republicans these days, is dead. The report from the Secret Service sounds so damn American: "neutralized and now deceased" - as if those are two different things. Someone killed in the crowd and already hailed as a hero; two others seriously injured.
And all this on the eve of the Republican convention. Mouths will foam.
I will find other things to occupy what passes for my mind. And, just for the record, I'm not in favour of anyone getting shot. The last thing we need are martyrs.
Returning from the coffee shop, I find the living room quiet and deserted. I check the bedroom. The laundry basket is still there.
Since Demeter fell, three years ago, the Resident Fan Boy has taken charge of the laundry. I sort it and leave it ready, and he takes it up as soon as it's permissible to use the laundry rooms, at 8 am. One of our neighbours, a fellow who thinks he's a wit, teases us regularly about this, and I remind him which century this is.
I remember it's the one morning a week that the RFB leads a Matins service at the cathedral, so I turn on some music in preparation for my sort of morning service, going over to set up Demeter's breakfast at her apartment.
Then I remember that the Matins service is supposed to end at 9:15 - an hour ago. I continue to make my morning toast, and think about Michael Mosley, a BBC radio personality and documentary host. About a month ago, he was on holiday on a Greek island, and leaving his wife on the beach, set off for a walk. Somehow, in the heat of the day, he didn't quite make it back to the pub, falling just out of sight of passersby. He wasn't found for four days.
I decide to text my own husband: "Are you okay?"
No reply.
"Are you at church?'
No reply.
I check the calendar, and try phoning. No reply - it goes to voice message. I wait five minutes. Same result.
I text: "Where on earth are you?"
I think of Clare Bailey, Mosley's wife, and how her thoughts must have progressed from mild concern (and mild annoyance), to worry, to panic. I think helplessly of how I have little idea how to track the RFB down. Should I call the church office? (What's the damn number?) Will I stumble out to the street and wonder wildly which route to search?
The phone rings. (Michael Mosley didn't have his phone with him.) The RFB has, of course, turned off his phone for the service, and forgot to turn it back on, before wandering off to have breakfast downtown and do some banking. I think of Michael Mosley and all those little things he suggested for people to have better health and longer lives -- only to collapse on holiday, with no one knowing where he was, or how to track him.
My heart eventually stops hammering, seconds before the RFB hoves into view.
 |
| Alex Janvier in 2022 |
"I wonder how long I'll be able to walk around like this."
Demeter is seated beside me in a sushi restaurant. We've walked from the bus stop in the heat wave, which is supposed to take four minutes, according to Google Maps. It's taken something like ten, Demeter, now 94, uses a walker, and plods with deep concentration and no sunhat. (I'd meant to tuck an extra in my bag, but only remembered everything else we need for today's dental appointment.)
We resume the trudge after a lunch for which neither of us has quite had the appetite. It's a long, long block between Blanshard and Douglas Streets. No shelter or shade on the north side. I'd have directed Demeter to the shady side, but that would cost us five minutes we don't have.
On the blazing bright sidewalk, a pale young man, with strawberry blond hair and no shirt, sits cross-legged, head drooping. There's a sign on the pavement in front of him - he's scrawled it on a piece of cardboard box with a marker: ELEVEN CENTS (11¢) -- THANK YOU
He reappears ahead of us, as we approach the crosswalk. Two scraps of plastic, about the size and shape of sandwich bags, appear to be attached just below his shoulder-blades, like the wings of a angel.
Across the street from our ground-level condo, we have had a front-row view of the dismantling of the strange stone structure with a window, which has been decaying for about two years, below an ancient house set on the rocks above.
Four years ago, I launched myself into the night, the Resident Fan Boy in pursuit, when I got a Lifeline call that Demeter had fallen. As I fled past the stone whatever-it-was - some sort of garage, or storage room?, I could hear a dog barking at me from within. (Demeter was bruised, but okay.)
Back in the present, I decided to remind myself how the structure had looked, so went to the "Street View" in Google Maps, noticing that the most recent update is November 2022, the first update since spring of 2017, which means that the photographic record of our neighbourhood now postdate our return to Victoria in late 2017, and our move to the condo in September 2019.
After refreshing my memory on how things had looked across the street from us, I wheeled the viewer around and gazed at our patio window, wondering if someone was sitting on the couch that November morning in 2022 - I could tell it was morning, by the angle of the weak autumn sunlight. The leaves were also autumnal, lots still in the trees, and plenty on the damp sidewalk. I "virtually" slipped down a side street, had a look at Moka House on Cook Street, then up the hill back to Fairfield Road, to look toward Demeter's building.
Then I saw a familiar figure on the sidewalk. It was me, facing west, and evidently on the way to set up my mother's breakfast. I was clearly standing stock-still, off to the right, in the driveway of a 1912 manor, waiting for an older gentleman to scuff through the leaves and pass me.
That was me in pandemic mode, always pulling off the sidewalk to keep the six-foot gap between other pedestrians and me.
I checked my journals, and realised three things: the sidewalks were dampened for the first time since late spring as we'd had a long drought, lasting well into late October. I'd just had my first cataract procedure - the reason for my sunglasses, even on a slightly overcast early morning. I had not yet fallen: I'd hit the pavement around the corner on November 25th, and in this capture, I'd not yet switched to my winter coat. So this was early November. Six or seven weeks before I caught COVID, along with Demeter and younger daughter. I stood on the sidewalk, planning Christmas, no idea of how challenging it was going to be. But that's true of any time.
This is my second Street View capture. The last time was in Ottawa, a May about ten years ago. I saw the Google van with its tower camera that time, while trudging east, across the supermarket parking lot, clutching two cloth bags containing the makings of younger daughter's birthday cake. I looked up the location later. I looked remarkably like a bear.
Many Canadians may have been looking for ways to tune out the jingoism of American Independence Day. There were options, but, at our house, we looked overseas.
The British election, it turns out, was perfectly timed for an evening's viewing on the west coast of Canada. The polls closed at 10 PM British Summer Time, so the returns started trickling in about 4 pm our time.
When I discovered that the BBC News was streaming their live coverage at their web site, I alerted the Resident Fan Boy, a longtime election junkie.
"We can set up your laptop to see it on the big screen TV," he said, enthusiastically.
"You mean, we can set up your laptop." Apparently, it hadn't occurred to him that this was possible. (I wanted to use my own laptop to follow bulletins and charts. The RFB probably had the same idea, blast him.)
And we watched things develop over the evening: the strange, studio-filling graphics that failed to make things clearer, the exit-poll that was the chief structure for hours, until enough ridings had been declared to indicate that, yes, it had been a reasonable prediction -- except that no one knew that the Conservatives would lose quite that badly.
I was astonished to see Colchester, where most of my father's descendants live, turn Labour scarlet in a sea of Tory blue on the ridings results map. A few years ago, elder daughter reported that, as delighted as she was to visit her paternal grandfather's family, she was horrified at how pro-Brexit and anti-immigration many of them were. Golly, I thought. They really must be furious at the Conservatives.
And many famous faces fell, these strange, entitled people, who seemed to treat their country like some sort of college prank, but Sunak won his seat (and will resign as party leader). And Farage, by gawd, got a seat by creating a whole new party, which only won five seats, but got an alarming percentage of the popular vote. So the faces on British political satire shows will be largely the same for a while.
This afternoon, I sorted laundry in the bedroom and turned on the television for company. It was the CBC news channel, and they were interviewing some analyst from the BBC.
They're still at it, I thought.
But no. He was talking about the imminent election in France, which seems poised to be taken over by le Rassemblement National.
Nope. If the Resident Fan Boy wants to follow that, he can take his lap top into another room.
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| Sutherland as Fortinbras |
He played a wide variety of roles, many of them in films that aren't exactly my cup of tea, but I remember him for three things - none of which were Shakespeare.
In the wake of Sutherland's death, I was looking for some of his performances when I stumbled across him at something like 28, appearing briefly, as a gangly, snaggle-toothed Fortinbras, the Norwegian prince who turns up to clean up the carnage in Hamlet. This was the 1964 televised production (available, thankfully, on YouTube, it's well worth a watch), filmed on location at Elsinore in the autumn of 1963, which starred a very dishy pre-Sound-of-Music Christopher Plummer, and a rather heavily made-up pre-Alfie Michael Caine.
None of these guys were famous at the time, all three became so, although it took Sutherland considerably longer.
M*A*S*H was, of course, the film that did it for him.
It's one of the three things I do remember Sutherland for, along with his appearance in the music video of "Cloudbusting" with Kate Bush (based on the more sentimental aspects of the life of Wilhelm Reich), and his performance of the easy-going, bewildered father in Ordinary People. "Cloudbusting" is easily found on line, but Ordinary People must be on some streaming service I don't get. My days of simply renting the DVD have disappeared, along with my beloved Pic-a-Flic, which closed about nine months ago.
M*A*S*H, if you can believe it, is available on Disney+, which we do get, in order that the Resident Fan Boy can get his Doctor Who fix.
I settled down to watch M*A*S*H for the first time in years.
Just a little personal context: Demeter loved this movie. She saw it years before I did, of course, and now denies liking it so much, but I remember her raving about it years ago. When I finally got an opportunity to see it (probably at the university cinema), I was puzzled.
Oh, it's entertaining. And it was ground-breaking: the improvisation, the overlapping dialogue, the gore in the operating theatre (which is mild, by today's terms, but shocking for 1970, particularly in a comedy). However, I remember feeling somewhat uncomfortable, and it took me several more years before it hit me - while I was watching it last week.
Hawkeye Pierce is an ***hole.
Sure, he's a surgeon, and saves lives under appalling conditions, but plenty of surgeons are jerks. The guy who safely delivered both my daughters by Caesarian was a jerk. A fellow mum who was a doctor herself, smiled when I described my experiences with him and said "Well, he's an excellent technician." (Which helped, actually.)
Also, I realise that M*A*S*H is set in the early 1950s, and seen through the lens of the anti-war attitudes of the late 1960s. (The movie was released in 1970, but filmed a year or two earlier.)
Even as a young woman, though, I felt uneasy about how the nurses are treated in the film, i.e. as fair game. Hotlips Houlihan is, admittedly, a pain, but her punishment for being a lippy female and a senior officer is really over-the-top, isn't it? Her humiliating exposure in the shower is the prelude of her reduction to a simpering hanger-on. In one of our last glimpses of her, she's standing like an escort, as the men play cards.
Here's a famous exchange from early on in the film. The punchline from the late René Auberjonois is funny, but listen to what Pierce is saying to Houlihan.
See, if she were a normal woman (and apparently she's sufficiently pretty) he'd hit on her, and she'd acquiesce, because that's the natural order, right? (Yes, she's being a highhanded twit; he's still an ***hole.)
Donald Sutherland, according to all reports, was not a jerk. He was a fine, multi-faceted actor. We are diminished in the loss of him.
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